Four minus one
11/01/08 10:42 Filed in: Media
Four minus one
Terry Joseph was a friend of mine. He died a week ago of cancer in the US.
We were journalism buddies, but our first meeting almost 20 years ago was as writer and subject.
I was producing a column for the Guardian called Portrait. I'd sift through the paper, find something or someone that seemed interesting, and go talk to the person in charge or the pivot personality in the situation.
I was aware of complaints about the condition of Queen's Hall, so I scheduled a chat with the manager, who just happened to be Terry Joseph. He gave me a story that pretty much finalised his annoyance and frustration with the job, blowing a whistle that started the process, which took almost ten years, of refurbishing the famous performance space and costing him his job.
It was the first time that one of my feature stories triggered an editorial at the Guardian, and I was proud of what I'd done with a column that was pretty much devoted to profiles.
Even then Terry knew who I was. He was aware that we had attended the same school (Trinity College, Moka) and had been educated by the same English teachers, Charlene Ogle and Hugh Spicer. That, and whatever he had seen of my work up to then, was enough for him to trust me with a story that would soon put him on the breadline. The picture that ran with that story is part of this gallery.
We later got to know each other at the Guardian, when I joined the madcap team that Alwin Chow was putting together to herald in the digital age of production at the paper.
In that fermenting brew of acrimony, rapid change and general madness, four journalists found common ground and good company. Lennox Grant was the news editor, Romeo Kaseram was the Features Editor, Terry was a feature and news reporter and I was the photo editor.
Together, we dubbed ourselves the Four Skins, and we would "pull back" for a drinking lime on most Friday afternoons to make sense of the turmoil we had found ourselves in the middle of.
By July 1990, just a few months after we found common ground, Lenny was gone to continue his career at the Express. I left the next year to reestablish my professional practice. Romeo would later marry and migrate to Canada, returning briefly to Trinidad in the mid-nineties for an unsatisfying turn as Sunday Editor at the Express.
Terry also joined the Express, and for a short while, the four of us were on the floor of that paper. But it wasn't ever really the same. We had all moved on in one way or another. I, for instance, was no longer drinking and that tends to put a damper on a good session of getting roundly hammered.
But Terry (I really don't know who TJ is, I've never called him that) and I would remain in touch over the years since.
I last saw him at the December launch of TriniTunes.com, to which I arrived late and I sat next to him on a tiny space near the door of Veni Mange getting the synopsis of what I'd missed.
He was in good cheer, as always, his gregarious, enveloping growl of a voice embracing the world with barely diminished energy. His throaty chuckling as he noted the obviousness of what had been offered as revolutionary that evening ("They showed us how to click and download a song, Mark, imagine that.") was a warm reminder that regardless of his illness, Terry was still as acerbic in his observations as ever.
Throughout his career, Terry Joseph balanced his love for the performance arts in this country with his need to comment on them publicly. This led him to wrestle with that precarious and sometimes painful procedure of having feet in both the world of doing the thing and writing about the thing. It's precarious because your motives are always suspect on either side of the fence that divides both practices and painful when you land crotch first on that philosophical divider while trying to sit on it.
I found myself in that situation years ago with local theatre, when I migrated from being a theatre critic to being involved in the production of theatre. In the end, I walked away from that arm of performance art entirely. Terry was too much in love with pan, calypso and Carnival to ever do that and I think that he made some choices along the way that were sometimes questionable.
But I never doubted the sincerity of his romance with local performance art, and I never refused him a request, even when it meant visiting his house to trouble shoot a cranky Windows PC.
I'll miss hearing from him from time to time. I'm pretty sure that next week's BitDepth (#610) would have triggered a call, his voice a drawling rumble on the phone as he commented on my thoughts about Carnival this year.
I won't be attending his farewell extravaganza today. I can't bear funerals at the best of times, when they are quiet, respectful and celebratory. This event will probably get the celebratory right.
I'm sure that Terry would have been pleased at the efforts that are going into planning his final honours, but I'll respect our friendship the only way that I ever have, with the words through which we found common ground over the years we knew each other.
