Inner Diablog

Luis Suárez and all that

2012-01-05T17:12:00.010Z

Mariana Echeverria, the cute replacement for Radamés on Guerra de Chistes (above) has established a niche for herself on the show by specialising in the telling of gags which would induce thousands of complaint calls to any UK broadcaster. She should be thankful that Mexico has no equivalent of the Broadcasting Standards Commission; or at least I am assuming it doesn't.

The other night, dressed as an angel, she recounted this little adivinanza: 'What's yellow on the outside, black on the inside, and makes you laugh out loud?' Answer...'a taxi full of 'negros' going off a cliff.'

Racial discrimination is not her only rollo however. Over the festive period she got laughs out of a boy with no hands as well as leper children.

Now, in tieing this cautionary tale back to that of Liverpool's seemingly much put-upon Uruguayan striker, let's make several observations that would seem reasonable to anyone who has spent time in a Spanish-speaking culture.

1) There is practically no sense of poltical correctness

2) There is a very high obscenity threshold

3) There's an awful lot of un-selfconscious racism around.

On the middle point, it has never ceased to amaze me how children's TV presenters in Spain feel free to use the word coño (cunt) on air.

Luis Suárez would probably regard our tendency to stigmatise those who make fun of people's colour, but not those who joke about a person's weight, lack of hair, intelligence or regional origin, as a strange form of discrimination in itself.

For if Uruguayans are anything like Central Americans, a good part of the local sense of humour is based on homing in on each other's most salient (and therefore apparently weakest) features. It rather resembles Public Schoolboy humour in its mercilessness. For that reason 'negro' is a nickname forced on many people of non-African origin who just happen to be a tad darker or sport curly hair.

Another Mexican show I watched last year had a well-known black singer as a guest and the hosts chose to welcome him with a string of gags that would leave many liberal folk in need of a jaw re-setting before they could run to their phones to complain. But I do believe that the idea was actually to make the strange dark person feel more comfortable on set! And the tactic appeared successful, because the singer chose to join in and proceeded to tell several startlingly racist jokes himself.

Relative homicide rates

2011-12-31T22:18:00.007Z

This year Guatemala had, with the exception of Mexico, a lower relative homicide rate than all its neighbours. Yes, that includes Belize. Honduras, meanwhile, is practically off the scale.

Yet when it comes to media stories about the wave of 'drug-related' violence that threatens to overwhelm civil society south of the border, Mexico and Guatemala are invariably the usual suspects. I don't seem to recall reading any articles in the past 12 months describing the ecotourism destination next door as "ungovernable", with the implication that it is rapidly degenerating into some sort of failed state".

It is also interesting to note that Colombia, which has done a sterling job of PRing its recovery from the maelstrom of lethal violence that swept across it in the 80s (and markets itself to foreigners with the strapline "The only danger is that you want to stay"), is still essentially as dangerous as South Africa.

New year, new novel idea

2011-12-30T20:44:00.004Z

For the past year or so I have been working on a schema for a novel which has as its central conceit the notion that in the 'not-too-distant-future' Chinese scientists have developed a gene therapy which allows them to selectively offer a significant lifespan extension to individuals deemed valuable to the state.

Now whenever one starts with a high metaphyical concept and then attempts to graft on some sort of story, one finds oneself in a bind. This year, a not-disimilar concept came to my attention in the form of a movie called In Time, and from the critical response, I have gathered that Andrew Niccol has failed to disguise the fact that the underlying idea disappointingly denies any precedence to either plot or character. (Anyway, I hope to be catching that flick early in 2012.)

I was planning to locate my own narrative in Guatemala, a choice which would permit me some geographical and cultural distance from the hard technological core of my MacGuffin, and encourage me, the author, to focus on the familiar and the intimate.

A Chapin location would have also allowed me to explore another key theme: what would happen if the Chinese 'solution' would have negligible (or at least unforseen) consequences for individuals of WASPish ethnicity but, owing to the known affinities between the Mayan and Chinese chromosomes, gave a sudden advantage to one of the western hemisphere's ethnic have-not groups?

I still think this is a story worth writing, but I have struggled to find a way to set it in a fictional universe that is essentially more interesting than expressing it as a mere thought experiment.

Yet, almost inevitably when one considers how human beings would respond to extraordinary longevity, one starts to ponder what will happen once they realise that it wasn't really what they were after in the first place. And so, a parallel narrative idea has sprung to mind: how might we behave if given the chance to live out all of the possibilities that our individual lives offer us? The attraction of this premise (which, you guessed it, would also be tied down to Guatemala via an as yet undisclosable tie-in to Antigua's parque central) is that it would permit me to gratuitously meditate on my own philosophical notions relating to the nature of quantum phenomena and free will, as well as verbalising my gathering apprehensions about ageing and the gradual withering of personal possibility.

I would also be allowed the chance to signal my intellectual debt to the likes of Asturias, Rulfo and Borges and, something I have always wanted to do, couch an otherwise explicitly science fiction tale within the idiom and mood of magical (or to butcher Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation) suficiently technological-realism. It's also a much harder story to write. But then that is what New Year's resolutions are for, isn't it?

Dawkins plays Santa

2011-12-15T17:37:00.004Z

Richard Dawkins has been honoured with the post of guest editor for the Christmas edition of the New Statesman and has been out there this week plugging the magazine via Sam Harris's essay on free will, the essence of which is encapsulated by a sentence one comes across about half way through:

"All of our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge."

It bothers me that some rationalists (amongst whose numbers I generally like to consider myself) are unable to perceive the obvious holes in their arguments. Dawkins himself wrote an entire book that affected to dismiss the probability of God by comparing the creator to some giant spaghetti monster in space, a line of argument that completely failed to acknowledge that when men speak of God, as opposed to giant spaghetti monsters, they are talking about first causes, and that when they do so, the whole category of probability becomes moot anyway.

None of Harris's arguments are especially new, but given the nature of the publication, he has attempted to demonstrate how they can be deployed to trump prevailing political discourse, presumably in order to make new enemies as one munches on the Christmas turkey.

It's as if he is saying that we scientists, at least those of us who can face up to unpalatable truths, have a deeper fundamental grasp of the big issues than either liberals or conservatives (in the American sense). Not quite what his chum Dawkins meant when he coined the phrase Holistier than thou, but certainly a variety of smug superiority that does this little clique of science-led dogmatists few favours.

Harris believes he can dispense entirely with the notion of free will because human consciousness is little more than a package of illusions of acting in the moment, when in fact it is a "a totality of impersonal events merely propagating their influence." From this premise, he goes on to reach the following conclusion: "If I had been born with the brain, body and experience of Ted Bundy, I would have been Ted Bundy - a serial killer put to death for his crimes. There is no extra part of me that could have resisted taking his path in life."

But hold on, doesn't that word "experience" muddy things up a bit? What if he had just been born with the brain and body of Bundy? There's no question that there is something innate in this type of psychosis, but the dodgy genetic hand dealt to Bundy had to interact for many years with society via his inherently plastic human mind before he went out to make his first kill.

Minds are never wholly impersonal. Harris has deliberately tied the notion of free will to consciousness, a stream we now know is always playing catch-up with the actual decision-making processes of the human brain, but our on-going mental worlds encompass the past and the future as well as the present, and our behaviour and overall personality is surely forming and re-forming as a result of a feedback loop between our illusion of executive control and those hidden committees of brain function. So while I may not be able to directly influence what I decided to do a millisecond ago, what I do next week must potentially differ depending on how deeply I think about it. Surely the 'totality' must include some more personal events when one steps back a bit from the conscious moment?

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

2011-12-13T13:17:00.010Z

I have to admit to feeling a little disappointed by Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Shriver's novel (which, by the way, I haven't read). It is certainly fascinating, if not entirely gripping, especially after the narrative slips into a groove after the first thirty minutes or so.

Ramsay is using sound and visual imagery in a consciously masterful way here, but at times both can seem a bit meddlesome. The Hillbilly background tracks and the persistent intrusion of redness started to become more salient than my interest in the underlying emotional drama.

There's no question that the latter is inherently more likely to have greater traction with parents than non-parents such as myself, but the notion that a child can take shape as a living embodiment of one's own existential compromises —

and a vengeful one at that — is still an intriguing one, and the trajectory of an author like Michel Houellebecq suggests that there's surely something in it.

Yet I've seen enough kids come off the rails here in Guatemala to have formalised the view that it is almost always the fault of the father, however useless the mother might otherwise appear to be. John C Reilly's doomed alcahuete dad Franklin makes a series of near comic interventions, but the character is inevitably underdeveloped, because Ramsay is trying to fashion a first person narrative from inside his wife's troubled consciousness, something which never seems to quite work in the inevitably third person medium of film.

It's a brave effort, but Tilda Swinton and her various haircuts are a less convincing presence than Ezra Miller and Jasper Newell, who play Kevin between the ages of 6 and 18 in the movie. And while I could see why she might be living in a hell of self-recrimination, it bothered me that apart from one or two suggestions regarding Kevin's line of defence at trial, Ramsay is less specific as to why the community around Eva should choose to project back onto her this sense of inner culpability so forcibly. (And could she not have moved away?) For while troubled teens and even adults may well emerge from misshapen domestic environments, I think we all know that deeper psychoses such as this are both more intrinsic and indwelling.

GRADE: B++

Cuba Travel Diary - Buena Siesta Social Club

2011-12-06T21:47:00.007Z

No trouble loading this one, even though the flag behind might have been a bit of a give-away. Perhaps it's because these particular well-ripended socialists seem to lack a certain rica cha in their general demeanour.

The lead singer (maracas) must have something of a sideline going as a ventriloquist...can you spot his lips moving?? And the guy using the green box as percussion is the very picture of punctuated inertia. My own inclusion in the conjunto did little to pep things up.

I was to hear several similarly close to flatlining renditions of Vacilón on my Cuba travels. In the municipal museum in Trinidad there is a small gift shop at each level of the tower. I was amused to observe how the staff turned on a recording of this tune every time a group of tourists emerged from below, and then immediately turned it off as soon as they had passed on upwards.

One Cuban song I must have heard umpteen times on this trip and, unlike several others I could mention, never grew sick of, was Dos Gardenias Para Ti. Many will have heard the Buena Vista Social Club version, but Diego's is still my favourite.

Several non indigenous ditties were also given the Cuban twist on numerous occasions. Besame Mucho of course, but one also came across bolero-isations of tracks like I Just Called To Say I Love You and, more successfully, that super éxito of Italian pop, La Tua Storia Tra Le Dita.

Cuba Travel Diary - No smiling commies please...

2011-12-06T15:05:00.016Z

After several failed attempts, I realised that I would not be able to upload any of my clips to YouTube with the words Havana or Cuba in the title or tags. This is presumably because placing in the public domain any evidence that socialism can be fun is clearly tantamount to trading with the enemy. Beyond pathetic really.

This would not have been a problem back in the USSR; I am yet to visit a place packed full of more miserable so-and-sos than the Moscow of 1984. But the Cubans are undoubtedly a jolly bunch and this city throbs every night to the sound of their music-making.

Even officialdom can be fun here. As I passed through the final security checks at Jose Martí International, several smiling X-Ray machine operators pointed out a colleague of theirs sitting at a nearby wooden desk and told me that the oil painting I was carrying in a cardboard tube would needed to be reviewed by this representative of 'La Policía del Patrimonio'. As soon as I made my way over to this nonplussed-looking individual, they all cracked up laughing. (Try telling Homeland Security to lighten up a bit and you are just asking for the full cavity search.)

Whatever 'Papa' Hemingway's well known preferences, my favourite watering hole in La Habana Vieja ended up being this one: La Lluvia de Oro on Obispo. And, let's face it, the Floridita, birthplace of the daiquirí, is a pink-walled establishment serving what Anthony Bourdain sagely describes as a girly cocktail — so one has to wonder what Ernest saw in it. In short it is not the kind of place any self respecting repressed puritan would normally select for starting a bar fight.

Cuba Photo Essay - Carritos

2011-12-05T17:26:00.005Z

Cuba is something of a walled garden, a state of affairs which no Mac enthusiast should carp on about too much.

Parts of this garden are well tended, pristine even. Others appear to have gone to seed.

And if you needed a handy visual emblem of this bifurcated condition, you really need look no further than the streets of Havana and the island's other major towns.

I was told that there's a local club for the owners of 'originals'...classic American vehicles with all their own bits still in the right place. Many of these vehicles were treated to Soviet-era refurbs however. My ride up to Guardalavaca from Holguín came courtesy of a 1952 American Jeep, with a Russian-made engine, a BMW steering wheel, no seatbelts and no wing mirrors.

Echando el Bullitre

2011-11-17T14:16:00.017Z

We've been torturing ourselves by watching back-to-back episodes of No Reservations for the last few days, with the occasional Andrew Zimmern outing in between.

Most recently we watched as Bourdain floated up the Amazon in search of "the last frontier of modern gastronomy" increasingly aware that the idea for this trek might well have been a bit of a practical joke conceived by Ferran Adrià and his mates. In an obvious perma-filth from pain in his lower back, he did rather pointedly encounter a cluster of wild geese at the end of this Herzogian quest. ("Canadian ducks" observed his guide.)

Bourdain had spent most of his time at Adrià's fabled three-star eatery in a fanboi daze. At the end of the meal José Andrés was red in the face and blubbering, but by then they'd consumed a number of solid state cocktails, wine, champagne and some gin and tonics, the latter surprisingly standard-looking in their preparation. The best moment of this paean to El Bulli occurred when a little plate of baby octopuses was placed in front of the intrepid chef and he announced a need to take a picture of it "so I can look at it later and touch myself".

His long overdue trip to the Philippines turned into an extended disquisition on why these islands and their gastronomic treats are not more well known on the international scene. I've never been (too complex from a cartographic point of view?) but I did try a delicious Adobo in Costa Rica last year, at San José's commendable Tin Jo. I have to say I do like the idea of these dampas that Tony visited in Manila; part market, part open-plan restaurants, where you buy the ingredients for a meal over on one side, and then watch as they are fried up in front of you on the other.

Colombian grub appears to be no great shakes meanwhile. Think of the stuff on the typical Guatemalan menu with the largest quantity of saturated fat...and add more grease. Even on the coast, where you's think you can hardly go wrong with lobster and red snapper etc., there's an awful lot of deep frying going on. That said, Bourdain did get led up to one little culinary Xanadu in the hills above Medellín called Quearepaenamorarte, where the resident chef concocted a dreamy little cornless tamal, filled with fish and shrimp embedded in a masa made from plantain, milk and coconut.

Bourdain's exploration of Cuban restaurant food was not altogether encouraging either. OK, it's not going to be like the USSR in the eighties, but some ingredients are scarce and the food culture seems to be as rigid and conservative as it (mostly) is here in Guatemala. The biggest issue is one of mood and morals however. As Bourdain put it: either you are subsidising the locals' dining via the semi-private paladares or you are gorging yourself in state-run restaurants which very few Cubans could ever afford.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention the excellent Dubai episode, which was a superb exercise in presenting the viewer with the opportunity to read between the lines.

Over the years I've had plenty of opportunities to note that there's hardly anything creepier on this planet than the wealthy, Western-educated Arab. Beyond a condescending manner, many are self-involved and seem to have some nasty atavistic switch at the back of their inner selves. But as well as unearthing some fine examples of the type, Bourdain located and dined with an even slimier individual, a British banker patsy, duly coaxed into making grotesquely amoral statements about the virtual slavery which has underpinned Dubai's growth. He only had to set him up with a few carefully couched questions and off he went. Jeremy Paxman should have a go some time.

Much of the early section was led by a more sympathetic Indian finance bod who'd clearly signed up to a rather distasteful Faustian pact, but was making the most of it. Then there was time for deliberately mixed messages about Ski Dubai. "There's an aesthetic sensibility going on here," Tony conceded (as Milton might have noted of Satan's Pandemonium in Paradise Lost), having just observed that the venture must be the most eco-hostile in a city already dishing out an on-going environmental disaster.

There was irony to prised out of another scene in which Bourdain visited the owner of a stable of racing camels who informed him somewhat pompously that 'our race' could not have survived without these animals. Bourdain, taking race in this context to mean human race, duly lectured him on the role of the international trade routes to the Italian Rennaissance, while the Arab, for whom it obviously meant 'Arab', looked on with a blank, me pela expression.

Euro party, ja!

2011-11-15T12:44:00.012Z

Angela's the kind of square, frumpy girl at college who only throws parties to appear cool as well as rich. And to rub shoulders with local lothario Silvio — a self-styled adorable reprobate who likes to think he wouldn't be seen dead with her in any other context.

Her money and connections have permitted her to hook up with a suave yet stunted other-half called Nick. He gives the impression that he's the one with both the trousers and the wallet in their relationship, but in fact he's neither. He's maxed out all his cards and he hasn't told her he had a rather worrying financial misunderstanding with the folks back home last week.

