Pics from the archive (6)

A Belizean dinner (fish with rice 'n beans)
Taken in Cayo / San Ignacio, 20th December 2005

The Plaza Central that was

As you can see from this nineteenth century pic, the Ayuntamiento used to have a clock tower (I wonder what happened to it? It must have been a casualty of either an earthquake or an over-dogmatic restoration job)...and the Parque Central looked like a refugee camp. (It was in fact the original location of the market.)

A couple of centuries earlier a lithograph artist gave us this view below from the same building's first floor colonnade. The cathedral was still intact, and Fuego has been caught in the act of sneaking in surreptitiously from the east to give the Volcán de Agua orejas de conejo.

The plaza itself was still unlandscaped in the seventeenth century; in fact many of the trees, plant-beds and iron lamps one sees today have been installed within the past couple of decades. It used to be in a bit of a state like the Parque San Sebastián.

The big stone benches which used to be there in the early 90s s were removed, because the vagos were using them as beds. However, you can still see indentical ones around El Calvario, seemingly sinking into the ground.

Pics from the archive (5)

An unfortunate citizen of Pompeii, taken 2nd October 2005

Night at the Museum 2

...The Battle of the Smithsonian.

I think we must have made it about half way before we realised we couldn't continue. There are some interesting visual ideas, but the script is a big pile of poo.

Grade: C-

A bit Moorish

Moorish architectural motifs are fairly common here in La Antigua. Everyone will have their favourite examples; this one on the left crops up just inside the front door of a friend's house.

A full 25% of Spanish words derive from Arabic rather than Latin and the rest, starting with "Hola!"

You might think that Los Reyes Catolicos were trying to put a lid on this when they expelled the Moors and the Jews from Spain in 1492 and made pork the mainstay of the Spanish menu for centuries to come, but in a sense the damage had already been done, and they were soon adapting to the heavily-cushioned life in the newly acquired Alhambra and Alcázar of Seville.

As a consequence one can while away whole afternoons picking out the legacy of the Caliphate in Hispanic culture. It's not just secular customs and styles that have been affected, because there's more than a hint of Islam in the Catholicism that Spain came to share with the Maya.

Pics from the archive (4)

Isla de San Nicolas (Garraitz Uhartea) in Lekeitio, Biscaia
Taken July 27, 2004

First Words (11)

"He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular."

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1899)

Conrad's buddy Ford Maddox Ford wrote that the author of the above paragraph was "never really satisfied that he had got his characters in, he was never convinced that he had convinced the reader; this accounting for the great lengths of some of his books."

Both men apparently fancied a sentence from, La Reine Hortense, a Maupassant short story:

"He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway."

I detect an echo of it in this first paragraph of Lord Jim — one of his shorter novels — which unusually goes about getting the lead character in from the get-go, artfully combining a concise physical description with a certain dynamism plus a therapist's eye for human disposition. For the worst thing a writer can do really is describe each new character entering a story as if trying to verbalise a photographic image. As Harvard Professor James Woods puts it:

"The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile."

I have a particular soft spot for Lord Jim as I first read it here in Antigua when I came across a reasonably well-preserved 1964 New American Library paperback edition on the book-swap shelves of a now-defunct Spanish school back in 1989. I stll treasure it.

TV Viewing Diary: Horizon

This season's Horizon has been top draw — indeed, a full recovery has been made after the tie-up with Discovery had led initially to a downmarket drift.

Perhaps the best programme so far was the one presented by Marcus du Sautoy, who has replaced Richard Dawkins as the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. (And are far more down-to-earth incumbent of that chair he certainly makes.)

— Who, where, what am 'I'? the intrepid Oxford mathmo asked.

And so he takes himself off to Berlin in order to submit himself to an experiment which demonstrates the disconcerting fact that our brain activity indicates which way we are going to go on specific decisions some time before we are consciously aware of 'making a choice'. In the case of Du Sautoy the experimenter knew what he was going to do a full SIX SECONDS before he did. (He'd earlier sat beside the conveyor-belt at a sushi bar just so we knew what he meant by choice.)

As one would expect, he had some sensible things to say about the implications of this finding for our moral being. Although science has discovered that consciousness is in some senses a retroactive story that our minds tell themselves in order to justify a more 'parallel' process of interaction with the world, this kind of 'determination' should not in any way excuse the individual from any blame for the consequences of his or her actions — our consciousness is encoded in the deeper mind and in a sense our ethical biases become encoded in there too.

Therefore, in some ways our "I" is our brain's report on itself. Earlier however, Du Sautoy met up with Professor Henrik Ehrsson who has a trick for demonstrating that one's "I" might be said to be little more than an interpretative illusion.

Du Sautoy was made to put on a VR headset which treated his eyes to the images transmitted from a pair of cameras fixed on a chair directly behind him. "I am three feet behind myself," he observed, feeling somewhat transplanted.

Things got really fun when Ehrsson brought a hammer into the lab and started attacking Du Sautoy's displaced consciousness...and the out of body experience was complete when he wore the cameras himself, tricking Du Sautoy into thinking he'd become the Swede.

Professor Christof Koch also related the bizarre story of 'concept neurons'. One of his patients possesses a single neuron which will only fire whenever he sees either a pic of Jennifer Anniston or her name in print. (It remains obstinately unmoved by Brad Pitt however.)

Connecting communications to business strategy

The refreshed Commetric website was launched at the end of last week, featuring a slick new 'Quick Tour' video:



My role now includes editorial oversight of the 'Connecting Insights' blog, which is already starting to fill up with insights gleaned from Commetric's suite of analytical services.

I can recommend this post by Petya Sabinova on the local media response to Coalition statements and actions in Afghanistan over the past few months. This announcement outlines the service offer in greater detail.

Pics from the archive (3)

Guiseppe Momo's spiral staircase in the Vatican, taken January 2002.

This and ten other amazing staircases can also be seen here.

Brüno (2009)

A comedy that felt more like a horror movie, was V's conclusion, where every laugh is practically a scream. "I'm impressed..." she then added with a croak in her voice.

Certainly one to watch in the comfort of one's own home, because there are times when it will force you to lose control of those laugh/scream mechanisms in an unseemly fashion. The pause button comes in very handy...so you have time to breathe, to pinch yourself.

We were agreed that it was a big improvement on 2006's Borat, which was, in the words of this flick's eponymous hero, a bit vossever.

TV Borat had been funnier than movie Borat because he'd found a good cross-section of puffed-up people to pick on, and had improvised some of those moments of satirical genius we'd come to expect from Ali G.

And they're back again big time with Brüno, at times very much an über-gay version of that earlier character (viz the hummus/hamas gag). Who, other than Sacha Baron Cohen could get Paula Abdul to talk about her humanitarian work whilst sitting on a Mexican? Or inform a Palistinian terrorist leader that his hair was sun-damaged? (The hand gesture this scary individual made after Brüno's subsequent comments on Osama's beard, was for me the biggest laugh/scream moment of the movie!)

Yet, as more and more people have been put in a position to see him coming, Baron Cohen's rise into Hollywood has been paradoxically accompanied by the lowering of his aim. It's become a bit too easy for him to prey upon America's legions of the excessively polite and the excessively dumb.

Still, when Brüno takes on a largely African-American TV talk show audience in Dallas, he's careful to make sure that the joke is on him (and indirectly on Madonna and Angelina Jolie when he tells them he swapped his iPod — one of the special edition U2 red ones — for an African baby). And it's hard to find much sympathy for the parents of toddlers willing to have them put up on a cross or subjected to liposuction in the name of fame. The editing is generally smarter here too.

Have we seen these Alabaman turners of the bent before? Was it on Religulous?* I loved it when the 'second stage homosexual converter' revealed his own inner demons by attempting to get Brüno interested in vimmin with a string of sexist stereotypes such as "women don't stick to the point".

One of the panel watching the pilot for his Brüno's Hollywood show scribbled "worse than cancer" on the form afterwards, and I guess that is how many people will still respond to the extremes of this movie, even when in on the joke. Incidentally, I don't have the same problem that Dr K has with the likes of Bono, Slash, Sting, Chris Martin, and Sir Elton turning up at the end to celebrate their own in-ness on the joke. Celebrity is a self-satirising medium of fame after all.

Grade: B++

* No, it was Louis Theroux, V reminds me.

Pics from the archive (2)

28th August 2005

Oddly enough, we had greater success cultivating chiles (serranos and scotch bonnet) on our balcony in London than we've thus far had here in Antigua.

TV Viewing Diary: The History of Christianity (2)

Diarmaid MacCulloch turned his back on the rising sun for part two, following the history of the 'Imperial' Christianity through the great schism of 1054 with Constantinople and then on up to the Reformation, his pet subject.

"I don't believe Peter was ever Bishop in Rome," he deliberated, quite early on.

Scholars are apparently still uncertain why Paul, who seemed to make the bigger effort to extend the Word to gentiles, was downgraded relative to Simon Peter once Christianity became the state religion in Rome. Perhaps it was simply that Greek pun — "upon this rock" — put into Jesus' mouth that earned Peter a basilica downtown, while Paul's church and final resting place was stuck outside the city walls.

The Abbot of said church was admirably frank in expressing a hope that the legacy of 'his' saint should achieve greater influence in modern Catholicism, and observing that if Paul not Peter had become the gatekeeper, the church would have had a much less centralised look about it today.

MacCulloch himself betrays a slight Anglican bias on these matters. For he categorically blames St Augustine of Hippo for all of western Christianity's sexual complexes (and specifically of course the doctrine of original sin) whilst failing to note that it was Paul who was the monster misogynist.

In the Dark Ages old controversies still complicated the religious scene — such as the Arianism espoused by the Goths. So the papacy made the decision to outflank this encroaching heresy by converting the Anglo-Saxons in the late sixth century and establishing a particularly loyal bond between these gauche northerners and the Bishop of Rome.

For his services Augustine , the leading Benedictine missionary in England and special papal envoy, was presented with the See of Canterbury and a pallium, which still features in the Anglican Archbishop's coat of arms a half a millennium after the English Reformation.

With no Emperor in Rome at this time, the Italian aristocracy entered the priesthood in droves (The Catholic Bishop's get-up today reflects the secular garb of Rome's fufurufos at this time.) and local secular power was increasingly concentrated in the person of the Pope.

The Papacy was helped first by the eradication of three out of four rival patriarchs (Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem) by Jihad and by the forged Imperial decree known as The Donation of Constantine (not in fact mentioned on the programme) which supposedly transfered control of the western half of the empire to the Pope in the absence of any other capo in the region.

On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III felt secure enough to share some of this ascendency by crowning the biggest barbarian then knocking around — Charlemagne — as the first 'Holy Roman Emperor.'

But a Papacy controlled by wealthy Roman toffs was hardly a model Christian institution. A zeal for change soon arrived in the person of the brutish reformer Gregory VII, whose main achievements might be said to have been:

1) Getting himself embroiled in a war with the very institution that Leo III had created, which destablised Europe (and Germany in particular) for centuries and perhaps could be said to have ultimately resulted in two World Wars thanks to Rome's continued efforts to stifle German nationalism and centralised leadership from this point onwards. (MacCulloch didn't actually say this though!)

2) Getting rid of married priests, largely in order to counteract the laws of inheritance that prevailed amongst the aristocracy and thereby establish the Pope's unchallenged authority in the selection process for the key ecclesiastical posts. (Up until this point only 'regular clergy' i.e. monks and nuns were expected to be celibate.)

3) Getting the ideological wheels moving which would lead to exciting new doctrines on the remission of sin, which would pave the way for the Crusades and the sale of indulgences which would in turn eventually culminate in the Reformation and part four (?) of this very interesting programme.

