Traveller's Dilemma

The Scientific American has an interesting article this week about the Traveller's Dilemma, a peculiar game theory scenario in which real live humans don't appear to opt for the path of rational self(ish) interest after all. (It is set up so that they should logically tumble down a staircase of backward induction to reach the Nash Equilibrium, which in this case the lowest value on offer.)

The piece's author Kaushik Basu asks if altruism might be hardwired into our minds after all. "Altruism, socialisation and faulty reasoning guide most individual's choices" and "What is interesting is that the rejection of formal rationality and logic has a kind of meta-rationality to it."

Hmm, maybe, but I'd still wager you'd get different results if you played the game in different cultural contexts. Might try it out on a couple of likely-looking chapines next time I'm out there.

The Time Machine

The bits that most impressed themselves on my young mind when I first saw this movie were those that George Pal added to Wells's tale; in particular the stops that the traveler makes in the early part of the 2oth century.

65 years of hindsight and global conflict made these scenes possible, and it serves to remind us how sure that generation was that humanity's final destruction was most probably just around the corner. They had a far less limp-wristed apocalypse in mind too: global warming of the most intense kind.

Re-watching the movie many years later and having recently read the book, I cannot but regret some of the creative decisions that Pal had to take to turn it into a 50s-style sci-fi adventure. The sting of Wells's vision of our posterity as over-specialised Underworld and Overworld beings evolved in turn from the men of labour and luxury has to a large extent been taken out. Weena survives, the Morlocks get genocided, and George himself becomes an uncomplicated man of action that ends up devoting his life to rebuilding the future he's just destabilised.

In contrast, in the world that H.G. Well began writing in, the imminent catastrophe facing mankind was perceived as a social one and needed fixing in the present. His Time Traveller is a more nuanced personality, with some important contradictions. "The fact is that the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt you saw all around him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness." I've known a couple of individuals like this...

The DVD has a fun little documentary made in the 90s which charts the checkered history of the time machine prop itself.

Suzanne's guitar

That little video of Chilean agit prop on the grid prompted me to see what else I could find on YouTube. Well, there's this cool little clip showing how Suzanne Vega's SL guitar was made. Below it there's another one showing her avatar 'singing' Tom's Diner live. Interview is skippable.

Death Line (a.k.a. Raw Meat)

You could drive a District Line train through the holes in the plot, but no matter, Death Line from 1972 features an excellent performance from Donald Pleasance, a bizarre cameo from Christopher Lee and plenty of seventies Tube nostalgia.

The basic idea is that a bunch of tunnelers became trapped underground near the old abandoned British Museum station in 1892, and after five generations of eating each other and the occasional unfortunate last-train passenger at Russell Square, the police finally take notice when a perv with a bowler hat and an OBE goes missing.

After his girfriend dies in childbirth there is only one of these unpleasant subterranean cannibals left: 'The Man', whose torrents of sticky dribble reminded me of Alien. When he gets really worked up he screeches "Mind the Doors", a gag that will be somewhat lost on Londoners young enough not to remember tube trains with conductors.

Experiencing gremlins in Second Life?

La Cumbia del Mole

Media-Mixteca Lila Downs canta con su voz hosca La Cumbia del Mole.



Mole...aaah.

Travesuras de la niña mala

Vargas Llosa's apparent lack of an out-and-out masterpiece may in part account for his failure thus far to secure for himself the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Yet the buzz of admiration I felt for this work the moment I had turned the last page, led me to briefly consider whether it could edge it for him.

Then I reflected back on the rather clichéd tours of Lima, Paris, London, Tokyo and Madrid, the workaday accounts of the relevant political and cultural goings on across three decades, and the rather uninspired collection of secondary cast members.

No, this is perhaps no masterpiece, but whilst acknowledging that readers with a markedly different romantic education to my own will possibly not find this apparently light novel as moving as I did, I'd say that the unusual love story at the heart of it is one of the subtlest, most perceptive studies to emerge from the Peruvian author's imagination over the course of his long career.

It's as if there are two channels within this narrative: one in which the author was working at the height of his powers and another in which he was on autopilot. (Oddly enough many of his novels have a more explicit two-tone structure, with the chapters toing and froing between alternative perspectives.)

