A well-deserved rebuke for the BBC

"A tabloid approach to an issue of public safety."

I blogged about it here back in May.

PapaRatzi turns to cheap immigrant labour

And while they're at it, the Cistine chapel could do with a new paint job.

Mexicali

Since my recent gripe about the state of Mexican grub in London, a great new place called Mexicali has opened a sucursal in Berwick Street, which more than adequately fills the gap left by the Beach Burrito Cafe. (Pictured)

This closure was collateral damage arising from the council's decision to shut down a particular row of 'businesses' down by the junction with Peter Street.

I guess it is more of a taquería than a restaurant per se, but the tacos, burritos and quesadillas are possibly the best I have tasted in the UK (and all cost £5.20 regardless of the key ingredient). Portions are practically Waco wobblebottom-sized.

What is your view on British cinema?

Flummoxed again. Well, nearly; Diego Luna seems to have a knack for skillfully uncornering himself just when you think he might be about to say something he'll regret. (Contains good gatecrasher tip.)

Diego Luna praises Michael Winterbottom

Un jaguarcito aprende a nadar

Where are all the brown people...

...in Mexican films and TV?

This question appeared to flummox Diego Luna at first. In fairness the old guy at the back who posed it was having microphone issues and the star of El Búfalo de la Noche looked as if he hadn't quite heard . After several moments where his mouth was clearly playing catch-up with his thought processes, Luna opted for a two-pronged response.

The first prong, "I'm a mestizo, we are all mestizos" is one of the oldest chestnuts in Mexican identity politics. (Carlos Fuentes pulls it in The Buried Mirror too.) Luna's own mestizaje includes his late mother's English anscestry.

The second was to re-cast the question as one of indigenous rights and to show where he stood on this by letting us know that he had once attended an important congress on this very thorny issue.

The trouble is that I don't think the old guy had invisible indigenes foremost in mind when he asked his question. His point was more like, why on channels like Telehit, where Diego's novia Camila has her own show, are all the presenters (and assorted culitos) generally the kind of Latins that could easily pass themselves off as Europeans (or worst case scenario, Argies).

On classic Telehit shows like El Calabozo and Guate's own lamentable Con Buena Onda the ordinary Mexican "brown faces" the questioner referred to usually make up the audience and have to wait to be offered a share of the limelight.

Hate crime

This crime of "hatred incitement" certainly has the novelty of casting the slavering haters as the victims.

Whilst there's more than a whiff of intolerance and intellectual hauteur about the views of Mssrs Amis and Hitchens, it's largely thanks to the prevailing mood of fear provoked by predictable Islamic overreaction that we do still still need such voices. Othewise, we'd only be listening to our timid politicians and diplomats as they insist that it's all a terrible misunderstanding, and that poor Gillian Gibbons made an "innocent mistake".

Unbelievable. Even if it had been a cuddly pig and she'd done it on purpose, there's no way that such things should be a criminal offence in the modern world, anywhere. Punto y final.

I'm glad to see that Amnesty International has grown itself an extra set of balls recently, firstly by taking a stance against the bishops on abortion following rape, and now by naming the incarcerated teddy-namer as a "prisoner of conscience," albeit an unwitting one.

And by jailing the teacher this East African government has brought wider global attention to the barbaric state of their prison system and the conditions endured therein by women who will spend a lot longer than a fortnight in Sudanese state accommodation.

Headless chickens

Wilfredo Monzón Guillén, alias El Gallo, leader of the minor-league gang franchise in Zona 18 of Guatemala City known, appropriately enough, as Los Gallos, was arrested yesterday and charged with 34 separate counts of murder. 7 of his associates were also captured in an operation involving hundred of cops and some regular army troops as well.

Shooter, 'seeing the elephant'

We all remember the speech made by Lt. Colonel Tim Collins on the eve of the invasion of Iraq:

"We go to liberate, not to conquer.We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.

"There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly. Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose. But if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory.

"Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there."

Somewhere nearby in Kuwait, Colonel Brian P. McCoy, Darkside Six, of the 3rd Batallion, 4th Marine Division was addressing his own troops, 'the Bull', thus:

"My idea of a fair fight is clubbing baby seals."

There in a nutshell, you might think, is the difference between the modern militaries of our two nations. Yet one of McCoy's subordinates was one Gunnery Sergeant Jack Coughlin, and in this account of his experiences in the days that followed we witness a fascinating tension between a milico mentality glutted on "violent supremacy" and one that occasionally threatens to examine warrior existentialism a bit more critically.

So, at one stage we listen as Coughlin humanises an enemy that he has recently put a couple of bullets into, the only man to survive a shot from his rifle it seems, yet one he would not hesitate to shoot again "if ever we faced each other again on the battlefield."

"War sucks," Coughlin tells us whenever he witnesses its lack of proper discrimination and sense of universal justice. And yet his mood immediately after 9-11 is one of unbridled enthusiasm for the opportunity to ply his deadly trade in earnest. "During Operation Iraqi Freedom alone he recorded at least thirty-six kills, thirteen of them in a single twenty-four hour period," the blurb on the back cover enthuses.

"In the warrior's world, we called dramatic change 'seeing the elephant.' Once you saw it you never forgot it," Coughlin reveals, and there's no question that his memoir has some elephantine insights into the code of the modern western warrior.

Before the invasion Coughlin has spent months trying to persuade his superiors of the merits of a more mobile deployment of snipers. Circumstances on the ground in Iraq see his dreams realised, as he is able to waste countless armed Iraqi fools from the top of a fast-moving Humvee.

There's a certain voyeuristic pleasure in 'glassing' the world of the professional murderer through Coughlin's scope and this is no doubt what put this book on the New York Times bestsellers list. And so the book is full of his arresting descriptions of his one-to-one duels with men that never saw him coming: "I smoke-checked him, bam, and he was dead, his body twitching for a few more moments while his internal systems shut down," whilst another of his rounds "created a hole that is called the 'permanent cavity,' and then the bullet exploded, sending small, jagged fragments spinning off in erratic paths that shattered his organs."

And yet the key moment, one that had certain voices in the media calling for Colonel McCoy to be had up for war crimes, is one where the gunnery sergeant suffers a sudden attack of amnesia. Having secured the strategically vital Diyala bridge "gravity and the physics of momentum" conspire to lead carload after carload of desperate Iraqi citizens towards the itchy trigger fingers of the Bull's grunts, amongst whom Coughlin sits. "It did not come to a stop, because it could not, until our defensive perimeter was set. There was no way to separate the sheep from the wolves," he explains, before adding that he has "no recollection" of many of the bloody moments that ensued.

"Fortunately, no one fired a shot at us, for had they done so, we would have returned a thousand," he had noted earlier in the war as his unit passed through a small town on the highway to Baghdad. Here is a soldier that is all too conscious of his position as valuable asset, one worth defending with indiscriminate gunfire directed against even marginally suspect civilians.

Given Collins's remarks about flags above, it was fortunate that Coughlin was in the square beside Saddam's statue when one of his Marine Corps colleagues tried to wrap the stars and stripes around it's bronze head. His own immediate superior, one Lieutenant Casey had with him a pre-1990 version of the Iraqi flag, which was immediately donated to the angry crowd.

The only way I have ever found to justify the invasion of Iraq to myself is as a continuation of the intent to smother the original aggression unleashed by Saddam in 1990. Not only do none of the other justifications make any real sense, they violate the principle I internalised when I abandoned the pacifism of my childhood: that force should only be deployed as a response to force.

Coughlin's wife stopped writing to him as war broke out and divorced him the moment he returned to California.

Soñar no cuesta nada (A Ton of Luck)

Free tequila! Not sure why though, as this was the festival's Colombian gala night and that nation's embassy mob were out in force.

The narrative of Rodrigo Triana's film is grounded on a set of real, reported events: in 2003 a patrol of Colombian troops chasing FARC guerrillas around the more inaccessible parts of the local rainforest, stumbled upon an abandoned 'narco-terrorista' camp where $46m in cash (in various currencies and denominations) had been hastily buried by its former occupants.

The movie outperformed Pirates at the Colombian box office. It's at its most entertaining whilst it explores the immediate ethical and economic chaos that this discovery causes in the ranks.

Although one amongst them refuses his share of this 'dirty money', he accepts an order from the platoon lieutenant to keep his trap shut about their plan to pocket the hoard without reporting it. Stuck in the jungle until their commanders are finally persuaded to send in a chopper to extract them, the soldiers experience the angst of wealth without an outlet. Bog rolls sell for $500, exchange rates fluctuate wildly and they feast on roasted mico using greenbacks as firelighters.

The script has been careful to paint the elite 'destroyer' unit as a close-knit bunch of highly likeable rogues, from whose naivety much of the comedy springs. There's a somewhat unlikely generosity welling up out of their collective covetousness.

After a couple of hairy moments, they arrive back at the barracks with their rucksacks full of plata and are granted a day of leave, and thus the predictable conspicuous consumption commences, which of course leads to the unraveling of their little conspiracy.

Being essentially a true story, its value as a morality play is somewhat compromised. Yet rather than dwell on the fates of the rumbled soldiers, screenwriter Jorge Hiller has bookended the tale with a sentimental story that introduces the wife and child of the one man who appeared incorruptible, a stratagem which delivers a minor twist and a limited sense of conclusion.

One of the key rationalisations for appropriating this dinero de nadie that the soldiers deploy is that it will only be pocketed by even bigger thieves further up the food chain. I'd love to know what did actually happen to all that dosh once the military authorities had confiscated it. (My understanding is that 50 of the 150 men involved were eventually brought to trial, and have since been released when that trial collapsed.)