Part 3 meanwhile will cover the 'Orthodox' church. Gregory had been helped by the actions of his predecessor Leo IX who had got shot of Constantinople and both its Emperor and its Patriarch, the last serious rivals to the Pope's claim to head up "all Christendom". This was achieved by sending Rome's least tactful legate Humbert for a crucial meeting with Patriarch Michael in 1054 which concluded with a frenzy of mutual excommunications.

Syntax Era

I took this pic at the Science Museum in London back in 2002.

Many (...many) years before I had had my first encounter with a computer in there. I typed in my name at the prompt and the black & white screen then diplayed "Hello Guy!". I was totally thrilled; as far as I was concerned it might just as well have been Hal 9000.

The BBC's one-off TV drama Micro Men (working title 'Syntax Era') tracks the rivalry from 1978-1985 between (Sir) Clive Sinclair and his former employee Chris Curry who went on to form Acorn Computers.

These were the bubble years of the micro-computer. It seems that Curry had the idea first but couldn't distract Sinclair from his fantasies about personal transportation. Sinclair was still, as was his wont, first to market with the ZX80 (see above, the little white door wedge beside the Apple II), but then Curry and his colleagues won the contract to make the BBC Micro under license.

Sinclair responded by trying to outflank Acorn with a move upmarket (The hideous QL or Quantum Leap) while Curry did the opposite, trying to steal some of the ZX Spectrum's gaming thunder with his Electron. Neither machine sold well and the champagne days came to an end.

For years Britain (and Cambridge geeks in particular) had led the way with 'personal' computing but surrendered the advantage to large-scale American and Asian enterprises. "We could have been the British IBM!" Curry snarls at Sinclair at one point, and the narrative here does suggest strongly that both men became distracted by their feud and might have done better to collaborate from the start.

One of the great Cambridge pubs, the Baron of Beef on Bridge Street, is the scene for some of the central encounters between the warring entrepreneurs. The last time I was in there it was just after collecting my 'free upgrade' MA in 1993, so I wasn't entirely sure if they'd shot in the real interior. In my day the floor was still covered in sawdust.

Sinclair had made the first slimline calculator and the first digital watch, but it seems he never really believed in the tranformational powers of computing and even today recoils from the Internet. He appears to have simply spotted an opportunity to significantly undercut the Apple II (the largest machine above) and the Commodore Pet on price, calculating that he could make hundreds of thousands of people desire a home computer even if they had no idea what they were going to do with it.

The drama concludes with bittersweet footage of Sir Clive (whose company Sinclair Research recently comprised himself and er...nobody else) in his C5 being passed by big lorries emblazoned with the logos of Microsoft and Compaq. Anyone for an A-Bike?

Tony Saint's script is gently funny and full of nostalgic touches, playing with the counterintuitive notion of Sir Clive's sexual magnetism. The Office's Martin Freeman is an always likeable presence and comedian Alexander Armstrong has a good turn as the irascible inventor. (Though his slaphead/ginger scalp prosthetic looks like it could be more firmly attached with Blu Tack like the RAM unit on the ZX80.)

{Full disclosure: I have a ZX81 and a BBC 'B' in a box in my storeroom here in Guatemala!}

Death Match III

The most controversial FIFA fixture in world football reaches round three today.



As some of you will know, Egypt were down 1-3 from the first leg, but with the score still at 1-0 in Cairo in the fifth minute of time added-on, the locals managed to get the second goal that they so desperately needed to draw the tie overall, and force this afternoon's decider in Khartoum. It was probably offside but seriously, what referee in the world was ever going to disallow it?

It is said that the ill-feeling that lead to the original 'hate match' in 1982 was a result of Egypt's indifference to Algeria's struggle for independence from the French.

Pics from the archive (1)

July 2006.

"Cómo le habla una chinche a otra chinche? Con chincheridad."

Wetbacks

When my father was evacuated across the pond in 1940 the first native of the New World that he encountered — a New York cab driver — greeted him thus:

"So Limey, how does it feel to be a refugee?"

While he was away becoming a product of the American High School system, my grandmother opened up her home to those late arrivals into WWII, the GIs. Many other London householders were similarly welcoming. My father has often told me how Grosvenor Square, site of the American Embassy, then took on the appearance of a car park for countless dark green US-Army vehicles.

A novel kind of refugee has just moved in next door to us. For not only are Mexicans and Guatemalans 'resident' in the United States having to plead with their relatives back home to reverse the customary flow of monies, Guatemala is starting to fill up with gringos fleeing financial ruin (and debts) in the land of the free.

Our local economic migrant is a middle-aged Texan. We've already nicknamed him 'White Van Man' after the vehicle which eventually followed him down here. We already know quite a lot about him thanks to his all-American loudness. Indeed, it is something of a routine for him to come out into the street every evening and speak into his mobile phone in such a way that any English-speakers within a two block radius will acquire a pretty good idea about the kind of obstacles he's already facing in his quest for a successful reboot down here...

TV Viewing Diary: The History of Christianity (1)

Presented by Oxford University's muy simpatico Professor of the History of the Church, Diarmaid MacCulloch, this new BBC series has set about tracking each of the key moments which have given the Christian faith the structures we see today.

This is not a history of theology, he informed us at the start, but a history of the church — a rather convenient excuse for not addressing controversies with contemporary resonance such as the historical origins of the Gospels — and yet he was quickly tackling the doctrinal scrap surrounding the teachings of Arius which led to the Council of Nicea in 325 and the imperially-imposed compromise we now know as the Holy Trinity.

Further dissention within the early church was largely condensed by MacCulloch. In a Constantinople restaurant he mixed water with oil and water with wine in order to explain the respective positions of Archbishop Nestorius and Pope Cyril of Alexandria on the manner in which the human and divine were combined in Jesus. Nestorius was exiled and then partially rehabilitated at the Council of Chalcedon. (He was also condemned for insisting that the Virgin should be described as the Mother of Christ not the Mother of God.)

Yet the first really significant bifurcation occurred when some early missionaries took the eastern road out of Jersualem, whilst others headed west into the empire which in 70AD had sacked the Temple and generally trashed the city, thereby uprooting Christianity from its origins as a Jewish sect.

Eastern Christianity was never to have a Constantine moment, was never to acquire the friends in high places enjoyed by its western equivalent. Still, MacCulloch makes his way to China, finding there an east-facing Buddhist pagoda (pictured), once a seventh century Christian mission, and learns that under the Tang Dynasty Christianity was known as 'the religion of light'. Its adherents were predominantly merchants, and so lacked the characteristic arms-bearing attitude of the Latin church.

Many eastern Christians remained pre-Chalcedon in outlook, rejecting the fudge imposed by the Byzantine emperor. The Church of the East, based for 1500 years (up to 2003!) in Baghdad, was one of these, and its members played a significant role in the translation of ancient Greek texts by the Abbasids.

The Syriac Orthodox church based in Damascus has a liturgy which is rich in symbolic gesture. A priest explained to the intrepid historian that unlike western theology, which has always been 'rational' and philosophical, the Syriac faith (encapsulated and transmitted in a near-relative of Aramaic) could have been knocked up by a poet.

Today Christianity is perceived as an integral part of the 'western' cultural offering, but these ancient eastern offshoots suggest that things could easily have been different, MacCulloch concluded. He even located a friendly Islamic scholar in Damascus willing to admit that the Muslim practice of praying from a prostrated five-times a day was borrowed from the ways of early christians in the east.

First Words (10)

"The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow."

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Equality for all, or just a share of the average?

The argument of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better is that amongst the richer nations, the biggest driver of performance against all the key metrics of 'wellbeing' is the gap between the richest and poorest 20% of the population.

Unequal societies like Britain and the USA perform worse on almost all measures of quality of life such as life expectancy, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy, even the quantity of recycled trash. (The model also works within the US: with rich and unequal states such as California underperforming compared to the less productive Mormon paradise that is Utah.)

As David Runciman notes in his LRB review of this book, the evidence presented doesn't always wholeheartedly support the argument. The data on infant mortality presents us with the best fit — so we see that children from the highest social class in the UK are slightly more likely to die than children from the lowest in Sweden — but elsewhere it's harder to insist that everyone is made worse off by inequality.

In the US the reigning perspective is that it hardly matters if the bottom 20% are completely screwed just as long as the other 80% are able to delude themselves into thinking that they have it better than everyone else in the affluent world.

As Runciman notes, it thus seems politically reasonable to some to argue that the poorest group in unequal societies are in a sense cut adrift (and can be treated as such) and to ignore average statistics of wellbeing precisely because they have been brought down for the society as a whole by the underclasses.

"This is why the difference between ‘almost everyone’ and ‘everyone on average’ matters so much: politics. If it is almost everyone who would benefit from a more equal society, then this is an encouragement to solidarity across social boundaries, so that joint action to remedy the problem might be possible. But if it is everyone on average, then this can go along with an absence of solidarity and the hardening of divisions, because the disadvantages may be so unequally distributed."

and...

"The practical political difficulties of bridging the gap between these two positions are clear from Obama’s recent speech on healthcare reform. He wants to be able to say to the American public that everyone will be better off under a reformed system – indeed, in an earlier, far wonkier speech he made to the American Medical Association in June he sounded pretty much like the authors of The Spirit Level: ‘Today, we are spending over $2 trillion a year on healthcare – almost 50 per cent more per person than the next most costly nation. And yet . . . for all this spending, more of our citizens are uninsured; the quality of our care is often lower; and we aren’t any healthier. In fact, citizens in some countries that spend substantially less than we do are actually living longer than we do.’ But he knows that most Americans think that the problems of their system are heavily concentrated at the bottom end, among the uninsured. So, as the politics got more fractious over the summer, this is where he directed his argument: not at the idea that the present system leaves almost everyone worse off, but at the thought that almost anyone could suddenly fall through the hole at the bottom. ‘Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured,’ he said to Congress in September. ‘We are the only wealthy nation that allows such hardship for millions of its people. There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two-year period, one in every three Americans goes without healthcare coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone.’"

Another problem for the authors of The Spirit Level is the question of policy. Many of the more equal societies in the developed world (such as Japan and Sweden) became that way as a result of peculiar historical circumstances and not (just) because a progressively-minded government decided to implement piecemeal policy changes aimed at stealthily reducing inequality.

Yet where inequality can be shown to be bad for 'almost everyone' and not just certain socio-economic groups, the data should be able to inform a set of policies geared to take note of the common underlying factors behind a whole range of different social ills that beset otherwise wealthy societies.

It would also be very interesting to see how the data plays out in the developing world and to consider for example, whether 'almost everyone' in Latin America would have access to better education if the inequalities of wealth here could be reduced. A straightforward one-on-one comparison with Asia would seem to indicate that this is indeed the case.

Confucius say confusing things

Miss Panama sows further confucianism:



and Señorita Antioquia clarifies the transmission of the porcina:



Coming soon... Sarah Palin on Oprah.

Casa del Rio

A while ago we watched amiable design historian David Heathcote making the most of a night at this highly unusual property in Devon. It was the fantasy home of a baker-entrepreneur — the man who brought sliced bread to Britain no less — and he'd chosen as his model the 'Hollywood Hispanic' mansion of actor Douglas Fairbanks.

It's the kind of house that periodically crops up on the listings of my mate Maddie in Miami, but which is altogether less likely to appear amongst the real estate ads at the back of Country Life.

When first constructed, it sat alone atop a hillside overlooking a cove-like valley. Today, the river below is chocker with modest west country pleasure cruisers and the Casa del Rio has acquired some less glamourous neighbours.

In the garden one can glimpse the ghost of a turfed-over swimming pool surrounded by stately isotales (con todo y su flor). The not-quite central feature of the main house is a magnificent marble spiral staircase balustraded with meandering ironwork.

The glossy floor at the base quotes the alternating black and white Art Deco motif seen also within the lobby at Claridges. (V hated it there and she hates it here too!)