Unlike that difficult fictional symphony Conversation in the Cathedral, this story of love at cross purposes saunters off unpretentiously from the first page at the buoyant compas of a Pérez Prado mambo. Plot-wise there isn't much to it. Ricardo recounts the various stages of an interpretor-translator's life lived in five different capitals, relieved of mediocrity only by its repeated intersections with the biography of his miscreant lover.

It was a story that was always going to be hard to end, and Vargas Llosa does rather well in the circumstances. It struck me quite early on that it would be fun to adapt this for the screen, yet how much of the subtlety of this narrative would be lost in the third person, so to speak? The narrator Ricardo is to a large extent a foil for la niña mala. If we can't directly witness the effect she had on his mind, his character will lose a good deal of definition.

Whatever my misgivings this is a very good novel indeed, and la niña mala could well be one of the better female characters in contemporary fiction. Compared to nineteenth century archetypes like Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, the cleverness of Vargas Llosa's compact rendition of this audacious Peruvian woman lies in what has been omitted. And if you take the time to fill in the gaps the lively beat does eventually give way to a haunting bolero.

Dodgy sarnies

Handing out ham sandwiches at political rallies is a common practice in Guatemala that some fussy folk have equated with vote-buying. Well, current poll-leader Álvaro Colom may be down at least 120 votes after that number of erstwhile supporters attending the UNE party meeting last weekend had to be treated for food poisoning afterwards.

Axiom or theorem?

Mathmatician Christian Calude has (quite cunnigly) asked "Is the existence of God an axiom or a theorem?"

It's the axiomatics that most seem to bother Richard Dawkins: "I do think that intelligent, sophisticated theologians are almost totally irrelvant to the phenomenon of religion in the world today...because they're outnumbered by vast hordes of religious idiots."

Yet does his belief that the non-existence of God is self-evident make him a bit of an axiomatic himself; an irreligious idiot?

Ruth Gledhill, the Times Religion Correspondent appears to have teased out the closet Pantheist in Professor Dawkins by chucking rather duplicitous vocab like numinous and transcendent at him.

"There is something our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly," he eventually volunteered. (Note though - Gledhill herself doesn't - that Dawkins does not mean by this something that one is obliged to worship.)

Ultimately the difference between Richard Dawkins's 'something' and the faith-heads' God is explanation. If Dawkins found God, he'd expect to understand Him, using step-by-step logic. (I'm being careful to capitalise here in case sic-os like Bill O'Reilly get on my case. See below.)

Trouble is, thanks to Gödel's incompleteness, Turing's incomputability and Heisenberg's uncertainty, we are already able to appreciate the likely role of the inexplicable in the fundamental fabric of our cosmic environment. God may not be compressible into His component axioms after all.

Anyway, when it comes to Science and Religion, it strikes me that there are essentially three positions that it is sensible to espouse (other than Gould's fence-sitting separate magesteria cop-out):

1) Current scientific theory and religion cannot be reconciled. Dawkins hints at this strongly but cannot prove it, and so ends up resorting to fundamentalist-type reasoning himself.

2) Current scientific theory can be reconciled with some sort of omnipotent, omniscient being, though perhaps not the the one described in the New and Old Testaments and the Koran.

3) Current scientific theory is wrong in as much as it disagrees with a literal interpretation of scripture.

A possible fourth position, that current scientific theory can be reconciled with pilars of stone, virgin births etc is not one that intelligent believers appear genuinely comfortable with, and as a result they will immediately drift into pantheistic sophisms the moment the subject comes up.

Cosmic smog

Attention all electro-sensitives! My suspicion that it is only a matter of time before we are told that the Big Bang - history's greatest wi-fi hot spot - can be seriously damaging to our health, has been bolstered today by following the heated exchanges heralding Panorama's investigation into the wi-fi 'smog' in our schools. Indeed a commenter on the Guardian Technology Blog has pointed out that the Cosmic Background Radiation from the Big Bang operates at the same 12cm wavelength as your average wi-fi router.

Update: The evidence that Panorama presents wantonly confuses the issue of the radiation emitted by mobile phones and that emitted by mobile phone masts. Indeed, the unusually high level of bollocks emitted by this documentary has in some ways spoiled my enjoyment of last week's exposé of Scientology.

"Some of these are run by a company called...the cloud". (You'd almost think it was all a bit tongue in cheek...but it isn't.)

Quoting Ian Betteridge (Technovia): "Professor Johansson doesn’t’ know the difference between high-frequency ionizing radiation - things like gamma rays emitted by a nuclear bomb - and non-ionizing radiation like radio waves..."