There was a Cuban short shown before the main feature: El año del Cerdo which cleverly traces two interlinked sets of coincidental events affecting a set of characters in an apartment block above a Chinese restaurant, which both unfolded during The Year of the Pig.

I love this guy...

I'd certainly agree that a society that gives up the right to be rude, whilst treating "insulting nonsense" with a respect it doesn't deserve, is asking for a whole lot of trouble. Freedom from other people's unproveable beliefs as a basic human right; now that's a dangerous idea!

Beowulf (Trans. Seamus Heaney)

The melancholy murk of the dark ages closes in around me when I read Heaney's utterly compelling translation of our first native epic. There are but a few points of symbolic illumination: Hrothgar's hearth, the wyrm's breath, the hero's pyre.

I can't remember being this fascinated and entertained when I read the poem at school. It's packed with wonderful observations like "Foreign places yield more to one who is himself worth meeting," but the best of all I'll have to quote in full.

In a society where every death has a price, a were-geld, fratricidal murder is particularly destabilising:

That offence was beyond redress, a wrongfooting
of the heart's affections; for who could avenge
the prince's life or pay his death price?
It was like the misery endured by an old man
who has lived to see his son's body
swing on the gallows. He begins to keen
and weep for his boy, watching the raven
gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help.
The wisdom of age is worthless to him.
Morning after morning, he wakes to remember
that his child is gone; he has no interest
in living on until another heir
is born in the hall, now that his first-born
has entered death's dominion for ever.
He gazes sorrowfully at his son's dwelling,
the banquet hall bereft of all delight
the windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping,
the warriors under ground; what was is no more.
No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard
Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed
and sings a lament; everything seems too large,
the steadings and the fields.

James Hart Dyke: The Royal Tours

James HD opened his winter exhibition last night with a private view at the John Mitchell gallery at 44 Old Bond Street.

I went along with Surfer and Zhoan before the concert.

I always knew that James was an excellent landscape artist, but this selection reveals his talents as a portraitist as well.

They come from his participation in four of Prince Charles's official overseas tours to places like Nepal, Sri Lanka, The Gulf States and Sierra Leone.

I was particularly keen on his drawing of the 'Over-keen PPO' and the African warriors (see image). Surfer is rather fond of James's painting of the Prince's helicopter shimmering into frame top left with wheels down.

Lang Lang at the RFH

Surfer had a wide-eyed look when we met up last night. "The biggest waves in half a century are going to hit the west coast this weekend...go check Magic Seaweed." I did, and the predicted fifty-year storm has already been downgraded somewhat, with 20ft not 50ft waves forecast for Whitsand Bay on Saturday.

Lang Lang's performance at RFH last night was a bit like one of those beachside days where a gentle morning swell has, by mid afternoon, become a relentless train of crashing rollers.

Before the interval he played Mozart's Piano Sonata in B flat (K333), Schumann's Fantasie in C and the Granados Goyescas with a poise that was seasoned with occasional moments of sparkle (matching his sequin-speckled shirt).

The second half began well enough with Lang Lang at the mike waggishly introducing five pieces of traditional Chinese folk music − The Dragon Songs. Surfer really enjoyed these and we discussed the musical similarities with Grieg's Lyric Pieces which derive in part I think from ancient Lap songs.

Then the pianistic triple salkos really got going. In Lang Lang's hands the arrangement of Isolde's Liebestod was all too Liberacestod and the Hungarian Rhapsody was marred by a whole load of OTT performance gestures.

Years ago V and I went to see Sviatoslav Richter in the old, unpolished version of the RFH. The auditorium was in complete darkness save for the little lamp that illuminated the sheet music which Richter squinted at as he played, as if discovering the notes for the first time. Now there was a showman.

Still, it was a pleasure to meet Surfer's charming friend Zhaoan ("Joanne with a Z") and her mates Richard and Charlie.

Cross Keys, Pangbourne

We had lunch yesterday at the Cross Keys in Pangbourne, the positives of which include a two course menu for £13.95, a chef that used to work at Mike Robinson's Pot Kiln and a little garden at the rear that backs onto the river Pang.

Amongst the negatives were the Chilean Merlot which tasted like you could run your tractors on it. "An explosively fruity nose," noted the wine list!

I'll try anything once, but it was a mistake on my part to pick the pheasant as my main course, which was rather like the least appetising parts of a roast chicken, tough on the outside and un-appealingly flushed and fleshy within.

Quién mató a la llamita blanca?

My second outing to the DLA film festival was apparently a monster box-office hit back home in La Paz.

It's a chaotic comedy that follows a pair of Indian crims Jacinto y Domitila − the most-wanted cholos in the land − as they traverse it with 50Kgs of Bolivian marching powder destined for Brazil. Behind them, in front of them and occasionally even overlapping with them, are a pair of likeable miscreants from the anti-narcotics police.

Essentially this is a full-on satirical caricature of a nation which shares many of the fundamental structural (and cultural) difficulties endured by Guatemala, which I suppose made it that much more funny and interesting for me. (Bolivia isn't − as the script suggests − the only country suffering from collective amnesia at key moments like general elections!)

I sympathised with George and Paula sitting beside me as much of the humour had been stashed in the language and its pronunciation, but they came out with the view that Rodrigo Bellot's film was vastly better than Sleuth, which they had seen the night before.

Latin Americans are usually better at laughing at their defects than they are at correcting them. Indeed some of the best piss-takers that I have met in Guatemala are quite literally taking the piss when it comes to the daily conduct of their own lives.

Being British I personally would have tried a bit harder to distil some of the film's raucous cynicism into irony proper: it tends to penetrate more deeply than mere mockery. I'd also have advised the director to ease off a bit with the innovative cinematic trickery. Still, highly recommended.

The whole movie is available in parts on YouTube.

'La Sobrinísima'

Diego Luna turned up to the Gala opening of the DLA festival with his new girlfriend Camila Sodi, Thalia's niece. (Thalia's website is something else...)

Like Diego Camila was launched into local stardom at a young age; Mexicans are surely second only to the Japanese in the extent of their collective schoolgirl fantasy.

She has that slightly podgy prettiness that her aunt had in her telenovela glory days, and on Thursday she was wearing an attractive early-stage Shakira hippy-chick outfit which included a patterned bandana.

In El Búfalo de la Noche she features as the rather randomly-introduced third woman in Manuel's life. The pair were apparently not yet dating when they got naked together on set and later refused to promote the movie in Mexico when the producers published stills from that short scene on a website without their permission.

Commision Against Impecunity needed?

The International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) reported serious difficulties at the end of last week, because as of next year it will not have financial resources to function thanks largely to its portion of the 2008 State budget being reduced from $6.6 million to $1.3 million.

Casting for a director

Diego Luna told us last Thursday that the most difficult thing he'd ever had to deal with as an actor was "working with a shitty director." He didn't of course name names, but I'd bet one of these trauma-inducing directors in Luna's career would have be my namesake.



Luna has just made his own directorial debut, J.C. Chávez, about the life and career of the Mexican boxer who has also been lumbered with some namesake issues. This movie showed on Friday at the Ritzy as part of the DLA festival, but I didn't get to see it.

Sin ofender al presente

Back in 2003 Jürgen Habermas invited some of the world's A-list intellectuals (including the now departed Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty) to comment simultaneously and without deliberation on the future of the EU.

Umberto Eco chose to argue that an enlarged and yet more unified Europe should try to establish itself more formally as a third player between China and the US.

"Utopia? Well perhaps a utopia made necessary by the new global equilibrium. It's this way or no way. Europe, if you will, is condemned, in order to survive, to find common defence and foreign policy instruments. Otherwise, and I mean to offend no one, it will become Guatemala."

El Búfalo de la Noche

This year's pick for the opening gala of the Discovering Latin America film festival. Diego Luna attended and spoke for almost an hour between the end of the movie and the reception which followed at Gaucho in Swallow Street.

I gathered from the under-indulgent applause around me as the credits rolled that there were other members of the audience struggling to assess this first feature from Jorge Hernandez Aldana, a Venezualan-born Pole. It bears strongly the creative imprint of its writer and producer Guillermo Arriaga, whose novel it is an adaptation of and whose regular directorial collaborator was until recently Alejandro González Iñárritu. It has for example, both the languid electric guitar score of Amores Perros and the drying-paint pacing of Babel, with the grainy texture of both. There are also plenty of Arriaga's signature flashbacks, though here they handled in an apparently less tructured and meaningful way.

The film takes us in close into the lives of a group of university-aged individuals living in Mexico City. Luna plays Manuel, a young man at the centre of a nexus of disfunctional families, friendships and flings who, crucially to this story, has deflowered and staked obsessive ownership of Tania, girlfriend to his schizophrenic best buddy Gregorio. At the outset this pinche loco has just been released from an institution and the very next day blows his own brains out.

What this movie does achieve, it achieves by way of suggestion and through an intrusive intimacy with the pains and pleasures of its alienated young characters. (The pleasures, though indeed eroticised, are the sort where people start sniffling midway through them.) We are given only just the most minimal number of reasons to develop an interest in these people, and if you took away the nudity there really wouldn't be all that much left.

Diego Luna delivers some bare bottom work on a par with that in Y tu Mamá También. I was feeling my own rear end quite sharply by the time we reached the one hour mark, but things do quicken up a bit when the barest outline of a thriller plotline is introduced.

Anyway, here's the trailer and I hope to post some clips from Diego Luna's Q&A session over the weekend:

All the Pretty Horses

'McCarthy-lite,' Scott had warned me.

There's a case for the sell-out I'm sure, but in truth I found it to be an odd synthesis of McCarthy styles , where passages of notable verbosity are followed by others in which sparseness predominates, in places deserving of its reputation as modern American classic, yet with an awful lot of riding around going on between them − a feature I recall from the author's other would-be masterpiece, Blood Meridian.