I'd say that Casa del Rio is eye-catching rather than beautiful and its exterior and tejado roof must look like even more of a folly during the dark winter months. It's available to hire for parties at a cost of just under £2000 for three nights.

The BBC4 series covering the inter-war years has been fascinating, if occasionally repetitive. There's only so many times one can learn that cocktails were invented to disguise the taste of bootleg booze, for example. But what with re-reading Tender is the Night, I suppose I am going through a bit of a 'Deco' phase myself now.

Amuse-buche

A bedtime conversation last night...

— what was that crap I ate today?
— buche

I was perhaps feeling a little bitter about our earlier off-site degustation, having just finished watching Francia y sus Quesos on el gourmet...an exquisite form of torture for foodies finding themselves an ocean's width away from fine frommage.

The squid-like texture of the buche, accompanied by a powdery cheese the colour of Cornish dairy ice-cream, seemed like a very poor substitute for Reblochon, Sainte Nectaire, Brin D'Amour and Comté.

Indeed, it had been vraiment painful to watch the intonationally-challenged Bruno and Olivier nibbling at these distant delights whilst swilling superior Burgundies.

The programme hasn't been uploaded to YouTube, but there are some better clips around these days of the pair's Boulangerie show. It can take you a while to realise that Bruno is actually speaking Spanish:

Birthday Boy

Today Bali celebrates making it through his first twelve months. Here's a collection of his best pics across this debut year.

Guatemalan homes tend to have roughly equal quantities of indoors and outdoors, and Bali is our most indoor cat, and also the most polite and gentle. Feeding him a piece of ham is like putting your credit card into an ATM.

He'll wait for as long as necessary outside any door he knows we're behind, but once inside will jealously maintain his personal space. His response to over-petting has earned him the apodo 'The Ginger Whinger'.

— Favourite toys: Straws, dental floss, TV remotes, iPod cables and headphones, brooms in motion.

— Favourite TV: David Attenborough, Disney-Pixar animations...basically anything where some of the participants have tails.

— Favourite foods: Papaya, tomato, mandarins, grapes, frijoles and the usual meats and treats. (Doesn't like tortilla, pasta, rice, bananas or fried plantains.)

— Favourite sleeping places: My foot and the doghouse.

First Words (9)

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice — they won't hear you otherwise — "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell; "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Thanks to Pedro for the suggestion.

Meanwhile, Sting salutes Calvino's seminal postmodern novel with the name of his new albumload of rearranged British folk tunes:




And in the original....

"Stai per cominciare a leggere il nuovo romanzo Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore di Italo Calvino. Rilassati. Raccogliti, Allontana da te ogni altro pensiero. Lascia che il mondo che ti circonda sfumi nell'indistinto. La porta è meglio chiuderla; di là c'è sempre la televisione accesa. Dillo subito, agli altri: «No, non voglio vedere la televisione!» Alza la voce, se no non ti sentono: «Sto leggendo! Non voglio essere disturbato!» Forse non ti hanno sentito, con tutto quel chiasso; dillo più forte, grida: «Sto cominciando a leggere il nuovo romanzo di Italo Calvino! » O se non vuoi non dirlo; speriamo che ti lascino in pace. "

First Words (8)

"Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get."

Iain Banks, Transition

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Diablo Cody's first script since the Oscar-winning Juno turns out to be a bit of a stinker.

Roger Ebert mischievously described it as 'Twlight for boys', and this is really where its problems lie. It wants to retain much of the indie cleverness of Juno whilst ceding to the genre conventions of high school horror...rather like a jock that wants to dress like the EMO set off the football field. (Or Cody herself doing a cheerleader routine!)

Presumably this need was driven by the requirement of extending the financial power of the Diablo Cody 'brand', but the results are hardly encouraging.

Cody throws everything at the screen — sex, repartee, gore, incipient frights, genre references — but nothing really sticks.

There's one short passage of very clever and funny dialogue (tellingly the one I'd heard as a clip before watching the film) but it can't save the rest of the screenplay from patchiness: sometimes the characters are in character and sometines they are mere mouthpieces for Cody.

Having thus far avoided the Transformers movies I haven't had an earlier opportunity to form prejudices about Megan Fox, so I can't really say — as did Mark Kermode — that this is her finest work to date and most probably the finest work she is ever likely to deliver as an actress. But in a movie which is ultimately a failed attempt at crossover, her own crossover (and upgrade to a lead role) is possibly the least unsuccessful.

Update: Fox explains the film's poor showing at the box office thus: "Jennifer’s Body’ wasn’t rated PG-13 like Twilight...It was a hard R, and kids couldn’t get in. So they bought a ticket to another movie and snuck in." haha..yeah right.

Grade: B-

Shifting tides of homicidal violence

The chart above shows the number of homicides per 100 inhabitants across Central America. (Gracias a The Black Box). Costa Rica has seen the largest increase relatively, more than doubling over the past 16 years, with 40% of victims in their twenties.

Up (2009)

After the sentimental opening and the whimsical, Gilliamesque 'take-off' which followed, I was steeling myself for disappointment, but I needn't have worried, Up is truly wonderful.

It has much of the pace and excitement of The Incredibles with some of those flashes of wordless comic genius which permeated Toy Story 2, and while in neither respect does it surpass those earlier Disney-Pixar classics, the beauty of its rendered visuals places it in a class of its own. And as a dog owner I won't quickly relinquish the sherrible jest of talking chuchos: "point!" and "squirrel!!!".

Grade: A (-)

The Savage Detectives: Impressions (3)

November 22 in the diary of Juan García Madero is one of the novel's first great set-pieces...where the young poet is treated to an idiosyncratic discourse on the essential gayness of his chosen art form:

"Ernesto San Epifanio dijo que existía literatura heterosexual, homosexual y bisexual. Las novelas, generalmente, eran heterosexuales, la poesía, en cambio, era absolutamente homosexual, los cuentos, deduzco, eran bisexuales, aunque esto no lo dijo.

"Dentro del inmenso océano de la poesía distinguía varias corrientes: maricones, maricas, mariquitas, locas, bujarrones, mariposas, ninfos y filenos. Las dos corrientes mayores, sin embargo, eran la de los maricones y la de los maricas. Walt Whitman, por ejemplo, era un poeta maricón. Pablo Neruda, un poeta marica. William Blake era maricón, sin asomo de duda, y Octavio Paz marica. Borges era fileno, es decir de improviso podía ser maricón y de improviso simplemente asexual. Rubén Darío era una loca, de hecho la reina y el paradigma de las locas..una loca, según San Epifanio, estaba más cerca del manicomio florido y de las alucinaciones en carne viva mientras que los maricones y los maricas vagaban sincopadamente de la Ética a la Estética y viceversa."

The English translation gives us...

"All literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.

"Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Ruben Dario was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak...Freaks were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-steps from ethics to aesthetics and back again."

Still pretty drole, but the polarity between marica and maricón has been lost and 'freak' isn't quite what Mexicans mean when they stigmatise a loca.

First Words (7)

"The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. The vices and the virtues of four nations have been displayed in the conquest of that region that even to this day has not been robbed of all the mystery and romance of its past — and the race of men who had fought against the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, has not been changed by the unavoidable defeat. They have kept to this day their love of liberty, their fanatical devotion to their chiefs, their blind fidelity in friendship and hate — all their lawful and unlawful instincts. Their country of land and water — for the sea was as much their country as the earth of their islands — has fallen a prey to the western race — the reward of superior strength if not of superior virtue. To-morrow the advancing civilization will obliterate the marks of a long struggle in the accomplishment of its inevitable victory."

Joseph Conrad, The Rescue

Perhaps not his greatest novel, but also perhaps the one I enjoyed the most.

Bankocracy

"For the free-marketers, the idea of endless bail-outs was just so obscene that the temptation to walk the walk of market discipline would somewhere, sometime, have proved too great to resist. Lehman did not create the reality of Too Big to Fail, it merely exposed it to general view. There was a brief moment when the general horror at the new state of affairs seemed likely to lead to change; but as stock markets and liquidity have recovered, that moment is receding, and we seem to be settling back into the status quo ante, with a few cosmetic changes about bonuses. It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can’t do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn’t capitalism: that, remember, is all about ‘creative destruction’, and the freedom to fail. That’s exactly what we don’t have. The most accurate term would probably be ‘bankocracy’."

Fascinating LRB review by John Lanchester of two insider accounts of Lehman Bro's failure last year, of which this is the conclusion. Once TBTF had manifested itself in public in September 2008, it became clear that our economic system had mutated into something beyond the current theoretical underpinnings. Perhaps it needs a new name, Lanchester asks.

La Cumparsita of the Day #34 (Last one for now...)

La Cumparsita of the Day #33

Preferisco ragionare...

"I prefer to reason rather than believe, that's why I'm an atheist."

That's the motto on the billboard created for by the UAAR (Unione degli Atei e degli Agnostici Razionalistici) in Pisa and subsequently set up behind a tree by a 'charitable' local firm, even though the organisation had specifically paid for it to be on the other side of the highway where there are no trees.

I'm reasonably content to describe myself as an atheist, largely because the term, — though it can feel like having a monkey on your back— presents fewer problems for me than agnostic. Having said that, the 'rational agnosticism' absorbed by the UAAR is not something I could seriously object to.

In the recent Intelligence Squared Debate Stephen Fry joked that the Roman Catholic Church talks much about 'moral relativism', something he himself has always equated with 'thinking'. The trouble is that there really is an insidious form of relativism out there, which I have always equated with not thinking, and I find many agnostics guilty of this abjuration from thought. ("So open-minded your brain falls out..." sayeth Richard Dawkins. More on him shortly.)

In cultures such as this, where the majority still inherit their beliefs from their parents, atheists are typically branded as individuals who have turned their back on morality, purpose and a concern for justice. Nihilists do exist, but I'm not one of them, and I tend to think that people who have thought through their moral positions make better judgments than people who have picked them up from sermons.

Yet any educated person privy to my views might still be inclined to describe me as an agnostic, just as they would probably label the (very undogmatic) intuitions of my wife pantheistic. The idea that the ultimate meaning of the cosmos is somehow immanent within it, is one I am also sympathetic to, as I am to the 'atheistic' tradition within Hinduism and Buddhism.

For a long time atheists were given a very bad name by the likes of Joseph Stalin. Just when that nasty spectre had started to fade, along comes Richard Dawkins. The philosophy of both men should properly be described as materialist — where legitimate enquiry/struggle is supposedly confined to the material world and all other viewpoints are dismissed as spiritual...which to them means hokum.

The 'dialectical materialism' which underlay the communist ideology of the Soviet Union was shown to owe is deeper origins to Plotinus, the Christian Neo-Platonists and John 'the Scot' Eriugena by the late, great Leszek Kolakowski. These early streams of Western thought led to a bias within our culture towards a process-driven view of history, with a beginning and end, and in between a teleology that gives the whole thing meaning (though Marxist thinkers and Christian theologians map this onto an external system of justice rather differently). And as far as I am concerned materialism is faith in another guise.

Listen to Richard Dawkins and you might think that Charles Darwin had come up with the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Darwin's achievement was to record numerable observations which demonstrated how life-forms — once they had acquired the ability to self-replicate— could make use of the external selection services of Sex and Death to adapt themselves to specific environmental niches, and thereby improve their survival opportunities in what has always been a highly competitive natural world.

This 'theory' has significant explanatory power outside biology — specifically in computer science — but it is not a complete philosophical system. Yet Dawkins's public preaching on the merits of science over all things religious, occasionally gives the impression that that's exactly what he thinks it is.

His position reflects the prejudices of a biologist whose discipline has necessarily remained rooted in the material world and the classical science of Newton, while his colleagues in the department next door have strayed into the altogether more exciting space where Physics and Metaphysics overlap.

