SEXY YOUNG FARMERS

Sexy Farmer

 

Farming is rough.

It’s dirty and hot and sweaty. It makes you stink and it makes you very tired. It’s hard frigging work.

Now, let us replace the word ‘farming’ with the word ‘sex and read the entire thing over. Funny how one word can change your entire perspective.

That’s why the government is convinced that it can make farming sexy. It doesn’t take much to change perspective. But the little bit of change might mean the difference between success and failure.

Not So Sexy Farmer

Young people have been abandoning agriculture in droves for decades in St Lucia. Who wouldn’t prefer to work in air conditioned offices with stockinged, g-stringed girls instead of sweaty, stained peasant women? (Editor – that peasant woman is the mother of the nation, you malonette!)

Most rural youth who came to town to escape farming did not end up as bank tellers, however. Many ended up in bomhouses and in the HCJ (hospital,cemtery or jail). Meanwhile, the decline of agriculture hurt everybody. Even banks couldn’t have as many tellers if there were less farmers bringing less foreign exchange into the island. Ironic. So many of those stylish girls who looked down on farmers, couldn’t get a job and had to make bom, because there were fewer farmers.

So now, the government has to make farming sexy again.

Agriculture minister Musa JnBaptiste wants the youth to see farmers as business people who always were and once again could be the most productive and valuable part of the private sector. (Yep, that’s what they were for 40 years. The Chamber of Commerce was a net liability compared to the illiterate agro-business men and women who carried St Lucia on their backs from the late 50s to the mid-90s.)

Others imagine farmers to the best kind of scientists – the kind who are always applying their knowledge in useful and satsfying ways. Like Edsel Edmunds, that famous St Lucian scientist who discovered that nematodes were sucking the life out of the banana industry in the 1970s.

In the early 21^st century, it seems that the best way to make something sexy is to make it profitable. And so, the government is making lands and funds available to young farmers.

More than any other young people, farmers are getting access to resources, lands, money and training all in the hopes that the beads of sweaty on the hunky young men and subtle abs on healthy young women of the countryside can be made sexy again.

It’s too bad that Lil Wayne and Vybz Cartel aren’t singing about farming because that woud be a big help – most young people nowadays take their advice from pop stars not from agriculture ministers.

But if the youth are listening, Musa will have his way and country boys will once again drive the biggest vehicles. In this day and age, anything that makes more money is bound to win. But of course, that all depends on whethre St Lucian youth really want money,or whether they just want to continue to be pretend Americans with expensive things and no actual ambition at all.

FLAMBEAU VS THE END OF THE WORLD

Photo of Castries after Labour ended sugar, flour and rice subsidies

Flambeau warned them that better days would not come.

Flambeau tried to show them the way. But they wouldn’t listen. And now, the new government is doing the unthinkable. They are raising the price of brown sugar by…EIGHT…CENTS….A POUND!

(Cue dramatic end of the world music)

In a world where nothing was going right, only one thing now stands between the St Lucian people and…(Dut!Dut! Duuuuuuuh!) The End of the World.

Our heroes are under pressure from a government who is using underhanded tactics like research, facts and transparency to make the people think that the heroes are themselves bad guys who made millions of Taiwanese dollars disappear.

Kenny's Horsemen (Photo courtesy FlambeauCam.com)

Government is trying to distract the people with the politically charged facts in the Constituency and Town and Village Councils Report because they know that the real story is not the millions and millions that Flambeau made disappear.

The real story is that Labour is cutting the subsidies on rice, sugar and flour in half.

The real story is that people cannot afford to pay eight cents more per pound for sugar. Not in this hypertensive country. How will poor people get diabetes now if Kenny Anthony and his wicked government continue like this?

The real story is that St Lucians had just voted Flambeau back into power, they would never have to deal with this headache right now. They would be able to focus all of their attention on trying to fit themselves in with the hundreds of millions in bobol that would accompany the HIA project. They would be focused on trying to get a little cocaine deal done. They would certainly not be in the position they are in now where they are forced to think about paying off debts and balancing fiscal deficits.