And Dr Michael Clark, of the Health Protection Agency: "When we have conducted measurements in schools, typical exposures from wi-fi are around 20 millionths of the international guideline levels of exposure to radiation. As a comparison, a child on a mobile phone receives up to 50 per cent of guideline levels. So a year sitting in a classroom near a wireless network is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes on a mobile. If wi-fi should be taken out of schools, then the mobile phone network should be shut down, too — and FM radio and TV, as the strength of their signals is similar to that from wi-fi in classrooms."

There's got to be a case for shutting Panorama down after this blatant piece of scare-mongering.

Transantiago torched in SL

Since February residents of Santiago Chile have had a new urban transport network called Transantiago , which sounds a bit like Guatemala City's new Bus Rapid Transport system known as the Transmetro....except that it's even less popular with its intended passengers.

Chilean activists decided to organise a protest in Second Life. They began by constructing the appropriate environment, a model of the national palace (famously bombed in 1973 with Salvador Allende inside it) and then gathered en masse to make their feelings felt.

As with all such protests, some just waved placards and 'shouted' a lot, whilst others converted themselves into flames and torched the virtual bus that was parked in front of the virtual seat of government. A minority just took off their clothes. Nobody had thought to organise the the virtual riot squad with tear gas and watercannon.

Many complained of getting "stucked": the idea had been to protest in such a way as to avoid paralysing the streets of Chile's capital, but the sheer quantity of avatar-activists meant that they instead rapidly paralysed the SL grid, with the inevitable loss of user experience.

mSpace

I was struggling to appreciate the coolness of Southampton University's new experimental search engine until I realised that you could move the three category boxes at the top around, as well as adding extra ones from the list on the menu above. The developers call this interface trick sorting and slicing.

Jin and his daughter Cherry

Murder by numbers

My mother watched a programme the other night about a gay couple trying to adopt a child in Guatemala that must have ticked most of her prejudice boxes. She triumphantly announced to me afterwards that the programme makers had described Guatemala as "the most dangerous place in the world".

Last year 5885 people died violently in Guatemala, and 98% of these murders remain 'unsolved'. That makes 19 a day, the highest rate in all Latin America.

But does that make Guatemala City comparably dangerous to cities like Baghdad? Even if the statisticians told me that the murder rate was around 20 a day in both the Iraqi capital and Guatemala City, I know which one of the two environments would feel more dangerous to me personally.

What about of hunter-gatherer communities, many of which have a much higher murder rate than industrial societies, where self-murder is usually higher up the exit list? Outsiders often look upon these 'traditional' ways of life as an approximation to paradise/utopia, yet their violent-death statistics are highly revealing.

Federer wins!

Roger Federer has finally managed to beat Rafa Nadal on clay, ending the Spaniard's 81 match winning streak on the surface which dated back to April 2005. The doubters have been circling around Federer since the start of the Spring, and in the first set he played as if he couldn't keep his eyes from drifting up to them. But then suddently he rediscovered his invincibility and ended up taking the third set 6-0. Roll on Roland Garros!

The bells, the bells

Mexico City's Zócalo has some of the clankiest cathedral bells I've ever heard.

The cathedral of Toledo on which this one was partially modelled, lacks this kind of wide open space in front of it. Over there I've observed Japanese tourists desperately backing up into the narrow corner about 30 yards and 30 degress from the façade where it is just about possible to take a pic with a compact camera that encompasses the whole of it.

By contrast the architects of New Spain might be said to have overdone the expansiveness of Mexico's Plaza de la Constitución. (Though the whole point might have been the flattening of the Mexica/Aztec structures that they had found there.)

The cathedral was consecrated while still incomplete in 1667 and the two bell towers and the central dome designed by Manuel Tolsa were eventually finished in 1813. The adjoining Sagrario, which serves as a parish church for the area, was constructed with the local tezontle stone in the 1700s and features a Churrigueresque façade, a style of stucco decoration popular in Iberia between 1600 and 1750.

Aside from Toledo, other famous examples are the charterhouse of Granada and Santiago de Compostella.

Churro de la Chingada

A velación is an evening when Guatemalans are supposed to visit their local church to pay their respects to their religious idols before they get carted around town in formal procession. In fact what happens is that most of them make it to just outside the church, where they proceed to stuff their faces with seasonal snack-foods, such as buñuelos, churros, tostadas etc and wait for someone they know to turn up.