Dawkins actually considers himself an agnostic because he claims to be only 99% sure that there isn't a god — and one has to be 100% sure if one wants to call oneself an atheist, he argues. This is of course nonsense. If there is one thing atheism is not about, it is certainty.

He has fallaciously equated the case for God with that of a giant spaghetti monster, which is nothing but a generically-unlikely supernatural thingamajig, as opposed to what my learned colleague refers to as a 'first cause'.

It is of course absurd to speak of probability outside of the behavioural context of matter in the observable universe....and then only matter in macro form, because down at the more fundamental, quantum dimensions, the very notion becomes problematic. So when in The God Delusion Dawkins describes God as "improbable", he's betraying much the same philosophical naivety manifested by many of his chosen adversaries. So in that respect at least, he might have to consider himself "trounced"!

Yet for much the same reasons, the idea of causality at the cosmological level is equally problematic. Hence, I would suggest that a belief in first causes necessarily requires a leap outside the bounds of logic and into assumption...if not indeed faith.

In the course of the past half century cosmology has had to relinquish its commitment to the 'steady state universe' in favour of the Big Bang model, which might initially have seemed more amenable to first cause enthusiasts, except that physicists went on to posit a number of possible explanations for the Big Bang which don't in fact require an intelligent detonator.

I mentioned one of these the other day: the notion that many big bangs have occurred as the more mysterious structure of the outer cosmos inflates, each one embodying the moment of decay when the process of rapid expansion ceases locally, causing energy to transmute into the firey creation of matter.

Which takes me back again to Richard Dawkins. Most people are atheistic when it comes to Thor and Zeus, he quips, "I've just added Yahweh to the list of deities that I'm atheistic about".

Now Zeus was the alpha-godhead of a society which generally thought the universe eternal: it's always been here, and always will be, so not much point in discussing who was responsible for creating it. Thor meanwhile, was the metaphorical embodiment of something scary which the Vikings didn't understand in a scientific sense, but which had the power to make their transatlantic voyages extremely uncomfortable.

Neither of these mythological personages can be a straight swap for the God of the Abrahamic tradition, said to be the Creator of everything.

Yet for a long time after they invented him, the Israelites conceived of Yahweh as a member of the Divine Assembly of 'holy ones' presided over by El, the high god of Canaan with his consort Asherah. Yahweh was essentially the supernatural being one wanted on one's side in battle, but when it came to agriculture, the people of Israel and Judah turned to Baal and his sister-spouse Anat. But being atheistic about Yahweh when he was part of a well-demarcated pagan pantheon, is not the same thing as being atheistic about Him once He has emerged in the eighth century BC as the peerless primal cause. (However, being atheistic about the Virgin Mary, the Archangel Gabriel, Lucifer and St Peter is perhaps more logically consistent with a rejection of other pre-monotheist deities.)

So, another potential trouncing for Dawkins? To a point, but I've yet to be exposed to a convincing logical/factual explanation for why the universe had to have had a beginning and why that beginning had to have been caused by something omnipotent and omniscient. In fact, our current cosmological model suggests that the very idea that our situation here involved the creation of something out of nothing is a category error, one of those sticky misapprehensions which 'common-sense' thinking occasionally serves up.

Digression: Though of course, 'folk' interpretations of phenomena are often found to be accurate by subsequent scientific investigation — I recall Guatemalan presecriptions for harvesting avocados at full moon and the local technique for containing the effervescence of a shaken fizzy drink bottle by placing one's palm along the base.

Anyway, I've asked myself a number of times whether either Darwin or Einstein really succeded in making the world less mysterious. When you are dealing with a mystery that is in a sense infinite, incremental steps in human knowledge are never really going to do philosophers out of a job.

Yet Darwin provided a concrete explanation for something which had no business being ineffable in the first place — the dynamics of the natural world that were going on literally beneath our noses, not outside the scope of the visible universe.

On the other hand, from the time he first came across a compass, Einstein was far more concerned with the world beyond appearances — and so his own contributions to science have that strange dual quality of clarification and re-mystification. (The idea that spacetime is grainy and that the chronological aspect of it doesn't flow as it appears to subjectively, wraps the essentially linear process of evolution in a blanket of inscrutability that Dawkins seems reluctant to touch upon.)

Like many of his contemporaries during the first half of the last century Einstein showed us that the barrier between the effable and the ineffable is a real and unyielding one, and that however many new ways we find to think about it, we are unlikely to be able to think our way around it.

Preferisco ragionare. I prefer to reason about these matters, to find my own path towards ultimate purposes rather than accept a culturally-mediated solution that has inevitably been distorted by historical contexts and human psychology.

I claim no special access to the ineffable, but then nor do I blind myself to the philosophical challenge that it presents, and seeing matter as a side-effect of a more fundamental reality, I find it hard to share Richard Dawkins's apparent faith that Science — at least as he conceives it — is making small but significant steps towards de-fogging everything that religion has traditionally sought to explain.

That's why I'm an atheist.

La Cumparsita of the Day #32

Not for the purists.

From the comments: "Esto suena mas griego que el tango, les acredito el tratar de tocarlo pero mejor que no traten mas, jodieron al tango."
(An Argie by any chance?)

Genesis

The first chapter of Genesis wasn't, as some of the Good Book's more credulous and literalist readers appear to believe, the first part of that work committed to parchment. It is commonly supposed to have been composed by a priest (or a set of priests) known to scholars as P, some time after after the destruction of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 and the commencement of the Israelites' enforced sojourn in Babylon.

People at that time were much less likely to assume an unrealistic certainty on matters ineffable, but found that story-telling was a most effective way of extracting meaning from the mysteries around them. In her fascinating biography of the Bible, Karen Armstrong writes that:

"In the ancient world cosmogony was a therapeutic rather than a factual genre. People recited creation myths at a sickbed, at the start of a new project or at the beginning of a new year - whenever they felt the need for an infusion of divine potency that had, somehow, brought all things into being."

P belonged to a Jewish culture which had flirted with the notion of an eternal cosmos similar to that espoused by the Greeks (and crucially, had not been fully monotheistic before the calamity of exile), but in these particular historical circumstances Yahweh had an obvious competitor in the form of the Babylonian deity Marduk who was said to re-create the world every year. In P's alternative version of creation, there was no great battle, no need for renewal, just an effective, non-violent little project carried out in the space of six days. It gave the Jews a clearly differentiated primordial myth in this period of lost political autonomy.

Armstrong goes on to say that 'few' people before the nineteenth century would have imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of creation that could compete with knowledge acquired empirically....but really, how are we to quantify 'few' here?

Asking if people believed this tale literally at any stage in its history is a bit like asking if medieval people believed the world to be flat. Most learned people probably didn't, but then they were part of an educated elite, a group which will always have a more sophisticated (or sophistic) position on where to draw the line between the effable and the ineffable.

My own line is that scholars at the time of P would most probably not have even understood what we mean by literal interpretation, given that scripture was not read in the same way that we moderns are taught to read, but instead used as a means to the real end, a state of religious understanding or ekstasis, achieved through formal recitation of the text.

Of course today we have to put up with hooey like the Creation Museum in Kentucky. But science and creationism are not two sides of a Yin Yang opposition, they are instead part of the same modern drive for factual certainty which has rather overshadowed its true alternative, the more abstract, intuited understandings that come from our exposure to metaphor.

But the apparent challenge of squaring Genesis with Darwin diverts some religious people into a pig-headed rejection of fact and others into an equally inane discourse on the wonderfulness of a God who came up with the idea of creating a process of self-creation.

The authors of the Old Testament — Jews — have generally maintained an approach to this problem that sounds more practical than your typical Christian bluff, and the Muslims — with their Abrahamic Tradition V3.0 — cleverly covered themselves early on by qualifying the creation story in the Koran with the statement that one day in Genesis is equivalent to “a thousand years of your reckoning.” Tellingly though, Muslim creationism has started to take hold in the most secular of Islamic societies: Turkey.

At the Intelligence Squared Debate Anne Widdecombe's managed to be duplicitous as well as abusive to the questioner when she tossed aside the issue of why women are barred from the priesthood: a woman can no more stand in persona cristi at the point of consecration than a man can represent the Virgin Mary, she snorted.

Only an utter dupe would see that as anything other than a casuistic post-rationalisation emerging from an organisation which developed within a culture where women were not even allowed to own property, one of the main perks of the priesthood back in the Middle Ages.

What this debate revealed is that religion does itself few favours by engaging in a fact-slinging contest,. Yet in the modern world, a return to a more mystic tradition (a la Kabbalah) could only really be viewed by the rest of a largely secular society as a conscious act of isolationism. A dilemma indeed.

Prawn cocktail

Camarón shows off his talent for knocking on tables ('compas') in the coolest of fashions, before taking centre stage. Paco de Lucía is also looking dapper in that jacket. I once heard him explaining his stage name in an interview: there were so many Pacos around in his vecindad that he chose to identify himself as the one whose mother was called Lucía.

The location much reminds me of that wonderfully grotty (yet extremely snooty) old sherry bar La Venencia in the Calle Echegaray, which I visited when in Madrid last June. No big surprise that the poor 'Prawn' died from lung cancer.

Shame that image and sound are a little out of synch.

La Cumparsita of the Day #31

Trounced

Roman Catholic cultural commentator Andrew M. Brown laments the performance of Archbishop Onaiyekan and Anne Widdecombe in defence of the motion 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world' at the recent Intelligence Squared debate. Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens ran circles around them....but then you'd kind of expect them to on just about any topic, especially against such mediocre opposition.

When Anne Widdecombe is at the podium you don't know whether to turn down the volume or dramatically lower the brightness of your screen....or both.

I've never found this kind of adversorial discussion particularly enlightening, but in this instance perspectives were indeed altered:

"The voting gives a good idea of how it went. Before the debate, for the motion: 678. Against: 1102. Don’t know: 346. This is how it changed after the debate. For: 268. Against: 1876. Don’t know: 34. In other words, after hearing the speakers, the number of people in the audience who opposed the motion increased by 774. My friend Simon, who’s a season ticket holder, said it was the most decisive swing against a motion that he could remember."

It's usually difficult for one team or the other to make converts in such encounters because both manage to find the other's weak points, but in this instance Stephen Fry led the RC pair into a number of significant intellectual traps which proved crucial in shifting the waverers:

— When you are a purveyor of absolute truth, you can hardly plead to be judged by the relative standards of different ages

— There's no point in responding aggressively to certain charges if on others you appear afraid to come out in public with your known doctrinal position

— Asking the audience not to focus on your misdeeds is indeed a bit like a paedophile in court asking the jury to forget about his track record of child abuse and consider instead the nice presents he buys for his grandmother

— An organisation which assumes responsibility for the moral lives of so many people at such a young age realy ought to have more to show for it.

La Cumparsita of the Day #30

First Words (6)

"Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see. But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels."

George Meredith, The Egoist

Weekend round-up

I've had the strange sensation that it was Sunday all day today. Meanwhile, V has been saying she has the feeling that it's Monday...but not next Monday, last Monday.

It's been one of those weeks I suppose - low on achievement - accompanied by some temporally-confused behaviour on the part of the weather, in which we've had a tardy but intense reminder of the kind of precipitation we experienced almost a full six months of last year. It seems I spoke too soon about the kitchen doors not swelling up in 2009.

Caught between tropical storm/hurricane Ida in the east and a nasty depression to the west now sliding up across Tapachula and into Mexico, things aren't supposed to get much better here in Guatemala until Tuesday at the earliest. There's been a bit of a nip in the air too.

Lunes ni las gallinas ponen, they say here. Martes, ni te cases ni te embarques. I'm not sure if there's a culturally-mandated excuse for not getting anything done on Wednesday too, but I found myself with quite a lot of catching up to do at the end of the week. V pointed out to me the other day that I'm already peppering conversations about impending projects with references to "next year".