Lucky for Lucians, Flambeau is on the road to recovery.

They have a choice between King and Chastanet for leader and they are actually considering Rufus for party chairman, which is a huge qualitative difference from last chairman, Clem Bobb. Everything about Flambeau right now screams ‘change’ and ‘progress’.

In no time flat, they are going to charge through St Lucia on their white horses (bought with Taiwanese funds, no doubt) and save St Lucia from fate worse that death – paying 20 cents more for a pound of parboiled rice. Hallelujah!

 

WHAT A BUNCH OF FAGS!

Why Homophobes Are The Biggest Bitches of All

 

 

Define fag:

A fag is person who bitches about stuff that is not important enough to pay attention to.

The word is the short version of the word faggot which is an old Anglo-Saxon word referring to someone who is someone else’s bitch. The faggot had to pay attention to all the little details that were not important enough for the boss to deal with.

Like the word ‘nigger’ (which originally means a parasite or freeloader, one who lives on the sweat of others, which is ironic considering that the ‘niggers’ did all the work), the word fag has come to mean something different than what the word originally meant.

But if a fag is exactly what the word says, then aren’t homophobes and other haters the biggest fags of all?

Consider first of all that it has been proven that any man who wastes his time bitching about gay dudes is probably gay himself. Most straight men can let a macoumere walk down the street without much more than a chuckle or a stupps. But some so-called straight guys cannot let a macoumere pass them without making some kind of comment.

Unfortunately, throwing words for gays means that you are noticing gays and everyone knows that straight men notice women, not other men.

“But it can’t be helped!” the homophobes will charge. “These gays are practically pumping their gayness in our faces.”

But in the very same moment, some woman was probably flaunting some sweet ass in you face too. But you didn’t notice because you were too busy bitching about the homosexual.

Consider also that heterosexual men are obsessed with sex and repulsed by homosexuality. Heterosexual men think about sex once every three minutes. It stands to reason that no true heterosexual man can even think about gays for more than 2minutes and 59 seconds, because he’s too busy thinking about vagina. Consequently, any man who can think, much less talk about homsexuals for that long must be a fag.

Finally, consider the kweyol etymology of the word for fag.

A macoumere is supposed to be a female friend, but is used perjoratively to refer to a male who acts like a female. In this traditionally sexist society, your macoumere would help you wash your clothes, do you dishes, cook your food, all the little things that you don’t want to do for yourself. In other words, your macoumere is your faggot. And a faggot, as wesaid at the beginning, is a person who has to pay attention to all the little things you don’t think are really important.

Is homosexuality really important to heterosexual men?

Back in the old days when there were men than women, homosexuality actually helped decrease the competition to get a bride. Nowadays, homosexuality only affects straight men by making many more women available for straight guys to take advantage of.

In other words, without gays, there would be no jabals and more of us would have to share a women.

Homophobes, rather than criticizing gays should be happy that these macoumeres are making more women available that ever before in history. But homophobes have shown their true colours. Rather than be happy for what God gave them, they prefer to look at Vincent and Sharmark and Donovan and talk about how much God hates them.

And you know what that makes them?

A bunch of stupid little bitch faggots!

 

THE REVENGE OF KENNY ANTHONY Part II

WHERE DE MONEY GONE, FELLAS?

Fine. Ignore the report. But where's the money, honey?

The McDoom/Mae Wayne soupsyon reigned for so long at number one that no one would have guessed that something as boring as budget could be the new bombshell.

But Labour’s release of the stunning report on spending by Constituency Groups and Town and Village Councils has knocked off the HOT COUTURE saga like Purple Rain kicking Thriller out of the number one spot in 1984.

Based on the first days of budget in April, you never would have seen it coming.

Labour played their hand poker-faced. They held a weird debate after the Throne Speech where the PM did not give a big budget address for the opposition to attack. This left the opposition with no choice but to complain about having no target to attack and to wait for what they had to know was coming.

Even during the PM’s big speech in mid-May, Labour kept the poker faces on.

The Flambeaus seemed poker faced, too.