As for the so-called romance at the heart of the story, I guess one man's mythic western is another's telenovela. I know which genre bell is clanging in the wind when McCarthy first describes the hacendero's daughter with her wide-brimmed black hat and matching Arabian horse. ("Real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.")

Here's one of the occasional outbreaks of McCathy-heavy, including the kind of complex metaphor that defies any sort of accurate imaginative reconstruction:

"In the grey twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed on the waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an Autumn pool."

There are also one or two nameless things dotted around this verbal landscape too, surely McCarthy's most over-used adjective of opportunity. ("Ranchero music with its falsetto cries almost like an agony played out of a cheap radio somewhere in the nameless night.")

Having dipped into works representing both his Tennessee and Western periods, my preference remains for his two most recent novels The Road and No Country for Old Men. I think it is largely to do with the way he handles dialogue in them (less decoratively), and how the richness of his style has also evolved into something altogether less obstructive to the narrative impetus.

I honestly can't remember having salivated with such enthusiasm over the prospect of seeing an upcoming movie than I have over the Coen brother's apparently faithful take on No Country for Old Men.

On the other hand I can't say that I will seek out the DVD of Billy Bob Thornton's adaptation of this novel (with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz) with anything like the same degree of enthusiasm. Hollywood cast a pair of fairly grown-up actors to play a pair of ill-fitted lovers who in the text were aged 16 and 17 respectively. Yet 'mojado reverso' John Grady Cole never really convinces as a fugitive adolescent in Mexico; the character is often little more than a cipher for an old man's wisdom and a senescent code.

There are certainly a number of very cinematic scenes in this book. The dance at the grange is a favourite of mine, and then there's the Mexican jail. The story also has one of those extended confrontations about two thirds of the way through where one character lectures another at length about how the world really is. This is the Hacienda's old maid aunty, who dresses with a "chilling" elegance and explains to Cole how the 'Spaniards' tend to pursue truth and honour in all their forms but not their substance, and how there are no control groups in history to reveal what might have been.

When Cole realises that Alejandra is determined to respect her aunt's wishes and dump him he reflects that "all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all." Yet like the majority of McCarthy's girls, she never approximates a fully-realised person, and it is therefore very hard to imagine what might have been in their relationship had her decision been different.

The friendship between Cole and Rawlins places McCarthy firmly back in his comfort zone though, and this little gem of cowboy wisdom from Rawlins was a salient moment in their always enjoyable dialogue:

"Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing."

Celebrate/Hate the new media douchebag

Inherited mutation?

I've decided to re-read El amor en los tiempos del cólera in time to be disappointed by Mike Newell's movie. I'm also intrigued to discover whether the small but plot-significant translation cock-up in the English-language version is a) still there and b) about to make the transition into the screenplay.

Not the Daily Show

The studios respond...

Just when you were thinking...

It couldn't get any worse than Dubya:

Krouty nosh

AA Gill has a convincing argument for the the comparative lack of Germanic culinary slots on the global dining out scene:

"When we eat foreign food, we don't just consume meat and veg prepared in a different way, we feel that we are somehow taking on a taste of the joie de vivre of the host country. So, rightly there are millions of Italian restaurants, and loads of Frenchish ones, hundreds of Americans, and even the occasional Mexican is awarded a culinary embassy. But where are the German restaurants? Where, indeed. There used to be one in London called Schmidt's, but it got gotterdamerunged ages ago."

It's Austrian and usually called a Milanesa (probably for the reasons outlined above), but he has some issues with the Teutonic signature dish too:

"The best thing about Wiener Schnitzel is saying it. It sounds like a man with a handlebar moustache sneezing minestrone out of his nose... It is about as forgetably minimal as food can be and still be food. Bland is too emphatic a word for Wiener Schnitzel. If it doesn't come with a lemon, it doesn't really exist at all."

Haute Cuisine is nicht, but London does have one notable German eatery: Stein's, on the river at Richmond.

Vintage Atkinson

The Web without an advisor?

A week ago today the FT's Michael Skapinker was indulging in a few belly laughs at the expense of the PR industry, whose pretensions to expand their invisible handiwork into social media he claimed to find quite amusing.

I shared my response to the article with Michael and he kindly offered to pass it on to the editor for consideration for publication, but as I am yet to see my name in print, I'll reproduce it here:

Dear Michael,

You have some interesting insights there, but I feel there's still a good deal more thinking to be done between observation and opinion on this topic.

Back in the days when online chatter was going on in places like Usenet and Listserv groups, it was perhaps more understandable if companies elected to put their hands over their ears and make out that it wasn't happening. But the thing about blogs is that they are providing a more reliable conduit between spontaneous popular discussion and the commercial media, and it's this hybrid nature of the humble blog post that makes it so relevant to the communications professional.

Listserv users probably had no reasonable expectation that the companies whose goods and services they purchased would be using that particular channel to improve their overall consumption experience. Yet as you rightly observe, the internet is "teeming with people complaining about companies,"and much of this griping can probably be isolated to the frustration sensed by those who would rather these companies did not continue to pass up the opportunity to both listen and speak to them using newer channels that we are all increasingly native to.

You could in fact argue that campaign-style activities that treat blogs and social sites as nichier versions of traditional media should indeed be rare, because you wouldn't really expect them to be that effective anyway.

But the fact that spontaneous networks of conversation are emerging which are far more joined up with our increasingly fragmented mainstream media, should be inspiring emotions beyond fear and hope, and there is certainly room for the informed counselor here.

I would not expect that sending out messages with the hope that the network will do the rest of the work will be the primary activity of the PR profesional for much longer. There is a more nuanced role in the offing which, amongst other things, involves grasping (and fostering) the conditions which permit 'social' communications to occur online within the context of values shared by the brand owner.

Regards,

Guy

Discovering Latin America

The DLA Film Festival kicks off in London this week.

I'm hoping to go and see El Bufalo de la Noche (from the pen of Guillermo Arriaga) on Thursday with Miseryguts. Diego Luna from Y tu mamá también is attending.

A week later on the schedule there is a Guatemalan film called Las Cruces… Poblado Próximo, but it is showing at a rather awkward time in the afternoon.

Juanes churned out a song for Rosario Tijeras, which was for me the highlight of last year's festival.

Ah, durka, durka, durka

People Magazine's 'Sexiest Man Alive'

Free Jazz and impatient hound

Scott and Germán doing some free jazz amidst the amazing natural acoustics of the wooded Cerro del Aguila above Mexico City. Includes minor chucho incident.

More here.

The Reggaeton version

Techno Techno...



In Spain an estimated 500,000 people have downloaded a ringtone featuring the King's words "Por que no te callas?" (Why don't you shut up?), generating a reported €1.5m (Which as we know, is now almost $2m).

The official song...

The Mitsubishi 'Wanker'

Spotted this one outside Stringfellows on Friday, appropriately enough.

It's the imported version of the SUV known here as the Shogun and the Montero in Guate

...imported by people that must be blissfully unaware what pajero actually means in Spanish.

Don't Move (Non ti muovere)

This was the bestselling Italian novel that the author's husband Sergio Castellitto made into film starring himself and Penélope Cruz.

It's clear enough from reading it that neither of Mazzantini's protagonists are supposed to be lookers, but on screen only Cruz had to labour under the aesthetic handicap of a rubber nose. Castellitto obviously deemed his own rubbery enough to start with (see poster, left.)

The central conceit that this story is a long, drawn-out confession of father to comatose daughter works rather better in print. The surgeon's motives for straying away from the stultified affluence of his married life are made clearer, without the need for portraying his wife Elsa as an icy bitch.

I suppose the film had to do this, because the dialogue (which, as perhaps you might not expect from the oeuvre of an Italian husband) is faithful to the book, was clearly not written with a view to shouldering the whole burden of revealing the inside of Timoteo's mind, because of course the entirety of the text emerges from there.

The book is also able to evoke a fuller range of important details and sensory experiences - Italia's nibbled fingernails, the smell of "rancid mayonnaise and sour floor-cloths' in the bar where Timoteo meets her, a tramp with the aroma of "a disemboweled dog".

Book and film both start to wallow rather self-indulgently in the hapless adulterer's predicament, but the film goes down this path sooner and the novel continues to compensate with a psychological and philosophical depth that Castellitto's adaptation can't match.

Mazzantini's imaginative access to the masculine soul is impressive, but she allows her narrator a few telling insights into her own sex too, such as his observation of his wife that "when she's inflexible it's a kind of self-defence, sure, but believe me, it oppresses her, too."

The furtiveness within Timoteo, a man claiming to lack belief in the world, and who makes a fateful decision to fly under the radar in order to discover and then lose his inner-brutality, is the essence of the author's vision for her protagonist. He's easier to sympathise with than his slick cinematic incarnation because of the way she satirises his social circle and especially his medical colleagues, who exhale "wine fumes and professional malice" at the congresses at which they gather.

Still, the film is worth seeing, and Cruz's performance, in her second language, is surely another major landmark in her career. She continues to be wasted by Hollywood.

Iconic Latin American videos from the 90s (3)

Te Lloré un Rio...might have been what Maná's lead-singer Fher said to Sting, the vocalist he had been compared to so many times, when they finally met. Sting apparently looked at him as if he was the indio caitudo he was trying to be in this particular video and walked off without returning the Mexican's optimistic "orale!".

36 Quai des Orfèvres

Starring Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Valéria Golino, Olivier Marchal's 36 is unquestionably the most stylish and melodramatic crime thriller since Infernal Affairs (see hilarious spoof below).