A few years ago one entrepreneurial soul in Antigua had the bright idea of going to Domino's and buying loads of pizzas which he then sold at a profit (per slice) at the velaciónes leading up to Semana Santa. Domino's realised they were missing a trick, so now each time street food sellers gather you can spot their branded sun-shade and the bloke with the blue baseball cap beneath it selling vast quantities of offical Domnino's pizza which I guess, in spite of the din of generators, has to be more eco-friendly snack, because it cuts out the man on the motorbike.

The typical Guatemalan churro is a doughy, coiled serpent whose habitat is stygian re-re-cooked oil, and is to my mind is nowhere near as yummy as its Andaluz equivalent, ideally consumed with dense hot chocolate in a cafe in Sevilla.

The Rebel Sell (2)

Some more juicy arguments from Heath and Potter's book.

1) You can't fight consumerism simply by consuming less (or indeed by changing your own consciousness).

As everything you earn gets spent one way or another, the only sure way to downshift your contribution to consumerism is to earn less. When you put your money in the bank instead of spending it on goods you have deciced you don't need, that simply frees up someone else to spend it on your behalf.

[This one is OK as far as it goes, but it's always been clear to me that although your average Guatemalan enjoys a trip to the market as much as anyone else, there is generally more to their individuality than how they define themselves as buyers. ]

2) Engaging in 'virtuous activities' is one of the major psychological devices that consumers use to grant themselves permission to overspend.

Most of the lifestyles that are commonly promoted as anti-consumerist play a significant role in promoting competitive consumption.

"In the last forty years anti-materialist values have been one of the biggest cash cows of American consumer capitalism." Organic food for instance, is labour intensive and is "one of the major forces driving the return to an almost aristocratic class structure in the United States, in which the wealthy no longer eat the same food as the poor."

3) Rebellion against aesthetic and sartorial norms is not actually subversive.

"Whether people have piercings and tattoos, what kind of clothes they wear, what music they listen to simply does not matter from the standpoint of the capitalist system. Corporations are fundamentally neutral when it comes to gray flannel suits and biker jackets."

and "How many more decades will it take before we realise that nuns who say 'fuck' are not radical, they are simply entertainment?"

4) Undergound/Cool taste inevitably drifts towards stuff that sucks (i.e stuff that is increasingly difficult for the mainstream to co-opt).

"In an effort to avoid the tyrrany of mass society the rebel increasingly finds himself in a half-empty bar listening to music that he himself acknowledges to be 'annoying', feeling superior to the poseurs."

[Yet surely not all refined taste can be dismissed as higher-order posing? There are real issues of quality at stake here. There really is a lot of dross in the mainstream so one's motives for admiring things outside of it are not always insincerely 'elitist'. When I first started listening to classical music I liked the Bruch violin concerto. I still do, it's a high-quality mainstream piece, but over the years I have also come to enjoy less accessible compositions.

The accessibility of some types of art is something you have to work on, but these are personal tastes: I don't force myself to listen to ugly music in order to feel superior to the vulgar masses.

And whilst I will grant that there is a persistent taint of status-seeking dishonesty in the production and consumption of all experimental art, it also remains the driving force of innovation in our culture. Beethoven's late quartets must have sounded very 'underground' in their own day.]

and lastly, 5) The point at which rebellion becomes genuinely disruptive generally coincides with the point at which it becomes genuinely anti-social. And then you're not so much being a rebel as being a nuisance.

Did it drop?

Biofuels driving up the price of corn

The Mesoamerican Food Security Early Warning System (MFEWS) has alerted that high corn prices and shortages will affect lower-income families in Guatemala from June to August, a time when the second harvest of the year has not even begun.

The cause is cited as the demand for ethanol production in the States, which has pushed the price of a bushel of corn from $4 to $8. Ethanol producers have consumed 86 million metric tons, 5 million over the figure originally projected. Rather than importing ethanol from Guatemala where it can be more efficiently produced from sugar, the good people of states like Iowa are obstinately trying to go it alone.

Local grain prices in Guatemala are also increasing, and as many farmers believe this is a trend that will continue, they are making substantial purchases of animal fodder, which may further affect the price and availability of corn for human consumption.

La Incondicional

In the Autumn of 1989, shortly before V's nieces introduced me to her, I was living in their house in Antigua. Over breakfast they liked to tune the FM dial to La Feminina and turn up the volume. Every half hour or so this particular track came round and the youngest of the sisters Wendy (then just 9) used to enjoy tormenting me with it, thrusting her index finger towards a point midway between my eyes with every plaintive tuuuuu belted out by Luis Miguel.