Terry Joseph was a friend of mine. He died a week ago of cancer in the US.
We were journalism buddies, but our first meeting almost 20 years ago was as writer and subject.
I was producing a column for the Guardian called Portrait. I'd sift through the paper, find something or someone that seemed interesting, and go talk to the person in charge or the pivot personality in the situation.
I was aware of complaints about the condition of Queen's Hall, so I scheduled a chat with the manager, who just happened to be Terry Joseph. He gave me a story that pretty much finalised his annoyance and frustration with the job, blowing a whistle that started the process, which took almost ten years, of refurbishing the famous performance space and costing him his job.
It was the first time that one of my feature stories triggered an editorial at the Guardian, and I was proud of what I'd done with a column that was pretty much devoted to profiles.
Even then Terry knew who I was. He was aware that we had attended the same school (Trinity College, Moka) and had been educated by the same English teachers, Charlene Ogle and Hugh Spicer. That, and whatever he had seen of my work up to then, was enough for him to trust me with a story that would soon put him on the breadline. The picture that ran with that story is part of this gallery.
We later got to know each other at the Guardian, when I joined the madcap team that Alwin Chow was putting together to herald in the digital age of production at the paper.
In that fermenting brew of acrimony, rapid change and general madness, four journalists found common ground and good company. Lennox Grant was the news editor, Romeo Kaseram was the Features Editor, Terry was a feature and news reporter and I was the photo editor.
Together, we dubbed ourselves the Four Skins, and we would "pull back" for a drinking lime on most Friday afternoons to make sense of the turmoil we had found ourselves in the middle of.
By July 1990, just a few months after we found common ground, Lenny was gone to continue his career at the Express. I left the next year to reestablish my professional practice. Romeo would later marry and migrate to Canada, returning briefly to Trinidad in the mid-nineties for an unsatisfying turn as Sunday Editor at the Express.
Terry also joined the Express, and for a short while, the four of us were on the floor of that paper. But it wasn't ever really the same. We had all moved on in one way or another. I, for instance, was no longer drinking and that tends to put a damper on a good session of getting roundly hammered.
But Terry (I really don't know who TJ is, I've never called him that) and I would remain in touch over the years since.
I last saw him at the December launch of TriniTunes.com, to which I arrived late and I sat next to him on a tiny space near the door of Veni Mange getting the synopsis of what I'd missed.
He was in good cheer, as always, his gregarious, enveloping growl of a voice embracing the world with barely diminished energy. His throaty chuckling as he noted the obviousness of what had been offered as revolutionary that evening ("They showed us how to click and download a song, Mark, imagine that.") was a warm reminder that regardless of his illness, Terry was still as acerbic in his observations as ever.
Throughout his career, Terry Joseph balanced his love for the performance arts in this country with his need to comment on them publicly. This led him to wrestle with that precarious and sometimes painful procedure of having feet in both the world of doing the thing and writing about the thing. It's precarious because your motives are always suspect on either side of the fence that divides both practices and painful when you land crotch first on that philosophical divider while trying to sit on it.
I found myself in that situation years ago with local theatre, when I migrated from being a theatre critic to being involved in the production of theatre. In the end, I walked away from that arm of performance art entirely. Terry was too much in love with pan, calypso and Carnival to ever do that and I think that he made some choices along the way that were sometimes questionable.
But I never doubted the sincerity of his romance with local performance art, and I never refused him a request, even when it meant visiting his house to trouble shoot a cranky Windows PC.
I'll miss hearing from him from time to time. I'm pretty sure that next week's BitDepth (#610) would have triggered a call, his voice a drawling rumble on the phone as he commented on my thoughts about Carnival this year.
I won't be attending his farewell extravaganza today. I can't bear funerals at the best of times, when they are quiet, respectful and celebratory. This event will probably get the celebratory right.
I'm sure that Terry would have been pleased at the efforts that are going into planning his final honours, but I'll respect our friendship the only way that I ever have, with the words through which we found common ground over the years we knew each other.
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