It's hard to describe the set-up without spoiling it, but essentially it is the story of two cops that operate by their own rulebook chasing both a violent gang of robbers and the soon to be vacant job of their boss. Auteuil's character Vrinks is married to a beautiful doctor who would appear to have been his former chum and now rival's girlfriend. Both men are prepared to take extraordinary risks to land the arrest and although it seems that Depardieu's Klein has screwed up first, he has a nasty surprise in store for Vrinks. Who does bottled-up, wounded masculinity better than Auteuil?

Just when it looked to be ramping up to an operatic Hong Kong style climax, Marchal delivers the twist that is exactly the denouement that this story requires. Superb.

And now for the funny stuff:



Update: Watching the extras I discovered that Marchal was himself an anti-terror policeman and that everything up to the moment Vrinks is released is effectively a true story. He admits though that he chose to make an 'urban western' which might have compromised the level of realism somewhat!

Iconic Latin American videos from the 90s (2)

Sabor, Sabor was the first massive hit for Rosario, daughter of the famous Andalucian singer and dancer Lola Flores who performed at the opening of the Olympic Games in Barcelona.

Now I know that Rosario is technically not a 'Latin' artist, but this video definitely belongs in the set. The flooded crypt idea was inspired.

Shortly after her mother's death from cancer in '95 Rosario's equally talented brother Antonio took an overdose and died. Rosario disappeared from the scene for a while then reemerged with this elegy for her lost sibling, with whom she was very close. She later starred in Almodóvar's Hable con Ella in 2001.

AA Gill has a high street beverage

This is what happened when AA Gill, most probably the model for Anton Ego in Ratatouille, finally went to try out a Starbucks:

"American coffee is only coffee because they say it is. It's actually a pale, scalding version of junior-school, jam-jar brush water...I can't remember the last time I was served something as foul as its version of a cappuccino. To begin with it took longer to make than a soufflé...An hour and a half later I was presented with a mug. A mug. One of those American mugs where the lip is so thick, you have to be able to disengage your jaw like a python to fit it in your mouth. It contained a semi-permeable white mousse − the sort of stuff they use to drown teenagers in Ibiza, or pump into cavity walls. I dumped in two spoonfuls of sugar. It rejected them. Having beaten the malevolent epidermis with the collection of plastic and wooden things provided, I managed to make it sink. Then with both hands I took a sip. Then a gulp. Then chewed. I had a momentary sense of drowning in snowman's poo, then, after a long moment, a tepid sludge rose from the deep. This was reminscent of gravy browning and three-year-old Easter eggs. How can anyone sell this stuff? How can anyone buy it twice? And this was only a small one − a baby. The adult version must be like sucking the outlet of a nuclear power station."

And then he spotted one of those free little brochure thingies:

"There was a pamphlet about fair trade, and how Starbucks paid some Nicaraguan Sancho a reasonable amount for his coffee so that he now had a mule to go with his thirteen children, leaky roof and fifteen coffee bushes. It made not screwing the little no-hope wetback into penury sound like the most astonishing act of charitable benevolence. And they just had to print a pamphlet about it so we all know what sort of selfless, munificent, group-hug people we're dealing with."

For this blog's view on Fair Trade coffee, see this post.

Iconic Latin American videos from the 90s (1)

Continuing the theme of Nice video, shame (though not always) about the song, I have decided to pepper my blog this weekend with some of those classic Latin American pop videos from the mid-90s which, it is clearer to me now, share a common visual idiom. We kick off with Matador by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, which has appeared on umpteen soundtrack albums:

Or was it this one?

Nice video, shame about the song

It's a pity YouTube doesn't seem to feature the video made to accompany Drowning in Berlin by the Mobiles, surely one of the sources for this fabulous spoof of the early 80s pop video by Rowan and the gang.

Sons of sweethearts!

García Márquez is the recipient of a Fatwah-lite. His last novel, Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes has been banned in Iran. It has actually been on sale in Tehran's bookshops, but the culture ministry has decided that this was in fact a "bureaucratic error" which they have now chosen to rectify. In Farsi it had the slightly less racy title of Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts.

iPhone marketing

I'm going to have to quibble with Jonathan Durden's article in Marketing Week about the 'genius' of Apple's marketing strategy in the UK.

In essence he suggests that the iTouch (I'm assuming he means the iPod Touch?) is an inferior product to the iPhone and has been designed largely to give locked-in Nokia customers a taste of the gadgetiest gadget, thus priming them to defect in due course.

Durden seems to have forgotten that the iPhone was launched months ago in the US and that the iPod Touch then followed in the late summer as part of the 5th generation of iPods. The timing of the two launches around Xmas in the UK is surely a localised phenomenon.

And unless he is working on the assumption that in the short to medium term all iPods will also be mobile phones, it would be wrong to discount the importance of the launch of the touch screen version of one of the world's most successful products. (It may actually be a more reasonable assumption that more iPods will swap the click wheel for the touch screen over the course of the next couple of years.)

Indeed, I'd wager that Apple have been less worried about cannibalising from the 'premium, more customer-sticky' iPhone than about compromising their position as the manufacturer of the most iconic, high-end media device.

Consider the age profile for the iPod Touch compared to the iPhone: which one is more likely to end up in a teenager's Xmas stocking? My own guess is that the iPhone will for some time remain a device targeted primarily at professionals: sticky, middle-aged cool, but not the device of preference of the under 20s.

Meanwhile, far from being the inferior product, I find the iPod Touch to be the first really compelling hand-held Web browsing device, and it surely has fewer defects as an iPod than the iPhone has as a mobile phone. (The sound quality is actually much better than my 4G iPod Video).

One day we may all carry a mobile device that gives us the best of Web, Text and Voice communications along with a high-capacity media player. With the iPhone and the iPod Touch, Apple has taken a couple of alternative routes towards that ultimate goal, but has clearly had to make more technological compromises in the case of iPhone, perhaps because this device was conceived as a way for them to intelligently encroach on a market packed with powerful brands, rather than opening up an entirely new category where they could expect to grab an 80% share of the market in no time at all.

Hecho tortrix

V just called to say she heard that maestro González Goyri , the famed Guatemalan artist she rubbed shoulders with at an exhibition last weekend, has died.

Last August another local great passed away: René Menéndez Martínez, inventor of Tortrix. This ad celebrated the Crunchapin's 45th birthday:

Chuchos electricos

Rudy has today highlighted the plight of Guatemala's street dogs, known locally as chuchos electricos (Corriente con corriente!)

The perros callejeros that scavenge around Panorama are a source of great pleasure to me. Some clearly have a very rough time of it, but others seem to do quite well out of neighbourhood charity, living on a diet of bread rolls, bones and half-eaten tortillas. They generally have a dignity born of a disarming humility coupled with admirable daring, and it must appeal quite widely, because according to Rudy they are just as likely to share the fate of unattended Mayan babies and be grabbed by some gringo and taken off p'al norte as a fashion statement.

No speed cameras?

Terracotta tenistas

Tenemos estos 3 guerreros de terracotta en la recepción de nuestra oficina esta semana.

A diferencia del ejercito de tales figuras enterrado por el Imperador de Quin en 210 BC estos llevan raquetas y forman parte de un grupo de ocho creados para celebrar la Copa Masters del ATP en Shanghai esta semana. Como tal vez se nota, son Federer, Nadal y Djokovic, supuestamente los mejores tres del 'ATP Race' en 2007, pero tambien los que parecen más agotados en estos ultimos encuentros del año.

Ultima Hora: Se quedaran aqui en GB en Wimbledon hasta que se terminan los campeonatos de 2008 y despues cada uno de los ocho tenistas se llevará su propia efigie a casa. (Claro que Davydenko venderá el suyo en eBay!)

World Diabetes Day

Today marks the arrival of the first UN-observed World Diabetes Day.

Earlier this year I was working with the International Diabetes Federation firstly to promote the passing of a UN Resolution on Diabetes, which was to firmly establish this date in the calendar, and then to encourage diabetes bloggers to help spread awareness of WDD activities around the globe, in part through the distribution of buttons and banners.

Over in Guatemala the Plaza España will be lit up in blue until Sunday.

Tablas, guitar and bailaora

Some close-ups from the Ojos de Brujo concert at the Roundhouse last week. My father used to play the bongos really well...

Islamic Rage Boy

"The angry young man of Kahmir, and now a blogger's darling."



and...



and...

Ojos de Brujo at the Roundhouse

More fun from the Roundhouse last week. That Cuban trumpeter can do keyboards too.

I've said before that I think Ojos de Brujo's blend of Flamenco with Latin rhythms and hip hop is variably successful. Still, Spain is in an enviable position when it comes to fusion potential. Compare for example Italy, which appears to be the only major Mediterranean country without a folk tradition, at least not one that has any visibility on the 'world music' scene compared to the likes of Fado and Flamenco.

A couple of weeks ago V recommended to me an album of songs called Nessuno È Solo by Tiziano Ferro: "the next Eros Ramazzotti" she said...not necessarily an entirely good thing.

Spain gets its afro influence via its former colonies, but in truth there's very little sign of indigenous MOBO at the San Remo Song Festival. Still, this early hit from Tiziano (who does have that unfortunate Lazio fan look about him) seems to have an enjoyable, Franco-Senegalese kind of beat:

No me taseas 'mano!

Hugo Chávez can count himself fairly fortunate that he was in Santiago Chile and not an American university campus, as instead of been told rather familiarly to put a sock in it by a constitutional monarch with a lot more cojones than John Kerry, his speaker-interruption tactics might have resulted in harsher treatment than the use of the second person singular.

Here we see Nicaragua's not-so-reconstructed leftist President Daniel Ortega getting in on the Borbón-baiting, which resulted in Juan Carlos getting up to go and look for a chocolate brownie...or maybe it was his taser.