The director of this video had obviously fully assimilated the gay vibe from Top Gun.

You have to be glad that Luis heads straight for the barbers.

Race to the Bottom

In The Rebel Sell, Heath and Potter heap scorn on Michael Moore's contention that gun control laws alone will not solve America's mass-killings problem. Instead they assert that a simple change in the rules rather than a cultural transformation will do the trick.

Yet I'm not at all sure that the role of culture in collective behaviours can be that easily dismissed. I've seen plenty of circumstantial evidence that certain types of individual personality types − and indeed some cultures − are more prone to engage in collectively self-defeating activities (such as private gun ownership) than others.

Take the question I have been asked many times recently. What is the cause of the escalating violence in Guatemala? When it comes to "root causes" the usual suspects are very much in evidence, poverty, inequality etc. And there's the much-mentioned, still-looming spectre of the thirty-year civil war. Yet it's hard to cook up a complete explanation using these standard ingredients. There must be cultural sauce that needs to be added at the end.

If there is a race to the bottom being held somewhere, Guatemalans are liable to sign-up to take part. The urge to distrust is a seemingly unavoidable part of chapin culture. Few would recognise the sort of situation where your centrally-casted Englishman would pause to give someone the benefit of the doubt, even if that involves unilaterally dropping his natural defences against exploitation.

Taken in the aggregate Brits and Guatemalans are rather obviously running alternative versions of John Locke's social contract software in their heads, regardless of the basic rules, which in some cases (such as how to respond to each of the three colours on traffic lights) are essentially the same everywhere. It would be a serious mistake I feel, to presume that the relationship between culture and institutions can be characterised by an unfluctuating directionality.

So when Michael Moore talks of a "culture of fear" in the US, he may just be on to something. (I recently suggested that a similar trait might be part of the explanation for the exaggerated religious credulity in the US.)

Rationality is never a level playing field.

Junto a mi chucho espiando horizontes

Miguel Bosé has recently released a new version of his classic Si tu no vuelves, this time round a collaboration with the shockingly talented Shakira.

Not sure about this one; it seems to lack the relentless emotion of the original. But it is growing on me.

This unofficial-looking video certainly doesn't know where it's going symbolically, starting off with bull-fighters and ending up with Shakira doing an impression of a giant moth.

Bosé himself is the son of the the legendary bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín and the Italian actress Lucia Bosé.



Compare and contrast the '93 original here:



And this one by Mexican pair Chetes and Amaral:



It's one of those ballads of overwrought Latin sentiment, the introverted poetry of which is hard to capture in video. It's a nice piece of music, but the power lies in the lyrics.

Si tú no vuelves
se secarán todos los mares
y esperaré sin ti
tapiado al fondo de algún recuerdo
Si tú no vuelves
mi voluntad se hará pequeña...
y quedaré aquí
junto a mi perro espiando horizóntes
Si tú no vuelves
no quedarán más que desiertos
y escucharé por sí
algún latido le queda a esta tierra
que era tan serena cuando me querías
había un perfume fresco que yo respiraba
era tan bonita, era así de grande
y no tenía fin...
Y cada noche vendrá una estrella
a hacerme compañía
que te cuente como estoy
y sepas lo que hay.
Dime amor, amor, amor
estoy aquí ¿no ves?
Si no vuelves no habrá vida
no sé lo que haré
Si tú no vuelves
ni habrá esperanza ni habrá nada
Caminaré sin ti
con mi tristeza bebiendo lluvia
que era tan serena cuando me querías
había un perfume fresco que yo respiraba
era tan bonita, era así de grande
y no tenía fin...
Y cada noche vendrá una estrella
a hacerme compañía
que te cuente como estoy
y sepas lo que hay.
Dime amor, amor, amor
estoy aquí ¿no ves?
Si no vuelves no habrá vida
no sé lo que haré
Y cada noche vendrá una estrella
a hacerme compañía
que te cuente como estoy
y sepas lo que hay.
Dime amor, amor, amor
estoy aquí ¿no ves?
Si no vuelves no habrá vida
no sé lo que haré

Random News

In fifteen minutes you will still be wondering...whether anything more interesting is happening in the world today than the disappearance of a four-year-old in 'Prayer de Louche'.