In retrospect, however, they seemed more stonefaced or scared-stiff – even Guy Smiley, who was bound to be one of the main culprits fingered by the report.

And then, last Thursday, Labour dropped the bomb.

And Flambeaus started deflecting and counter-accusing – though to be fair, they have yet to bring up Rochamel or cost-overruns on the VF-Soufriere Highway. (In fact, given what is said in Labour’s bombshell report, it will be a wonder if anyone ever brings up Rochamel and cost-overruns again.)

Last Sunday, at the Babonneau Constituency Brach meeting, King said the report was “An attempt to discredit the UWP. It is designed to destroy the UWP’s integrity, character and behaviour.” Whatever that means.

But if Flambeau thinks they can simply dodge the question of what happened to millions in Taiwanese funds, they have another thing coming. This mess is complicated, but in the end, dealing with it is as simple as the theory of relativity. Flambeau must go through the report and answer, item by item, the burning question, “WHERE DE MONEY GONE?”

All the squirming and deflecting in the world, all the politiczation of the report they can muster, will not be enough to make the multi-million dollar question go away.

It is ironic, because this year’s budget was the first time in more than five years that Flambeau has spent more time discussing the budget than Kenny Anthony’s ‘misdeeds’.

For Kenny, that’s probably the best revenge of all. Because catching all the waste and irregularities of the former Government may have been time-consuming and expensive, but killing the ghost of Rochamel and silencing Guy Joseph on cost overruns…that’s priceless.

 

 

 

“BELELESH!!!”: NO STRAIGHT ANSWERS FROM TOURIST BOARD

THE FLOGG PRESENTS THE DODGE OF THE WEEK AWARD TO SLTB

Would I lie to you?

“We can’t tell you that.”

“We don’t want to get into that.”

“We’re not discussing that.”

Those were the answers to all the toughest questions at this morning’s Tourist Board press conference.

After weeks of sustaining major damage in the press, the Tourist Board finally held apress conference to address the annual post-jazz controversies and scandals.

 

Emails showArnold and others at Tourist Board didn't think a Lucian was strong enough to close HOT COUTURE. StillTracey insists, "We pushed to ensure that Lucians got priority."

 

Wooing the media with Tracey Warner-Arnold's pretty charts and lots of stats that no one would have thought to ask for, Director Louis Lewis, PRO John Emmanuel and Warner herself showed that things are getting better for the ailing festival in its first year of revamp. The attendance numbers are up across the board. And while surveys show that most people still think the festival is good, not excellent, the three Tourist Board officers agree that at least the decline has been arrested and the festival is no longer in a coma.

“It was the best year for recording arrivals,” Lewis told the press, in the kind of statement that would dominate the rest of the press conference. Three thousand five hundred people came specifically for the festival, there were 7000 more paying patrons on the Sunday as last year and even the Saturday mainstage got a little bump.

But while these numbers were interesting, those were not the numbers most people were itching to hear about over the last week and a half since the close of the festival.

Reporters wanted to know why the Tourist Board didn’t refute or at least distance themselves from Vincent McDoom’s criticisms of the HOT COUTURE producers through the last week of steaming hot controversy.

Lewis: “We appreciated the restraint on the part of the producers (Mae Wayne and Adrian Augier). What we didn’t want was for this (scandal) to become the signature or what was most remembered about this year’s festival.”

Unfortunately, it was what wasmost remembered, which is why reporters were asking why Tourist Board did not immediately address it.

Lewis: “We did not want to encourage or be associated with it.”

As if they had a choice.

Lewis: “After his (McDoom’s) press conference, there was no attempt to get feedback from us.”

Ironically, the question from the reporter was whether they got in touch with him.

Lewis: “Many disparaging remarks were made and these things were so far from the truth.”

Like what? Lewis, Warner and Emmanuel never got specific. Even when reporters came back to the same questions about Tourist Board’s spending, they insisted that everything you’ve heard is not true, but refused to release the categorical truth (as Lewis himself is fond of saying.

Instead Lewis deftly used his sleight of lip to direct attention this way: “Mr McDoom is a very creative person, passionate about his work. But he sought to make himself the center of attention and when he failed, he disparaged the board.”