I did have a very pleasant lunch with R at Hector's on Thursday and put in a brief appearance at the opening of the CFA's debut exhibition at Las Capuchinas yesterday evening. It was a young. sophisticated and largely local crowd, with some of the usual suspects. A friend I ran into confided to me that his business in Antigua has suffered a drop in revenues of over 80% in 2009, a blight that he puts down to the recent ebb in remesas more than anything else.

He also told me not to get my hopes up about the cabernet sauvignon from our local winery Chateau DeFay. Apparently, at another one of these gatherings, he and other attending guests were mortified to discover that the 'oversweet' red plonk produced up there was all that was on offer.

Still, to avoid any suggestion that I am quick to crticise things I haven't even tried, a trip up the dodgy Palín road looks like a project I might still try to fit into the remainder of this year. The cheese alone looks enticing. (Judging by the fantasy castle showcased on the website, the finca deFay's proprietors are likely to be as unconcerned about any totally uncalled-for remarks one might be inclined to make about the inferential pretentiousness of their concept as those of a certain French bistro in Antigua.)

I suppose the unpredictability of the weather over the past 24 months can't have worked in favour of a consistent vintage anyway. But there are enough micro-climates in Guatemala, that it wouldn't surprise me if there were indeed a spot or two around which were more or less suitable for viticulture. It just takes so long to get going, and one does need an inordinate amount of know-how and capital. A great hobby though, and perhaps also a great lifestyle...in spite of all the effort. (Brazilian wines such as Rio Sol have been a bit of a revelation to me. )

One place with far fewer delusions of grandeur which I have tested out on numerous occasions, is our local Domino's outlet. In the interests of full disclosure I suppose I ought to fess up here to being a shareholder. (When the stock dropped to around $3 at the start of the year I loaded up and waited for it to return to double figures a few months later; a piece of business that should keep me in pizzas for a while.)

DPZ now trades at around $7.5 and I've hung on to some of my shares for what are undeniably sentimental reasons. These warm feelings were put to the test the other afternoon however, when we dropped by to pick up a double order of cheesey bread. The counter staff were fighting with the bank of phones in front of them, and it seems that with the kitchen behind them undermanned, some of the motorcycle couriers were on emergency seasoning duty, because our order was delivered minus the salsas, yet heavily over-sprinkled with garlic salt.

We'd gone in to get it ourselves because V had decided that she didn't want to be responsible for some poor bloke having to come out on his bike in this stinky weather.

Downpours do tend to turn our neighbourhood into an occasional island township like Mont Saint-Michel, thanks to the basin located at the intersection of the main highway with the Calle del Reformador. Once that moat fills up with water even the big lorries start wandering around the narrow streets looking for a way out with a hard surface.

The Muni are trying to alleviate the problem by laying down an empedrado in the Avenida del Comendador, the last main road in the district to have remained mud-paved throughout the current wet season. Unfortunately, the project was delayed when the street-levelling machinery accidentally fractured the water main, and I suppose they were rather hoping that the rains would have ended on schedule this year, because every day or so the lake which has now formed at the southern end of this artery has been getting a significant refill.

Even once this has finally dried out, this project is likely to remain a bit of a struggle, given that they can't now take the level of the new surface down to where they originally wanted to (thanks to the shallow sewage system they have discovered), and I wouldn't be surprised if the guys in charge are also starting to drop the words "next year" into their meetings.

In other news...

A German tourist named as Paul Wolfgang Ritter was reported as having died today from gunshot wounds he received in Puerto Barrios on Wednesday. The story was hardly the lead in the local papers, perhaps a reflexion of editors' concerns about the damage this misadventure could do to the local tourism industry.

Ritter was a 73-old passenger of a Norwegian cruise ship who had disembarked at Santo Tomás de Castilla with the intention of crossing the bay to visit Livingston. For some reason he also thought it would be a good idea to visit a Hindu shrine in the public cemetery of Puerto Barrios and it was there that a pair of tattoed mareros, 20 and 21-years old respectively, decided to relieve him of his valuables and his life.

La Cumparsita of the Day #29

Version Dr Zhivago.

Coraline (2009)

Some critics have argued that this is way too scary for children, but I recall being the sort of kid who was constantly imagining — and dreaming about — alternative worlds (not all of them especially 'normal'), so in this case I imagine I would have been really thrilled by Coraline.

I can't be alone because much of children's literature feeds of this urge to seek out hidden worlds. This movie reminded me much of Les Triplettes de Belleville (Belleville Rendez-Vous), one of V's faves from 2003, but I suspect the weirdness of that film had less traction with the kiddiz.

Anyway, Coraline Jones is an only child whose parents are perpetually busy, and not all that nice; but then neither is she. Left largely to her own devices in 'The Pink Palace Apartments' — an old wooden mansion divided into three flats of which her family has recently occupied the largest — she comes across a little wooden door in the wall which, once unlocked and at certain times only, leads to a parallel household.

In this initially brighter version of Coraline's reality her 'Other Mother' and 'Other Father' have black buttons instead of eyes. Everything she apparently lacks is supplied there, be it jumbo home-cooked meals, a plushly decorated bedroom or quality time in the fantastic garden with her father. If she will agree to having buttons sown into her own eyes, she can stay there forever...

Aside from the aesthetic and technical beauty of the artwork and animation, this is where I think the adult interest in this movie lies. Just stop for a minute and try to imagine another version of your current life where all the things you believe you would need to be properly contented are suddenly available. (I suppose I engage in a similar exercise when thinking about alternative psychologies to my own — a way of developing fictional characters who assume different attitudes and make different choices to my own...or who simply approach alternative scenarios with my own set of biases.)

What would you sacrifice to get to his place? Would you want to stay? I can see how the dream could quickly become a nightmare without direct intervention from a locus of evil such as 'Other Mother'...una telaraña de autoengaño que no requiere una araña.

Can't wait to see Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs now...

Grade: A--

First Words (5)

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

If matter exists in finite quantities while time is infinite, everything has to occur more than once - this is more or less the modern scientific expression of the 'mad myth' that Nietzsche excavated from its Egyptian tomb.

However, contemporary cosmology has even more perplexing notions up its sleeve. For if space is infinite, the limited number of possible arrangements of protons means that many of these recurrences may actually be ocurring concurrently — your double is repeating your actions for you.

Fanciful? According to science writer Marcus Chown in The Never Ending Days of Being Dead, your nearest double is a long way away, but he or she is fully predicted by our current model of the universe.

"All that is really necessary is an assemblage of matter identical to you. Roughly speaking that means about 10˄28 particles. So how far would we have to travel to find another identical assemblage? Well, if there are 10˄28 possible locations for protons, there are 10˄10˄28 possible arrangements of those protons. And this means your nearest double is just 10˄10˄28 metres away."

This is of course a lot further than we can currently see. This spatial horizon 'is 13.7bn light years, a limit set by the age of our local universe. But we have grounds for considering that it goes on forever — technically at least —- because of what we have been able to deduce about its earliest moments.

It is often said of the Big Bang that it was neither big nor indeed a bang (it not being an explosion as such). It is also the case that it was probably neither the beginning nor indeed a singular event, according to our current standard model of cosmology.

Central to the latter is the idea of Inflation. This was the moment -—literally a fraction of a second — before what we call the Big Bang, when our universe doubled and redoubled its volume as many as eighty times over.

How did this happen? Well, one of the consequences of quantum theory is that there is no such thing as nothing. The vacuum isn't empty, in fact by default it contains energy which is constantly flicking into and out of existence, but in sum, comes to more than zero.

In a process still only partially understood, this initial 'void' acquired the propensity to inflate through the repulsive gravity which emerges when the pressure of a material is large and negative enough to cancel out the energy density which Einstein revealed as the 'cause' of gravity. Chown has a rather handy metaphor that can help lay persons, such as myself, grasp the implications of this:

"Imagine holding a stack of bank notes between your hands, pulling your hands apart and discovering that ever more bank notes fountain out of nothing to fill the gap. That was how the vacuum at the beginning of time was. As the universe grew, energy was literally conjured out of nothing. Inflation, as many physicists have remarked, was the 'ultimate free lunch'"

Big Bangs have been going off like a rastro of cohetes (without the bangs of course) whenever and wherever the inflation came to an end, dumping energy into local 'bubble' universes in the form of superheated matter.

But the false vacuum that drives inflation expands far faster than it can decay into a normal vacuum, so 'outside' the region of matter that we can see — the consequences, if you like, of our own Big Bang — the process continues. And this is why our own space is technically infinite — because the boundary between it and the continually inflating false vacuum — the pregnant void — is receding faster than light and is therefore unreachable; a technicality which allows us to speak of our own material universe as infinite to all intents and purposes.

And this is why there must be many other versions of me doing the same or similar things I'm doing right now, somewhere out there in spacetime.

And if that weren't enough, there are all those parallel universes predicted by the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum phenomena — knowing that a fundamental property of particles is the ability to be in more than one place at the same time, yet unable (barring one much-debated exception) to observe this in our own universe, a school of thought exists which holds to the notion that every time one of these tiny quantum 'choices' is made, a splitting or bifurcation of the universe into a pair of alternative streams occurs, resulting in a vast structure known as the Multiverse.

Oxford's David Deutsch has a great hypothesis covering how time travel works in the Multiverse — you can go back in time, but it's never the same quantum track you came from, so in a sense time-travel is a special form of space travel, only one moves between parallel realities. More on that another day...

I long wanted to write a novel that fictionally explored the framework of multiple universes, but it seems that bastard Iain Banks has beaten me to it.

Actually, the idea has been bouncing around serious science fiction for quite a while. In Larry Niven's All The Myriad Ways people able to jump between the various versions of reality have been topping themselves, unable to cope with the knowledge that nothing we ever do really matters, because every time we succede another version of us fails.

And this brings us back to The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the existential confusion served up by the idea of eternal recurrence. In practical terms even suicide is pointless because one of your not-so-hypothetical doubles in time, space or even quantum reality, is bound to choose life over death.

First Words (4)

"On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed facade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse's Hotel des Etrangers and Cannes, five miles away."

F.Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

It's a common enough tactic for authors to use their first paragraphs to establish location, but the clever thing about this one is that Scott Fitzgerald is also signalling to us the complex chronology of the story to follow.

La Cumparsita of the Day #28

A bit of Betjeman

Chelsea 1977

The street is bathed in winter sunset pink,
The air is redolent of kitchen sink,
Between the dog-mess heaps I pick my way
To watch the dying embers of the day
Glow over Chelsea, crimson load on load
All Brangwynesque across the long King's Road.
Deep in myself I feel a sense of doom,
Fearful of death I trudge towards the tomb.
The earth beneath my feet is hardly soil,
But outstretched chicken-netting coil on coil
Cover cables, sewage pipes and wires
While underneath burn hell's eternal fires.
Snap! crackle! pop! The kiddiz know the sound
And Satan strokes his furnace underground.

First Words (3)

"It is a truth uni­ver­sal­ly ac­knowl­edged, that a sin­gle man in pos­ses­sion of a good for­tune, must be in want of a wife. How­ev­er lit­tle known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first en­ter­ing a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the sur­round­ing families, that he is con­sid­ered the right­ful prop­er­ty of some one or oth­er of their daugh­ters."

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Epic death squad fail

The mayor of Mexico's richest municipality has inadvertently revealed his powers of premonition by announcing the demise of the man who tried to assassinate him some three hours before the body was discovered:

"[Mauricio] Fernandez, the mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia...was applauded when he revealed that Hector 'Black' Saldaña, a cartel chief turned kidnapper, had been killed. The announcement, however, was premature – according to Mexico City prosecutors, Saldaña's blindfolded body was not found for another three hours, and was not identified until two days later."