Of course the most interesting issue surrounding the conflict in Iraq remains whether Prince Harry should be allowed to go and take part in it. A former colleague of mine, Colonel 'Bosnia' Bob Stewart DSO, was on BBC Breakfast this morning and it looked like he'd had one too many espressos before going into his debate with John Nichol on this all-important military issue. Barking out the reasons for his apparent u-turn since his previous appearance on the comfy sofa, he appeared to want to drag everyone's blood-pressure levels up with his own.

In an unusual break from the inexorable build-up to the mass public grief event still to come, Sky News invited James Whale on last weekend to review the papers. There were more worried looks on the faces of the anchor-folk as Whale went off script a bit. "Do you want to know my opinion? Well, I'll tell you my opinion..." And that was that all male children should be reversibly sterilised and forced to apply as adults for a breeding license.

Whale's Wikipedia entry informs us that "James is an honorary bishop in the Ralian religion, he is not afraid to mension this on air, on 14th May 2007 James said "I am an honorary bishop in the Ralian religion".

Penguins in bed

There's a version of Ricardo Arjona's video for Pinguinos en la Cama in which the Guatemalan cantautor is accompanied by the Argentine model Emilia Attias. Then there's this one, where the song becomes a duet with Argentine-born Chenoa.

Bangs for your buck

Marcus Chown (many thanks for your comment on my earlier post!) references Douglas Adams's remark about parallel universes being neither parallel nor universes, which reminded me that there's a similar quote out there about the Big Bang being neither big nor indeed a bang.

Indeed it seems it wasn't so much an explosion of stuff into space as a rapid expansion of space and time, which just happened to have stuff it it. If we could take an escalator up to the next dimension in order to watch the expansion of our 3D universe, it would appear like the inflating 2D surface of a balloon. It's no doubt a very important event in the history of our local universe, but it may just be that, a local event, and it almost certainly wasn't the first thing that ever happened.

Scientists used to argue about whether gravity would eventually regain the upper hand and our universe would reach the end of the tape and start rewinding all the way back to a Big Crunch. There's a chapter in The Never-ending Days of Being Dead entitled Yo Yo Universe (the Spanish translation is interesting) that explores the ideas of Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, whose cyclic model of how the universe swells, shows how Big Bangs might be able to keep on repeating like Groundhog Day, without the need for a radical contraction of all the matter the universe contains.

I've just finished the chapter after that, Keeping it Real, in which Marus Chown points out that although most scientists habitually only fret about reconciling General Relativity and Quantum Theory in the long past cosmological era when things could be both tiny and massive, the truth is that all the atoms in our bodies (and all other macroscopic objects) are at this very moment behaving weirdly, regardless of our own constant efforts to appear normal.

Which means that Quantum Theory is truly not just a description of the properties of really titchy stuff like elementary particles, but instead a fundamental description of the 'reality' that we ourselves really only experience as a result of an effect of an effect of whatever ultimate reality there might be out there.

We can never directly experience the indeterminate world, because there are simply too many atoms in our immediate vicinity; conditions in which the wave function, which we can witness only as an interference pattern, decoheres within around a ten millionth trillionth of a second. But a being able to somehow isolate itself from all the particles around it, could be in two places at once, no trouble.

Que seas feliz feliz feliz

A bit more Hacienda-chic from Luis Miguel, el sol de México. Notice how he walks up to the chica with the corset and Maria Callas eyeliner and dips his head seductively like Horatio Caine from CSI:Miami. Forgot the shades though.

Le Chevalier Tempête / Los Plateados

When I was a boy, Saturday mornings were often livened up by a French-made serial called Le Chevalier Tempête which the BBC re-fashioned (and along the way made a whole lot sillier) as The Flashing Blade.

Interestingly, they never got round to dubbing and broadcasting the final episode. It is something of an epilogue, but unless you've seen it you won't realise that a) one of the lead characters doesn't die in the final battle and b) the French version was actually intended as serious drama.

The general idea was that in 1630 the nasty pointy-bearded Spaniards were beseiging the unlaundered French defenders of Casal, a fort in Italy...but the historical geo-politics escaped us.

Perhaps the best thing about this show was its opening title sequence. It gives you a pretty good idea what the appeal of it was to the immature male imagination.



Ditto, the opening titles of much more recent Mexican telenovela Los Plateados.

One can never underestimate the importance of a cheesey theme song.