George and his mates got on the invitation list by telling a load of tall tales about how ludicrously loaded they are. Shipping and all that. Then they showed up empty handed, made a B-line for the drinks table, grabbed anything unopened, and have since been getting generally rowdy over in a corner.

Ideally they'd like to vacate somewhere else to hold their own little after party, but George's attempt to put it to a vote ended in a fracas. Now the booze has run dry, George has passed out and Angela has her beady eyes on their group from across the room.

Yes, she's on to them, and wants them to leave and never come back, but is frightened of making a scene which would kill the whole party stone dead.

And what a mess they've made. She's crying on Nick's shoulder as she takes in all the splintered furniture and the vomit on the couch. Surely they can't expect her to pay for all this?

Meanwhile, Silvio has decided that his style was being cramped and has left the building.

The remaining members of his overgroomed 'Club Med' clique are standing around in a huddle looking a bit confused. Is the party over yet? They can see why Angela has gone a bit ape about all the puke and stuff, but Silvio has been paying for most of the alcohol since Angela's party scene started...even if it did kind of fall off the back of a lorry.

2012, here we come.... (#37)

2011-11-14T14:39:00.005Z

Spotted this chart within a post on FT Alphaville this morning. The headline was "Eurozone, why did we bother?"

The English abroad No2

2011-11-13T18:42:00.002Z

Freya Stark...

"We English rely almost desperately on the breaking of rules, and it will be a poor day when we forget to do so, for this idiosyncrasy may rescue us in a deluge of the second rate. It incidentally gives us an advantage in the understanding of traditions other than our own, which more logical nations find difficult to master "

2012, here we come.... (#36)

2011-11-13T15:37:00.004Z

Later has arrived...

2012, here we come.... (#35)

2011-11-12T16:02:00.008Z

Danny Gabay and Yiannis Koutelidakis, a pair from Fathom Consulting, passed the Guardian a note this week which couched its observations on Italy's insolvency within a rather clever metaphor of literary provenance:

"Italy is more akin to a once rich and famous Count who has been using the family heirlooms for firewood for years now and is facing some pretty cold winters ahead."

And, rather like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa back in the day, this count has been shivering away in his ancestral pad for many years now. For monetary union did no favours to the Eurozone's third largest economy, which was growing at a slow pace of 1% even in the 'boom' years before the 2008 crisis, and suffered a 5% plunge after it, comparatively more severe than the slide elsewhere in the EU. And relative to the Germans, the Italians have experienced a greater loss of competitiveness than the Greeks since joining the €.

Daniel Gros (Director of the Centre for European Policy Studies), has analysed all the factors that normally foster an increase in economic activity and has found that in all but one case, these have improved in Italy since it adopted the euro. The odd one out? Governance.

If political failure can so easily trump the potential for economic success, it is the very collection of individuals today voting for the new austerity package who pose the greatest threat to the future of European integration. For with a debt to GDP ratio of 120%, an Italy which doesn't grow at faster rate than 1% over the next few years represents a permanent systemic threat.

2012, here we come.... (#34)

2011-11-12T15:04:00.007Z

In much the same way that the stench of corruption and a trail of floozies couldn't bring down Silvio Berlusconi, but the collective agitation of the bond market could, the spectre of international terrorism turns out to be a less effective tool for dismantling democracy than that of major financial disorder.

That the plutocrats fear poverty as much as death (and certainly more than the deaths of their fellow citizens somewhere lower down the scale) is something that eventually occurred to the IRA in the latter stages of their campaign when they switched from targeting random civilians and the occasional politician, to attempting to raze large parts of London's financial districts to the ground.

So we can slot financial crisis somewhere in between nuclear meltdown and army of suicide bombers on the scale of international fear catalysts. And we can see from the repeated use of the word 'contagion' over the past few months that this particular panic considers itself almost equivalent in overall scariness to a global pandemic of the biological sort.

We can also understand why those in a position to define public information have been so keen on the notion of the dirty bomb, which combines the unmatchable horror of seeping radioactivity with the similarly unseen threat of the enemy within. Then all one has to do is suggest that Wall Street would be high on the list of potential targets for such a device...

2012, here we come.... (#33)

2011-11-10T17:58:00.007Z

Watching Greece change its PM has become a spectacle akin to watching Yahoo! appointing a new CEO...something that won't have gone unnoticed amongst those who still consider themselves the Greek electorate.

Yesterday, while the Greek political elite struggled to find a functionary who was dull and compromised enough to suit all their interests, Italian bond yields poked their noses above 7.5%, perilously close to that all important 8%, goodbye Italy and goodbye Eurozone as we know it, cut-off point. The financial talking heads all say that what the markets want right now is certainty, but what yesterday's stampede for the exits demonstrates is that they don't really want to face up to the certainty that Europe is about to go down the plughole.

Anyway, things appear to have settled a bit today. Italy's 10-year bond yields dipped below 7% again and Spain's are not that far behind at 5.75%. As we can see from the chart below, it's difficult to see how a default in Spain would not be triggered by a worsening of the crisis in Greece and Italy. The latter nation owes €1.4 trillion, so the sucker is basically unbailoutable, however generous/stupid the Chinese happen to be feeling at the time.

For those who comfort themselves that the problem will go away once the northern members of the Eurozone have divested themselves of all those Club Med deadbeats, take a look at French 10-year bond yields today: 3.45% and rising. Merkozy may be joined at the hip, but the gap between the cost of state borrowing in France and Germany hasn't been this wide since '92 and it seems almost certain now that France will struggle to keep its own AAA rating, the loss of which will trigger another selling spree.

Cuba Travel Diary - Anticipations (2)

2011-11-10T12:42:00.010Z

There's nothing under heaven so blue,

That's fairly worth the traveling to.

(Robert Louis Stevenson)

Dr Johnson famously said of the Giant Causeway, that while it was worth seeing, it probably wasn't worth going to see. I think that in the end I felt something similar about Machu Picchu and my journey to it. Stevenson had also observed that tourism is the art of disappointment, and while there was nothing the least bit disappointing about my experience of being in Machu Picchu, it's hard not to reflect back on the getting there as a trail of not quite satifying experiences.

I suppose this may be because I undertook that journey in August at the rather late-in-the-day suggestion of V, who had suddenly blurted out that I ought to go and see Machu Picchu. Thus, the going to Peru and the being in Peru presented themselves as collateral concerns.

The biggest psychological hurdle turned out to be my arrival and departure point; Lima.

Since the last cholera epidemic it has acquired something of a reputation as a trendy gastronomic destination, but no amount of yummy food can compensate for the relentlessly doom-laden aspect of the Peruvian capital.

It's a desert city perched on a bluff above the kind of sea that makes you want to make a B-line for the high ground. And when I say desert, I don't mean some eye-catching variation on aridity, the likes of which one comes across in parts of Central Mexico. Here the outlying terrain looks like the rest of the planet will when we've finally finished murdering it.

As for the cloying coastal fog — la garúa — it prompted Melville to describe Lima as "the saddest, strangest city thou can'st see" and native writers such as Vargas Llosa and others have since described the prevailing ambience as leaden, ashen, cold and tenacious, "a floating powder" (Salazar Bondy) and like being inside "the belly of a dead whale" (Alfredo Bryce Echenique).

Why are Central America's problem-laden capitals less dismaying? I think it's because they're in the tropics. There's hardly a grisly indoor domestic space in the world which cannot be improved by the judicious deployment of a pot plant or two, and so it is with our own concrete jungles here: that they often seem on the verge of being reclaimed by the real thing can only really be totted up on the merit side.

It's fitting that the most diverting site I came across in Lima was the Convento de San Francico (pic below) with its underground bone dump. These catacombs became the final resting ground for 25,000 Limeños up until 1851, when the practice of mass burials beneath major churches was deemed insalubrious. Upstairs, the former monastery's library, with its 25,000 crumbly tomes, would make the perfect setting for a thought piece on the death of the book.

Cuzco was lovely, but I was out of breath even in my sleep.

Arequipa was also pleasant enough, but not as deeply interesting as nearer equivalents such as Oaxaca. With its three looming volcanoes it presented itself as an odd amalgam of places already digested, Antigua itself, Mexico's various 'colonial gems' and even Tapachula. It wasn't until the third day that it started to reveal its underlying selfhood, and by then I'd seen nearly all I wanted to see and could think of little else to do other than sit around and drink coffee.

Across this land, the juxtaposition of the strikingly familiar and the strikingly strange was always to be a tad disconcerting.

For the trip to Havana I shall be back on COPA — in part because I would rather collect their miles than TACA's, and in part because the cheapness and shortness of the flight from Cancún was offset by the cost and hassle of getting up there. I also had no desire to reacquaint myself with Soviet-built airliners.

Still, Guatemala to La Habana via Panama City is hardly the most carbon-conscious route. I was tempted to take advantage once again of COPA's ongoing invitation to its passengers to indulge in a night or two in the Panamanian capital at no extra charge, but decided against it as I want to get stuck in to Cuba as quickly as possible.

I wonder what kind of fellow travellers I will encounter there. Well, as I will be sauntering towards to my nephew's wedding on the beach at Guardalavaca ('Keep the Cow') at some point I'm going to have to scrub up for an encounter with a chunk of my own family.

One supposes that, across the island, there will be fewer Yanks, more Canucks, and, horror of horrors, a load of Brits. They were thick on the ground in Peru too, where one comes across more of the socks and sandals sort of traveller than one does here in Guatemala. But it was August, so the Frogs outnumbered them all.

One of the real downsides to being a tourist in Peru is that the relevant authorities seem to want to make it the most regimented experience possible. When I came across a museum in Cuzco where photography was actually permitted and I didn't have to spend fifteen minutes talking myself out of the company of a fetching female student guide, I was frankly flaberghasted. I very much doubt whether the average sightseer has to jump through quite so many hoops in communist Cuba as one does in Peru.

Perhaps the aforementioned French tour parties have to share some of the blame on the demand side. For Peru seems to attract a lot of visitors who are not what you would tend to regard as natural travellers (or even tourists for that matter.) Specifically middle-aged French couples who one suspects have rarely partaken of a vacance outside their own borders, and seem to be on the verge of some sort of unseemly outburst at any given moment. They certainly seem to look as if they might need regimenting, and may even crave it.

2012, here we come.... (#32)

2011-11-09T20:52:00.006Z

With the PMs of both Greece and Italy circling the drain, and both nations attempting to demonstrate that their preferred response to outside interference would be the no government approach, it wasn't going to be long before the financial markets wised up to the fact that this was not a particularly positive news story.

On a separate note, us gibberish speakers in Latino-land are all Greeks. For Gringo apparently derives from Griego, the favourite term of abuse in eighteenth century Málaga for anyone who spoke Spanish badly. (In Madrid this agravio was reserved for the Irish.)

The English abroad No1

2011-11-09T20:28:00.006Z

We export two chief kinds of Englishmen, who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of the native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit: To fit themselves modestly into the picture and suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native as far as possible, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge people among whom they live into strange unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again.

The other class of Englishmen is the larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against their foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their impassivity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the people among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an example of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.

T.E. Lawrence, introduction to Doughty's Arabia Deserta.

2012, here we come.... (#31)

2011-11-09T15:18:00.011Z

...But probably too late.

Anyone who saw The Walking Dead this week will know what V was on about when she compared the situation of the zombie in the well to the crisis embedded in the Eurozone.

She reckons that any attempt to extricate said zombie now will have results similar to the one we witnessed on Sunday's show...

(It does look a bit like Silvio Berlusconi as well...)

2012, here we come.... (#30)

2011-11-09T15:04:00.006Z

Il faut changer les traités...it was true last year, and it's even truer now...

(Thanks to Frode for the video link.)

2012, here we come.... (#29)

2011-11-08T15:43:00.005Z

Misha Glenny, an acknowledged expert on Russia's 'crime of the century', when state assets were sold off at ganga prices to salivating, semi-criminal, would-be oligarchs, now believes the same thing is about to happen in Greece.

Writing in the FT about the moves made by Greece's high-earning, tax-evading, super-rich, he notes the surge in Greek interest this year in London's property market, and adds that these groups have an even bigger eye on the assets that the government may soon be forced to sell off...

"The oligarch conglomerates are waiting to scoop them up at anything up to less than a fifth of their real value – a poor financial return for the state but in 5-10 years time a bonanza for the purchasers. Some have been even banking on Greece exiting the euro so that they can then use the billions of euros squirrelled away outside the country to purchase the assets for knock-down drachma prices... If the crises in Greece and Italy tell us anything, it is that the European Union has tolerated widespread corruption, criminality and malign governance not just in supplicants from eastern Europe but in some of its core western European members....If anything is to come from the catastrophe facing Europe it is essential these patterns of corruption are broken. Otherwise neither Greece nor Italy will ever be free of the institutional sclerosis that allows these practices to prosper."

The year so far in movies

2011-11-07T09:18:00.002Z

Aware that I have had neither the time nor the inclination to review on this blog all the movies we've watched this year, here's how the scoring has gone at least, up to November 5. October was a good month. This one has started off less encouragingly...

Can't decide whether to risk sending this month's average to dangerously low levels by watching Miranda July's The Future. Will I want to chew my own nuts off or will I be charmed by the ickle kitty?

JANUARY

El Infierno (Mexico, 2010) A-

True Grit (2010) A-

Crank: High Voltage (2009) C++

Black Swan (2010) A (-)

127 Hours (2010) A--

The King's Speech (UK, 2010) A--

The Kids Are All Right (2010) A-

FEBRUARY

Due Date (2010) B

Winter's Bone (2010) A (-)

The Weather Man (2005) B (+)

Tamara Drewe (UK, 2010) B (+)

The Resident (2011) B--

A Serious Man (2010) A (-)

Never Let Me Go (UK, 2010) A-

Borderland (2007) B (-)

Crank (2006) B (-)

The Bank Job (2008) B+

The Illusionist (France, 2010) A (-)

The Mechanic (2011) B

The American (2010) B (+)

Despicable Me (2010) B++

MARCH

Tron Legacy (2010) B (+)

Little Big Soldier (China, 2010) B+

Season of The Witch (2010) C+

Hereafter (2010) B (+)

La Nana (Chile, 2009) A-

Presunto Culpable (Mexico, 2008) A-

Norwegian Wood (Japan, 2011) B

The Wolfman (2010) B

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (2010) C

Megamind (2010) B+

APRIL

Battle Los Angeles (2011) B-

Restrepo (2010) B (+)

The Town (2010) B (+)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (France/Germany, 2010) B+

MAY

13 Assassins (Japan, 2010) A--

Animal Kingdom (Australia, 2010) B++

United (UK, 2011) B+

Surrogates (2009) B

Limitless (2011) B+

Matando Cabos (Mexico, 2004) B (+)

Los Ojos de Julia (Spain, 2010) B (+)

JUNE

The Dark Knight (2008) A-

Unknown (2011) B+

Hanna (2011) C+

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) B+

Sucker Punch (2011) B

Biutiful (Mexico/Spain 2010) A--

Sunshine (UK/USA, 2007) A--

Paul (2011) B+

Match Point (UK, 2005) B+

JULY

Source Code (2011) A-

Chico & Rita (Spain, 2010) A--

Trust (2010) B (+)

Au Bout Portant (France, 2010) B++

My Kidnapper (2010) B -

Countdown To Zero (2010) A-

Legend Of The Fist (China, 2010) B (+)

Let The Shrink In (2001) C

AUGUST

Bad Teacher (2011) B

Brighton Rock (UK, 1947) A--

Brighton Rock (UK, 2010) B (+)

Fast Five (2011) B+

Fast and Furious 4 (2009) B

Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides (2011) B

SEPTEMBER

Bridesmaids (2011) C

Thor (2011) B+

The Guard (Eire, 2011) A-

Friends With Benefits (2011) C

Triangle (Australia 2009) A--

Confessions/Kokuhaku (2010) A-

Aqui Me Quedo (Guatemala, 2010) C--

Horrible Bosses (2011) B (+)

Trollhunter (Norway, 2011) B+

Drive (2011) A-

Blitz (2011) B+

Confessions/Kokuhaku (Japan, 2010) A--

OCTOBER

Pour Elle (France, 2008) B++

Attack The Block (UK, 2011) B++

The Borrower Arrietty (Japan, 2010) A-

Colombiana (France, 2011) B

Midnight in Paris (2011) A (-)

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (2011) B+

The Yellow Sea (South Korea, 2010) A-

I Saw The Devil (South Korea, 2010) B (+)

The Housemaid/Hanyo (South Korea, 2010) A--

Retreat (UK, 2011) A--

Bedevilled (South Korea, 2010) A-

Scream 4 (2010) B++

Rio (2011) A--

Villain (Japan, 2011) B++

NOVEMBER

Kamikaze Girls (Japan, 2004) B

Perras (Mexico, 2011) B (+)

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) B (-)

Sleeping Beauty (Australia, 2011) C

Cuba Travel Diary - Preparations (1)

2011-11-06T22:49:00.010Z

It seems that the train journey I had planned to take from Havana to Santa Clara is not to be. It was one of only two reasons I could muster for making the journey, the other being a visit to the mausoleum of el comandante, but it seems that El Che doesn't open for business on Mondays.