Currency adoption

Guatemala's new waterproof, polymer-based One Quetzal note is proving popular with eBay collectors, according to El Periódico. I've been using one as a bookmark since it was given to me by Orly.

Nominally worth about 13 cents to the forex trader, they have been selling for as much as $4 on the online auction site.

Their long-term value may depend on whether the government expands the experiment into other denominations.

The 600 or so that come up for sale daily on eBay represent 0.001 of the total in circulation. This is getting close to that statistic that says that every 100th Guatemalan child ends up as an adopted American!

More Ojos de Brujo

Includes an extended trumpet solo and more floorboard thumping dance.

Por que no te callas?

The Iberoamerican summit in Santiago Chile ended in disarray when King Juan Carlos of Spain invited Hugo Chávez to shut the fuck up. The Venezuelan presidente had been heckling Zapatero's closing speech and had repeatedly referred to the Spanish leader's predecessor José María Aznar as "un fascista" of the extreme right. The incident has gripped the Spanish-speaking world and El Mundo has this morning compiled all the related Internet gags it could find. A commentator on Five Live said it was rather like a typical British Christmas dinner where the relatives are united in silent munching before someone says something and then it all kicks off!

Meanwhile Chávez has described Juan Carlos as "impudent" and insinuated that the King played a role in the coup attempt against him in 2002. (One of those Spanish ambassadors again...though somehow I can't imagine Juan Carlos back in his hotel room slobbering over a candle and hissing "Yo soy luz, Chávez es la oscuridad"!)

"No rey, no nos vamos a callar. Yo soy de los hijos de Bolívar," affirmed Chavez yesterday, but then said he hoped this spat woudn't damage relations between the two countries.



Full Disclosure: Zapatero and Juan Carlos are my heroes. Chávez isn't!

Elizabeth, The Golden Age

Mark Kermode had sold this to me as ridiculous...but in a good way. This sounded like something that would be worth spending money to see, but unfortunately every time the funny stuff gets going − snarling Spaniards prancing around like a bunch of repressed Opus Dei freaks, Sir Walter swingin' in the riggin' − the action switches back to a rather humdrum but good natured domestic drama.

And unfortunately, there's also rather a lot of the bad kind of ridiculousness, such as the fact that the Elizabethan court appears to have been located in the nineteenth century neo-Gothic annexes of St John's College Cambridge and then of course there's that speech, on that horse, in that armour. If any of the pike-carriers that the virgin queen addresses had actually participated in the battle it would perhaps have been more forgiveable. And what was wrong with Elizabeth's actual reported speech at Tilbury?

For this part of the movie I'm sure that Shekhar Kapur could cite his influences as Henry V, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Return of the King and maybe even John Boorman's Excalibur, a film that epitomises for me the premium variety of ridiculousness (see below).

I almost went to see this film that evening when I was wandering around Santa Monica suffering from sleep deprivation. Instead I went to see The Kingdom, but I now suspect that the effect would have been much the same: zzzz for the first three quarters followed by a degree of attention to the explosive climax. So, entertaining enough, but I liked it best when it was closest to being a spoof. In this instance, I really was expecting more of the Spanish Inquisition.

Incidentally, I have often heard the guides on the Thames tour boats asserting that the infamous cloak-laying incident involving Raleigh, the Queen and a puddle by the stone steps on the Bermondsey bank of the river, directly in front of my apartment. I'm pretty sure it never happened though, and at the time of the Armada Raleigh was landlubbing it as Vice Admiral of the not entirely seaworthy county of Devon. It was of course Drake, as anyone who has read One Hundred Years of Solitude will know, that the Spanish regarded as the pirata de mierda.

However it was an ill-conceived attack on the Spanish outpost of San Tome on the Orinoco that would lead to the Spanish ambassador (no doubt just like the baboso in this movie) to petition James I to reinstate a death penalty imposed in Raleigh just after Elizabeth's death. After his execution in 1618 Sir Walter's wife Bess carried his embalmed head around with her in her handbag until she could no longer abide the smell.

JipJop Flamenkillo

Surfer tells me that the Cuban Music Awards at Floridita last Friday were 'a bit WOMAD'. So too was the Ojos de Brujo concert at the Roundhouse on Wednesday, especially when that Senegalese rapper in the white shell suit bounded onto the stage for the final number.

The dancer seen here isn't named on the band's Wikipedia page, but the three appearances she made on the night were really what added some bite to the musicians' performance.

Tottenham Court Road in the 80s

Nothing changes really...

Concert in Las Capuchinas

La Antigua's freeloading fraternity was out in force last night at the Santo Domingo for the opening of an exhibition of works by established Guate-born painter and sculptor Roberto González Goyri, the man responsible for that massive statue of Tecún Umán that you pass on the way to the airport. He has quite a funky website with sound effects too.

The nibbles were top quality too, V reports. Taquitos de pollo and brochetitas and some very good wine. Jeannette came along. (My mother insists that the nibbles at Claridges last week were done by Gordon Ramsay, but they were generally unexceptional, apart perhaps from the salmon mouse served in tiny ice-cream cones.)

If she recovers in time V plans to go along to a classical concert in the ruins of the Convent of Las Capuchinas this morning at eleven. An American soprano called Carol Ann and a pianist called Ana Lucrecia will perform. The entrance is free but you have to bring a toy to give away as a Xmas present for children in need. What a great idea.

MySpace. Don't you love it...?

Marie Antoinette

Nobody seems to know exactly why they booed this movie at Cannes.

Perhaps it was because Sophia Coppola appears to have deliberately overlaid the values of the Ancien Régime with those of the modern Hollywood dream, and thus appears to be both trivialising and celebrating something that one assumes many historically conscious French people place beyond this kind of absolution. (American presumptiousness et tout ca.)

This, coupled with the fact that we never get to see the full consequences of the Queen's story, robs the whole thing of political depth...at least of the conventional sort, because Coppola may be trying to make another kind of political statement here, one where 'the mob' are but a hindrance.

Yet I for one remained uncertain of the intended message. The most enjoyable part of the film for me was the opening half hour, where the 14-year-old Dauphine-to-be makes her 'transition' through a temporary marquee erected on the border between Bourbon and Habsburg territories and where she is ritually decontaminated of her Austrian life. This is followed by equally well-observed scenes of the kind of court etiquette that is usually referred to as stifling.

Thereafter interest is maintained primarily by the costumes, wallpaper and bed linen as the young Queen explores the existential possibilities of the modern celebrity blonde, dabbling with self-indulgence (gambling, shoes and cake), nature, motherhood and dashing young foreigners before a final, unconvincing stab at stoic spouse.

Todo Tiende

The first of my videos from Wednesday's Ojos de Brujo concert. Marina dresses a bit like the Predator with feather boas.

The Roundhouse is an extraordinary venue. It began life as a Victorian steam engine shed. In 1968 The Doors gave their only UK concert here and the cops once raided the place to investigate the nudity in Oh! Calcutta!. It reopened in the summer of 2006 after years of dereliction.

Female beauty as cliché

In the world of American entertainment feminine beauty has become a bit of cliché . Bizarrely you are far more likely these days to see a classically beautiful woman in a European porn movie being shagged by a pair of Serbian skinheads wearing black leather jackets and y-fronts, than in an American movie or TV series.

Heroes is one of the worst offenders. There are some ludicrously beautiful men, Sendhil Ramamurthy (Mohinder) and Milo Ventimiglia (Peter) being the stand-out examples, whereas 'cute' is about the best that can be said for the leading female cast members. Dania Ramirez (Maya) has potential, but she needs to stop bleeding black ink out of her eye-sockets.

Lost isn't much better. OK, there's the feisty, freckled Evangeline Lilly (Kate), but then she's surrounded by Naveen Andrews (Sayid), Matthew Fox (Jack), Daniel Dae Kim (Jin) and Josh Holloway (Sawyer).

In CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, if anyone is going to get a modelling gig, it would be one of the males. Yet CSI: Miami is to some extent an exception. Yes, there is the uber-smooth, square jawed Adam Rodriguez (Delko) but on this show at least his masculine lusciousness is regularly out-shone by Emily Procter (Calleigh), Sofia Milos (Yelina), Khandi Alexander (Alexx) and Eva La Rue (Natalia). And they achieve this in spite of the collective aesthetic handicap that the producers seem to have deliberately set them up with: age. They are all over 40...and gorgeous.

It's not much different in the movies. Think of a properly beautiful actress working in Hollywood (Aishwarya Rai, Sarah Shahi, Mia Maestro [pictured], Monica Belluci etc.) and she will tend not to all or even part American. Would women as 'plain' as Kirsten Dunst and Sandra Bullock have prospered in the black and white era? Quirky is obviously the modern equivalent of ravishing, especially when cute (Anne Hathaway, Katie Holmes etc.) won't suffice. I guess someone could try using Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johannson to de-bunk my argument, but they are surely at best borderline cases.

Luna de Xelajú

I'm not certain, but I think these are the marimbistas that visited London about a decade ago as part of a cultural event at the Barbican that the Guatemalan embassy organised.

V's cousin Alan plays with La Union Musical. They've released a couple of CDs of dance tracks rearranged for Guatemala's national instrument that one could almost chuck some shapes to.



(Thanks to Alfa of Blog de mi Guatemala for this!)

The gadgetiest gadget

Great post from Diamond Geezer about today's UK launch of the iPhone.

Caballo regalado?

The Rainbow Cafe in La Antigua is up for sale it seems. The owner wants little more than $100,000 and yet claims it makes $70,000 per annum. Somehow those numbers don't make much sense to me, but the idea of owning an established cafe-restaurant does appeal.