Data Visualisation

From Mashable's 16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools, I have picked my favourites:

Walk2Web, Quintura and especially Kartoo look like they have taken visualised search to levels that I will now find genuinely useful in my professional life. In each case the interface will take a bit of getting used to, so I'd expect to be using them as accessories to our existing methods, for the time being at least.

They will certainly help us to quickly grasp the nature and extent of the connections between the topics (and the websites) that are the subjects of our search asignments. They are bound to be a source of 'free' ideas too.

Fidg't's Visualizer can also provide handy insights into how online social ties are reflected in user-generated content production and consumption behaviours.

The Rebel Sell (1)

Don't get me wrong, I'm really enjoying this book and I am sympathetic to its project of debunking countercultural rebellion.

Indeed I remember thinking at Cambridge that the biggest conformists of all were the members of the various rebel subcultures.

I also appreciate the key distinction Heath and Potter make between dissent and deviance: that the dissenter would re-set the rules for everyone, not selfishly for himself alone like the deviant.

And I feel I have a certain special perspective on this issue: one home with hand-made furniture and another with largely mass-produced stuff. One foot in a country where people will unquestioningly form an orderly queue and stop at traffic lights during the night, and the other foot in well, Guatemala.

But there are arguments deployed here that are not as secure as they might initially seem, and although I'm not even half way through the text, my need to quibble is quite urgent.

1) If consumerism were all about conformism, why is the desire to stand-out its primary driving force?

This does seem like a compelling hippie-slammer, but it's really just a restatement of the contradiction at the heart of American society. How can the world's most individualistic nation also be the world's most herd-like?

In my book, when you come across a contradiction like this you should celebrate it, rather than try to make it go away, for it may be telling you something interesting about the world.

2) The engine of consumerism is a 'mass-action problem' similar to the prisoner's dilemma, such that a good number of people that buy 4-wheel drives do so defensively, in order to protect themselves from the other people on the road with a propensity to crash into them and kill their children.

This trouble here is really the perennial economists' tendency to regard all consumers as equally rational agents operating on a level playing field. It's based on a rather simplistic version of game theory. But there are different base mixes of personality types in different societies, and alternative cultural responses to the fundamental dilemma. For instance, I've said many times before that what most strikes me about Guatemalans' response to these so-called mass action problems is their willingness to screw their compatriots even when they apparently seem to know that it is not in their best, rational interests to do so. And then there are the stupid people. (Scott Adams's Induhviduals)

3) Social status is subject to diminishing marginal utility so that the less you have of it the more you are willing to pay for it.

So, the plebs end up spending more on status-enhancing gear than us inherently classier folk. This hypothesis, lifted from Thorstein Veblen, is fine on paper. But what of the boxer from the slums that suddenly makes his millions, sees his status surge, yet can't help continuing to spend money as if it is going out of fashion? His race to the bottom has become a solo journey. Some people are not only keeping up with the Joneses, they are trying to blast themselves clear of their own humble upbringings.

4) Once GDP per capita reaches $10,000, further economic growth generates no gains in happiness. With the abundance of stuff in our lives, how come we aren't more satisfied?

Those econonists again, failing to realise that their rational agents are getting older. Societies with lower GDP per capita see less economic and social change in the course of their citizens' reduced life-spans. Societies where income increases significantly over the space of a generation are likley to feature unhappier late-middle-aged people. (And yet societies, like Guatemala, where the generations stick together more, are perhaps less prone to this downer effect. )

I don't have an answer to the dilemma in 1). But consider the case of the soldier in war. His existence is driven by both intense, aggressive competition and an unquestioning conformity to a set of values, both local to his unit, and national to his political identity and the system which created the conflict he finds himself embroiled in.

So, lots to think about. More soon.

28 Weeks Later

If you wanted to rebuild British civilisation London E14 wouldn't be the most obvious seeding point, but hey, it's my own neighbourhood, so I just had to go and see this entertaining sequel to 28 Days Later.

And so I had the pleasure last night of watching Canary Wharf (and by implication the cinema I was in) getting so badly bombed by the USAF that the resulting fireball surges all the way down the Greenwich Foot Tunnel and lights up the face of the statue of General James Wolfe which overlooks the Isle of Dogs from its high vantage point across the Thames.

In some ways Poplar was the ideal location as it really does look that grimy and apocalyptic almost every morning. All they had to do was shoo away the resident zombies (more the shuffling sort) for that realistic forsaken inner city look.