My itineraries are usually distinguished by their flexibility, but over in Cuba they like to see a firm committment to location for at least the first three days and so, after booking my flight and making reservations for the three evenings that I plan to spend in the capital, Monday it was really going to have to be unless I was prepared to sacrifice one of my stops en route to the east of the island.

Sadly the evening rattler to Santa Clara is said to be the only reliable train service these days in Cuba, a society which once proudly boasted the first railway system in all of Latin America. It will have to wait for another day, and I will have to depend on the buses of Viazul to get around.

If any of the train journeys I made between Reading and London Paddington last April were at all memorable, I'm sure I'd remember at least one of them. I do however recall having to traverse the Thames valley that way four times in forty-eight hours around the time of the Royal Wedding.

So this year's only unforgetable ride on the rails was the return leg from Machu Picchu (Aguas Calientes) to Ollantaytambo on IncaRail. On the way out I'd been packed in knee-to-knee with the French tourists, but on the return leg the only seat avaialble was in First Class, where I was to share a delightfully robed table with a well-to-do Peruvian mother and her somewhat high-maintenance, coppertopped ten-year-old. The meal was served in little ceramic pots: there was a tomato confit and quinoa salad, queso paria, a veggie lasagne, and sacred valley fruit infused with mint for dessert. The wine was local, a Tacama Gran Tinto from the oasis of Ica (south of Lima), and appeared first in a steaming mulled form — one might say the last hike of the day, and very welcome as the cold closes in at 3300m.

First Great Western commuter services aside, I can readily agree with Paul Theroux's notion that, alone of all forms of transportation, a train is just as much a place as a vehicle. Of course the most famous train in Santa Clara is indeed now a place (of pilgrimage), as it was famously derailed by el Che himself at the wheel of a bulldozer as it attempted to deliver government reinforcements to the critical final battle raging in that city. (Viz Stephen Soderbergh's Che Part 1)

Sleeping Beauty (2011)

2011-11-06T16:25:00.017Z

If I hadn't sat through 2/3 of Aqui Me Quedo, I would have no hesitation in describing Sleeping Beauty as the worst movie I've seen so far this year. And relative to budget and intellectual aspirations it almost certainly is.

Before I really get stuck in however, let's just cast our minds back to the source material such as House of The Sleeping Beauties by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata. From a nation that has staked a realistic claim to being the mecca of all things outrageously pervy, there's perhaps a surprisingly elegaic subtlety to his esoteric tale of lost potency. It has twice inspired Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez to explore similar scenarios, most notably in his last novel Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes, but also in the short story in which he locates himself next to a beautiful sleeping girl on a long haul flight. (The debt to Kawabata is directly acknowledged when Gabo remarks that House of Sleeping Beauties is his chosen reading material for the journey.)

Non-Nobel Prize winning author and first time film director Julia Leigh obviously thought it would be illuminating to view this conceit from the sleeper's perspective. Its origins are acknowledged obliquely via a load of bonsai trees in the background and other Japanese interior touches, yet it is movies like Kubrick's last masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut and the guilty pleasure that is Hostel, that more openly spring to mind as influences.

The result is some sort of boorish Australian pastiche of European art house cinema from the mid part of the last century. Leigh appears to have scripted her characters so that they act just short of what we would expect of human beings made of flesh and blood. All the excrutiating underlying emotional currents present in the novella have been purged, because for this director the concept and its ramifications are far more important than the individuals encapsulated by it. During the scene in which one of the old geezers delivers a po-faced monologue about a short story by Julio Cortázar before climbing into bed with 'Sara', the fourth wall broke down, and so did we, into fits of hysterics. Who needs soporific drugs when you have these guys around?

Now Eyes Wide Shut also divided critics, attracted accusation of art porn, and is not without its flaws (most notably Kidman and Cruise). But other than the changes in time and location, Kubrick was far more faithful to Schnitzler's vision than he was to say Stephen King's in The Shining. Might one suggest that this was because Kubrick knew himself to be a superior artist to King, but perhaps not to Schnitzler?

Anyway, my own view on this matter would be that whilst it is perfectly OK to add flesh-eating zombies to Jane Austen classics, it would not be a recommended career move for any budding female author to re-write the works of Hemingway as a critique of masculine power relations. In short, if there's any chance that an author might have been better than you are, resist the temptation to steal his or her basic idea and rejig it to suit your own concerns.

There's really nothing more unedifying to behold in art than mediocrity affecting a painstaking pose of profundity.

GRADE: C

2012, here we come.... (#28)

2011-11-06T15:00:00.007Z

Let's pause to calibrate our sense of doom and gloom by checking out some of the latest thinking from the pessimist platoon's point man. It seems that Dr Death likes to invite people back to his pad for wine, canapés and talk of creeping cataclysm.

It's a funny old thing this 'slow motion train wreck'. It looks a bit more to me like a set of nested train wrecks all playing out at slightly different frame rates. Indeed, some of them are periodically on freeze frame, almost tempting one to imagine that they might stay that way for long enough for most of the passengers to exit unharmed, or somehow even snap into reverse.

Greek politics seem resistant to all efforts at containment. If the Greeks themselves should have been offered the chance to vote on their own rescue package, then there are surely quite a few non-Greeks who probably feel they should have had in on the Papandreou confidence vote. The Greek PM managed to survive that process, albeit with a large knife in the back courtesy of his Finance Minister, but his plan of forming a coalition government of 'national unity' looks unpromising this weekend, given the continuing absence of the main opposition party.

Yet perhaps the more intriguing train wreck right now is Italy. The Euro denominated BTP/bund spread separating Italy from Germany is at a record high. The Italian Central Bank claims that Italy is solvent so long as it doesn't have to pay more than 8%. We're at 6.6% and counting. Last week, at a joint press conference, when Merkozy was asked if Berlusconi had been able to reassure them, they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

Meanwhile, the Italian PM has been bragging that Italy turned down the option of a low interest loan from the IMF.

Perras (2011)

2011-11-04T14:23:00.010Z

Given the way Perras had been shamelessly plugged across the more shameless comedy shows on Telehit, we had both been expecting this festival reject to be both amateurish and trashy, but it turned out to be a more substantial work than either of us had anticipated. (We might have guessed this had we then known that it began life as a work for the stage scripted by debut director Guillermo Ríos.)

Now, I've recently had cause to re-flag my insight that Mexico and Japan share an occasionally creepy pop cultural fixation with adolescent schoolgirls and the similarities and cross-currents are very much to the fore again here. It's frankly hard not to smirk at the underlying intentions of an film which wishes to document the over-sexualising of teenagers whilst seeking to titilate its audience with the very same phenomenon.

Yet in truth, these kind of fourteen-year-olds do exist in some quantity down here south of the border. Part of the power of this film to disturb was the frisson of recognition. Ríos has more on his mind than prematurely misplaced innocence however, as the core scenario sees the ten girls of his ensemble cast locked away in detention, uncertain of which of their number has done the unnamed terrible thing to cause this punishment. As the collective polemic ensues, Ríos flashes us back to prior events in school, and several of the girls recount a more personal story which touch on some of Mexico's more familiar endemic difficulties.

It's a scenario that is perhaps more theatrical than cinematic, though the best of these outgrowths is a delightful animation (another borrowed Asian technique) in which a grandmother is forced to share her home with the family of her hijo patán. Ríos also goes to town a bit with a car crash sequence. The trouble is that on many levels (character, narrative etc.) the whole rather inevitably ends up being less than the sum of its parts. And yet this very unevenness is one of the factors which contributes in the end to maintaining the disguise of the terrible event and the identity of its protagonist.

Over the years I've come to realise that one can almost immediately tell if a movie about Latin America's problems has been made by outsiders or insiders. Sin Nombre and Maria Full of Grace for example, could only have been made by non-indigenous eyes looking in. This kind of ennobled, bleeding heart take on the issues is rarely found in the region's native cinema. Perras is symptomatic of the irreverent local-eye approach we've seen over the years in movies like Matando Cabos, though it lacks the satirical bite of funny yet moving works such as La Nana, Y Tu Mamá Tambien and even El Infierno.

GRADE: B (+)

The 70 That Matter

2011-11-03T14:01:00.008Z

Yes he's back: El Chapo is at No55 on Forbes magazine's list of The 70 That Matter.

As ever it's an idiosyncratic, Yankocentric chart. Guzmán Loera comes in seven places ahead of Japan's new PM Yoshihiko Noda. Indeed, Japan's leader is now deemed considerably less weighty in today's world than Brazil's.

Meanwhile, the ECB's 'Super Mario' Draghi matters (just) a bit more than Nicholas Sarkozy, while the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon matters a lot less (at 38) than several US corportate CEOs, though, surprisingly enough, Carlos Slim ("& family") outrank Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who clearly lacks significant relatives. Berlusconi's in, Zapatero isn't. No room either for Papandreou, who matters quite a lot right now and may still do so tomorrow.

And what's with the President of the International Fencing Assocation Alisher Usmanov, at 70?

2012, here we come.... (#27)

2011-11-03T12:57:00.005Z

Does anyone really think that Merkel and Sarko had no idea Papandreou would go rogue (i.e. to the people) after the Brussels get-together last week?

And why is it so surprising, that the nation which invented democracy should think it appropriate that some sort of popular consultation could take place before surrendering much of its sovereign control over its economic fate for the next several years.

Papadreou's gamble does now appear to have backfired, but one can understand the original motivation: transform a Hobson's choice cobbled together by foreign technocrats into something at least resembling a local political Catch-22.

For the Greeks, who might be forgiven for caring less about what now happens to the wider world economy, there's an extended period of economic pain ahead. In the short term at least, the pain would probably be greater if they were permitted the option of disorderly default and a return to the Drachma.

Papandreou may have hoped that his government could play upon popular terror of that greater pain, turning the plebiscite into something of a formality, and covering the collective backsides of Greece's political elite with a democratic mandate for the barber-shop approach to bond-holders.

Or, maybe he wanted to leave the door open for the full meltdown 'solution', which would at least leave the Greeks in charge of their own destiny once again — first in the queue as far as the euro exit sequence goes, and perhaps not that much worse off than everyone else once the impact of this decision has run its course.

2012, here we come.... (#26)

2011-10-31T14:43:00.005Z

Most people are able to go about their lives without even the sketchiest understanding of quantum physics. To lack even an intuitive comprehension of classical Newtonian physics is a far more dangerous disposition however.

Until recently something very comparable applied to the world of economics. Most people could get on with their daily lives as producers and consumers of goods and services and not really have to give much thought to the weird underlying reality constructed out of semi-comprehensible securities, credit default swaps, CDOs, quantitative easing etc. etc.

Yet rather like a scientist who wakes up one morning with the premonition that the quantum world is the primary one and that everything else we perceive around us mere epiphenomena, I had a similar awakening myself with regards to the structure of 'late stage capitalism' around the middle of the last decade.

Surrounded by marketing people who thought of their own role in life as the most creative and fascinating part of the whole supply chain, I started to pity them for the bottom-feeders that they now appeared to me to be. For suddenly nothing was as it had always seemed: economics, politics and society in general was revealed as inexorably emerging from the hidden reality of high finance. And then in 2008 it stopped being quite so hidden.

There can hardly be a citizen in a major western democracy who is not now aware now how their world really works. Millions have been deprived of the illusion of usefulness (and not just PR and marketing people!). Can anyone deny that over the course of the last three years our leaders have made all other social and political goals subsidiary to that of maintaining the solvency of our banks? And however much we moan about this, if they hadn't, we'd have a lot more to moan about.

This is why the US markets responded so positively to news of the latest Eurozone fudge at the end of last week. This new plan is likely to accelerate the pending recession across the old world but, lets be clear, America doesn't care. These Frogs and Krouts are competitors after all. The current American administration cares about two things only. Postponing any day of reckoning beyond the 2012 Presidential election, and preventing a 'credit event' with global economic consequences. If the Europeans can find a way to sink themselves without affecting everyone else, so much the better...

2012, here we come.... (#25)

2011-10-30T19:10:00.004Z

Remember how I told you how I was done with this little series of posts?

...I lied.

2012, here we come.... (#24)

2011-10-29T14:04:00.003Z

Tom Meltzer explains the European bailout 'plan' with the help of his animated friends. Hilarious.

2012, here we come.... (#23)

2011-10-27T18:03:00.007Z

Given that the can has now been kicked further down the road than I can be bothered to gaze, (right into the kind of distant mirage one habitually witnesses when traversing Florida's 'Aligator Alley'), I shall signal a break from this series of posts, by quoting the last sentence of Michael Lewis's Boomerang:

"As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off."

420 days, 16 hours and 53 minutes to Bak'tun 13.

Bedevilled (2010)

2011-10-27T16:28:00.008Z

Town mouse visits country mouse, whereby both discover just how deeply messed up they are, setting off a chain of events involving sado-masochistic cruelty that's pretty full-on even for a South Korean revenge flick.

The delightful bleakness of this film results from its insistence that while the provinces are full of violent, petty-mined retards, the metropolis breeds soulless egotistical misanthropes. As this is not an environment in which redemptive arcs can take place, there are only one or two brief glimmers of real kindness: in the person of a boatman and a bank employee, as well as the more problematic case of a puta, whose fate on the island was one many questions we were left with.

In western stories, even when good doesn't precisely triumph over evil, some sort of stasis triumphs over chaos, but in most Korean movies of this sort, normality rarely achieves ascendency at any stage in the narrative. Chaos reigns. Revenge is usually the only thread that runs through from beginning to end, and it habitually presents a disturbingly amoral spectacle. One is never quite certain where the chain of events is heading, plot and character become detached along the way, then recombine in new forms, and the endings, are typically announced (if indeed announced at all) with a zap of very black humour.

In this particular instance we were left with a sense that the overall experience had been thoroughly satisfying, even though the story had once again failed to resolve in any of the familiar ways.

"Put bean paste on it". I will remember that one!

GRADE: A-

2012, here we come.... (#23)

2011-10-27T14:57:00.007Z

Knowing that the Germans wanted to treat the Greeks to a number one haircut and that the French preferred to see them sporting a fashion-friendly number three, I could have told you a week ago that they would settle on a number two.

As soon as this compromise had been announced, and the banks and other bond holders were facing up to a 50% 'voluntary'* decapitalisation of their Greek paper, Klaus Regling, boss of the European Finances Seriously Fucked fund (EFSF) was off to the airport in order to board a plane to Asia in the hope of spreading the contagion as fast and as far as possible. I hear that in Asia people wear surgical masks conscientiously in order to indicate to passers-by that they could be infectious. Somehow I doubt that Herr Regling was wearing one of these.

Back in the days before the Lehman Brothers collapse the very last people to buy subprime-backed bonds were nearly all Germans. Now the Germans themseles have to hope that there are fresh territories full of even more ingenuous financial patsies out there in Russia, China, Brazil etc.

However this ends up being funded, the impact on EU financial institutions and the flow of credit will be marked. The markets might have been relieved by the noises coming out of Brussels last night, but those pesky economists have been rather less impressed. Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics for example, predicts a double digit drop in Eurozone GDP across the funding period:

“Seen from the funding side, the euro package will divert €1,300bn worth of savings from private sector investment and spending. That must mean a reduction of Euroland’s €9400bn GDP by €1300bn, or 13.8 per cent over the period in which it is financed."

* Up in the land of licentious litigation there will be people taking legal counsel about their credit default swaps today.

2012, here we come.... (#22)

2011-10-27T14:22:00.004Z

"I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is a marathon not a sprint." (Nicolas Sarkozy, last night)

Didn't Pheidippides keel over and die at the end? Beware of Greeks bearing metaphors.

2012, here we come.... (#21)

2011-10-26T16:23:00.009Z

There's a new movie out in UK cinemas right now, Stephen Sodebergh's Contagion, the subject matter of which is a biological rather than a financial pandemic. I was however interested to hear the director's stated opinion that when the time comes, when thousands if not millions of lives are threatened by some nasty little microbe, we, humanity, will inevitably find a solution.

Broadly the same idea was worked into the teleplay for this week's The Walking Dead (again, not in fact a documentary about a sizeable portion of the world's developed economies) in which a character referred to the zombie apocalypse in rural Georgia as just another one of those blips in human progress which we seem to be able to muddle through.

And this set me thinking how we do seem to have this underlying apprehension that all major problems have some sort of solution...as long as we put our thinking caps on and kind of douse them in our collective output of opinion. Yet the euro crisis has all the makings of a properly intractable difficulty.