As for allegations that Tourist Board paid one producer over $60,000 and another one about twice that, Lewis said: “That is absolutely and categorically not factual. The Tourist Board has a clear process for contracting services. People on the outside may try to overcharge us. But that’s very hard to do because of the process of tendering…

As for the stage that models complained about ad nauseum last week, Lewis said, with a perfectly straight face: “Models walked that stage without challenge of difficulty.”

Lewis is apparently totally ignorant of the fact that most models have confirmed that the stage was dangerous and many of them had falls and near-falls during rehearsals. Most of them reading this will wonder what universe he lives in and what drugs make him happy.

On the critical question on HOT COUTURE, Will McDoom be back next year?, Lewis said, “It’s a bit early to respond to whether McDoom will come back.”

Tracey Warner-Arnold insisted, “We made collaborative decisions. In all of our discussions, we pushed to ensure that St Lucians were pushed forward.”

However, when confronted with that showed categorically that Tourist Board preferred a foreign designer to end the show, she backtracked, saying, “At the time the emails were sent, there was a showing and not all of the local designers had entire lines to show.”

When confronted with the fact that the foreign designers were not in St Lucia and their clothes had not been seen either, Warner seemed strangely to be on McDoom’s side, saying that he had to go out and look for designers and advise them about how and what to present.

“On the Sunday before the show, a casting call was made to see who was wearing what. Not all of the local designers were ready,” Warner insisted again, in spite of the fact that the foreigners weren’t ready either and neither the producers, nor the Tourist Board knew what they would be showing.

“I can’t say categorically, I wasn’t there withMae and Vincent,” added Warner, mere minutes after boasting about collaborative decision-making.

“We were not being as transparent as you just requested,” Lewis chimed in when reporters asked more questions about mis-organisation and over-pricing.

So how much did Tourist Board really pay for Mae Wayne and Adrian Augier? Was it $60,000? $120,000? Now that Tourist Board was out to clear the air, what was so wrong about the fees that some media thought producers charged?

“That information is absolutely, factually and categorically wrong,” Lewis declared confidently.

So what’s the right information, dear Servant of The People and Government of St Lucia?

“I don’t want to get into a dialogue on this,” Lewis said.

“We cannot give the pricing,” Warner added.

Poor John-boy says the blogs are cyber-bullies to Tourist Board

 

“People are engaging in cyber-bullying,” John Emmanuel came to the rescue. “We go on our blogs and complain because we did not get our way.”

So basically, Tourist Board says that whatever information you have that didn’t come from them is wrong. And whatever the right information is, they have it, but they’re not telling us.

Nyah, nyah,nyahnyahnyaaaa! Or as the Lucians say, “Belelesh!!!!”

 

 

 

P.Y.L.F.S - POLITICIANS YOU’D LOVE TO….

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

THE ANSWER IS WAGE CUTS... YOU FIRST..

.

 

C'mon! It's a wage cut, not a suicide!

St Lucia spends more money on government wages and salaries than it spends on fuel for the entire country. And not just by a little bit. By over a $100 million dollars.

That’s why over the next few years, the battle to make wages a smaller percentage of government’s expenditure is going to deepen and widen, perhaps even cracking serious fissures between the Labour party and the trade unions.

It’s simple, but brutal math.

The government is operating at a deficit, and despite what some politicians have said about contemplating surpluses, Treasury officials confirm that government almost always run deficits, no matter what they say in the budget.

St Lucia needs to cut $80 million a year from its expenditure for the next three years in order to realistically meet all its financial targets and not end up like Jamaica and St Kitts and them – in the hands of the IMF.

There are many long term solutions for increasing productivity, competitiveness and standards, decreasing waste and all that good stuff. But where is the $80 million a year going to come from in the short term.

Of all the things that the government can cut without causing a drop in services there is only one that can deliver the $80 million. AND THE ANSWER IS WAGE CUTS.

Either less people are working for the same money or the same number of people are working for less money. But there is no chance of more people or more money. No healthy chance anyway.