Merck settles

So Merck has settled with the Vioxx plaintiffs. I wonder if their legal counsel, which was reportedly costing them $600m per annum, was anything like the school of suited sharks portrayed in Michael Clayton. (The plaintiffs' lawyers probably are...)

At the time I saw that movie I reflected that in my own experience in the communications business, bad corporate ethics calls are less likely to be the result of the machinations of cynical and sociopathic clever people than institutionalised incompetence − often enough exacerbated by the interactions of uncommonly dumb people. Hollywood likes its baddies to be knowing and smart however.

Update: MRK up $2 so far today. Yay!

Desde Barcelona...

Here are some pics from the Ojos de Brujo gig at the Roundhouse the other night. I have some great video clips too which I will sort out over the weekend.

Surfer tells me that there is something called the Cuban Music Awards going on at Floridita in Wardour Street tonight. I think the trumpeter in the pic above was Cuban because a bloke standing next to me kept shouting "vamo' coooba" whilst waving at him (and he doesn't seem to be part of the usual band line-up).

Meanwhile veteran Juan Luis Guerra basically cleaned up last night at the Latin Grammys. but Ojos de Brujo picked up the gong for Best Flamenco Album for Techarí. I wonder if they flew from London to Las Vegas to collect it?

Calle 13 got Best Urban Music Album for Residente o Visitante and Best Urban Song for Pal Norte. But mini-reggaetonero Miguelito lost out to some religious cack called Como se llega a Belén by Voz Veis. Arturo Sandoval got the award for Best Latin Jazz Album.

Here's Juan Luis Guerra's 'Best Song':

Ta negaiito

Calle 13's Grammy winning Pal Norte, featuring the Orishas.

There's a bit in the middle of the video that's a bit like one of those old Saatchi ads for British Airways.

That alpaca is cute.

Energy Emergency

A state of energy emergency has been declared by out-going Guatemalan Vice President Eduardo Stein.

The rise in the dollar price of a barrel of oil will clearly cause a great deal of short term pain to the local economy, but I really think it should spur them on to develop their ethanol refining capabilities and to reduce their dependence on the medieval bigots and freaks that control most of the black gold.

Stein is the most senior politico left in Guate right now because Berger has gone off to the XVII Iberoamerican summit in Chile with Álvaro Colom, the man set to replace in January. It goes without saying that previous transitions have been less amicable, but Berger apparently asked Colom 'sos rojo o crema?' and having received a satisfactory reply, booked him a ticket to Santiago.

It's the Latin Grammys tonight...

And one of the nominees is 8-year-old reggaetonero Miguelito who takes the genre to somewhere beyond self-parody. The phenomenon started when record company execs realised that Latin American kids, and not just the ones with tweezed eyebrows, were learning the lyrics of stars like Don Omar and Daddy Yankee by heart. When a competition was organised to find the best of these mimics, they then discovered that the resulting audience wasn't exactly dominated by the under-18s.

Secuestros relámpagos

Express kidnappings are on the rise in Guate. There were seven in the first five days of November, at least one of them in La Antigua. Women are the preferred victims. Their loved ones usually get a call within 15 minutes of the snatching and on average they are released within six hours once the ransom monies have been transfered to the kidnappers: generally beetween 10 and 20 thousand Quetzales ($1300-$2600, not a lot really). The kidnap gangs tend to use hard-to-trace mobile phones.

Back in 2005 there was a fairly crappy movie made about this phenomenon in Venezuela:

Slightly random Thai lightbulb ad

Presidenciable

This was the interview with Colom at the Tikal Futura, just after he was confirmed by the TSE as President-elect, that convinced V that he was "sweet and sincere":

Neowar

Umberto Eco has one of those fertile minds that helps us to comprehend contemporary reality by coming up with a whole new range of categories to slot it into. One of these is his concept of neowar, the conflict model for the globalised world.

During the cold war which followed centuries of paleowar, there was equilibrium at the centre of the two first worlds, but conflict was normative at the periphery, he notes. Paleowars had fairly clear fronts and the enemy was either systematically attacked behind theirs or rounded up and put in camps.

In the modern era of neowar however, the enemy is just as likely to be talking to us in our own homes using our TVs and broadband connections and we are much more likely to be sympathetic to them, or at least the 'innocent' victims on their side of the non-front that separates us.

9-11 was, Eco feels, the initiation of a permanent state of neowar in which disequilibrium arrived at the centre. The response from Washington was to immediately engage in the 'simulcrum' of a paleowar in Afghanistan and later Iraq.

The biggest danger he suspects, is that the rhetoric of paleowar (Crusades etc..) becomes the conduit for talking ourselves into a new macro-polarisation, which under the conditions of globalisation, would be unwinnable for both civilisations. The front of such a crusade would exist only in the politcal discourse; and anyway, history has shown how pointless an exercise the crusades were even in the context of the pre-Modern world.

This intellectual model is certainly interesting, but it starts to come apart the moment Eco tries to use it to explain the whole of our current confrontation with 'Terror'. Is there really more 'disequilibrium' at the centre now than there was say in the 1970s? Surely he remembers the Red Brigades in Italy? How does globalised conflict look to the Taleban fighter on the ground in Helmand province? In spite of all the dire warnings from our politicians and policemen, it strikes me that so far 'Al Qaeda' has proved far more resilient as a wager of localised paleowars on the periphery (albeit asymmetric) than as a bringer of death and destruction to our doorsteps.

Concepts like paleowar and neowar are useful, but instances of conflict in today's world are still likely to be different kinds of hybrid, especially when you look at how the various levels of participants (politicians, grunts, terrorists, insurgents etc.) actually internalise their motives.

Wahaca and Loco Latino

Talking of Tex-Mex output, the area within lunchtime walking distance of my office has two new Mexican eateries.

First up Wahaca in Chandos Place, which is a phonetic spelling of Oaxaca. They probably didn't do this just because we Londoners are the kind of morons that wouldn't be able to pronounce it properly (rat-a-too-ee), it also kind of makes sense from a Googling perspective too.

Not long ago I went to a Geek-meet with Frode and he looked a little put out when one of the specimens present ventured that Scrubbs, my Norwegian chum's favourite show, was nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is. Well, Wahaca is nowhere near as trendy or as tasty as it thinks it is either.

"Quite good," our Chinese intern Evi politely summarised, and it may not have even made that grade had someone not ordered what is clearly Wahaca's signature dish, the Sonora salad, (see the menu here) which arrives in a bowl with the oleaginous substance of a mutant Kettle chip.

I was also pleased to find some jalapeño seeds in the bar matchboxes. This is a clever response to smoke-free England. They are now in a little pot on my balcony and I will report back on their progress.

The rest of the formula is being violently tugged between an earnest desire to be more authentic and the inauthenticity of international cool. When did 'Mexican market eating' become a lure to anyone that has actually eaten in a Mexican market? And when did you last hear electro-tango tracks played in your local cantina? OK, some of the ingredients show a degree of extra effort, but I'm with AA Gill when he warns his readers off any restaurant where the opening gambit of the serving staff is "Have you been here before?"

Our own notably pushy waiter made a point of informing us that we wouldn't find any Tex-Mex nonsense like fajitas at Wahaca. Oh no. Maybe someone can explain to me why burritos are kosher and fajitas aren't, but I've had some of the best sizzling chicken in the Yucatán, which is quite a way south of El Paso.

What depressed me most about Wahaca was perhaps the realisation that V and I could do better. The idea has mucho mileage, especially when you read this article by la patrona, but they need to start by taking stock of the fact that you can't make a small portion of totopos look yummier by serving them in what looks like a mug without a handle.

In blatantly appealing to the donkey, sombreo and slammer crowd Loco Latino in Romilly Street has opted for the south of the border authenticity of the Mayan Riviera. The comedor ambience would be familiar to anyone that has been to the joint called Los Tacos on the Calzada in La Antigua, run by some of V's cousins: red checked tablecloths, red paper napkins and a bottle of hot sauce on the table. Loco Latino calls itself a bar, but the one inside the restaurant (there's a 'cantina' upstairs which I didn't visit) is the kind you find in East End Balti houses: lots of mirrored glass and bottles that generally don't move off the shelves.

The quesadillas there are a violation of the trades descriptions act, because there is but one, and it arrives bubbling in tomato and oil and looking much like (oval clay bowl notwithstanding) a microwaved Smart Price canneloni. The fajitas sizzled and were very tasty. The tortillas came in a little plastic pot and were a passable compromise between the flour tortillas you can get at your supermarket and the less flimsy corn variety that are the staple of Guatemalan cuisine.

Verdict: This is how to serve quesadillas (i.e. 3 not 2, with something alongside, all on a plate that is just a bit bigger than the dish itself). I still don't agree with AA that there's no such thing as good Mexican nosh. But finding it in London remains a chore. The best of the bad remains La Perla, and if they decide to put half as much effort into composition as Wahaca does, I'll be going back more regularly.

Mi primer amor

I was never a huge fan of Selena's Tex-Mex output, but there's no doubt she was a major vocal talent. I've always thought that J Lo's fame was in some ways borrowed (or inherited) from the the slain Chicana, because it was her miming to Selena's tracks in Gregory Nava's biopic that really launched her A-list career.

Nava had made a great movie in 1983 about a pair of indigenous siblings fleeing the civil war in Guatemala and attempting to make a new life in California: El Norte. It was one of the first things my Spanish teacher wanted to talk to me about in 1989 when I had passed the threshold of the cue-cards. Note to self: I must get a copy of the DVD.

This was a great mid 90s track from the Barrio Boyz which Selena fronted shortly before her death. She might never have made a movie star, but she sang better than J Lo and she would probably have gone on to sort out the Barrio Boyz' dress sense.

