Local Lives
Tribe PDF crosses 7,000 downloads
30/03/09 23:32 Filed in: Website Updates
Tribe downloads as logged by my web statistics as of March 26, 2008. The other files in the listing are small files associated with page designs on the website. Overall statistics cover two years of cumulative data. The Tribe PDF is just under 800KB and only downloads when someone specifically clicks on it.
Downloads of the facsimile document of Gathering the Tribe, my account of a year spent observing the Carnival band Tribe's production process has crossed 7,000 downloads in its first month of availability.
The PDF file of the three pages allocated to me in the Guardian's Ash Wednesday Carnival souvenir created a spike in the bandwidth on my site's servers this month, but it's a welcome surge and covered by my hosting arrangements.
Thanks for your interest.
The file, along with PDFs of the first eight in the series are to be found here...
An expanded gallery of images is posted here...
The Tribe PDF bandwidth use expressed by volume in bytes in webstats for the last two years. The first Local Lives is ahead on volume, but it's been on the site for two years, not four weeks.
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Remembering Bheem Singh
17/11/08 21:32 Filed in: Photography
Bheem was always kind to strangers but he doted on his children and their children. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.
Bheem Singh died on November 09 and was buried on November 12 in a quiet ceremony at St Mary's Church in St James.
In one of those curious turns that makes Trinidad and Tobago such a unique and intriguing nation, the man who returned Divali, a Hindu festival to St James with a street display outside his home at Ethel Street, was buried under Christian rites.
Bheem Singh was always kind and generous to me and his tireless patience with my efforts to photograph his work for the festival, so he was, after a fashion, the first of my Local Lives subjects.
I first photographed the work he was doing with his sons on Ethel Street for The Wire, but the photos weren't published. When I came by to apologise for wasting his time, he berated me instead for not visiting on Divali night to share in the food his family generously served to anyone who visited their home.
This year, neither Bheem nor I were at the family's celebrations. He was in hospital while the family bravely carried on with the celebrations and I was was in New York, having carelessly failed to factor in the overlap with my travel.
He was a generous, kind and cheerful man, a great neighbour in St James. He will be missed, particularly when the lights of the deyas are lit each year.
I've finally posted the last three of the published Local Lives essays, including A Light in the West.