The question now is, who is willing to take the first cut? If the leadership thinks that less people are needed, then which ministers will become redundant? If less money for the same number of people is the answer, then how deep a cut will Cabinet and Parliament take, in order to show us the right way forward?

The leadership of St Lucia has, for about a decade now, had the opportunity to  inspire us and lead by example.

The first cut is the deepest. If they are our frontline generals, shouldn’t they volunteer to take the cut?

After that, it would be so much easier for the rank and file soldiers to endure the kind of truly reasonable austerity that Labour’s enemies want people to revolt against.

The opposition, being a victim of its own folly, can only wait for Labour to make mistakes. Instead of treading softly and taking half measures, Labour should be heroic. They should do exactly what Flambeau promised to do but never did – take pay cut.

Now Jimmy will say that this will not even make a pinprick of a difference to the Treasury, but I dare say it would be so symbolic, so heroic, so damned epic and it would only cost a little more than a month’s salary.

Restore the faith of the faith, especially in these times when the heathen are taunting them, saying “Better Days? Better Days? En chou zot!”

Come out of the tents, generals.

Get down here on the economic battlefield with us.

Show us your wounds and we’ll show you ours.

DR ANTHONY PRESCRIBES DIET, EXERCISE & SURGERY

 

St Lucia, Simply Beautiful

Dr Anthony didn’t want this surgery. He certainly didn’t want to be the one who would have to do it.

He had urged the previous physicians to take preventative measures.

Now, he had a patient on his hands who was consuming too much, producing too little and desperately in need of an intervention. He would have to surgically excise fats that might be useful in a healthier nation.

“What are we going to do, Doc?” the people pronounced in mid-April during the first stage of the debates.

“I’ll tell you what we have to do,” he said, picking up the microphone and signalling to the deejay to drop the beat. As the OG gangsta sound of Dr Dre’s ‘The Chronic’ faded in, the spotlight came up on Kenny D Anthony’s toughest challenge, his most impossible task. He was like Obama, cleaning up after Bush, but wishing he was Clinton. He was like Prometheus, trying to get out of his chains, when someone came to tell him that all the fires went out.

Here’s a very brief sample of the most important lyric sheet in St Lucia this year. In the coming days, there will be more detailed reporting and analysis of the most surgically incisive lyrics PMKA ever spit.

Jason, I'm confused. Am I a rapper or a surgeon? We can't afford mixed metaphors in these tough times?

According to the Prime Minister, there will be huge cuts in capital expenditure. The Infrastructure Ministry got a little over $25 million for capital works, which in any other year, would be considered a joke. But right now, in the words of the Wonder Pets, “This...Is...Sewwious!”

Structural reforms are supposed to help minimize waste, increase productivity and competitiveness.

There are a thousand little cuts everywhere in the budget, so that the Prime Minister could protect social programs while trimming fat. One impressive manoeuvre was to reduce subsidies on rice, flour and sugar so that prives would go up by maybe a shilling a pound, but to increase the Ti Kaka Dan pensions government grants to the poor and indigent by 25%. Government will save about more than half of the $18 million it spends on subsidies now, but will end up spending less than $2 million on increasing the subsidies. Nice move...

BUT....

There is always a but.

All the things mentioned above won’t save St Lucia from the debt and deficit crisis it is in. And so, it all comes down the government’s wage bill. In the end, government spends 13% of recurrent expenditure on wages and salaries. That should be more like 9% in a healthy country.

The wage bill is exactly 4% too high.

Can you feel the irony washing over you. The Prime Minister was very subtle in making this point. (I would have bashed it into the heads of union leaders.) Four percent is almost exactly the increase that public servants recently fought for. It is as though we were in a bad situation but we were in exactly the right position to get out – AND WE BLEW IT.

Give yourself a pat on the back, wherever you are.

VAMPIRES@SLTB

 

Oh no! Not you, too! I thought you were our friend!

What would you do if you found out that:

1.       SLTB paid BET US$450,000 for get Akon, when one of their own board members could have gotten him for US$275,000?

