Let me tell the story again. How I went Brooklyn. For Pan. Carnival Thursday night. Entering Despers USA’s panyard, I brush past police. On duty. Inside, news spreads. Kathleen Reilly, who’s waged a long nuisance campaign against the band, has herself been arrested. For harassment.
It’s not the same yard I recall. Gentrification’s spread of new residential buildings onto old industrial blocks pushed Despers out their longtime home. After years, they’re back. On a block that got away. As Odie drills the band he grew up in, White women shimmy shoulders. In a corner, a man thumps a mini-conga. Out of time. Unperturbed.
Panorama eve. Approaching D’Radoes’ spacious yard, next-to-nowhere, the cloying welcome of Sanitation Depot #14 is respite from the bodyshops on the unlit block where we parked. A police cruiser pulls up. Music stops. Alcohol disappears. (Except one woman who say she done pay.) Agreement is struck. They run the tune one last time. By Pan Evolution, a few blocks away, we’d stacked up single-file, against one wall.
Panorama night. Family members, aficionados who’ve paid US$50 or more, pick a wet plastic chair from rows set out in the open-air Brooklyn Museum parking lot (habitual location of the competition), try to wipe it dry. Space out a little. So our umbrellas won’t drip on each other. We look up. The view of the reportedly $90,000 stage is obscured. Two canopies, to shelter judges and officials, brand a health insurer into our memory. The company who block us from seeing the pan.
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