Island Soul City Dreams

I reflect. I analyze. I speak my mind. ~ I Keep it Irie ~

Archive for the month “September, 2013”

18 Sep 2013

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Revenge Is Never The Solution

Photo Credit: Google Images/Marie-Elise.com

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” – Edward Bulwer-Lytton

On Tuesday afternoon, someone I’ve grown to love and admire, someone who over the past five years has become a very dear friend, did something to hurt me to the core. This someone actually happens to be a national icon in their professional field. I thought their actions were erratic, immature, unwarranted, utterly disrespectful and downright nasty. Like a woman scorned, I seriously considered doing something to cause this person major damage. It was the type of damage that could destroy their career, marriage and impeccable public image.

I sat down later in the evening, and for seven hours, I wrote a lengthy blog post – a tell-it-all of sorts, with the intention of publishing part one of three today. It was filled with a potpourri of emotions, punctuated with effective use of almost every literary device, it came alive with the most active verbs, was colored with the boldest of adjectives, and I capitalized on all the best writing tips my former editors and journalism professors at Columbia University gave me. If you’ve read my writing, you know I delight in finding a way to take readers on the journey with me, and that I did.

I then I edited some incriminating photos to accompany the post, created the most SEO friendly headline imaginable and carefully re-read all three 3,000 plus words. It’s the stuff the TV series “Scandal” is made of, and I swear, it’s my finest piece of writing ever. It could generate record traffic to my blog. It could lead to me finally publishing that book about which I’ve long been dreaming. It’s destined to create even bigger headlines than the one it boasts. Alas, NO one will ever get to read it. Read more…

Posted in Roots & Culture and tagged A Woman Scorned, CaribScribe, Conflict Resolution, Forgiveness, Forgiving a Friend, Forgiving Friends, Forgiving Loved Ones, How to forgive a friend, Island Soul City Dreams, Life in New York, Maquita Peters, Revenge, Revenge is never the answer, Seeking Revenge, The pen is mightier then the sword

05 Sep 2013

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Doing It With Love: A Sweet Soca Story

I was a teenage student in my native Barbados when I bought my first album. In fact, it was not one, but two albums and they couldn’t be more different. One was “Tapestry” by Carole King and both the album and artiste remain among my all-time favorites. The other album, released in 1993, was by Square One, a top local Soca band and it was entitled, “Square Roots”. “Tapestry” was on CD and “Square Roots” was on cassette. I was mainly able to listen to the former when I was at home with access to the CD player. But since we were still in the era of the Walkman, I could listen to “Square Roots” to my heart’s content. From the day I took that plastic off the cassette, I was locked on to Square One’s infectious rhythms, be it as I traveled on the bus, walked around my neighborhood, or hung out with friends where we’d unplug the headphones, play the music out loud and sing and dance along. As was the Bajan saying back then, “Man, I stretched out dat tape (cassette)!” My favorite track on that album was a slow to medium tempo tune, “Special”, because it simply made me feel that way.

Me with Biggie Irie of Barbados.

Like most Barbadian teenagers at the time, I loved the band Square One. Many of my girlfriends and I had a crush on its cute lead singer Anderson “Young Blood” Armstrong, while our male peers were infatuated with his gorgeous co-lead vocalist Alison Hinds. Square One was the epitome of energy, had wicked drum and bass lines, scintillating keyboard harmonies, tantalizing steel pan melodies and vocalists that commanded the stage and sent the audience in a frenzy. They were Bajans playing “our” music and had quickly become a national treasure, earning the moniker, “Soca Ambassadors”. One could imagine my excitement the year after buying their album, to meet in person members of Square One. Read more…