A last word on the sort of cultural change which might save the day; not, I'm afraid to say, a particularly optimistic word. In Boomerang, Lewis identifies the current euphemism used to describe the kind of miraculous transformation which would make Greek people more like German people: structural reform.

He goes on to point out sagely that this kind of personality about-face can rarely happen quickly enough to be relevant to what actually transpires. I would add that most forms of significant cultural change are organic, which means that individual-level mirror-gazing, combined with promises to be less selfish, myopic, reckless etc. are ultimately akin to attempts to reseed a rainforest by systematically planting individual trees.

2012, here we come.... (#20)

2011-10-24T18:04:00.025Z

"If there were any justice in the world the Greek bankers would be in the street marching to protest the morals of the ordinary Greek citizen." (Michael Lewis)

I've read up enough on the Greeks recently to have to resist the urge to get on the next plane to Athens and start chucking those petrol bombs back at them. And I'm not especially well disposed either to those masked Italian protestors brandishing 'We are the 99%' banners.

Lewis's book amply demonstrates the human need to pin the blame. His visits to countries affected by the current crisis, which he likens to financial disaster tourism, also show us that — depending not just on our political biases, but also on our national cultural backgrounds — we tend to look in different directions for our scapegoats. Only the Irish seem to have been collectively flummoxed by the question of who is actually to blame. For everyone else it is really simple: investment bankers, dodgy politicians, the 1%...not me. (Been thinking of getting myself one of these t-shirts.)

In truth cheap money brought out the worst in everyone, and what we have witnessed is perhaps the greatest flowering of human folly in the modern era. And to my mind a good deal of the populist protest sentiment, whether Tea Partyist or OWS, is just another expression of this absurdity, though one can appreciate the levels of frustration that seem rise in parallel with our collective improvidence.

Technological change has surely played a major part in all this, because it is that much easier to be immoral (or at least recklessly irresponsible) when you are sitting behind a computer screen. But lets not blame our tools eh?

Greece has had what Lewis describes as a societal level moral collapse, and when that happens there really are no political solutions, only cultural ones. And these are of course incredibly hard to introduce as piecemeal policy measures.

Of course Greece is only an extreme case of what has happened on a far more international level. Guatemala may not have been exactly flooded with cheap credit over the past decade or so, but it's hard not to examine the state of its political and social affairs without considering the wider context of a global ethical malaise. It's enough to make one turn to religion. Well, not quite.

Anyway, I'm not really buying the argument of Marshall Auerback (The Myth of Greek Profligacy, Counterpunch) that all attempts to paint the Greeks as deadbeats are "nonsensical propaganda, designing to justify the continued collective execution being inflicted on Athens for the sins of its father and grandfathers. As if Greece is the only country ever to cook its books in the European Union!"

Of course European monetary union has always implied a degree of book-cooking. But just to gain entry to the single currency Greece had to commit grand fraud — pretending that their budget deficit was 3% when it was in fact 15% — a situation which was only fully revealed once the IMF had had a chance to de-manipulate all the numbers and uncover some of the expenses which had been simply shifted out of the accounts to prepare the way for euro membership.

As with much of the sub-prime lending that went on prior to 2008, it must have been obvious to quite a few people (who should now feel thoroughly ashamed of themselves) that Athens was utterly crooked and therefore a very bad bet.

And some of the usual suspects from across the pond quickly became involved to make things even worse: Goldman Sachs reportedly took $300m in fees for fixing up some suspect loans which helped the Greek government to disguise its real level of indebtedness. The Wall Street men also taught the Greeks how to securitise future income streams from things like the lottery and motorway tolls, so they could spend cash up front from revenues yet to be received. As individual blame connected with collective blame, local blame duly connected with global blame.

2012, here we come.... (#19)

2011-10-23T13:45:00.011Z

At 12m, the population of Greece is roughly equivalent to that of Guatemala, though the Greek economy is around four times as large. This hasn't stopped the denizens of that Mediterranean land from running their taxation system along Third World lines.

While researching Boomerang in Athens, Michael Lewis had a coffee with a disgraced, formerly whistle-blowing tax inspector who made a point of pointing out how the waitress in the smart hotel cafe in which their interview was being conducted, had singularly failed to supply the author with a receipt.

Sales tax avoidance is of course rife here in Guatemala, though the standard method is a little less flagrant; one could even say a little more sophisticated. For many of the retailers in this town (big international operators like McDonalds included) provide customers with receipts which appear to have been printed using ink which fades to illegibility within a day or so of the purchase.

In Greece as in Guatemala, sales tax is only so important because only a minority are in a position where income tax is much of a bother to them. (Usually only salaried employees). Lewis explains how Greece has the largest number of 'self-employed' workers in the Eurozone, most of whom, including surgeons earning millions of euros have no problem reporting their annual income as €12,000 thereby entitling themselves to the 0% tax rate. In fact two thirds of Greek doctors pay no income tax at all, though presumably they have to expectorate the odd bribe or two.

There are laws against tax avoidance in Greece, but enforcing them would apparently mean imprisoning almost every single doctor in the country. And quite possibly each and every member of the 300-strong Greek parliament as well, because it has been revealed that not a single one of them is being taxed on the real value of their properties. And we Brits were indignant when our MPs started building duck ponds off the back of their Parliamentary expenses!

The similarities with Guatemala reemerge when Greece's system for taxation based on real estate values are considered, though the Greeks also lack a proper national land registry. Properties have a computer-generated 'objective' value and as prices have risen these have tended to stay static. The difference is usually paid in cash, with only the formula-driven value reported to the revenue collectors.

Here in Panorama, real estate values have increased quite dramatically over the past thirty years since our colonia was founded. Many of the original residents would have a real problem paying the annual impuesto de inmueble based on any kind of 'real' valuation, and so a variety of techniques exist for keeping the burden both manageable and, you might say, equitable.

Firstly, any legal documents relating to sales or transfers attempt to preserve the valuation dating back to the 80s. Lots with houses on them are often reported as baldíos for tax purposes. Inheritances can be handled as sales within the family whereby the children are sold plots (often by pre-deceased parents) at bargain prices, which are then solidified in the associated paperwork. And in general Guatemalan citizens like to hold their central and local governments to ransom by not offering up their accumulated tax debts until the last possible moment, in the hope of extracting some sort of special offer — such as pay up now and we'll offer you a moratorium on the mora (fine), you can pay by installments etc.

As a consequence of all this the Guatemalan government collects revenues equivalent to just 11% of GDP. Even the Greeks can manage three times that at 33%, but given the fact that their economy is four times as large, one has to assume they have more people in a position to contribute if the inclination somehow grabbed them.

Michael Lewis however concludes that the evasion of taxes is likely to remain endemic in Greece, in part because it's hard to enforce a prohibition against such a widespread abuse, and in part because any cases that do make it to court, take an average of fifteen years to prosecute. As the tax collector reported to him...

"The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It's a cavalier offence — like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady."

2012, here we come.... (#18)

2011-10-22T19:43:00.011Z

In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks — Michael Lewis, Boomerang.

Greece's bankers were amongst the most conservative in the Eurozone during the last decade. They somehow neglected to award themselves huge sums of money and stayed well away from the American subprime scene. (In fact the worst bet they made was on their own government.)

Instead you could say that the people earning whopping, unjustifiable bonuses over there can mostly be found working for the state: the average public sector worker in fact earns three times as much as the average private sector one, and has seen his or her pay double in real terms over the past 12 years — bribes not included, as Lewis helpfully points out.

The state-owned railway company has to offset a wage bill of €400m and other outgoings totalling €300m against its annual revenues of €100m. Meanwhile its average employee earns €65,000 a year and expects to retire at 55.

So it's not just the lenders who are going to need to take a 'haircut' if the Greek situation is to have any meaningful resolution. To those who say that austerity is the not the right approach the current global financial crisis, I would say that in the case of the Greeks, oh yes it is.

So, while one can begin to sympathise with the Germans when they peevishly suggest that Greece should sell a few of its islands to help meet its obligations, all this would really achieve is leave them with fewer assets and a reduced 'export' income from tourism next time the debt gets out of control, as it most surely will, unless significant adjustments are made to the corrupt and wasteful Greek state.

Anyway, Lewis's excellent new book serves as a reminder that it is too easy to blame the bankers for this whole mess we're in (even the ones who were fishermen just a few years previously). Cheap credit created temptations and exaggerated behavious across whole sectors of society.

He likens it to locking whole nations in a dark room with a pile of borrowed money. Each succumbed to a different temptation...

"What the Greeks wanted to do once the lights went out..was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it."

Clarification required?

2011-10-22T19:29:00.007Z

Had to tap myself on the head a few times this week listening to the hacks from up in the imperio yanqui querying the manner of Moammar Gaddafi's death.

After all, he had only just narrowly avoided America's chosen method of liquidation for what their President has described as 'Arab leaders' (and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity, and regardless of whether they carry a US passport.)...the unmanned drone attack.

Well, that and a French bomb, one or both of which may represent a fictitious attempt to share the praise/blame.

That some random Libyan should choose to put a bullet in the hated tyrant's head in the middle of a war zone after 42 years of misrule and eight months of civil strife, in which said dictator passed up on a number of clear opportunities to vacate, has somehow become the cause of a great deal of tut-tutting.

The inverse loyalty scheme

2011-10-21T18:30:00.009Z

Over the course of the past few years we have been repeatedly netflixed by the lady who runs the shop right in front of our house.

Each time we show any kind of propensity to repeat purchase specific items over the medium term, she raises the price of said items*, presumably for us only — so more or less the opposite approach to the coupon schemes run by the big UK chains like TESCO.

And whenever this happens I stop buying the item in question forthwith, as if to demonstrate that the apparent convenience offered by her tienda (if I tripped up on the cobbles outside my front door I'd probably end up at her counter) will not so easily translate into economic captivity.

Now I'm not a total codo — I can spot a value-added shopping experience when I see it (Waitrose over Tesco say) — it's just that I am not really seeing it here. And unlike our old friend in Federal lock-up, I don't have an inherent problem with differential pricing schemes, even 'gringo' prices (though V has actually had the worst experience of hikes), it's just that I don't care to be gamed in this way, and would have thought that our response might have put a stop to it by now.

We're down to a few items where the opportunity for opportunistic margin grabbing are limited; eggs for example. I stopped buying milk there last week when she upped the price by another Q0.50, thereby handing the Bodegona a 20% price advantage.

When it comes to the afternoon bread session, I try to intercept the van before it reaches the shop. Firstly, this permits me to ensure that all the pirujos, bolas, champurradas etc. that we buy are fresh, because the tienda-owner likes to pad out one's purchase with a few odds and ends left over from the morning, or even the previous afternoon. That's if she is willing to sell you any bread at all unless you have made a prior arrangement to reserve Qx from each delivery.** The bread that has not been firmly set aside will be sitting there in its basket, but she will be extraordinarily reluctant to part with it, perhaps because she will need it to add a few squishily stale rayaditas to tomorrows orders.

*In the case of red wine, she stopped stocking my preferred brand of Chilean plonk and instead started offering another label which costs Q15 more.

** This sort of lock-in might work for the majority of our neighbours — who are nothing if not slaves to routine — but our dietary habits and timetables are generally more flexible, so I want to be able to impulse purchase my bakery products.

2012, here we come.... (#17)

2011-10-21T03:48:00.003Z

And here's a chart from another continent that tells a scary story. Chinese GDP figures released this week might seem to suggest the possibility of a softer landing over there, but when you look at the way real GDP and nominal GDP have diverged since 2008, there are clear signs that things may actually be getting bubblier.

2012, here we come.... (#16)

2011-10-21T03:40:00.004Z

Today the can-kickers took it to another level, kicking the can with the can in it further down the road, via a de facto delay to the EU summit and the decision everyone kind of hopes it will come up with.

Meanwhile, MoneyGame published what it describes as the 'new scariest chart in Europe' (above), with the following commentary:

Greece, in a way, seems like a lost cause. Everyone knows it will default in some way or another. But while Greece might theoretically be ring-fencable, nobody thinks Italy is...

2012, here we come.... (#15)

2011-10-16T15:50:00.008Z

Gold traders are reportedly more bullish about their prospects next week than they have been for several months.

Maybe they have heard the latest audio message from Rapture prophet Harold Camping who remains set in the view that the end will come before we've even said hello to 2012. Having been largely wrong about May 21, Camping has turned his attention to October 21, next Friday, which he cautiously predicts will be "the final end of everything".

This time "the end is going to come very, very quietly," Camping affirms, without such telegenic collateral effects as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and catastrophic tsunamis.

And fortunately, "There will be no pain suffered by anyone because of their rebellion against God," (even commodity speculators), because "he has no pleasure in the death of the wicked."

2012, here we come.... (#14)

2011-10-16T15:50:00.006Z

The panic is starting to take hold...

Campero's image 'adjustment'

2011-10-13T15:47:00.009Z

Severo is about right in this instance.

Having worked with companies like Shell that protect and venerate their brand/marque with a near religious devotion, this update from los Gutiérrez strikes me as reckless, whatever its relative merits aesthetically.

When you choose to revamp rather than refresh you are often showing premeditated disrespect for those customers who have, in some cases, a lifetime's worth of emotional investment in your brand.

It matters less for B2B firms, but leading consumer brands always try to make iterative changes where there is something in the design that signals backward compatibility. I'm not really seeing it here.

I note that their main corporate website has yet to make the leap, so either PC intends to roll out the new image regionally (something one of the world's leading brand owners like Shell is unlikely to contemplate), or they are being a bit chicken, and want to test the waters in Texas with a potentially more yufe-ful customer base before admitting to a brand desecration back home in the motherland.

2012, here we come.... (#13)

2011-10-05T18:08:00.008Z

Fools' errands and fools' gold...is how leading American historian John W. Dower has characterised both post the 9-11 military-statebuilding adventures and the financial collapse of 2008.

These were parallel phenomena in his mind, because both were grounded in historical amnesia and an ideological commitment to the notion that we have somehow slipped the usual constraints, allowing free makets alone to take full control of both political and economic systems.

So perhaps it isn't so hard to see why some of our fellow Europeans have tended to regard the resulting mess as largely an 'anglo-saxon' problem. This allowed them to erect an imaginary Maginot line between themselves and the consequences of this anglophone shallow-mindedness, and now that it has been definitively breached, they are only just starting to realise how much trouble they are in.

When the crisis first broke regulators ordered European banks to increase their liquidity buffers and most of them did so by investing heavily in government bonds, seen then as comparatively risk-free as well as highly liquid. Meanwhile, believing that the problem lay elsewhere, the French and the Germans went about the recapitalisation of their banking system with a lot less enthusiasm than their US and UK counterparts.

Now almost half of the €6,500bn stock of eurozone sovereign debt is showing signs of heightened credit risk and this particular, highly interconnected part of the global financial infrastructure is surely carrying the greatest exposure.

As Jeremy Warner put it recently in the Telegraph:

BNP alone has a eurozone sovereign debt exposure of some €75bn, amounting to roughly 6% of total assets, including €14bn of Greek debt and €21bn of Italian government bonds. And that's just BNP. The other two major French banks, SocGen and Credit Agricole each have exposures of a similar order of magnitude. Collectively, French banks have €56bn of Greek sovereign bonds alone. They've so far only written down this Greek debt by around 20%, or in line with the restructuring agreed at the time of the last bailout.

2012, here we come.... (#12)

2011-10-05T17:27:00.004Z

Jason O'Mahoney in Marketwatch yesterday:

"It’s kind of like being on a family safari: There’s a herd of elephants charging towards you, but your young kids just love the cute elephants and if you shoot them they’ll never forgive you. Yet if you don’t shoot them, there’s a very good chance the elephants will trample both you and your whole family. Welcome to the choices facing the leaders of the European Union."

Later in the article the author manoeuvres his elephantine prose into a new metaphor of impending yet (supposedly) avoidable calamity:

"There are some who argue that if Captain Smith had turned the Titanic into the iceberg and rammed it direct, the move would have damaged the ship but left it afloat while at the same time destroying his reputation. Today, Titanic would be a metaphor for a crazy captain who annoyed 2,223 passengers, instead of a maritime disaster. Europe’s leaders don’t need the benefit of historical hindsight. They can see the disaster coming and they know that the only way to save the ship is to go at it with overwhelming force, even if it destroys their political names in the process. The iceberg is looming out of the night. It’s time to decide."

Nada Haces Por Mí

2011-10-05T14:26:00.007Z

Mexico is one of three nations which spring to mind sharing a pronounced pop-cultural obsession with efflorescent females.

Juan Carlos Lozano's video for his new solo rolo Nada Haces Por Mí, ever-present these days on Telehit, can be found closer to the tasteful French end of this slightly suspect scale than the pervy Japanese position at the other extremity. Lozano himself sits at the leading edge of Mexican ambient electro-pop/rock having headed up both Moenia and Morbo before setting off on his own with this catchy track.