2.       SLTB paid an outside company $80,000 to do passes (yeah, the backstage, vendors and media passes) when they equipment to do it cost about US$10,000 and they had already bought it and been doing the passes themselves, for years?

3.       SLTB paid one producer of HOT COUTURE $120,000 to do what Adrian Augier was already doing for $68,000 and Vincent McDoom was doing for free.

4.       SLTB turned away a French media outfit called B Black who wanted St Lucia to host a three-man crew while they got footage of the festival and the island for documentaries and programs to air in Europe. B Black is like the BET of France. SLTB asked them what their demographic was, as though it would not be worth is to get the free publicity if the target audience was old white people who like country.

SHE MAGAZINE PUBLISHER: LUCIAN DESIGNERS SUCK

“Your St Lucian designers are not up to par. I have seen their work and I don’t think they are fabulous. We disagree very much on this point. Not one St Lucian designer is strong enough to open.”

Those are the words of Mae Wayne, publisher of SHE Caribbean and co-producer of HOT COUTURE. Wayne’s harsh criticisms of St Lucian designers came in an internet exchange with the show’s Creative Director, Vincent McDoom, who replied, “That is not fair of you to say this and I cannot let you say this. Give these designers a chance to surprise you. It’s a St Lucian event. It is normal that a St Lucian should open the show.”

The Flogg obtained a copy of some contentious disagreements between McDoom and Wayne on the role of St Lucians in the show. McDoom thought they should have priority while Wayne, as quoted above, thought they were not good enough. (Which explains why Lucian models and designers have benefited so little from SHE Caribbean being based in St Lucia.

McDoom set a press conference for 2:30 Wednesday afternoon to address issues raised by the emails about the treatment of St Lucians in Tourist Board related festivals. Over the last week, McDoom has publicly criticized the Tourist Board and HOT COUTURE producers Mae Wayne and Adrian Augier for exorbitant fees and their controversial contribution to the show.

Do you think St Lucian designers suck?

What you know about fashion?

WHAT THE MODELS SAY

 

 

What SHE Team? The STAR doesn't even have an office dedicated to SHE Magazine. The SHE Team is a bunch of emails.

MAE and THE SHE TEAM:

We saw her twice or three times before the show.

 

She had a team? What team? The dressers? Was she even paying those people?

 

If they’re were talking about the dressers when they said the SHE magazine team, well, ok. The dressers and the make-up people, they were really on point. But the real team was us, the models. I don’t know where this SHE Magazine team was.

 

Planning committee...? They had a planning committee?

 

Personally, I thought it was Vincent’s show and Tourist Board was sponsoring. When I saw all these people at the Audi Showroom acting as though they were in charge, I was surprised.

 

The only time when we, as models, did something that didn’t involve Vincent was a photo shoot at the STAR with Rick Wayne. And we never saw those shots, ever.

 

But the way Mae and them write the story in STAR, you will swear that there were no models. It was as if she and her team and the designers had a show.

 

I saw Mae at rehearsals. She stayed for about 10 minutes. We saw a lot of Joan Johnson and Denise Lay, though. They were very helpful to us.

 

I saw Mae at the fittings. I think the team she’s talking about are the dressers. But these people were like the waiters in the restaurant. The service was excellent, but they were not in the kitchen cooking. We were. The show would have been exactly what it was without them.

 

 

 

ADRIAN AND THE STAGE:

A lot of people in the show didn’t even know who he was. He was never at rehearsals or anything like that.

 

They say as if Vincent was the only to miss a fall on the stage. Endless of us were tripping on that same spot. That stage was not level and you could feel it moving under you. That’s why Vincent said for us to use no stage at all.

 

The models were at risk. I don’t think Louis Lewis understood that when he blew up in Vincent’s face. Vincent was saying that the stage was not only not good, it was not safe. The shoes were leaving marks in the stage. The boards under the stage were shifting. One of the dresses got stuck in the stage itself.

 

They had to have people helping us on and off the stage, because it was not stable and it was not safe.

 

 

 

VINCENT:

We didn’t just learn walking. We learnt about the fashion industry. He showed us videos and talked to us. He got them to tape us walking and then we watched the tapes and critiqued each other.