Surfer has reminded me about the great old Ronny Barker sketch where he's playing a TV news anchorman in the USSR. Reporting that a leading comrade has been run over by a car, he then adds "ah no, sorry, that's next week's news."

Ghost Town (2008)

Ricky Gervais is at once both out of place in this movie and its MVP. I can't think of that many other actors who could have saved this movie from being completely formulaic. Bill Murray perhaps...

Gervais is a misanthropic Britsih dentist living in Manhattan who experiences a few minutes of death under general anaesthetic which endow him with the ability to see passed-away predestrians with unfinished business in the Big Apple. Normal folk just sneeze when they walk through one of these invisible shades.

The set-up at least is unusual and includes more off-beat comedy than the subsequent development of the idea. Still, Gervais more or less carries off the role of romantic grinch, with some competent emotive support from Téa Leoni.

Grade: B+(+)

Guatemalan subcultures #1

This is what many of the 4x4s you see on the streets of Antigua do in their spare time. A couple of our friends are founder members of this rebellious club for the teen-at-heart....soltero(ne)s, por lo menos!

La Cumparsita of the Day #27

Versión Michigan.

Moon (2009)

The debut feature of Duncan Jones — son of a certain period classic pop star — has deservedly secured seven BIFA nominations.

It's almost impossible to describe without mentioning either 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running or without spoiling the surprise. Suffice to say there's a moment quite early on in this story about a lonely man called Sam Bell running a mining station on the dark side of the moon, when the number of Sams inexplicably doubles, and the plot possibilities suddenly swell in a particularly stirring fashion.

If it has a failing it is that it spends a bit to much time nodding deferently at its forerunners and misses some rather obvious opportunities to really ramp up the tension and thought-provocation in the final section. And while it's undoubtedly going to be one of the most memorable flicks of 2009, perhaps a little too much of its magnestism has been borrowed from the hard sci-fi classics of the sixties and seventies.

Grade: A-

First Words (2)

"I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be."

John Fowles, The Magus.

Woody Allen is supposed to have said that given the chance to live his life over again, he would do everything exactly the same, other than seeing the movie adaptation of The Magus.

Fowles's novel on the other hand, is one of those works one should try very hard to fit into this lifetime.

Mesoamerican Thingamajig(s) of the Day

La Cumparsita of the Day #26

Versión cha cha cha Paraguasho.

Ordinary Thunderstorms

William Boyd's new novel entertained me thoroughly on at least four levels: as reader, as writer, as a former resident of Chelsea and as someone who lived beside the Thames for 18 years. (I might add that I've had a fair bit of exposure to the inner machinations of drug companies as well.)

It begins with a murder — in a mansion block on Sloane Avenue called Anne Boleyn House, clearly an analogue for Nell Gwynn House where my mother stayed briefly after her divorce.

The man who has extracted the knife from the victim — thereby incrimating himself — and fled the scene without calling 999, is a climate scientist called Adam Kindred.

Recently divorced and removed from his position as a cloud-maker in Arizona, Kindred is in this unfamiliar city for an interview with Imperial College. A chance meeting with the Research Director of a major pharma firm leads him to sail straight into the most extraordinary of tempests that can burst upon an ordinary life.

And ordinary Kindred is. I never had the feeling that Boyd was particularly interested in him as a character, for he has few quirks other than his idiosyncratic way with binary decisions, and he serves here mainly as a lesson on how an intelligent person can 'disappear' in today's metropolis simply by shedding the documents and devices through which our identity is acknowledged and connected with others. Kindred obliges his creator by behaving very much like a blank slate once he has opted for invisibility.

The author has more fun with Ingram Fryzer, CEO of Calenture Deutz — named after the man who took the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in 1593 — and with ex-army freelance hitman Jonjo Case who follows Kindreds's trail up and down the Thames.

There's also a river cop called Rita Nashe — after Thomas Nashe, sixteenth century author of The Unfortunate Traveller — who at first looks as if she will play a key role in unravelling the conspiracy, but is then disappointingly reassigned to romantic interest duty.

Several other members of Boyd's rather Dickensian cast of secondary characters — beggars, hookers, mercenaries, preachers, corporate manipulators and sink estate low-lifes — have this under-developed or under-utilised feel. Yet it was only when the end was upon me that I had any sense that there might have been some sort of intermittent malfunction along the way.

We were certainly denied the classic Hollywood climax in Boyd's Costa Prize-winning last novel Restless, but here the absence of resolution is almost complete: hardly a strand in this multi-stranded narrative is ultimately consummated in the way that readers of less literary thrillers (or indeed Dickens) might expect.

What we get isn't exactly a frustrating conclusion — though I wondered why the promising allusions to the formation of super-storms at the start had deteriorated into a platitudinal discussion between Adam and Rita about the meanings possibly portended by all the connections and coincidences Boyd has woven into the narrative— but this failure to dish out justice, except in the most indirect of ways, felt to me like an authorial affectation — of the sort you might expect of Adam Kindred himself; a man we often see struggling to make the most practical choice.

So, Ordinary Thunderstorms is successful to a point as a modern corporate thriller, and successful to a point as a vehicle for Boyd's habitual literary theme-building and the particular exploration of London's sub-digital underbelly he has undertaken here.

It would have been better if the small defect in one aspect of this novel had been matched by an excess of achievement in the other, but what we have instead is a double deficiency, albeit minor on both counts.

But in one area it is a model for emulation: that of the expert delivery of the 'free indirect' style, where the prose is composed in the third person, but so clearly from the immediate perspective of the character in the frame, that the effect is very similar to first person narration. This is something that was picked up by Felix Francis, son of Dick, when Boyd appeared on the Mayo books podcast in September. He's never tried a third person story, he confessed, but Boyd had provided him with an education about how it could be done without the side-effect of Tolstoyian omniscience.

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

La Cumparsita of the Day #25

Next year's movie highlights (1)

Last week The Times pushed out a piece about the top 50 films of 2010, featuring the flicks most likely to dominate the box office next year.

What bloke of my generation won't be counting down the days to the release of The Expendables, a veritable caboodle of 80s action talent, starring Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis and the Governator himself, Armold Schwarzenegger.

Comparative newcomers Jet Li and Jason Statham will tag along in this tale of a crack team of mercenaries dispatched to deal with a latino warlord. (Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke have also been cast as period furniture.)

In discussion the other day Surfer and I agreed that Jean Claude Van Damme and Stephen Segal are going to be the most obvious ommissions from this class reunion, though perhaps they graced a slightly later period.

Surfer was vehement that a seat should have been found for Segal, but I've always considered him a bit of a C-word and that it's the 'Muscles from Brussels' who recently demonstrated a capacity for laughing at a joke when he himself was the punchline.

Chuck Norris clearly has too many commitments with Fox News.

First Words (1)

I was going to do a series featuring random remarks about random tomes plucked from my bookshelves here in Antigua, but following on from my earlier post which featured the first paragraph of Los Detectives Salvajes, I have elected to discourse on the different ways that favourite authors find of getting their fiction flowing.

First paragraphs won't always work - in my edition of the El Otoño del Patriarca para one goes from page 9 all the way to page 48...hence the more inclusive name I have selected for this occasional indulgence.

Matthew Lewis was just 19 when he penned his infamous gothic masterpiece The Monk in 1796. This is one of those first paras which establishes both the central location — the sinister Capuchin church in Madrid — and the novel's wry take on the rituals that some use to project a sense of ethical wellbeing...though Lewis's low-key sarcasm in this opening gives us barely a hint of the sensationalistic exploration of human folly and vice which is to follow.

"Scarcely had the Abbey Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors. Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled either from motives of piety or thirst of information. But very few were influenced by those reasons; and in a city where superstition reigns with such despotic sway as in Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt. The Audience now assembled in the Capuchin Church was collected by various causes, but all of them were foreign to the ostensible motive. The Women came to show themselves, the Men to see the Women: Some were attracted by curiosity to hear an Orator so celebrated; Some came because they had no better means of employing their time till the play began; Some, from being assured that it would be impossible to find places in the Church; and one half of Madrid was brought thither by expecting to meet the other half. The only persons truly anxious to hear the Preacher were a few antiquated devotees, and half a dozen rival Orators, determined to find fault with and ridicule the discourse. As to the remainder of the Audience, the Sermon might have been omitted altogether, certainly without their being disappointed, and very probably without their perceiving the omission."

The Savage Detectives - Impressions (2)

I wonder how many readers investigate the structure of the books they read before they start with Chapter One? For anyone undertaking Los Detectives Salvajes for the first time, the question of whether or not to suppress this urge to snoop is a matter of more than passing curiosity itself. For the first 15% or so of the novel and the last 15% or so are a series of diary entries by the young Mexican 'visceral realist' Juan Garcia Madero.

The freshness , the likeability of this diarist — perhaps the only true poet in story about poets — is surely a conscious device on the part of the author, aware that the polyphonic middle 70% or so of his novel comprises a multitude of different short narratives delivered by over 50 separate narrators across the two decades from '76 to '96, and that readers anticipating a resumption of Garcia Madero's testimony will experience a kind of extra dramatic impetus through this tangle.

With Kindle editions and audiobooks jumping ahead is of course that much harder. (...and V's usual tactic of starting with the last page becomes highly problematic!) Will the next generation of authors be forced to take this into account?

I think I'm going to start a new regular series on top quality first paragraphs. Bolaño's is as good a place as any to start:

2 de noviembre

He sido cordialmente invitado a formar parte del realismo visceral. Por supuesto, he aceptado. No hubo ceremonia de iniciación. Mejor así.

La Cumparsita of the Day #24

Mesoamerican Thingamajig(s) of the Day

GEM in LAG

Robert aka GEM (Gringo en México) appears to have run out of Mexican locations to which he can take his peculiar brand of geniality, and so has passed down the isthmus and into Central America for his latest series. Last night he was here in La Antigua Guatemala, providing viewers with a slightly unrepresentative tour.

Up early to visit the parque central, he was soon enough declaiming his mantra — "tengo hambre" — and so set off to the Santo Domingo for desayuno.

The chef in that fine establishment might have made more of an effort with the typical breakfast that Robert was duly served up; not even the cameraman seemed especially interested in this bodoquito of frijoles, accompanied by two slices of plantain and a couple of fried eggs, with a tea-spoon of chirmol tipped over them. Attention quickly switched to the bowl of chiltepe sauce. "Peeka!"

He'd have been better off going to the 'Panzón Verde' for an albeit less typical — but very nicely turned out — plate of Eggs Benedict. (Pictured below.)

But afterwards Robert still repeated "comi rico" whilst rubbing his panza. Thus fuelled up, he next visited the Colonial and Vigua museums within the ruins of the friary, along the way flirting with Olga and Xiomara — the two indíenas stationed strategically on a pathway near the pool, beside substantial piles of huipiles and other piezas típicas.

"Te vemos en la tele siempre Robert," they told him.

Lorenzo Gottscha of Valhalla was his host for a tour of the various contraptions they've knocked up there for husking and sorting their harvest of macadamia nuts. Robert seemed pleased to have found a fellow speaker of colourful gringo Spanish, but Lorenzo clearly didn't want to address him directly at all during his visit, speaking instead at the invisible producer somewhere behind camera. (The crew's PNC escort was caught giggling in the background.)

GEM's appetite was then better served (he'd already eaten pancakes at Valhalla) at the Posada Don Rodrigo where he tucked into a set of well presented typical Guatemalan dishes, such as Caldo de Gallina, Pepián and Pollo con Crema y Loroco...though after the caldo he didn't exactly throw himself at the rest of the meal with his accustomed gusto. We've all been there...

Someone really ought to have told Robert that it's not the done thing here to say "óoorale!" every time a new dish is brought to your table.