2012, here we come.... (#11)

2011-10-03T20:07:00.005Z

"Living through a collapse is a curious experience. Perhaps the most curious part is that nobody wants to admit it's a collapse. The results of half a century of debt-fuelled "growth" are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. No one wants to be the first to say the dam is cracked beyond repair."

That was the opening paragraph from Paul Kingsnorth's Guardian piece last week, in which he sought to draw our attention back to the work of Leopold Kohr, for whom bigness was never a good thing. Most political and economic systems (even Communism) work well on a small scale, he believed, but once they grow become increasingly problematic. Kingsnorth thinks he may have been on to something...

"The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event."

2012, here we come.... (#10)

2011-09-30T17:33:00.015Z

Historically 90% of all American economic expansions have been of less than three years' duration. So perhaps one ought not to be so surprised that things appear to be about to go in the other, wrong direction. Yet I still cling to the view that, left to its own devices, the US economy has (or had) the ability to muddle through this situation.

The trouble is that would require a hypothetical situation in which everyone is constrained to act like jurors in an on-going trial, and thereby prevented from reading or viewing any commentary on its progress. For such is the condition of modern communications that all prophecies — even Mayan ones — tend to be self-fulfilling. (Mea culpa...)

The nature of short selling is that it helps to bring about the desired situation while creating a backlog of negative sentiment. Economic data published this week may not have been as scary as it might have been, but now the prevalent expectation has been recalibrated based on events in August. The hedge fungus and other speculators have been back on the case of the global banking system since the current crisis entered a new phase around the time the House Republicans revealed the true nature of their insanity. As John Lanchester puts it:

"The disturbing thing about the whole process wasn't so much that the Tea Partiers were irrational as that they were irrationalist; they were consciously pursuing a course of action which made no economic sense, as part of a world-view which is essentially theological."

Lanchester compares Rumsfeld's known and unknown unknowns with what investors might describe as risk and uncertainty. The former is the natural state of affairs, the environment in which they function, the latter is 'uncharted territory' and thus much harder to operate within, as well as being fairly terrifying.

As we commence viewing Act III of this particular Greek tragedy, all other stock market signals are being drowned out by emotive headlines. CNBC's Jeff Cox explains..

"In a normal market, the wide disparity between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and technicals would be screaming an ugly message, but these are not normal times. That's because the massive amount of headline risk—market moves driven by the constant churn of big news events—is at an apex"

So none of the usual risk signals really count right now and the Greek 'news event' is not a risk signal at all, for it has been cloaked in the unknown unknown of uncertainty (and the irrationality of that perverse doomsday faction within the GOP).

2012, here we come.... (#9)

2011-09-30T14:19:00.013Z

While politicians from both sides of the pond have been attempting to reassure markets by reiterating their determination to kick the can ever further down the road, leading economists have, rather unhelpfully, already called the end game.

Nouriel Roubini, that fraternity's reassuringly nicknamed Dr Death, was first off the mark as usual.

"Greece is stuck in a vicious cycle of insolvency, low competitiveness and ever-deepening depression. Exacerbated by a draconian fiscal austerity, its public debt is heading towards 200 per cent of gross domestic product. To escape, Greece must now begin an orderly default, voluntarily exit the eurozone and return to the drachma."

Acknowledging that there are no real rules in place for how this might be achieved, and that both a good deal of international trauma and 'collateral damage' are inevitable, he too cites Argentina's pesification of its dollar debts and those dodgy folk on Iceland as examples of an effective emergency response.

Aside from an immediate restoration of competitiveness, Roubini mentions the more dubious secondary benefit of other Eurozone economies being able to see clearly just how screwed over the Greeks end up and thus having "a chance to decide for themselves whether they want to follow suit, or remain in the euro, with all the costs that come with that choice."

Others, while also favouring an orderly default, find the prospect of a Greek euro-exit too scary, while Citi's Willem Buiter believes it won't do any good anyway in terms of restoring competitiveness. In this he has been backed up by Ian Bremner, Visiting Fellow at LSE, who adds that

"The problem with this line of argument, however, is that Greece actually is less exposed to international trade than any other eurozone country. Only €16bn of its €230bn gross domestic product is export-based. True, the tourism industry does comprise a significant 15 per cent of GDP, but a devaluation would have limited upside against Greece’s less expensive Mediterranean competitors such as Turkey. Worse, Greece has a mountain of debt denominated in euros. A switch to a new drachma would not change this. In fact, the drachma’s devaluation would only make the debt that remains that much harder to pay off."

Furthermore..

"No legal framework exists for an exit from the euro. Greece would have to negotiate with its eurozone partners, and most likely with the 27-member European Union. It would be a prolonged and messy process, creating a political and economic drag for everyone involved."

As of yesterday it is advantage can kickers for the time being. Merkel has got through her local vote on the EFSF with her majority intact, but it won't be until the second half of next month that all the other members of the EU have caught up...around the same time that the Greek state starts to run out of money for pensions and salaries.

Anyway, the spectre of a catastrophic collapse before the next crucial German vote on EFSF2.5 in early 2012 does seems to be receding; the policy makers appear to be making the present state of traumatic uncertainty that much more durable with their not quite satisfactory fixes.

2012, here we come.... (#8)

2011-09-29T15:46:00.007Z

"Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation. They need to regain control and they need to do so now."

So says George Soros in this morning's FT. He proposes a 3-step solution:

First, the governments of the eurozone must agree in principle on a new treaty creating a common treasury for the eurozone. In the meantime, the major banks must be put under European Central Bank direction in return for a temporary guarantee and permanent recapitalisation. The ECB would direct the banks to maintain their credit lines and outstanding loans, while closely monitoring risks taken for their own accounts. Third, the ECB would enable countries such as Italy and Spain to temporarily refinance their debt at a very low cost. These steps would calm the markets and give Europe time to develop a growth strategy, without which the debt problem cannot be solved.

Of course there may be bold and creative solutions to this crisis out there, but what are the chances that politicians everywhere are going to find themselves hamstrung by their parties, their electorates and by the limitations and fundamentally mal-coordinated nature of national and international institutions? Who or what is ever going to regain control?

I'd like to think that 'behind closed doors' the people with the power to act already have a handle on this, but then I am, in spite of the tenor of this series of posts, some sort of optimist.

2012, here we come.... (#7)

2011-09-28T17:25:00.004Z

It has been reported today that William Hague, Her Majesty's Foreign Secretary, characterised the Euro as a burning building with no exits back in 1998. Others have since deployed the slightly less gruesome comparison with the Hotel California; if there are any exits, suffice to say they have not been clearly marked...

2012, here we come.... (#6)

2011-09-27T17:50:00.005Z

Dead cats are once more a'bouncing as chatter spreads about a multi-trillion dollar windfall to the European Finances Seriously Fucked (EFSF) fund at some as yet unspecified date in the future.

But lo, who is that yonder complaining that the EU was specifically created in order to undermine the good ol' US of A and that not a penny of hard-earned American money should be 'sent overseas' with the intent of saving the likes of those cheese-eating surrender monkeys once again.

Yes, it's Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Vice Chair of the House Republican Conference, who released a statement yesterday saying that she would oppose any effort increase funding for the International Monetary Fund to be used to bail out European banks.

No matter that the US carries a $17bn vulnerability to Greek sovereign debt, $2bn more than the UK, and a total of $187bn of PIIGS exposure.

2012, here we come.... (#5)

2011-09-27T15:32:00.006Z

When Argentina pulled off the biggest sovereign debt default in history back in 2001, it owed $82bn. Greece owes $500bn. Yikes, eh? Whether we're talking about a neat 50% 'haircut' or a full-on grunt-style buzzcut, it's not going to be especially fetching.

Not without irony, Argentina is now oft-cited as an example of vaguely positive damage limitation. This is partly because some of the pain was shifted from external creditors onto local savers and because, thanks largely to a strong dose of Peronist protectionism, local living standards have rebounded somewhat in the subsequent decade. (Not that international lenders are going to extend them further financing for a very long time.)

Argentina's default should properly be seen as a recent episode within the rather more tragic largometraje tracking the most spectacular decline in comparative affluence in world economic history. Just before WWI Argies enjoyed a higher standard of living than both the French and the Germans. They then spent the better part of half a century slipping from the First World to the Third, the only nation to have ever really accomplished this feat. (So far.)

These days they enjoy a GDP per capita of $15,854 which, in spite of the recent 'resurgence' barely exceeds that of Mexico ($15, 113). The banker bods at UBS recently opined that a Greek default (followed potentially by a Euro-exit) would quickly shave off at least 50% off their GDP. In per capita terms this currently stands at $28,434, so the suggestion is that the most likely scenario would see Greece falling back in line with the likes of near neighbours Bulgaria ($13,563) or even Romania ($11,860), which would leave the EU's southern border looking remarkably like that of the USA.

Rise and shine

2011-09-27T14:26:00.014Z

I recall now why we tend to avoid going out with the dogs first thing. One has to run the gauntlet of the 7am rush, which can be like playing some weird, live chapin version of Grand Theft Auto.

Outside the front door await the resident early-idling citizenry...consisting to a truly disheartening extent of hipocritas, egoistas, resentidos and free-floating chiribisqueros plus other assorted lifestyle bottom-feeders, and enriched at this hour by clusters of puddle-hopping estudiantes, blithely-urinating albañiles, pinches salariados, and cascades of bicicletistas imprudentes.

Then there's the paranoid poof with his can of Mace, who runs off screaming insults in the American vernacular every time he sees Jin and, if we're really unlucky, the knuckle-dragging brinconcito, who shuffles past gesturing at the ludicrously large gun that he carries under his sweatshirt.

Potentially even more hazardous are the extralegally-hooting madres de la alta suciedad, many still in their night clothes as they undertake their time-trial school runs, handling their vehicles as if any pedestrian in their path is to be swatted aside like a late-shift zancudo.

Better to stay indoors with our platanitos fritos and freshly-brewed coffee. After 11am, the only human obstacles are the shambling undead known locally as bolitos.

2012, here we come.... (#4)

2011-09-26T14:51:00.007Z

It was amusing to hear Angela Merkel calling this weekend for a 'barrier' to be erected around Greece. Anyone with any sense has to realise that the firewall will have to ultimately extend around the borders of France and Germany itself, at the very least.

But of course managing German expectations is going to be the key to the progress of this particular systemic failure. The Americans in particular have surely already figured out that it will be easier to get the Krouts to cough up if they think they are protecting themselves (via some sort of stop loss provision) than if they think they are bailing out the good-for-nothing Greeks, and transatlantic political discourse over the past week or so has adjusted itself appropriately.

Merkel and co still don't seem to be in any great hurry to sort out the EFSF (European Finances Seriously Fucked?) emergency fund, a permanent 'backstop' which is not due to take proper shape before the mid part of next year.

2012, here we come.... (#3)

2011-09-24T15:08:00.003Z

Seemingly also trapped between a rock and a hard place is President Obama.

Specifically he has been boxed in by the people who created the conditions for global economic catastrophe (the free market fundamentalists of the GOP) and the people who are most likely going to get the blame for it (the Europeans, particularly them feckless southern ones).

The President's approval ratings are already low enough to suggest that re-election in 2012 will be an uphill struggle, so you can understand why he's been war-dialling Sarko and Merkel lately in the hope that some sort of firewall can be erected across the Atlantic, strong enough to hold up through the autumn of next year.

As far as the wider institutions of the EU are concerned, the path of least resistance is always going to be a bigger mess rather than a stronger union, especially under the present set of constraints, time in particular. But Obama has to be hoping that the French and the Germans at least can come up with a coordinated approach to bolstering their banks and ring-fencing other vulnerable, yet not entirely bankrupt economies such as Italy and Spain, in the increasingly likely event of the Greeks coming unstuck some time before the US Presidential election.

G20 finance ministers meeting in Washington DC this weekend have been pepped up by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's calls for a 'decisive signal', but perhaps their minds will have been even more concentrated by the reported remarks of Greek finance minister Evangelos Venizelos, who apparently thinks his country has three options at the moment, and that the best of these is treating its creditors to a 50% 'haircut'.

Meanwhile, surely the best case scenario for the US administration right now is a contained explosion in Athens, which somehow fails to develop into a cataclysmic chain reaction.

2012, here we come.... (#2)

2011-09-24T14:57:00.006Z

Greece's present predicament is not entirely unlike that of Aron Ralston in 127 Hours. They went for a hazardous trek in the Euro canyon and have ended up trapped between a rock and a hard place.

Ralston survived thanks to the timely realization that only by cutting off his own arm could he hope to break free. The Greeks have reached this point now too, but unfortunately there's an old treaty kicking around which expressly forbids this kind of opportunistic self-amputation.

In fact Greece cannot do anything to alleviate its situation right now without the unanimous support of its sixteen Eurozone cuates, some of whom seem to have switched off their mobile phones (Slovakia, Slovenia...).

2012, here we come.... (#1)

2011-09-22T17:29:00.007Z

The American psyche features a unique juxtaposition of unfounded optimism (remember Reagan's "It's still morning in America"?) and latent apocalyptic expectation. There in a nutshell you have your explanation for the recent volatility on US financial markets: it's as if current world conditions have been finely calibrated to set off violent spasms of see-sawing stateside sentiment.

Triangle (2009)

2011-09-21T17:25:00.005Z

Christopher Smith is an English director who specializes in postmodern indie horror movies - films that successfully strive to be a bit more than the sum of their borrowed parts.

This one, made just before Black Death, pointed strongly to his evolution as an interesting 'original' voice in the genre.

It's going to be hard to discuss without laying down a few spoilers, so in this instance I won't try all that hard to avoid it.

First let me say that no matter how bad the movies they feature in, there is something about ghostly empty liners from the 20s or 30s that has always appealed to me. There's inevitably a bit of Shining-au-mer about this particular horror trope, and in Triangle the quotations are explicit. Smith's achievement here is to take a potentially over-familiar format and keep the viewer guessing throughout.

The liner in this story, the Aeolus, becomes the core scenario (and then rather oddly un-becomes it in the third act) for a set of nested repetitions and duplications which appear to revolve around the character Jess, played by Melissa George. In perhaps the movie's most striking scene, a dying woman crawls into a corner of the deck where two dozen or so versions of her dead self lie in various states of decomposition and perforation by seagulls.

The plot is clever enough that Smith probably had to scribble it out diagrammatically before he started typing. Clearly he would have liked it to be a bit more that just structurally clever, but in this there are signs that he struggled a bit. He does after all seem to be a better director than he is a screenwriter, and whilst we had no quibbles with his ability to involve us and occasionally chill us right through to to the conclusion, the narrative has one or two weak points, at least when one pauses to consider it, in the round.

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian suspects that the premature disappearance of a female character called Heather is a plot hole. No, not really...she just drowned. But why introduce her in the first place if she is going to be demised somewhat contingently before the main engine of the plot has kicked in? (More worrying perhaps is what happened to the character with the hole in the back of his head at the end of the initial repeat.)

The plot doesn't have obvious holes, but Smith had to make a couple of obvious compromises to keep things together. Firstly, although at one point there surely must be three Jesses in operation, we only ever see two. Secondly, the re-initiation of the cycles can only really happen if Jess goes (inexplicably) from full awareness of her predicament to a vague sense of déjà vu.

There is also an apparently throw-away splice point in the narrative, when we see Jess considering her reflection in a cracked mirror and then follow the reflection out onto the deck. If this moment had any significance, it's not something I have sorted out after a single viewing!

And as mentioned above, Jess's assumption that the recapitulations were localised to the liner was one that I think was worth hanging on to, in the name of overall mythological sense, in spite of the mild twisty moment served up by the pile of dead gulls on the beach.

The all-Aussie cast has done a fairly competent job of appearing to be American, unfortunately the same cannot be said of the Australian coast's efforts at resembling Florida.

Still, an impressive, thought-provoking if not resolving chiller flick, which shows the kind of cleverness that can be derived from the UK's stupidity tax (Lottery funding).

GRADE: B+

Notes on 1Q84: No1

2011-09-09T14:56:00.015Z

One hundred and fifty pages into the Barcelona edition of Book One, and I think I'm beginning to understand the meaning of the title. This is more than I can say, for example, after completing the first two books of Bolaño's equally voluminous 2666.

I have to say that if I were to be making my living as one of those ghastly editor types, I'd probably have wanted to snip around 10% of the words from every scene I've come across to this point. Heaviness isn't something I have come to associate with Murakami, however much extraneous detail he might seem to willfully introduce into the moment. I suppose the Spanish translation may be partly to blame (the English one is taking its time to reach the shops as publishers promulgate the appropriate volume of buzz), but I do recall noticing that my feet were immersed in treacle at times during The Wind Up Bird Chronicle as well.