Most voted for

Apparently, more people voted for Colom than any other Presidenciable in the new democratic era in Guatemala, including current President Oscar Berger who defeated him four years ago.

Scott Adams in Second Life

"About 60% into the video, an avatar that looks like Dilbert appears and attacks me. It was art imitating life, imitating art beating the crap out of something imitating me."
Scott Adams

The new face of Guatemala

Yesterday Álvaro Colom told a local radio station that "I plan to convert Guatemala into a social democratic country with a Mayan face."

His is not an especially Mayan face of course, but the president-elect does seem to be a fully ordained Mayan priest. (Guatemalans have also been quick to point out his facial resemblance to General Miguel García Granados Zavala, president from 1871-3 and long-term incumbent of the ten Quetzal note; above.)

Whether or not his government-to-be will be strictly speaking either leftist or social democratic, it will probably be the first since popular elections were renewed in the 80s that has declared itself committed to helping the country's most impoverished groups as its #1 priority.

I am getting a real sense that the cambio so much promised by generations of Guatemalan politicians may at last be upon us and that the esperanza in UNE's campaign pledge that perhaps seemed a bit wooly before these elections is now beginning to infect all sectors of society there, even the newly-deflated, air-punching, chest-patting PP voters.

V has described Colom as 'Quixotic' (by which I think she means given to endearing fantasies) but his running mate is no Sancho Panza.

Instead, as the New York Times observed today, the future Vice President Dr Rafael Espada is perhaps the man that most embodies this potential for unifying the 'two Guatemalas'. Espada is a world-renowned cardiac surgeon and the first medic to assume the second highest office in the land. In a thirty year career (based mainly in Texas) he has regularly returned home to Guate in order to perform heart surgery on both its most and least privileged citizens. His charity operations are described in his Wikipedia article as 'gratuitous' surgery, and he was performing an average of ten of these outside the US each month before running for office with Colom.

Espada (an interesting surname for someone that opens people up) was himself was born illegitimately, his father a member of the elite who disowned him. After being brought up by his mother, he attended the public San Carlos University and through hard work, scholarships and good fortune went on to train under a noted surgeon in Houston, where he later became deputy chief of cardiothoracic surgery at the Methodist DeBakey Heart Centre. In his new role as a politician, he notes that many of Guatemala's impoverished Maya groups suffer from diseases that would elsewhere be considered more preventable.

His boss also yesterday praised the role of Cuban doctors in Guatemala and suggested that his government would expand cooperation with the socialist regime on that island, which may set a few alarm bells ringing in Washington.

Yellow School Buses

Apparently we now have something called the Yellow Bus Commission in the UK chaired by former education secretary, David Blunkett, who thinks their deployment as an antidote to the school run can help save the planet: "Even though the Americans have not paid a lot of attention to energy conservation and climate change, I think it actually does help," he told R5 Live.

Hmm, many of America's school buses end up spending a busy retirement as multicoloured chicken buses in countries like Guatemala, where they don't give the impression of being at the front line of environmental friendliness! (I did look for a photo which showed the black smoke belching out the back!)

Remember remember...

Tonight is bonfire night in London aka Guy Fawkes night, and boy did I get grief for that every year at prep school.

Is it ethical? asks Spiked with tongue in cheek.

London used to sound like Mogadishu for around two weeks either side of this important date, but the authorities have cracked down on the sale of fireworks over the past couple of years. The best displays are public, though on Sunday I missed out on Surfer's dad's rocket attack on the neighbouring township of Acton, which he likened to the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

St Andrew's, the prep school that borders Herons Farm, had its annual display on Friday night, and as ever it was a traumatic experience for all the horses, my father reported.

I attended the one in Battersea Park on Saturday by positioning myself on the Chelsea Embankment opposite the Buddha and just across from my father's notorious bachelor pad on Cheyne Row. (The clip below mostly comprises of footage I took of the finale.)

El Curando is a great little site for picking up authentic Chapin clobber, such as these wooden effigies of highland saint and sinner Maximón, the closest thing Guatemala has to our Guido, though instead of being roasted every year he is treated to fine cigars and wicked liquor. (They also burn the Devil every December 7.)

We have a friend in La Antigua whose principal collectible obsessions are ducks (feathered and felt) and authentic Maximóns, and it is the latter that makes him bonfire material himself, according to some of the more righteous members of our neighbourhood.

This one looks a bit like Saddam Hussein.

Right, I'm off to sit on my balcony and watch some more luces going up across the whole southern panorama of the capital. It's starting to sound like Somalia out there already. The only snag is that it is considerably colder out tonight than it was on Saturday.

Raffled and ruffled

The last time I met up with Xtofer he was fretting about where to spend an upcoming week-long break. This is where he ended up. Jammy.

Meanwhile Joel wrote to me at the end of last week to report the loss of his seismic virginity.

They had a 5.6 level quake in the Bay Area last Tuesday evening, epicentred nine miles from San Jose City Hall. Surprisngly this is said to be the largest seismic event in the area since the biggie back in '89.

Prowler

I had an unexpected feline visitor yesterday evening, thanks to the scaffolding which has been erected along the river-facing side of our building.

This cat had a beautiful mottled brown coat. It wandered in from the balcony door, had a good look around (giving my writing desk special attention, as seen here) and then departed in search of such other happy homes that the temporary structure might afford it access to.

Let's hope none are in the fur trade.

Viraje Obligado

Rudy today proclaims Guatemala's membership of the Latin American social democratic club. Listening to the radio early this morning you would have hardly thought this election was as close as it was. Almost everyone that rang in offered their congratulations to Colom and praised their fellow citizens for having rejected the past. Most were gente humilde and it was touching to listen to their gentle optimism and gratitude.

Manos flojas!

Ing. Álvaro Colom has won (52.7%). Late yesterday evening he made a (partly incomprehensible) victory speech and then rather brusquely refused to answer media questions about his plan to rid Guatemala of poverty. "Mañana..."

V found Alexandra and the gang at the table again when she went to vote. They pawed over her cédula once more and pointed out gleefully that their computer print-out had added one more year to her age.

There was hardly anybody else around. What had started out a very warm day had become markedly chilly. In parts of the country turn-out was as low as 10%, with some polling stations open for up to three hours before a single voter showed up, and thus far neither candidate has mustered 2m votes. Everyone seems to be a bit exhausted by the process and there has been no major aggro in the streets.

V changed her voting intention at the last minute − as she usually does − rationalising that she didn't want to feel responsible when the other lot messed up the country, so convinced she was that Mano Dura was all set to claim the presidency and that her vote would be meaningless. But now, somewhat unexpectedly, she's feeling like a winner!

Tough on crime has been temporarily seen off by tough on the causes of crime. This is how the BBC sees it. The murder rate currently stands at 5000 per annum. Let's see what it's like in 2012.

So it's adios to Otto and Mano Tiesa for at least four more years. The Washington Post can't quite believe that the candidate with the better hair lost. He also had the best campaign song, so here it is again, one last time:



Plus a less official and professional election broadcast found on YouTube:

Que tomas contra el malestar estomacal?

Is the question being asked of every election correspondent that calls into Emisoras Unidas from various parts of the country. WTF?

When I last spoke to V she was lying on the bed contemplating going out to vote; maybe. "Hay un calor sofocante," she told me and this same weather report was repeated on the radio just a few minutes ago.

Back in September they forecast that the rain would play a part again, but as it turns out it is the heat (and the fact that it's Sunday anyway) that has been impeding democratic activity in Guatemala so far today.

Update: in the west it may in fact be the cold that is fostering abstencionismo. However, in a poll conducted by the media, over 70% of respondents have instead blamed the 'quality of the candidates'.

Roger

I went to a rather unusual drinks party at Claridges on Friday night, thrown to celebrate the life of a family friend who died last April.

His three sons were our hosts and each made a fine speech. Only one found it hard to maintain the generally upbeat mood. (Another was sporting a diamond encrusted ring that would have put J Lo to shame!)

I hadn't seen any of them for over twenty years, which added to the general weirdness of the occasion.

My parents met Roger (here in a blue top matching that of his wife) on a cruise in 1966, and this pic was taken on board. Roger shared my father's love of Jazz, specifically the gypsy-jazz of Django, Stéfane and the Hot Club of Paris. I recall him as one of the few unquestionably good men amongst the adults I was exposed to in my formative years. "He deserved better than her," my father observed of Roger's marriage last week, which by the end of his life had evolved into an awkward ménage à trois.

The driver that took first my mother and then me home knew the former chairman of H&K David Mclaren, so we had a nostalgic chat. He almost flattened a copper that stepped out into the middle of the Victoria Embankment in front of the Ministry of Defence. This representative of the organisation just fined £175,000 for health and safety violations proceeded to give the man behind the wheel a lecture on maintaining readiness for these surprise (yet regular) anti-terror check-points on London's riverside highway.

They are of course fairly useless as the many of London's Jihadists frequent the East London Mosque and so it would make a lot more sense to stake out Commercial Road, a parallel artery to the north and east. But then that would appear to be harassment, and would be less visible to the Whitehall aparatchiks.

VIP La Otra Casa

Is a new movie from Guatemalan director Elías Jiménez Trachtenberg, which is on general release over there right now.

A government official called Juan Ramos is jailed for suspected corruption: an unusual enough premise in Guate. Apparently the rest of the film is about his struggle to get himself transfered to the VIP part of the prison and the plots hatched by his personal enemies that are geared towards ensuring that his stay behind bars is nasty, brutal and short.

The film has quite a funky website. Oddly, it has yet to be listed on the IMDB along with Jiménez's first feature, La Casa En Frente.

Voto por Otto?