No presidential-style gira of Antigua would be complete without a trip to Jades SA, where Robert got some quite shocking responses to his signature "cuantow cooesta aystee?

Next week, he will be heading off to Pana.

La Cumparsita of the Day #23

From the comments: "Even if there is such a pungeant smell of female lesbianism in this take, why not admire it for what it is?"

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

La Cumparsita of the Day #22

Cafe Society in Antigua...Part Deux

I had a sixteen year association with the world's oldest communication agency, founded in Ohio during the great depression, and now able to boast over 70 offices in over 40 countries, including this one. But none has a bigger head-count or indeed turnover than the London office, for the UK capital has few rivals when it comes to the ascendancy of style over content.

So I suppose one could trace the origins of my objection to the kind of processed chic embodied by Bistro Cinq to my having grown up in this most over-branded of cities. It's also one of the most over-priced, and one always has the suspicion that a substantial portion of what one is being asked to pay for is the cost of manufacturing and maintaining an image.

Looking around Antigua for further examples of ersatz eateries, one might quickly come to a halt outside a certain Mexican restaurant close to the Arco de Santa Catalina.

Superficially at least, Frida's in Antigua might appear to offer as frabricated an environment as the aforementioned purveyors of generic froggy nosh — with the additional defect that food served in there is truly undistinguished — but it has in fact put down substantial roots in the local soil — not least as one of the main hubs of the gay and lesbian scene — whilst maintaining its appeal to anyone in search of a soggy plate of nachos and a mediocre margarita. Which is why, on most friday nights, Frida's is packed while Bistro Cinq isn't.

Food quality aside, I think the problem I have with Frida's is that I can't look at it without being reminded of the most excutiating and largely incomprehensible monologue that I have ever been subjected to here in Guatemala — about the merits of Mexico's most mustachioed female artist.

Anyway, along with standardised fare such as enchiladas and fajitas, Mexican restaurants all over the world — even in Mexico — have this inclination to send out signals comprising both truths and falsehoods. The boilerplate might be pure kitsch, but it is usually open to a degree of co-creation with the culture it inhabits. One of the more self-confident examples I can recall is The Pink Taco in Phoenix, but even the tackier kind of joints one finds in the UK have come some way to meet the expectations of the people that I hope I can refer to as 'the natives', without sounding like Nick Griffin!

Similarly, Indian restaurants on UK high streets are as much a British phenomenon as they are an Indian one. With a soundtrack that sounds like a mosquito buzzing in your ear, and an attempt of variable ambition and meretriciousness to suggest another location halfway round the globe, smiling waiters help you pick dishes from an essentially syncretic menu, whilst pouring Cobra beer into tall glasses — an 'Indian' lager brewed exclusively in Fulham, London.

It would be churlish to describe these places as inauthentic. Not so, sadly, Antigua's very own Palacio de las Indias, which lacks the key ingredient of Indian management, as well as a regular clientele of lagered-up office workers. (See "It wouldn't be a Friday night if we didn't go for an English" below...)

There are certainly several more valid locations for enjoying 'ethnic' food in Antigua. Korea House for example, is not only run by Koreans, it is usually reassuringly replete with Koreans too. The Chinese restaurants (such as La Gran Muralla) may not be packed out with Chinese diners, but you do have a sense that the family behind the swing doors are tucking into the same stuff that they serve to their customers— and if there's a lantern hanging from the ceiling and a few faded prints depicting ancient Cantonese ways on the walls, you can rest assured they weren't put there by a chichi interior designer.

However, the 'small plate' formula belongs to a uniquely Iberian set of eating habits, so I suspect that tapas will always be that much harder to successfully transcribe, without more formal diners being left feeling short-changed. (V undoubtedly felt fully ripped off when she was served croquetas de pollo at La Cocina de Lola which were all papa and no pollo.)

One of the first, and still one of the best examples of authentic, locally-adapted, international cafe-restaurants in Antigua is Quesos y Vino, now in its third incarnation (fourth if you include the extra sucursal which briefly flourished beside Las Capuchinas). Its Italian owner was smart to eschew the word pizza in his choice of name, opting instead for two old-world delicacies which were then comparatively hard to find here. The result was a rustic, very personable place for a snack, which somehow felt properly situated in Antigua in spite of its foreign inspiration.

V was a little disappointed when she went without me last year to the new, larger version, in part she claimed because the service was slower and the food seemingly prepared with less loving care, but perhaps the real problem is the nostalgic glow adorning our memories of the original Quesos y Vino on the east side of the Calle del Arco — where, six days of the week, one could sit on a stool at the counter and enjoy a simple, unpretentious meal of made-to-order panini with a glass of wine. Cafe society? Almost.

I'll have the gammon steak...

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

La Cumparsita of the Day #21

Musical interlude...

Fondly remembered from Temporada de Patos.

Cafe Society in Antigua...or the lack thereof

La Antigua can boast a French bistro — "bistro sink" according to some of the locals I've heard speak of it — but its only real resemblance to an authentic Parisian eatery of the Belle Epoque is that it caters for people who lack the facilities to cook for themselves — though in this case that means out-of-town visitors, rather than impoverished Bohemians living in sparse ateliers.

Picasso, without either gas or electricity in the Bateau Lavoir, found he could get a substantial meal of steak frites with tart aux pommes plus an espresso at Le Lapin Agile for just 90 centimes, but was often content with a chorizo and tomato plus an extra helping of artistic conversation.

Thanks to the relentless co-option of counterculture by consumer culture, modern French boulevards have witnessed the transformation of these places of gaiety for the intellectually-gifted but economically miserable, into the loci of the sophisticated loitering known as cafe society.

There might be something inauthentic about sipping a citron pressé outside Des Deux Magots whilst scribbling in your Moleskine norebook — Hemingway's favourite, they tell us — but it still beats the whiff of garlic and phonyness I've got every time I've walked past Bistro Cinq.

I have to say that I have always presumed that the food served in there is above-averagely good, but ersatz culinary environments are usually a big turn off for me.

Antigua itself is partly to blame for this dispiriting sense of sham. Compared to say Oaxaca or Campeche, there are no obvious spots for informal al fresco beverage-sipping: interior patios are simply not interchangeable with pavement tables, because the whole point is to be able to sit and watch the world stroll by.

There are cultured people here for sure, but those with budgetary constraints are more likely to favour the typical anglo-american drinking hole, whilst those leading what Picasso and his muckers would have regarded as the bourgeois lifestyle, tend to only show up for smart vernissages at the Santo Domingo or the piano recitals held at the neighbouring Casa de los Leones. In between there's an amorphous mob of ex-pats and perma-tourists who spontaneously rendezvous whenever they catch the scent of a freebie.

La Cumparsita of the Day #20

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

Vecinos rabiosos

Ground zero for the kind of grumpy, mis-fit ex-pat personalities I mentioned in an earlier post is surely Jardines de Antigua. It's a gated community without a gate...a state of affairs which seems to lead to a particularly twitchy kind of paranoia. This lot make the residents of La Zona look like frigging Tahitians.

With a certain type of north American one is used to the frontiersman mentality — where almost any form of otherness is interpreted as savagery. Through this daft spyglass, most locals tend to manifest themselves as so many injuns circling the wagon train. But in truth, the problem in Jardines is not with the wild westerners, it's with what Donald Rumsfeld calls the old Europeans. There's the Frenchman who rushes out to beat his beagles whenever they bark at us from behind his gate (surely what he put them there to do?) Then there's the unbalanced couple who have forced us to change the route of our AM and PM chucho promenades simply in order to avoid them.

'Herr Bunker-mentality' has a German Shepherd like ours, though his appears to be more of a penis extension than a pet, because when his 'Fritz' attacked Jin and lost, he went beserk and started kicking and throwing rocks at our dog. It didn't matter how much we screamed at him to behave like a normal human being, it was as if we weren't even there.

In my experience two large male dogs will nearly always have a short scrap the first time they meet, and it will only make matters worse if owners rush in to separate them...or indeed to join the fight. This initial altercation establishes the status situation for all future encounters, and this is clearly what proved intolerable for our mitteleuropean 'gent'. Jin has been put in his place by small furry pooches, but I've never felt the urge to drop a boulder on them afterwards.

Anyway, some weeks later we ran into his wife walking the same dog in Jardines in the late evening and she ran off screaming before either canine had come within sniffing distance. And my Norwegian friend in London is always telling me how many new friends he makes whilst out walking his cocker spaniel.

Most worrying of all was the incident when V had a machete waved at her by a notorious Italian perve. As far as Jardines goes this guy is more transient than resident, riding through the development on a bicycle dragging his husky along behind him on a fairly short leash.

Of course when his dog and ours become aware of each other's presence he finds it hard to keep going in a straight line. Any 'normal' person would realise that all they have to do is stop and wait for the dogs to interact and then carry on as before, but no, this was his cue for a frenzy. He ran over to where a gardener was pruning a hedge, snatched his machete and started bearing down on V.

She hadn't brought a gun to this particular machete-fight, but she is very adept at using words as penetrating weapons, and found the right way to bring up having recently spotted this man openly enjoying gay porn in a cyber-cafe with two young Indian boys seated beside him. He tossed the machete aside and fled the scene. The gardener stood petrified nearby as this played out.

Jin is not an aggressive dog at all, though he barks at lone males with alcohol on their breath or anyone with a history of shooing him away with pebbles. He keeps his distance though and hardly ever intrudes within leaping range.

But once, when V was ambling down the rough earth road on the edge of Jardines that we have dubbed 'Gringits' (the residents generally being both gringos and gits) Jin wandered over to smell some flowers outside the impressive colonial-style residence which then belonged to a deceptively dignified-looking Yank that we'd come across a few times on the Antigua culture circuit. This man duly appeared, reached inside his pocket for a can of MACE and shouted at V: "Take your dog away or I'll spray him ...and then I'll spray you!!!"

In this instance V had only her disarming sang froid to defend herself with (Never, EVER, show fear, she constantly counsels me), but most gringo aggressors are ultimately unprepared for the firm little lecture she can quickly deliver in her well-enunciated English proclaiming their lack of education. (This man later came over and apologised, claiming that he had mistaken Jin for one of Arzu's ferocious K50-trained Alsatians, widely-rumoured to have torn apart several pedestrians who have strayed into this itchy trigger-finger neighbourhood.)

Most of the Guatemalan residents of Jardines are paid to live there, while the real owners spend their time in cramped, over-furnished apartments in Guatemala City. Few of these guachimen are hostile, though there's one kid who once tried to scare us by appearing with a shotgun (which he cocked ostentatiously) as we walked past his employer's house.

Last weekend we were out again with the dogs when Cherry (notably smaller than Jin) made the mistake of snarling at an old chapin with a walking stick...which he was soon flailing around like a cavalry sabre. I rushed over to apologise on behalf of Cherry and explained that she is harmless and that he should just say her name rather than try to club her with his bastón, but it soon became clear to me that I was dealing with the ex-military type, whose last intimate interaction with a dog may well have been when he had to slit the throat of the puppy that newly-recruited cadets are given here in Guatemala.

You don't realise who you are dealing with," he screeched, "the last time a dog came and barked at me I pulled out my gun and shot it dead."

Dogs, I have discovered, really can detect a dickhead a mile away.

In a land where the majority of people suffer from one or another kind of powerlessness, 'Usted no sabe quien soy' is a much overused form of intimidation. I didn't know who he was, but he certainly looked like a silly old fossil terrified of a small dog, and he was soon scuttling off back in the direction from whence he had originally appeared.

Pets are not the only way to make new enemies around here, especially in the open-air sanctuary for demented retirees that is Jardines de Antigua and adjoining neighbourhoods. There have already been a couple of incidents relating to my right-hand drive vehicle which have led me to recall the time it was set upon by another bastón-wielding berserker back in Salamanca.