Murakami has set about an inherently more ambitious two stream narrative structure in 1Q84. One of these follows a very familiar route: one of the author's notoriously anodyne male leads is lured into mysterious territory by an enigmatic younger female. The other also features an enigmatic lady, Aomame, but she is very much more than the sum of her quirks, an apparently fully rounded feminine protagonist, and one whose day job comes as an unexpected early revelation which surely marked the moment I became fully committed to the novel.

And yet the spice of this precocious twist derives from the fact that Aomame's extraordinary vocation remains an apparently secondary part of the predicament that Murakami has established for her: her dawning realisation that the reality she is experiencing following the impulsive use of an emergency exit on a city highway to escape a major jam, differs in several important respects from the one that she began her day with. This alternative to the 'real' 1984 features the consequences of a couple of localized but significant recent news events of which she has no recollection, plus one potentially major international one, and she has duly dubbed it 1Q84.

At this moment one potential point of intersection between the alternating narrative streams is suggested, but at this stage it is only the vaguest of hints. The male lead, Tengo (an individual whose very name causes a handful of comprehension issues in the Spanish edition), a mathematics professor and would-be novelist, is compulsively pursuing what he suspects is a morally-suspect project suggested by friend and ghastly editor-type Komatsu, which involves re-writing a story conceived by a dyslexic schoolgirl in order to win a major literary prize.

Anyway, the point of connection, however tenuous, has at least temporarily alleviated the sensation of reading two entirely distinct novels concurrently.

I find that the parallel narrative format generally works better for authors of the sort of books that sell well at airports, because the fundamental technique of such writing is to interest the reader so much in the future that they can't wait to rush onwards, barely taking note of the present instant.

Now Murakami is himself no slouch when it comes to asking questions and delaying the answers, but he also has something of the skill of great literary writers (such as the aforementioned Roberto Bolaño) of involving us so much in the details of the present instant that we barely notice the compulsion to turn the page. I can't help feeling that in terms of forward momentum, Murakami has sacrificed something here to his new dual protagonist format; a fine line is being trod, but so far I am not having to work too hard to keep up the trail.

Thor (2011)

2011-09-09T14:30:00.004Z

I have to admit I really quite enjoyed Branagh's Thor, but then I read Roger Ebert's remarks and felt not a little ashamed!

On further reflection, it occurs to me that many of his criticisms (the profound silliness of Asgard and its occupants for example) could just as readily be directed at many of Wagner's operas without them immediately shedding their status as serious works of art. Not that that is what we have here, but Branagh's sensibility has a high camp operatic quality to it and I'm sure that is why Marvel picked him for this segment of their catalogue, and not because, as Ebert suggests in his one and a half star review, someone screamed "Get Branagh, he deals with that Shakespeare crap."

And so what if the infrastructure in dire peril here consists of a bunch of New Mexico 7-Elevens? The small town, desert location has genre resonance and the silliness would surely have got out of control if larger populations and more recognisable landmarks had been drawn into this ultimately tongue-in-cheek tale of clashing celestial realms.

Grade: B(+)

Torchwood: Miracle Day

2011-09-04T19:38:00.006Z

How does Torchwood manage to be so consistently entertaining and so annoying at the same time?

John Barrowman observed that the short five episode season in which we last came across Captain Jack and his mortality issues was too short for his taste. Well, now Starz and the Beeb have finally combined to give us some more Torchwood and this time we get ten whole episodes, though once again with an over-arching theme: one day people just stop dying.

The doubling of time available has however allowed a team of writers and directors to use this as a platform for exploring a range of different themes and parallels including concentration camps, gayness and Catholicism and the evil that is corporate PR.

On top of this one has the inevitably rather awkward transatlanticking of the original rather Welsh format, which seems to have been achieved by snapping on some CIA-types who seem to have been imagined using the remarkably similar FBI-types we came across in the doomed ABC series FlashForward. Viewers will recall that this too had a seemingly straightforward premise which became a bit of a mess across the season, but that was really nothing compared to the dog's dinner we have here.

Behind all the campness Torchwood was always a more intelligent series than FlashForward and there were moments in the first four or so episodes when I was genuinely impressed with the way that the consequences of global non-mortality were being thought through. But then it gradually became clear that, even with just ten episodes, the end product would feature unevenly-developed plotlines and characters, of the sort that we became familiar with in longer running US serials like Heroes and Lost, and where one often had the impression that the production team were making things up as they went along. I do hope there's a point to all this overacting by Bill Pullman for example.

Even the central premise of this new Torchwood has started to drift. A few episodes ago a rogue agent had her neck snapped and yet was still on her feet swiping at a moving vehicle. They have such lust for life, someone then observed, suggesting a zombie strand to the narrative, which never really got going. Yet with two espiodes to go we're now apparently back at a situation where one bullet can remove consciousness permanently, which is basically death, and would surely be recognized as such by any sensible society without the need for ovens.

There's another serious problem. Jorge Luis Borges once said that the key to any crime-mystery is that all the suspects have to be there from the start. The person or persons responsible can't just wander in from stage left at the beginning of Act III, but that is essentially what appears to be happening here.

And yet I am enjoying it so....

Travel Bites 2011: No2

2011-08-29T14:49:00.004Z

Peru, at once sufficiently similar and sufficiently different from Guatemala, such that I was never quite certain whether I was in my comfort zone or not, a state of affairs which quite often resulted in a truly disconcerting travel experience.

These points of intersection and deflection could be either heartwarming or disheartening.

I could list a number of seminal Peruvian experiences which are emblematic of this conundrum. Take the cebiche for example, just like a ceviche, but tomatoes are out and sweet potatoes are in.

Travel Bites 2011: No1

2011-08-23T17:11:00.006Z

Tocumen International Airport in Panama, aka 'the hub of the Americas', plays host to some five million passengers every year, two million of whom pass through in transit. It may not be as swanky as Guatemala's Aurora, but it's certainly better connected, linking major cities in ten different Latin American countries and with its rather messy blending of arrival and departure spaces, one always seems to be caught in the middle of a frantic steeplechase, as passengers hurry from one end of the terminal to the other in order to make their rather tight connections.

The major carrier operating from here is Panama's Copa, part of the United-Continental group, and as a consequence Tocumen bears a passing aesthetic resemblance to George Bush Intercontinental in Houston, though without the pervasive smell of popcorn.

One of the first things I spotted after disembarking the flight from Guatemala was a man wearing a Panama hat. I doubt whether it was purchased inside the airport however, because Tocumen, unlike its equivalents in Guatemala and El Salvador, appears to lack one of those emporia of local souvenirs selling all kinds of Panama-badged nic nacs. Though if all you want to remember Panama by is a bottle of Ron Abuelo Añejo, you should be fine...

Brighton Rocks

2011-08-11T20:04:00.009Z

Having just finished Greene's gripping 1938 novel, I managed to watch both movie adaptations on the overnight bus up here from Lima.

Each was (obviously) made after the Second World War, which makes them, for me at least, inherently a little less interesting than later interpretations. For Brighton Rock is one of those works which, almost certainly unknowingly, delivers a snapshot of a world on the edge of the abyss. It's final words seem almost prophetic in this context, as it leaves Rose wandering off towards 'the greatest horror of all'.

My grandfather was a cine enthusiast and shot a number of otherwise trivial home movies (in colour) during a family holiday in the South of France in the same year Brighton Rock was published. I have them on a VHS conversion and naturally there is now something poignant about watching people enjoying simple pleasures in a place that would soon be off-limits to pleasure-seekers.

There's a rather droll textual forward to the 1947 film which reassures viewers that the violent Brighton underworld and the slums that acted as its incubator no longer exist. (Did the Germans bomb them to oblivion?) Meanwhile Joffe has controversially shifted the chronology of his update forwards into the 60s when social order was crumbling once again, this time as rival youth subcultures asserted their ascendency and the right to duff each other up. It's an interesting gambit, and one which forces Joffe to ditch some of the key plot set-ups from the novel, such as Fred Hale's alter ego Kolley Kibber and the newspaper treasure hunt.

The 23-year-old Dickie Attenborough is quite remarkable as the teen sociopath Pinkie in the Boulting brothers' film. It makes you wonder a bit about the ingratiating lovie he appears to have become in his dotage. The essence of this character is surely his repressed inner life, which manifests itself as an over-expressive tendency in the arena of opportunistic violence. Hard as it is to do more than suggest this turmoil on screen, Attenborough's personification seems to glow with this deadly juxtaposition of cockiness and elemental fear.

Sam Riley's Pinkie is less remarkable, rather more like a junior incarnation of paranoid gangster types we have grown accustomed to on our screens. (Note that the 1947 film reached American cinemas as Young Scarface!) The script does however give a bit more support by implication to the notion that there was something not quite right about Pinkie's relationship with the deceased leader Kite. And we do get the impression that this Pinkie is not quite sure where he falls on the line dividing sympathy and antipathy for the poor waitress, whereas Attenborough gave us very few hints of warmth to work with.

It's a rather one-note performance, but the same cannot be said of his foil here, Andrea Riseborough's Rose, as complex and nuanced as the late Carol Marsh's version was a straightforward portrait of wide-eyed innocence. (Marsh reminded me a bit of rising British starlet Carey Mulligan. A bit too pretty for the role really.)

Anyway, I didn't mind the reduced emphasis on Pinkie's sordid internal dialogue, in part because it's one part of the novel that stretched credibility for me. Greene always tests my tolerance for thickly laid-on Catholic guilt

The character which wasn't pitched right in either film, but certainly not in the 2010 remake is that of Ida Arnold. Hermione Baddeley had her as a kind of salt-of-the-earth proletarian archetype, whereas Helen Mirren plays her as a bit of a cold fish, which is oh so wrong from the point of view of Greene's take on the underlying theological message. Arnold is an ageing bad girl, not far enough past her sell-by date to stop posing a threat to other people's marriages. In the context of this story

For Ida's quest to be meaningful Fred Hale's end needs to be something we regret. It doesn't help Joffe's film at all that he has cast the bloke who plays the assassin in The Borgias as Hale and tossed aside all Greene's ambiguity about the journalist's role in the demise of Kite. Indeed, here Hale is just another gangland thug. Boulting in contrast, insisted that Hale's mistake was to write too candid an article about slot machines and Kite's intrusion into this business.

Perhaps to take our mind off his substantial alterations (Ida is now the manager of Snow's and Corkery not just her would-be lover but also the bookie that gets 'carved' by Pinkie and Dallow, while dodgy solicitor has been expunged completely) it would seem that Joffe decided to put back into his narrative all the things that Greene and Rattigan left out of their own screenplay in 1947. (Back, to good effect is the bottle of vitriol and the cliff-side denouement and less effectively perhaps, Rose's father.)

Interestingly Joffe's screenplay imitates the twist from the last scene of Boulting's film. I have to say, I do wonder whether it was Graham Greene or Terence Rattigan who thought that one up. In a sense it makes for a 'better' ending than the novel provided, but from the perspective of the author's scathing examination his faith it's a bit of a cop out, zooming in on a crucifix which, we are given to conclude, symbolises a universe where the wellbeing of the innocent is taken into consideration. Whatever happened to 'the greatest horror of all'? Unfilmable, one presumes.

PS: Having just finished tracking through the debate about the 'highest' genre in art in Public Enemies I think it worth noting that Boulting's movie (as Joffe's surely will one day quite soon) feels dated in a way that the novel itself simply doesn't.

Speaking of genres, the 1947 film clearly fits within the noir tradition. In contrast last year's rehash shows its awareness of the Hitchcockian tradition that was then still a decade away.

Debt-ceiling debacle

2011-08-02T21:14:00.005Z

Well, the Septics have got to be thankful that there's hardly anywhere else in the developed world that looks a safer bet for stashing large amounts of loot at low risk right now.

Still, the fact that there was in the end considerable bi-partisan support in both houses for welcoming catastrophe with wide-open arms, means that nobody outside the US will have watched this artificial crisis without drawing some obvious conclusions about that nation's long-term reliability as a safe haven, let alone as the de-facto leader-by-example of the global economic system.

Whether or not the ratings agencies have the cojones to do anything about it is another matter. The long-term issue of national indebtedness won't go away until the Bush tax cuts are reversed out and a very serious look is taken at other entitlements paid for at the Federal level. Let's not mention all the overseas empire not-building.

Obama got caught out. He did nothing when he controlled Congress and before it filled up with delusional loons from the Tea Party. Their cultist approach to the constitution is perhaps little more than sublimated racism, but in times of worldwide insecurity it's really not ideal to have that many apocalyptically-inclined politicians in a position to make (or break) the key practical decisions facing humanity right now.

They know the President is by nature inclined to doing deals and doesn't quite know how to handle people who will go all the way for their belief in the counter-factual.

Should he get a second term, Obama has to hope that the American electorate will have figured out the difference between fact and opinion and will have extirpated these extremists from their bridgehead in Washington.

Bésame Mucho no7 - Vienna School

2011-08-02T18:44:00.002Z

And here we have the lady who started it all, Mexican concert pianist Consuelo "Chela" Velazquez, elaborating on the simple lovestruck teen ballad she had composed some three decades earlier.

Bésame Mucho no6 - Kenny G and Stevie W

2011-08-01T18:29:00.002Z

Takes a while to get going, but worth the wait as it features Stevie Wonder on the harmonica.

Rango (2011)

2011-07-30T18:40:00.007Z

This film kind of freaked us both out. As the credits rolled V said that in truth she hated it, but hate is perhaps a more nuanced verb in her vocabulary than English-as-first-language-speakers might initially expect.

I was impressed by Rango, and I certainly enjoyed it on a number of levels, though whether I actually liked it is another matter. In some ways Gore Verbinski's foray into digital animation is a weird experiment in expectation mismanagement.

We've all heard how the genius of Disney-Pixar manifests itself in the way they fashion child-appealing, character-driven narratives which are nevertheless peppered with plenty of knowing references and gags, even underlying story subtexts to leave the parents wet-eyed in the aisles.

Well, here the polarity has been startlingly reversed. The jokes about prostate examinations are not here for mere decoration so to speak. They are part of its dark, disturbing, downright ugly existential fabric...and the kids get the kinetic stuff to keep them hooked to the end on sheer visual excitement. (Johnny Depp's performance is, as ever, note perfect for all audiences.)

I had assumed this must have been made for 3D, but in fact it looks as if Verbinski has deployed his digimation with a view to showing us just how unnecessary the extra dimension can be. There's an enormous beauty in all this ugliness, and I think this is very much part of the movie'a adult depth. This is a satire which stands some comparison with the classic westerns it is exhuming.

As a young teen I found High Plains Drifter a tad disconcerting...but a decade earlier it was Chuck Jones's bizarre psychedelic animation blend The Phantom Tollbooth (1970) which inserted itself immediately into my dreams, and nightmares. Rango has, I suspect, a similar power to mess with forming imaginations.

Grade: hmmm....B (++).

Bésame Mucho no5 - Nihongo Flamenco

2011-07-30T16:56:00.002Z

Mis respetos.

Bésame Mucho no4 - Bossa Nova

2011-07-30T16:51:00.003Z

Now this is more like it...

Rosa Passos doesn't look much like the girl in this video, i.e. and when she passes each one she passes goes ah. More's the pity...

Bésame Mucho no3 - You're not doing it right

2011-07-29T17:14:00.009Z

Back in the early 90s I used to think Thalía was cute, probably before I'd heard her sing.

I can't listen to this clip without thinking of Marilyn's "Happy Birthday Mr President". And as for the outfit, was she sending some sort of subliminal sartorial message to the producers of El Clon?

It's a wonder she still has a recording contract. Hold on, no it's not — she's married to Tommy Mottola, who traded down a bit in terms of vocal talent at least after his split from Mariah Carey.

With so many versions of this classic song out in the ether, there were bound to be a few turds, and I will surely spare you the majority of these, however Thalía's rendition — with it's excruciating pauses and overworked notes — has a certain negative bewitchery of distinction.

Bésame Mucho no2 - You're doing it right

2011-07-29T17:01:00.008Z

This is the version through which Consuelo Velásquez's song achieved worldwide fame — recorded by the Chilean bolero-singer Lucho Gatica in 1953, 22 years after it was originally composed.

Bésame Mucho no1 - Live in the Parque Central

2011-07-28T17:12:00.006Z

This famous little ditty was composed by a 15-year-old Mexican girl in 1931 when, so she said, she herself had yet to experience the pleasure of her first kiss.

Here's it is performed very capably by Maestro Hugo Cruz, the star musician of Cuban-emigre band Orquestra Casa Blanca in Antigua's Parque Central last Monday...Santiago day. Having positioned myself at the rear on the Cathedral steps, I had to run round to the front to capture the rest of Cruz's solo with its gypsy-inflected encore.