 

At the beginning, he told us, he wasn’t there to be our friend, he was there to train us. So we knew what to expect, if he talked to us harsh. But in the end, he was more than a friend to us. To some of us, he’s like family.

 

The most I ever got for a modelling gig before Vincent came along was $100.

 

THE DESIGNERS:

 

I loved J-Lo

 

To me they were all very good. You couldn’t tell who was St Lucian and who was foreign if nobody told you.

 

 

THE DEVIL WEARS NADA (or The Empress Has No Clothes)

If George Bush hates black people, who does Mae Wayne hate?

 

Mode Ste Lucie.

That’s what St Lucia would have gotten instead of HOT COUTURE, if St Vincent McDoom had not flown down from Parisian fairy heaven wearing winged pink metallic Louboutin pumps to save the St Lucia Tourist Board from the vampires it calls its friends.

 

Mode Ste Lucie would have featured many things that were not present at HOT COUTURE. More foreign designers would have been featured. And models. Any local models would have to work for free since the producers were ‘giving them an opportunity.’

 

Mode Ste Lucie would have been held at Samaans Park or Sandals, instead of at the Audi Showroom. It would certainly have cost a helluva lot of more than HOT COUTURE did, but whether it was successful or not, one thing is for certain. It would not have been significant.

 

HOT COUTURE, on the other hand, was a fucking milestone.

 

HOT COUTURE was so great that it had its own follow-up scandal built in, cost-free. Talk about international standards. We are really going to the big time now.

 

HOT COUTURE did not just put St Lucia on the regional and international map for the first time ever (yes, it did – google it!). McDoom also managed to burst through the angry clouds of exploitation and free dozens of St Lucian models from their enslavement, championing their cause despite all objections from producers.

 

It sounds like a joke.

 

 

But if Mae Wayne was really in charge of HOT COUTURE (as The STAR Magazine insists that she was), then the event would have looked more like SHE Magazine – printed perfectly, but too expensive, hardly any sign of Lucian models and not a chance of being profitable, ever! In all of the organizations that Wayne manages, Lucians are stereotyped as lazy and uncreative and foreigners are being overpaid to have the same Lucians teach them how to do the work that the Lucian could have done in the first place.

 

Wayne proved her foreign bias with the cover of last weekend’s STAR. Even the foreign-based models on the cover said that they would have preferred for Lucian models dressed in Lucian designs would have been on the cover. But Wayne’s standards are such that regular Lucians aren’t good enough to grace the cover of St Lucia’s fourth worst selling newspaper.

 

Lucky for the Lucian models and designers, McDoom remembers that he was once one of them – a kid from La Clery who needed some training and an opportunity to prove himself. The St Lucia Tourist Board only wanted to exploit his celebrity, but he brought so much more than that. He brought a confidence in local talent that Tourist Board has never encountered before.

 

And he proved from the start, that while Mae Wayne’s dick might be bigger than Adrian Augier’s, Vincent McDoom’s dick is bigger than them all.

 

On the eve of the Coco Palm press conference where McDoom is expected to tear open a new anal cavity for Wayne, the empress still imagines that HOT COUTURE was the biggest thing to ever happen to Vincent. It is certainly the biggest thing to happen to her in a long time. What she doesn’t realize is that to McDoom, this isn’t even a show. This is charity. It’s patriotism. It’s the revenge of an abused little boy on behalf of exploited young people everywhere.

 

He’s not just going to let her take HOT COUTURE away. Especially not when he’s not just the only fashion expert in the place, but also the little boy who is brave enough to say that the Empress has no clothes.

THE ART OF RUFFLING FEATHERS FROM HAUTE MESS TO HOT COUTURE

Everyone hailed Hot Couture as an unqualified success.

Everyone that is, but the Creative Director. Vincent McDoom was only too happy to qualify its success. In post-show interviews, he emasculated both the Tourist Board and co-producer Mae Wayne and eviscerated Adrian Augier, confirming many people’s worst impressions of him (Augier, that is).