V was at the wheel and when we entered a fine plaza with a very fetching plateresque church at the end of it, I asked her to pull up and let me out so I could take a picture. As soon as I got out the car I heard a torrent of Spanish invective behind me and watched as an ostensibly feeble old guy started bashing my car with his stick. What had him fuming was the notion that any driver should have dared to blithely disembark there without bothering to park properly. Thanks to the polarised windows he hadn't at first spotted V at the timón, but as soon as he did he vamoosed pretty sharpish.

The other day here in Antigua V was parked outside a local shop when an agent of the PMT appeared at the passenger side window and shouted in overbearingly"Where's the driver?!!". "Here?" my wife offered in return, pointing at the wheel in front of her.

On a kind of related note, here's a little clip of my mother cerca 1953 getting into a car which, by today's standards at least, features a measure of unconventionality in its door layout which might, in the words of Peter Cook, "confuse a stupid person ".



(The car and cine camera belonged to my grandfather.)

The Goods: Live Hard Sell Hard (2009)

We both suffered from laughers' remorse after watching this unapologetically crude comedy last night.

In format it's not unlike Employee of the Month, with a few nods back to Airplane....and perhaps even stuff like Stir Crazy.

At least with Judd Appatow's output one can console oneself with the idea that the gags are targeted at younger, less mature audiences, and there's always a padding of sentimentality to cushion the repeated blows of on-screen vulgarity.

Not so here. This is grown-up smut, delivered with the shamelessness of the car salesmen who tells you he's throwing in the dust mats for free.

There are plenty of chuckles though, most of which erupt spontaneously out of the moments of sheer, undirected ridiculousness.

Grade: B(+)

La Cumbia del Rio

The original version of the tune that became an Internet phenomenon...somehow. (Ok, it's pegable.)

Now the Pikadientes de Carborca have been signed by Sony, but I'd sure like to see them behind a procession here next Semana Santa!

Screensnaps #9

Another panther chameleon.

Neural decoding. Scary?

"In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing - and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering.

"Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field's most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans - and even to diagnose eating disorders."

Fron the New Scientist.

La Cumparsita of the Day #19

Screensnaps #8

This little amphibian — a pebble toad - looks like something that might be jettisoned skywards out of Fuego's fervid crater!

Not all our cats enjoy watching TV, we have discovered. Bali does though; and so does his mother Wizzy, but we've never seen any real evidence that she is really seeing what we see.

But with Bali it's different. His eyes followed this toad's tumble down the side of a mountain and when he spotted the cause of this emergency maneuver — an enormous toad-eating tarantula — he turned to look at me to make a slightly distressed burble and then quickly re-focused on the progress of this eight-legged beasty.

We plan to watch the next episode of David Attenbrough's Life (mammals) with Bali in order to discover what else fascinates him.

His usual position is at the end of the bed right in front of the big screen. During the episode about reptiles a wave hit the camera and Bali looked down below the bed, as if expecting the floor to have been flooded by this sudden deluge!

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

Dios Remero Jaguar.

Screensnaps #7

Panther chameleon.

Could confuse a stupid person...

"You can tell it's a good painting if the bottoms follow you around the room."

This classic Pete and Dud sketch sprang to mind yesterday when I was reading about Cezanne's use of multiple perspectives and thinking how well this technique translates into narrative (or indeed blog) voice.

La Cumparsita of the Day #18

Mesoamerican Thingamajig(s) of the Day

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

A pair of American newlyweds played by Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich — bothersome from the get-go — set off on their dream honeymoon in Hawaii.

I'm going to have trouble here, I thought, because I wanted them to be dead long before any credible threat to their perfect getaway had presented itself.

But nothing is quite what it seems in this unusually smart and witty B-movie thriller. Soon there's enough irony, dark humour and deception around to make this a very enjoyable ride.

Our pair have embarked on the meandering, steep-contoured Kalalau trail leading to a perfect isolated beach, encountering along the way two other couples intent on reaching the same location.

Early on news reaches them that a pair of bodies minus teeth and fingertips has turned up on the neighbouring island, and that another couple was captured in the act of murder on CCTV...

The only glitch with this set-up — and there be spoilers this way — is that I figured out the twist here long before it was revealed.

There's a nice little exchange between screenwriter Cliff and Nick about 'red snappers' and 'red herrings' and frankly, the writers here have deployed a few too many of these rather fishy decoys in their own script not to create a bit of a stink. When you see that the signposts are pointing every which way, you tend to stop and consider the only alternative left which hasn't been suggested.

In spite of my anticipation when the 'prestige' is finally delivered, we both looked at each other as if to say ' did we just get cheated?' It took a few minutes of careful reflection for us to decide that the maneuver we'd been subjected to was legit in narrative terms.

Credit must go not only to the writers, but also the performers for smoothing the way for this clever switch which audience sympathies inevitably have to follow if it is to have been deemed a success. A special mention here for the Timothy Olyphant who is superb at building both the menace and the likeability of his character Nick.

Grade: A-

Twitter can be the game changer

Yesterday I experienced something of a lightbulb moment relating to the future role of Twitter in the production and consumption of media communications.

I love Twitter. I signed up early but it took a bit of peer pressure (thanks Frode) to turn me into the -114 follower twitterer I am today.

I've been immersed in the information revolution for as long as it has been possible for someone of my generation to be so — starting with a Computer Studies AO-level back in 1983 — but there's always been a fail-safe system of leery scepticism operating in parallel to any guileless, early-adopter enthusiasm: Is this technology truly indispensable? Does it complicate my life? What are the hidden costs? Is it for some people, not others?

I taught my 82-year-old father how to use email and he now uses it almost daily, revealing an ability to express himself with concise and witty prose messages that I'd been missing out on. But he doesn't really get blogging or microblogging, in the same way he doesn't really get modern advertising post-Ogilvy, with its emphasis on lifestyles over product benefits.

But yesterday it suddenly became clear to me how Twitter really does have the potential to change everything, at least for those of us that have grown up with the necessary information filtering skills (and inclinations).

My professional interests include the interpretation of the role of media in shaping the discourse of organisations, in particular through the identiification of patterns — or networks — of influence.

Up until now the starting point for the 'social' analysis of any piece of content would be a semantic one: algorithms made to carve up text into extractable entities such as the names of individuals — journalists, politicians, spokespeople — who could be assumed to participate within affective complexes of authority and influence.

These names and other keywords would then be fed through further software machines in order to identify and map out these associations and their amplification effects in meaningful ways.

Back in the day, the networks of influence were implicit, but essentially invisible until the majority of content assumed digital form, and even then further software number-crunching was required.

Then, when social networks appeared on the scene, some of the relationships started to become, in effect, hard coded, and so the would-be media analyst was about to get something at least for free.

Newspaper articles in online form have URLs which can now be shared via social media such as Facebook and Twitter (as opposed to the more private medium of email) and the open nature of the latter platform in particular means that it becomes comparatively straightforward to analyse / visualise the relationship between a particular piece of content and particular networks of 'friends'. Tweets thus appeared to be another important media phenomenon to be tracked, but as not all readers of content shared it with their 'friends', this was going to be another string to our bow rather than a whole new mode of combat.

Well, that's how it seemed to me until yesterday when I came across the New York Times's experimental Timespeople Twitter function. This is the game changer...

For if content itself becomes a node (or even a hub) within the social network, then all the relationships are finally joined up electronically. And in theory, any reader who has become a friend of the publisher will leave an electronic trace of the influence exerted by a particular article (plus a trail to their own social network) simply by reading it. No URL-sharing required.

La Cumparsita of the Day #17

Screensnaps #6

The new 10-part David Attenborough Life series is proving to be a spectacular demonstration of the virtues of 1080p resolution. This screensnap shows a pair of Brazilian caimanes conserving energy whilst hunting after a long period of being packed together in shrinking pools during the dry season. They line up in rows and basically wait for the fish to swim into their open jaws.

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

La Cumparsita of the Day #16

Pontypool (2008)

A Canadian horror movie sportinng a self-conscious wordiness worthy of Miguel Ángel Asturias. Indeed its opening immediately reminded me of those first few lines of El Señor Presidente.

"Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre!"

The premise is straightforward, but this genre-friendly set-up is soon being stressed by the script which starts to yank it in all kinds of strange directions.

A late night talkshow DJ and his female producer and assistant are in their basement studio in the provincial town of Pontypool, as news starts to break of crowds of people chanting odd phrases while they tuck into their fellow citizens.

It soon becomes clear (well, not really) that the vector for this particular zombie virus is the English language, transmitted via terms of endearment and other trigger words like "kill", and that French-Canadian troops are acting over-keenly in suppressing this 'uprising'.

No simple George Romero zombie allegory this, Pontypool seems to have something profound to say, but the babble is fast and the action is slow. (Too much jaw and not enough gore, quips The Mirror's critic Dave Edwards.) Yet even as it descended into incoherence we remained somehow gripped, as if sensing that these dips into and out of sense where in fact core to the very sense of the movie, even if we didn't quite get it.

Grade: B+

PS: I suspected that director Bruce McDonald must have fed something subliminally scary into the soundtrack supporting the opening sequence, because both cat and dog sat up here and looked around anxiously for a few moments during it.

Nick Griffin's 'PR coup'

A record 8m people tuned into this week's edition of Question Tme which featured the debut appearance of recently-elected MEP Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party.



Radio 4's Sue MacGregor has since accused the Beeb of setting the 'attack dogs' against Griffin, a tactic which could only have led, she suggests, to many viewers feeling increased sympthy for the BNP.

On the night senior politicians from the 'mainstream' parties did appear to be congratulating themselves on how they had run circles around this rather obviously stupid, yet nonetheless cunning and shifty derechista.

Bonny Greer even told us that we should regard the BNP's take on the 'indigenous' history of the British Isles as a work of comedy. (Though her characterisation of the Roman Empire as multicultural and tolerant and the Celts as recent African emigrés seemed almost equally potted....and she wasn't laughing when he desribed the Ku Klux Klan as 'non-violent'.)

Griffin's taunters on the panel collectively concluded that the British people had far too much nouse to take this nasty man and his nasty politics seriously. In fact, after the show a poll indicated that 22% of viewers would 'seriously' consider voting for the BNP. (Griffin currently represents roughly 1/60th of the UK electorate.)

This is the age-old problem of voters being unduly impressed by politicians who say in public the sort of things these voters only think in private....thereby disregarding the obvious truth that such politicians must also think things in private that they are reluctant to come out with in public.

Only the Conservatives appeared to have come with the intention of scoring some points against the government, and embarrassing the suddenly comparably shify Jack Straw on the issue of border controls. Indeed, the Tories' all too transparent ploy here was to place 'ethnic' party members on the panel and in the audience so as to snipe at Labour's record on immigration, without seeming to side with that odious creep sitting next to Ms Greer.

Earlier Straw had his own comedy moment when he said that, as Justice Minister, he could of course personally guarantee that Griffin would be able to speak in confidence on the BBC about his Holcaust doubts without fear of any long-range EU lawsuits.

It was a bizarre spectacle overall: the normally nerdy and clubbish arena of British politics suddenly beset by a name-calling, American-style culture war, where bug-eyed ideology overwhelms the traditional anglo-saxon virtues of common sense and a more sober, empirical 'fervour' for the facts.

Talking of Anglo-Saxons, nobody took the opportunity to point out to Griffin that they had perpetrated their own uncontrolled immigration a very long time after the end of the last Ice Age.

The most positive spin one could put on the whole thing is that by drawing Griffin and his party out of the shadows and into the discredited mainstream of British politics, they too will end up discredited by association!

La Cumparsita of the Day #15

Mesoamerican Thingamajig of the Day

La Cumparsita of the Day #14