Animal Kingdom (2010)

2011-07-25T15:33:00.002Z

David Michôd's directorial debut features an interesting narrative sleight of hand...for this is a movie about a family of bank robbers, none of whom do we ever see actually attempting to rob a bank. And frankly by the end of the film, I was beginning to doubt whether any of them would be up to it. Is this significant? Well yes. Imagine a movie about a clan of shoe-shiners in which no shoes are actually shone in 113 minutes.

But the potential at least for enforced cash withdrawals means that Michôd can locate his self-consciously naturalistic family drama in the familiar moral wilderness of the criminal underworld.

There are in fact two families (or tribes) in this landscape, the Codys led by their manipulative matriarch Janine, and the Melbourne cops, seemingly driven by similarly unpredictable and violently vindictive urges. Beneath this perennial group-level conflict, the film focuses on the individual set to between newcomer Joshua "J' Cody and the unhinged alpha male Andrew "Pope" Cody, played superbly by Ben Mendelsohn. This is another one of those dramas without much of a moral centre, but David Michôd squeezes out the inherent tension in Joshua's situation to exciting effect.

Grade: B++

Ambassador Bolton

2011-07-25T15:12:00.004Z

Has been a bugbear of mine since his ludicrously obstreperous appearance on David Dimbleby's presidential election night show in 2008. Clearly John Bolton feels more comfortable in the company of his own sort. And so it was that he appeared on Fox News on Friday night, and in spite of the reported arrest of a lone, blond-haired Norwegian man with apparent extremist political and religious views, the massacre was still in his opinion, unlikely to the the work of local right-wingers.

Charlie Brooker also saw this bizarre interview:

"Some remained scarily defiant in the face of the new unfolding reality. On Saturday morning I saw a Fox News anchor tell former US diplomat John Bolton that Norwegian police were saying this appeared to be an Oklahoma-style attack, then ask him how that squared with his earlier assessment that al-Qaida were involved. He was sceptical. It was still too early to leap to conclusions, he said. We should wait for all the facts before rushing to judgment. In other words: assume it's the Muslims until it starts to look like it isn't – at which point, continue to assume it's them anyway."

What this confirmed for me was the now almost absolute association in American political discourse, especially that of the right, between fact and opinion. If I believe something to be so, then it must be, and more's the point, you must also believe it to be so.

My Kidnapper (2010)

2011-07-15T15:34:00.008Z

There aren't many people more self-righteous than the former Colombian kidnap victim. The Queen of them all is of course Ingrid Betancourt, but not far behind in bleeting self-regard come the three Yanks who were snatched from the clutches La FARC at the same time. In comparison British TV-producer Brian Henderson and the eight tourists kidnapped in the Sierra Nevada are relatively small time, as indeed was the guerrilla organisation which took them, the ELN. And they got off lightly — just over three months in the jungle - compared to the more normal fate of local political and military captives.

I've waded through enough of this material to have garnered a sense of what most irks me about these accounts of what was clearly genuine hardship. Firstly, the former kidnapees are mostly in denial about the extent to which they were asking to be captured. Betancourt was warned not to campaign in a FARC controlled zone and the authors of Out of Captivity were ex-military civilian contractors flying interdiction missions over the guerrillas' installations, and yet repeatedly pour scorn on the FARC's tendency to regard them as enemy combatants and mercenaries. Meanwhile Henderson and the seven others the ELN picked up at La Ciudad Perdida had apparently been told the area was safe for tourists, yet we later learn somewhat indirectly that this is at best a partial truth, because one of them, the German Reini Weigel was subsequently sent the bill for her rescue by her government: relevant travel warnings were in place at the time. (The Germans do of course have the perfect word for the emotions welling up at this point in Henderson's documentary: schadenfreude.)

Secondly, their sense of their own importance is hard to square with their sense of the comparative unimportance of the conflicts that beset Colombia. Henderson's attempt to re-encounter and understand Antonio, one of his ELN guards, has a whiff of anthropological expedition about it. The committed guerrilla is exposed as a man living within a closed intellectual milieu and on at least one occasion Henderson uses the term 'the real world' to refer to the perspective of the cosmopolitan foreign outsider.

This sense that the issues that underlie the context for the kidnapping are informed by inherently myopic viewpoints and ideologies both narrow and shallow, provides an excuse for not providing any real analysis of them. And of course the kidnapped individuals are all exposed to the insurgency at grunt level, surely not the best place to comment on the wider drivers and motivations. Could one really gain an accurate understanding of Britain's strategic objectives in Afghanistan by interviewing a private on patrol in Kandahar?

So, having failed to deliver any real political interest, My Kidnapper goes on to disappoint on the level of human interest. Antonio's real identity is so camouflaged, that all Henderson gets out of what is supposed to be the emotional crux of the movie is a rather stilted and controlled apology for suffering caused.

The two Israelis who go back to the scene of the crime with Mark and Reini (but crucially are not permitted to meet up with now retired guerrilla Antonio and his partner) are superficially the least likeable of the returning victims, but there's an admirable side to their aggressive paranoia under these circumstances — and it's undoubtedly truthful, as anyone that has rubbed up against examples of the multitude of Israelis backpacking around Central America could testify to. Better their dogged hostility to their oppressors, than all that wittering about lost freedoms which often sound more like lost privileges.

GRADE: B-

An interesting correlation?

2011-07-09T18:19:00.000Z

"If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them. Are the religious worse because they’re religious, or are they religious because they’re worse?

"The first direction of causation is well known, but it’s the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologically speaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with a framework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. In converts – those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, or without having previously taken it seriously – the correlation between religious belief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is not incompatible with charm) is particularly striking."

Galen Strawson

No exceptions...

2011-07-08T17:12:00.003Z

"It's impossible — no exceptions — for the genuine spiritual or religious impulse to achieve full expression in religions that mandate belief in a supernatural, personal God. There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because they have somehow maintained the forms of personal God religions, while in fact having abandoned any such belief.

"Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It's easy to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self."

Galen Strawson, British philosopher

Match Point (2005)

2011-07-06T21:00:00.010Z

Rather like that other memorable London-based movie Closer, Woody Allen's Match Point has profound failings baked into its very fabric, and yet somehow manages to end up as a markedly satisfying experience.

As for those failings, let's start with those which have nothing to do with the location. Whilst not irritatingly 'stagey' like that of Closer, too often the dialogue here is clumsily unrealistic, with characters delivering lines too obviously scripted to convey information to the audience rather than the designated interlocutor on screen.

There's no attempt at disguise and Allen has made things harder for himself by crafting his story with such one dimensional characters out of whose mouths any sort of nuance would have seemed unrealistic in its own way. Having given this aspect of the film some consideration, I'm not so sure however that it is a failing as such. Jonathan Rys-Myers delivers and eerily empty performance as retired tennis-pro Chris Evans, inscrutable in his calculating moral detachment. If any of the other main players had been more rounded, the subtlety of this impersonation might have been drowned out. (The script does her few favours, but Johansson appears to be trying hard with Nola, especially drunk Nola.)

Anyway, the real problems here have to do with the switch from NYC to London, facilitated by a load of dosh from the BBC. Maybe there wasn't time to rethink the narrative too carefully, but the first sign of trouble shows up with Evans apparently using a knowledge of Dostoevsky and opera and presenting himself generally as "non trivial" in order to gain entry to the upper echelons of British society. Like that would work!

Back in Manhattan of course, there's a much clearer association between high society and high culture, between cosmopolitanism and support for the arts (as well as charity in general).

Only recently I was at one of London's leading arts venues with Frode. and having noted how unaffected our fellow audience-members were, he duly confided to me that the realisation had come to him rather belatedly in life that New York is a far more snobbish, class-based environment than London. This didn't come as news to me, as I recalled my father's experiences when he opened an office over there in the 80s and his future partners attempted to impress him with evenings at the sick-making University Club. And then there was my own visit to the Met last May, where the lobby's fill up with individuals one would hesitate to describe as unaffected.

Our class system is not non-existent for sure, but for outsiders it's certainly a bit of a minefield and Allen comes out of this little foray into it minus his foot. Brian Cox has been about as miscast as his namesake the TV professor of physics would have been as the country pad patrician. And the lines this bizarre family deliver are packed with jarring solecisms, bogus 'U' vocabulary and bizarre non-sequiturs; my personal favourite being "I grew up in Belgravia, so...", largely because I could say it myself, but of course wouldn't.

I suppose this may be an issue which is only going to bother us Brits. But there are subsidiary issues of verisimilitude. I mean, how likely is it that two tennis players from these islands good enough to play on the main ATP tour, would meet by chance on Old Bond Street? A location Allen reuses for yet another non-tennis related fortuitous encounter in the movie. This was surely intended to be Fifth Avenue in the original conception. I wonder whether it also had Nola penciled in as a Brit?!

GRADE: B+

Somos Lo Que Hay (2010)

2011-07-05T15:24:00.004Z

Mexico DF has become the preferred global shooting location for cruel social metaphors with no moral centre. Reassurance was hard to come by in Amores Perros and La Zona, and so it is too in this tale of a family of anthropophagites struggling to come to terms with the sudden loss of their patriarch and 'bread winner'.

The poster claims that the movie does for cannibals what Let The Right One In did for vampires, which is sadly not the case, because the Swedish movie had emotional depth. It has been well shot and the performances are generally strong (especially Paulina Gaitán from Sin Nombre), but having established that the widow and her three adolescent children have a particular penchant for munching on the soft underbelly of Mexican society, this becomes one more of the movies under-explored themes, along with 'el ritual', which although greatly advertised in the dialogue, never actually materialises and as a result one experiences the last act as a rush to completion.

Grade B(+)

Museum Pieces #6

2011-06-23T15:57:00.002Z

From London's Science Museum, an assortment of items arranged to set off warm and fuzzy feeling of nostalgia amongst us 40-somethings. Note the slim, door-wedge-styled Sinclair ZX80 between the Apple II and the Windows 3.1 manual. I had the replacement model myself, the ZX81, in black. In fact I still have it here in Guatemala in a box up in my study!

Museum Pieces #5

2011-06-22T13:57:00.004Z

One of the treasures of the British Museum I make a point of revisiting each time I'm in there, these twelfth century walrus ivory chess pieces known as the Lewis Chessmen (though the most characterful figures are perhaps the two queens) were probably made in Trondheim, Norway and were discovered on the Isle of Lewis in 1831. The BM has 67 of the 78 pieces; the rest can be seen at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh.

Kids and computers

2011-06-18T14:57:00.010Z

"Science is a tool for problem-solving - the best that humans possess. But it has this peculiarity, that when it is most successful it creates new problems, some of which are insoluble." (John Gray)

V's niece has a surprising fluency about the PC interface. Yet the notion that each generation is inevitably more au fait with information technology is a myth that could do with some challenging.

For example, V herself would have little trouble using the DOS prompt to deal with a tricky corrupted file that repeatedly crashes Windows Explorer once clicked on. Her niece meanwhile, for all her dextrous expertise, probably has little comparable understanding of the underlying hardware and software architecture of a laptop. For her, it's really just an oversize Blackberry that won't fit in her back pocket.*

I'm sure she knows how to use the simple Google search box to look up Justin Bieber, but if she didn't, I could show her in a matter of minutes. What I'd find a lot harder to pass on are the sort of sophisticated search techniques that became the basis of my living in the mid-1990s. This is because they are grounded in reasoning skills acquired across my formal education, many of which have little basis in either computers or technology in general (Medieval History for example!)

Here's another example that got us thinking. We have a young acquaintance in our colonia of apparently above-average intelligence and sensitivity, better-educated and certainly comfortable with computers. When V offered to help him improve his English conversation skills, we soon discovered that he didn't really know how to use a dictionary. Now you might think that this, rather like mental arithmetic, is exactly the sort of low-tech talent that kids today can dispense with, because there are electronic tools out there that make such tasks so much easier than they were in our day.

But dictionaries are systematised information, the very basis of the computational revolution that went mainstream in the latter part of the last century. And it's not just that our friend struggled, as so many Chapines do, with his ortografia: not knowing or caring for example if the translation of 'deep' is Hondo or Ondo. He didn't seem to have accurate mental map of how the letters of the alphabet are ordered, and once he got to the right letter for the word he was seeking, he started slowly reading every word in the sequence until he eventually found it.

It therefore surely goes without saying that the ability to mentally parse an index at speed without a computer is very much a preliminary life skill that one has to acquire before one has any hope of getting the most out of all that binary data stored on computers around the globe.

Most of the really important computer skills are not really computer skills at all. Hence, giving every teen in Guatemala a free laptop is unlikely to transform the nation into an IT powerhouse overnight...though it might drastically increase the number of irrelevant Facebook taggings.

The people who get the most out of these technologies are ultimately those who are using them as an extension — an enhancement even — of their own information processing capabilities. Yet the flipside of this 'solution' is perhaps a whole new set of problems, when one considers that the very same tools may actually be hindering a whole subset of children in education today from acquiring these capabilities in the first place.

*I'm reminded of my photographer cousin's gripes that somewhere between XP and 7, the dominant visual metaphor for Windows became that of a kiddies' playground.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

2011-06-17T16:34:00.010Z

Known rather more ominously as Der Plan in Germany, George Nolfi's directorial debut never quite shakes off its likeabilty, ultimately rooted in that of principals Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, though the more one pauses to consider its philosophical scaffolding, the more one starts to feel like Phillip K. Dick would have done on learning that one of his paranoid metaphysical mysteries had been forcibly paired up with a cookie-cut romantic comedy formula. (Who knows though, he might have appreciated the irony of coating It's a Wonderful Life in a fascist veneer!)

Every appearance of Harry Mitchell, David Norris's fedora'd expositing angel / case officer left me reeling as if from a blow to the lower gut, but one of the underlying themes — perhaps even more central than the inevitably bodged one of free will — that of the incompatibility between love and ambition, was worth more than a moment's pondering.

Doesn't poor old Adrian have a case agent?

Grade: B+

Abusadora

2011-06-15T15:55:00.004Z

This wonderful chap was making the most of a community Xmas party in San Sebastián de la Gomera that we sort of crashed a few years ago.

Just love the way he manages to integrate a repeat order for another chela into his dance moves...

I guess that in both temperament and to some extent accent, the people of La Gomera are closer to the tropical Hispanic model than Iberians proper.

This clip has always been a favourite souvenir of mine from that trip and I recently rediscovered it on an old 2003 Mac external drive that I managed to fire up again. As this was one journey we made without a digital camera, the Mini DV camcorder tapes I'm currently processing through Final Cut are a real treasure.

Hanna (2011)

2011-06-11T17:05:00.014Z

It is said that Christopher Nolan's formula for success is in making two of the three key elements in any screenplay — plot and narrative — intelligently complex, while leaving the viewer a straightforward path through the maze via the third — character — which he invariably leaves simple, at least in terms of motivations.

One can get a sense of just how mediocre a project Hanna was at conception by mentally stripping away its striking-looking cast, its self-indulgent direction, its intrusive score by the Chemical Brothers, its icky coating of fairy tale resonance etc. until one is left with the core trichotomy of plot, narrative and character, all of which are embarrassingly sub-standard.

Saoirse Ronan became attached to the production first and called in her old mate Joe Wright from Atonement. Sure he could make something of this underdeveloped material? Well no, because the completed movie has the inevitable reek of directorial over-compensation.

The cast are no help. Bana and Blanchett act as if told to cut back on the charisma and Ronan appears to be the result of a secret government programme to genetically engineer unsympathetic lead characters. It doesn't help that the three of them have an essentially pitiless approach to all the other incidental cast members.

The action opens in Finland where Eric and Hanna have been lying low since she was a baby. Eric has filled her mind with facts about the outside world and taught her how to terminate with extreme prejudice, armed and unarmed. The screenwriters then serve up the dumbest of macguffins in the form of a switch and a flashing red light, the result of which is that Hanna ends up in a secret US government facility in Morocco (yes!).

Blanchett plays Marissa, a kind of wicked witch come step-mother, but also a government spook with suggested double-agent tendencies. Once the red light flashes, Marissa will stop at nothing to kill her, Eric tells Hanna, though the rest of the plot hardly bears this out and Marissa only knows of Hanna's existence because the latter gets herself deliberately captured. Cue unlikely escape with Hanna making her way up into Spain by stowing away with an English family in a camper van, who would appear to be a rather limp attempt at satire. On the road Hanna befriends Sophie, played by Jesscia Barden reprising her role as the gobby teen from Tamara Drewe, though to less amusing effect.

Meanwhile Hanna is being trailed by a gang of German skins led by Isaacs (Tom Hollander with a blond hairdo and banana-yellow 80s tracksuit), a sub-villain who is little more than a visual effect and whose lackadaisical attempts to take Hanna captive generate the first in a series of tension-free chase scenes.