Here, before the first round of polling, Alejando Giammattei advised Guatemalans not to vote for 'Ya-maté...al Obispo' and other robbers and killers:




It's still quite early over there, but so far the turn-out has been markedly lower than September 9. As before, the public sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks is prohibited today. It looks like it will be tight and the bomberos voluntarios are on stand-by across the country, because whichever man wins, there's bound to be some serious mayhem.

V has found a way to rationalise support for Mano Dura. She says it's a bit like choosing between her eldest brother, the one with carácter y decisión and her youngest brother, 'el mudo' with the mano aguada. Which one would she trust not to leave the door to the national shop open, she asks herself. Not an easy choice, she says, because both have their failings.

My main concern is that perhaps Otto won't actually be able to deliver on his promise of greater security, because a) UNE dominates the congress regardless of what happens today and b) the delinquents have paymasters who are likely to be in his immediate social circle. It's clear that the narcos have set themselves up for a win win too.

Eastern Promises

One of the most fascinating, and least tense, gangster movies I've ever seen. Possibly the most violent too.

"Is that it?" someone behind me asked the moment the credits rolled. Yes it was, and that was really fine with me, but I can see why some might still have had unresolved expectations.

If Cronenberg's movie has any faults they begin with the fact that Nikolei is somehow more complex and scary than any of the 'real' baddies and the fact that Semyon, the local leader of the Vory V Zakone, seems to be mysteriously under-staffed. These Russian mobsters are big on family but apparently short on goons.

It's never anything other than completely engrossing however. Yet compared to the MS-13, these Russians are a bit wimpy with their body art.

Refried Molotov

Yo ya estoy hasta la madre
de que me pongan sombrero
escucha entonces cuando digo
no me llames frijolero.

Y aunque exista algún respeto
y no metamos las narices
nunca inflamos la moneda
haciendo guerra a otros países.

Te pagamos con petróleo
e intereses nuestra deuda
mientras tanto no sabemos
quien se queda con la feria.

Aunque nos hagan la fama
de que somos vendedores
de la droga que sembramos
ustedes son consumidores.

Don't call me gringo,
You fuckin beaner
stay on your side
of that goddamn river
don't call me gringo,
You beaner.

No me digas beaner,
Mr. Puñetero
Te sacaré un susto
por racista y culero.
No me llames frijolero,
Pinche gringo puñetero.

Now I wish I had a dime
for every single time
I've gotten stared down
For being in the wrong side of town.

And a rich man I'd be
if I had that kind of chips
lately I wanna smack the mouths
of these racists.

Podrás imaginarte desde afuera,
ser un Mexicano cruzando la frontera,
pensando en tu familia mientras que pasas,
dejando todo lo que conoces atrás.

Si tuvieras tú que esquivar las balas
de unos cuantos gringos rancheros
Las seguirás diciendo good for nothing wetback?
si tuvieras tú que empezar de cero.

Now why don't you look down
to where your feet is planted
That U.S. soil that makes you take shit for granted
If not for Santa Ana, just to let you know
That where your feet are planted would be Mexico
Correcto!

Alli esta el cabrón!

And the slightly slower verion:

Para que me entierren...

Proshecto Gotan

A hueeeevo

Chinga tu madre

Siempre.....tienes que abrir tanto la boca,
metida en las cosas, donde nada te importa mejor no te
metas donde nadie te llama
aquí nadie te quiere, aquí nadie te extraña.

Dime (quien ?) te cedió la palabra,
te pones a hablar y luego nadie te calla.
Porque no lo piensas y no lo dices que nunca
te cansas de meter las narices.
Porque no te ahorras tus comentarios ?
porque te tendremos que escuchar a diario ?

Se sabe en tu casa y en todo el vecindario
hay que estar a escondidas porque sabes que carga el palo
tu abuela, tu vieja y el puto de tu hermano
se pone borracho, se pone marihuano
me quiere joder y quiere chupar
porque no chupa faros me deja de molestar
a mi y a mi gente, a mi brother compadre
busca algun pretexto pa romperle la madre
Para que nadie se quede sin hablar,
para que todos chinguemos igual.

Chingo yo chingas tu chinga tu madre.

Sabes que me caga de sobremanera,
lugar donde vaya siempre tiene que ir mi suegra.
Yo lo único que quiero es que se muera
yo lo único que quiero es que se muera, como sea
Si vamos a salir es con chofer,
yo pienso que lo hace por joder.

Si estamos en la sala y nos vamos a la cocina,
seguro nos observa por detrás de la cortina.
Si nos vamos a ir al cine, nos manda con tus primas
y cuando me despido nos
observan tus vecinas.
Para que nadie se quede sin chingar y pa
que todos chinguemos igual.

Chingo yo chingas tu chinga tu MADRE.

Te vas y ya no quieres verme nunca mas
me vale que te vayas, te deseo que seas feliz.
El destino ha sido cruel pero así tenia que ser
la verdad nunca te he amado solo te quería coger.
Creías que me tendrías para siempre,
te crees una mujer tan solo porque usa brasiere
pero te has equivocado nunca estuve enamorado
y he fungido mis orgasmos las mil noches que te ame.

Chinga yo, chinga tu, chinga tu madre(x8)

Siempre en domingo...
chingen a su madre, a los de caló...chingen a su madre
a los televisos...chingen a su madre,
los de molotov...chingen a su madre.

La vida es un ratico

I suppose Juanes must be very marginally the second most famous Colombian singer-songwriter in the world.

His new album, titled as this post, has been produced by Gustavo Santaolalla, who I saw in concert a couple of weeks ago at the Roundhouse with his electrotango combo. It's growing on me quickly, especially the track called Tres.

As with Guatemala's own three-time Grammy winner Ricardo Arjona, it's the mix of rock with local traditional rhythms and heartfelt,well-crafted lyrics that makes this music so appealing. Here's a clip I found of YouTube of Juanes singing the title track from this album:

La revancha del tango

It's only just occurred to me that it might be an idea to upload some of my older vids. They're lower res and hence a bit longer. This one comes from the superb open air concert given by franco-boludos Gotan Project in the quad of Somerset House, back in the sweltering August of 2003. For the first twenty minutes or so they performed behind a semi-transparent tela onto which all sorts of iconic Argie stuff was projected.

At the time Surfer reckoned that they were being supported by none other than Animal from the Muppets.

Five portions

This morning V talked me through a heart-rending clip on Guatemalan TV news in which a man from Tabasco saved his parrot from rising flood waters. I'm not sure how ashamed of this I should be, but I usually find footage of stricken animals in these kinds of natural disasters more affecting than the state of the human beings. It still pains me to think of an image of a dog stranded on a roof surrounded by water after Katrina hit Louisiana.

V and I went on to discuss the vegetarian side of our own animals' food preferences. Cherry clearly adores bananas and wolfed down three last night, making plaintive "una mas porfa" noises after the consumption of the first two.

She will eat the meat of the papaya but leave the skin, but that's fine because this is the cats' preferred part of the fruit. Their favourite treat is the stalks of coriander that have previously been floating on the surface of some broth. It's a wonder to watch them delicately pulling this through their tiny mouths. They are also partial to macuy, a local edible weed. Unlike Cherry, they won't give a chunk of banana more than a sniff, but can't get enough of fried plantain.

I suggested to V on our call that an animal she was sure someone referred to as a 'pinche Doberman' was perhaps more likely to be a Doberman Pinscher!

Here in the UK the mother of all stupid studies has attempted to scare us out of eating red meat, apparently a major cause of cancer. Logically then, the Argies, South Africans and those tribes that hunt antelope all the time should be riddled with aggressive tumours, especially as they barbecue most of it. Somehow, I think not.

Endureciendose?

I knew it. The last poll before they all go to the polls, and Otto has suddenly scraped a five point lead.

V was telling me today how she was unexpectedly invited into a neighbour's house in Jardines today and served up a delicious portion of the mother of all fiambres.

Fiambre is the traditional dish of the Day of the Dead in Guate, and Rudy's post yesterday will tell you everything you need to know about it. Basically, you get around ten different varieties of sausage and chuck in anything else you might find in the fridge. The slide show showing the preparation is worth watching. (What's that blue thing?)

Look who's spamming me

I seem to have found my way onto some email list of cédula-carrying Chapines.

The big story this week in terms of my day job has been the ruthless retaliatory action taken by Chris Anderson against a few careless members of the PR profession.

It's hard to work out who is the shark and who is the cleaner fish in this tale of a symbiotic relationship gone bad.

Both parties depend quite squarely on other people's more productive labours.

It's a spat that has reminded me of Laurel and Hardy's slapstick comedy where neighbouring shopkeepers go to war.

However, a bloke called Dan appears to have extracted quite a lot of free business advice out of the comment trail.

Mobile marketing in Guate

Two journalists from El Periódico, Enrique Castañeda and Hilda Mérida have informed the human rights prosecutor in Guate that several death threats were sent to their mobile phones after they began investigating the financing of Otto and Mano Dura (Partido Patriota).

The journalists assert that Mano Dura is linked to both organised crime and drug-trafficking. (A bit like the other lot...)

“We have received threats and suffered intimidation ever since the start of our research into the structure of the PP and its financing of Otto Pérez Molina’s election campaign,” Enrique Castañeda said. He added that he could not name “any one person or party in particular” but the threats had increased the more their investigation went on. Meanwhile Pérez Molina claims to know nothing about the investigation and adds that he has a clear conscience.

Francisco Goldman has been on tour pushing his new book The Art of Political Murder, Who Killed the Bishop? Two of its pages insinuate the existence of 'new evidence' that it was in fact Otto who dunnit, and this has helped to keep Goldman busy in the run up to Monday's election. The finger has been pointed at Mano Dura by Ruben Chanax, a park vagrant who used to sideline in espionage.

Here in the UK we have been marking the Day of the Dead...election.