The St Lucia Tourist Board would probably have preferred all of McDoom’s easy, off-the-cuff criticisms to be aired in the closed conference rooms during what they like to call the post-mortem.

But Vincent McDoom is only making sure that the same thing that happened to him this year doesn’t happen again next year. From early on, he openly pegged Augier as an over-priced producer and cut his fees in every way possible. And while he did not exactly go to war with Mae Wayne, he repeated questioned her usefulness, or more specifically, whether she was worth the amount of money that Tourist Board was paying her, given that Augier was the producer and McDoom was the Creative director.

(Seriously, what was she for? What did she bring to the table that couldn’t be paid for with a tenth of the money, over the counter at the STAR?)

Insiders say that when McDoom first walked into the planning meetings for the fashion show, it was all one big haute mess.

“Well, first, they were planning an event and allocating money, but they didn’t even have an artistic director, so that was like throwing money in the air and at themselves,” one insider told The Flogg, showing agreements worth tens of thousands of dollars that were in existence months before McDoom was even called in to save the day.

“Even when they invited Vincent, they were thinking of him as a trainer or a celebrity judge or something,” another insider said. “They brought him to St Lucia and didn’t even realize that they should put him in charge of everything. They were going to spend more money on foreign designers and foreign artistic director and all kinds of nonsense, until he put his foot down.”

The Flogg has confirmed that without making a stroke of progress, the planning committee for Hot Couture had managed to agree to give spend $160,000 on two of its members. No models, no designers, no nothing of any use whatsoever.

That was in February.

Then, enter Vincent McDoom, asserting himself in ways that no one imagined, but taking responsibilities onto himself, mainly to prevent others from causing him to fail. He was working for free, so you know them – they let him work. For less than the price of Allen Chastanet’s monthly phone bill, he managed to create a successful new cultural franchise for the island.

“Within a week of his getting here, you could just throw away all the rest of the committee,” one of The Flogg’s insiders said. “They wanted to bring endless foreign designers and he insisted that if they’re not using mostly local designer then there was no point doing the show. They wanted to pay endless money for a bigger venue, but he ruled that out, saving them at least 30 grand. And then, they wanted to models to work for free, after they had given out so much money for ‘consultants’.”

“We’re giving them an opportunity,” the highest paid committee member was said to have commented.

“How are they ever going to become professional if you don’t treat them professionally and pay them,” McDoom was reported to insist.

“Ok, how much per model?” he was asked. “$75 to $150?”

“More like $700,” McDoom insisted.

“That’s too much!” he was told.

“But you’re getting $100,000, for what?” he replied.

McDoom’s practically free directorship, his single handed creation of the Hot Couture franchise and his upstaging of the jazz festival in general is part of his revenge on the establishment that abused him, refused him, exploited him, neglected him, tormented him and discarded him as a young St Lucian.

Some of those same people profited from Hot Couture way more than he or the models did. Way more than all of them combined. It is the way of the world – at least in St Lucia.

But one suspects that McDoom is aiming to change all that. First he successfully ended the career of a Speaker of the House. He toppled his abuser and reversed the disgrace, but he can’t stop thinking about other young people who are abused and neglected in endless different ways.

You could say he has a hero complex.

He sees himself in every beautiful, talented young St Lucian and he wants to save them all – or as many of them as he can.

It’s impossible of course. Too many people rely on the way things are now to just allow McDoom to change the status quo for the benefit of some dumb youths. They’ll probably put a stop to him eventually.

But for now, they need him. He’s their meal ticket, the hand that slaps and feeds them. He’s the lynchpin of a  new multi-million dollar machine and they all want a piece of him, no matter how much he makes it hurt. Their only problem is that McDoom is not just some dumb fag with a bit of fashion celebrity. He’s one of the few legitimate revolutionaries of 21^st century St Lucia.

And he’s giving the Tourist Board a choice.

They can go down the road of success with him, ruffling feathers as they go. Or they can stick with their hundred thousand dollar consultants and producers who overcharge for recycled stages and costumes. It’s their choice to make. He’s holding all the good cards.