An indication of just how hard Wright is working to generate interest from this material is the gratuitous campside extempore Flamenco scene he inserts at this point. It's set within a completely mishandled sequence in which Hanna and Sophie set off with some lads from the Andaluz which, in more capable hands, might have provided an opportunity for character development via engaging dialogue.

The action then jumps rather incoherently from southern Spain to Berlin, a German capital that is really only there to tick the post-Bourne thriller box, but which oddly fails to tick its own inner boxes. Where are the sex shops, the graffiti-strewn stairwells and the techno clubs and other clichés that Unknown so lovingly renewed?

Hanna's one USP as a character we might care about is that her isolation in the forests of the arctic circle has left her strangely unacquainted with the modern world, but the writers have only been bothered to explore her attitude to the unaccustomed sensory experience of music and Joe Wright's own contribution is a ludicrously over-egged scene involving electricity.

Saoirse Ronan might have done better to leave this one in the hands of a more self-consciously commercial director...of the sort who might even have eked a franchise out of this unpromising premise.

GRADE: C+

Divine chaos

2011-06-11T15:24:00.003Z

"When at last I had disabused my mind of the enormous imposture of a design, an object, and an end, a purpose or a system, I began to see dimly how much more grandeur, beauty and hope there is in a divine chaos - not chaos in the sense of order or confusion, but simply the absence of order - than there is in a universe made by pattern...Logically, that which has a design or a purpose has a limit. The very idea of a design or purpose has grown repulsive to me on account of its littleness. I do not venture, for a moment, even to attempt to supply a reason to take the place of the exploded plan...I look at the sunshine, and feel that there is no contracted order: there is divine chaos, and, in it, limitless hope and possibilities."

Richard Jeffries

The Immortalisation Commission (Part One)

2011-06-03T18:43:00.007Z

A history in three parts, John Gray's latest book relates how sophisticated humanity has attempted to think its way around the prospect of personal oblivion in the century and a half following Darwin's removal of the glass ceiling, which had been thought to separate mankind from the rest of the beasts.

In the first part, Cross-Correspondences, Gray looks at the Spiritualist movement in Britain, which was the most immediate of his 'rebellions against death'. Unlike the now more familiar response — that if science comes into conflict with personal conviction, there must be something fundamentally wrong with science, darnit — these late Victorian men and women turned to science itself to protect themselves from the most up-to-date conclusions it had to offer.

One of the leading figures in the movement was Henry Sidgwick, who professed that if death really was the end, then the world was truly chaotic and therefore not especially friendly to human values — or rather the specific elite Victorian values which invited him to repress the impulses that conflicted with his sense of duty.

Why would these people care more than we seem to about the existential pain of living in a world where the human mind is a localised after-effect of trajectory of matter? Gray doesn't state this directly, but it does seem to be the case that the likes of Sidgwick and Frederick Myers is that theirs was not a simplistic piety which Darwinism had confounded, instead it was the age-old conflict between morality and self-interest which had seemingly been reinvigorated by On the Origins of Species.

The chaos most feared by Myers was the threat of 'insistent desire', for Myers like Sidgwick and others was a Victorian gentleman of the sexually ambiguous sort. The self Sidgwick wanted to take with him into eternity was clearly an idealised version of himself; in other words the self he had failed to be in life.

Gray goes on to suggest that these intellectuals fitted into a milieu which sought to extend the naturalistic outlook into an invisible world in order to purge itself of its defects as a whole. One of the more bizarre secondary anecdotes in this section of the book is the tale of August Henry Coombe Tennant, conceived in the Biblical sense as part of a planned out-of-wedlock tryst between a medium and one of the leading lights of the Spiritualist clique, and in the cereberal sense as part of a whacko scheme to create a made-to-order messiah who would save humanity from chaos. This attempt to manipulate the afterlife using techniques that called themselves scientific, went by the name of spiritual eugenics.

One of the ironies of Myers's research into the survival of the human personality after death was his realisation that the personalities we exhibit on this side of the grave are far from fixed. Everyday identities are in fact rather fluid impersonations spun off by our primary psychological reality, the 'subliminal self'. And, as Gray notes, if each of us is "no more than a bundle of sensations, egoism may be no more rational than universal benevolence." Myers did however believe that his subliminal self might have access to knowledge beyond the reach of our more chimerical personas.

The notion of the subliminal mind may also help us understand the automatic writings which the Spiritualists practiced as long as their movement persisted. They endlessly poured over these scripts, authored they believed by lost friends and lovers (some of them secret), although it was their own hands holding the pen. The texts reflected a shared high cultural lexicon and were encoded in an outlook which no longer exists, and to some extent never existed, because the human relationships revealed are those of Victorian England "not as it was, but as it imagined itself to be."

This consciously (or subliminally) fictive elite lifestyle, was one where death was understood not as the final calamity at the end of a long struggle against poverty, disease and insecurity, but rather as "a move from one wing of a great country house to another, a shift in which nothing was lost."

You could call this naïve...

2011-06-02T18:04:00.006Z

Take a few moments to savour these hilariously blinkered, paternalistic remarks made by Carole Mallory on The Wrap this week on the topic of Arnie's love-child with Guatemalan home-help Patricia Baena.

"Baena is from Guatemala. Some years ago I lived in Guatemala while shooting a film in Antigua, its major city. The people were the most charming, compliant people I have ever met and largely Indians. You could call them naïve. Baena would have been in awe of her master and could have seen succumbing to his wishes as part of her duty. Clearly he was attracted to her enormous breasts and Guatamalan naiveté, seeing a live-in opportunity to turn her into his sex slave, satisfying his need to dominate women. A Guatemalan woman by nature would have respect for those in charge of the household, both Maria and Arnold.

"She would probably be in awe of Maria Shriver, seeing such respect as her duty. She might well have been torn and conflicted about where her true allegiance belonged. The fact that Arnold's advances —which could have been deemed rape — turned into an affair is understandable, given the power structure of the household. Arnold was her master. Many argue that this is like Thomas Jefferson having an affair with his slave. While Jefferson had six children with one of his slaves, let's rejoice that Arnold was caught after having only one child. Schwarzenegger is no Thomas Jefferson, an otherwise good politician who fathered illegitimate children with a woman who worked in his household."

This knee-jerk respect for the sophisticated foreign master doesn't exactly square with all those reports from the front-line of class conflict that we used to get from Don Marco, does it? Though he did seem to have a thing about breasts. Still, he always gave the impression that he was the mouse and the maids were the mishes.

Los Ojos de Julia (2010)

2011-06-01T14:00:00.007Z

This Catalan chiller which, like 2008's superior El Orfanato, stars Belen Rueda, likewise benefits from Guillermo del Toro using his name as a powerful Spanish cine brand on the poster.

Rueda plays twin sisters Julia and Sara. Both suffer from a progressive deterioration of their eyesight. Julia has 80% of her vision left at the start, but is prone to stress-related attacks which will tend to lop off further fractions.

Meanwhile Sara is already blind during the opening sequence in which we witness what the cops interpret as her suicide by hanging — but then they didn't see that foot kick the stool out from under her.

Julia suspects foul play and is determined to investigate. Husband Iván however appears to want a quiet life, partly because of Julia's known tendency to suffer seizures, and partly because he has copped off with Sara at some point in the past.

Guillem Morales starts off well enough, delivering a highly suspenseful first hour, which successfully suggests much of the mood of supernatural horror, without ever leading us to doubt that Julia's adversary is a man of flesh and blood, albeit one with an uncanny — and plot relevant, though mostly only poetically — ability not to be seen by people he walks right by.

The director might overuse the 'look who's behind you' scare a bit too readily, but there are some implementations of the visually-impaired horror trope I hadn't seen before: such as Julia's eavesdropping on the bitchy conversation of a group of blind women (played almost as undead!) at a social club for the sightless. There's also a creepy neighbour who functions a bit like Christopher Lee in The Resident, i.e. as a rather too obvious red herring.

During this opening sixty minutes Iván is kind of in the way, because he has to keep leaving Julia on her own in order for her to wander into darkened spaces where her failing vision is going to add to her (and our) growing sense of vulnerability. So — spoiler alert — Iván is removed from the scene permanently around the mid-point, yet instead of ramping up the tension, this is really the point at which the movie goes a bit awry.

Morales and co-writer Paulo have to an extent under-exploited their material early on, but have nevertheless managed to keep the tension up nicely enough. With Iván gone, they really let go and we had the sense that too many new or at least suspended narrative ideas were being crammed into the final third. For example, it's as if they suddenly decided to stop showing us the faces of everyone we're supposed to start being suspicious of, such as Julia's ophthalmologist.

And this is a pity, because they really needed to focus on their villain and his own visibility issues in order for the conclusion to be meaningful as well as more than a collection of twists and set-piece frights.

Grade: B+-

Public Enemies (1)

2011-06-01T13:23:00.007Z

I spotted this enticing little volume in Oaxaca in its Spanish translation back in January and decided to hold out for a Kindle/English version. It's been worth the wait...

These two giants/pigmies of the French cultural vanguard/rearguard (delete appropriate to taste) waste no time in establishing their lack of mutual admiration*, except perhaps in as much as they congratulate each other on having dealt rather admirably with not being all that admirable in the first place.

I've just passed the section where Houellebecq speaks movingly of his fear of succumbing to misanthropic apathy, "that bleating sterile sulkiness that makes one hole up in a corner constantly muttering 'arseholes the lot of them' and, quite literally do nothing else." This might not be the "greatest danger" for me, but I recognise the threat nonetheless.

* Addressing Bernard-Henri, Michel waggishly observes that "you dishonour even the white shirts you always wear."

More on Limitless and Surrogates

2011-05-24T13:32:00.005Z

Red wine is my NZT; a couple of glasses and things really do start becoming so much clearer. The trouble is that somewhere between glasses three and four these new powers mysteriously vanish. As noted yesterday, Limitless had me flinching a little at the notion of what I might have achieved already in this life if I had been able to maintain my lucidity levels permanently at the one glass of vino levels.

It also reminded me of another excuse I have for underachievement: I could never sign off on a concept as sloppily concretised as this one was. If an outline idea for a narrative were to occur to me, say one along the lines of Limitless or Surrogates, I'd need to think it all the way through, to make sure there weren't any obvious holes in it and to make sure as well that my story at least attempted to explore all the more interesting implications therein.

Hollywood scriptwriters seem to have collectively opted out of this sense of responsibility / accountability. What exactly does NZT do, for example? Is it improving neural connections, memory, deductive reasoning or all of these things? Eddie can learn a new language in days, but he can also deal with some subway punks simply by accessing his recollections of Bruce Lee movies. Yet no matter how good my visual memory is I'm never going to be able to play tennis like Raffa Nadal just by watching him on court. Nor indeed could Nadal practice his own serve by viewing repeated playbacks under the influence of NZT. These are physical memories, not visual ones.

I imagine that whoever wrote Surrogates might have been hanging out in SL or World of Warcraft one day and thought to himself, what if the avatars were made of metal and latex instead of 0s and 1s? It's not a bad concept, but the plot that has been built around it is so perfunctory that one finds oneself seeking scraps of entertainment behind it in the production design and in the few occasions the director has been left with to showcase the sociological ramifications of the situation.

As for me, I'd have got stuck on the thought that physical avatars would transform a city of 10m individuals into one of 20m.

Limitless (2011)

2011-05-23T14:11:00.007Z

I felt much the same way about Limitless as I felt about Surrogates: here you have an intriguing TV sci-fi concept trapped within a dumb big screen format. It's hard to add much to Roger Ebert's conclusion - that here's a movie about a pill that allows you to access the 'missing' 85% of your brain, that's only really using 15% of its own - but I will add that there were parts of the film that struck me as existentially unsettling. Maybe it's my own nagging sense of under-achievement, or perhaps it was the fact that we never get proper resolution of the rather crucial issue of whether NZT has turned Eddie into a pyschotic killer as well as facilitating his ability to pre-cog the market and hold conversations in Cantonese with the waiters at his local Chinese restaurant. Bradley Cooper seems oddly well cast as Eddie Morra, a bit of a creep both on an off the medication, and emblematic of a movie that seems unsure whether its halcyon presentation of the American Dream is desirable fantasy or disturbing satire.

Grade: B

The 10,000 Year Explosion, How Civilisation Accelerated Human Evolution

2011-05-17T14:36:00.007Z

There is more genetic variation within human groups than between them.

This statement has always struck me as less of a hard scientific truth than a hazard warning, an expedient intellectual Here Be Dragons. Surely it was only a matter of time before the 'controversial' thoughts it was planted to ward off would be being thought again?

Cochran and Harpending appear to give it short shrift. There's a similarly sizeable variation within dog breeds than between them, but does that mean that the differences between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are 'skin deep' too?

Their book sets out to inform us how, far from arriving on an evolutionary plateau, our first modern ancestors to break out from Africa were about to embark on one of the most accelerated phases of human biological change. Through a process of genetic introgression they began by stealing some genes from the European natives, the Neanderthals, an exchange which the pair believe may have kick-started the sudden leap-forward in artistic and technological capabilities which ensued.

Yet it was the advent of agriculture which heralded a whole new set of selection pressures, such as new diets and disease risks. Cochran and Harpender duly map the spread of lactose tolerance to the ascendency of the Proto-Indo-European language and show how new patterns of social organisation favoured alternative heritable psychologies.

So far so credible. Indeed I have a great deal of sympathy for the book's broad analysis, it's just that some of the detailed explanation is at best flimsy and at worst blood-pressure raising. This is a complex web of may haves and could haves, with the occasional must have thrown in for good measure, and one is never quite sure how the dependencies work. In other words, how long a string of may haves is holding up that must have.

We're told that humans who have been growing stuff for longer have had more time to hard code an understanding of the underlying economics into their wetware. So, it's hardly surprising, we're then informed, that 'Amerindians' find it harder to get their heads around the benefits of neo-liberalism when it comes to wealth generation.

Aside from the gobsmacking political bias behind this little hypothesis, everything we know about the Maya surely gives the lie to any notion that America's indigenes are somehow congenitally soft-headed when it comes to numbers. The Maya might have domesticated corn rather later than Europe's classical cultures had access to wheat, but it was the Romans, ingenious as they were, who had to make do without a zero, wasn't it?

I take no issue with the data showing that Jews of European origin win more Nobel prizes and score higher in IQ tests than any other distinct group of people on the planet. But Cochran and Harpender's explanation for how this state of affairs might have come about is also neither quite good science nor good history.

Yes, the Ashkenazim were a closed community forced by their host culture to specialise in finance and management. But how exactly would the selection pressure have worked in practice? Unless the less brainy Jews were somehow more prone to die off before marriage, or indeed were comparatively less likely to marry, then the whole process would depend on the cleverer sort having more children than both the intellectually-mediocre and outright dumb, something which we know to be generally counter-factual from contemporary research. (It also rather depends on intelligence being something that is passed down the male line only!)

And as ever with these retrospective arguments from natural selection, I can all too easily concoct an alternative model of my own: in the middle ages Christian education was controlled by the Church and the most promising pupils would naturally have been siphoned off into a profession which would (mostly) take them out of the procreation business. So instead of the Jews getting smarter, the rest of Europe was steadily becoming thicker!

Anyway, as ever the real problem here is the term Evolution itself. We might be able to move beyond seeing Great Danes and Chihuahuas as only superficially different, but which one is more evolved? While Cochran and Harpender are surely right to question the conventional wisdom of human evolutionary stasis, can we really say that the various detectable adaptations to the multiplicity of different environments that human beings have taken up residence within over the course of the last 10,000 years, are qualitatively the same thing as the series of species transformations which occurred before the emergence from Africa?

Super Mario

2011-05-14T14:30:00.004Z

It's Cup Final Saturday and more than three times the population of Antigua Guatemala is right now seated inside Wembley stadium. Stoke are playing tight in the first half, obliging several Manchester City players to try their luck from long range.

One of these is the notoriously petulant Italian Mario Balotelli, he of the inflated ego and white Maserati. In September last year he was at the wheel of his other car, an Audi R8, when he was involved in a minor accident. Police at the scene were somewhat intrigued by the discovery that the footballer was carrying 6000 Euros on his person. Balotelli's explanation? "Because I'm rich."

Perhaps Super Mario keeps a big wad of cash in his pocket to satisfy a need to perform random acts of generosity. For it was only recently that he handed a homeless man one thousand pounds outside a casino.

Last week Balotelli's social work was in the news again. When asked for an autograph by a young fan outside City's training ground, he in turn asked the lad why he wasn't in school. Upon learning that a bully was making formal education a living nightmare for the autograph-hunter, Balotelli drove him and his mother to the school, where he set up a face to face confrontation with the headteacher and the alleged bully. Handshakes of conciliation were effected and Balotelli climbed back into his Maserati and drove off.

Born to Ghanaian immigrants Balotelli was given up to foster care as a young boy. Now his parents want him back. Balotelli's explanation? "Because I'm rich."