Alex Garland freely admits that his original concept was inspired by John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. Garland and Boyle have stepped aside here to allow Canary Islander Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, director of the excellent Intacto, to move us on to the period twenty-eight weeks after Cillian Murphy had traversed a deserted Westminster Bridge, a time when the rage virus appears to have spent itself out and an American-led expeditionary force is trying to repopulate London from within a secure 'Green Zone'. (The political subtext is obvious without being especially informative.) The Yanks have orders to go code red if the sickness resurges (or in-surges!) within the protected area, which of course it does.

The rage-plaguers defy the rule that says that sick people are debilitated. Turbo Zombies is how Paul Arendt has described them, while Mark Kermode, an acknowledged authority on the subject, insists that they can't be proper zombies because they don't actually die before the sudden change in their dietary habits. Fresnadillo handles the transformation of a leading character into one of these ultra-peckish types very well, but for most of the movie they seem to be moving too fast for him and his camera to keep up with them.

Aside from the camera jitter, the film's other faults include the fact that the occupying Americans are massively under-staffed compared to say one of Zhang Yimou's Chinese hordes and the general lack of character development, but in spite of all that I really enjoyed it, perhaps even more so than the obviously subtler and smarter original.

It also features the ever lovely-but-doomed Rose Byrne. There's a sad quality to her beauty which has resulted in her being consistently hired to play characters whose destinies don't work out especially well. (And as it was in Sunshine, her final moments here are rather hard to track.)

You gotta fight for your right...to party

Some arsehole obviously thought it would be a really good wheeze to throw a corporate 'communist party' on the The Silver Sturgeon last week. Convention dictates that we find this less offensive than the Nazi Reichskriegsflagge. But tot up the number of lives ruined by both systems and it's more or less even-steven.

I'm sure this image would resonate nicely with Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, authors of The Rebel Sell: How the counterculture became consumer culture, which I will be reviewing shortly.

Darkness

This was Jaume Balagueró's follow-up to Los Sin Nombre, using Hollywood-based actors and funding, and it's definitely more derivative drag than thrill-filled homage!

The Shining gets the rip-off treatment more than any other precursor, but Balagueró is also revisiting the conceit of his earlier film: that pure evil can be conjured out of medical-occult experiments involving domestic murder.

Here though he has failed to create characters we can really care about, or to put them in situations that are genuinely chilling.

The performances of the non-anglophone actors are especially stiff, and it's clear that the script was also put together by men with a late-learned grasp of English.

Señor Matanza

One of my favourite videos of all time, featuring a young-looking Manu Chao, then front man for his band Mano Negra. (Worth watching through to the end!)



"Ese federal, ese chivato y ese sapo, el sindicato
y el obispo, el general son propriedad
del Señor Matanza"

On oublie tout, on devient fou

It's Eurovision night. Which reminds me that TC and I have recently been trying to trump each other with cheesey Latin tunes sung by operatic tenors. She started it with Aquellos Ojos Verdes and Méjico Lindo (y Querido) sung by the Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez. But I reckon this little number by Roberto Alagna is frankly unanswerable.

Alagna had a much-reported hissy fit at La Scala last December, storming off stage during a performance of Aida when he was booed by the loggione. The conductor here looks like he might be a bit more tolerant of that sort of behaviour than Franco Zeffirelli was in Milan.

Ay cabrones, get ready to boo...

Y caduque en la muerte

There's a whole generation of men in La Antigua Guatemala who claim to have played basketball on the courts of Jocotenenango with the city's most famous, Grammy-winning son.

Mojado (Wetback) :

El Blaxicano ve te cuelga jeta

El rapeo chicano at it's best: La Receta from Kemo the Blaxican.
Video's a bit messed up though!

A nation of shopkeepers?

The Independent has dug up some of the ironies of the recent French Presidential election. Ségo, widely seen as the candidate of the past, was supported by a far greater number of young people than Sarko, whose typical voter was a male shopkeeper in his sixties in a rural town in eastern or southern France.

Fram

I got stuck behind this 8-decked Norwegian ship, the MS Fram, on the way into work this morning. (These penguins were not waddling along the banks of the Thames; I just didn't have my digital camera with me.)

The Silver Sturgeon was hogging the overtaking lane so to speak, so the Riverbus had to chug along in the wake of this 2007-model liner from Narvik, which is no doubt accustomed to moving very cautiously along its local coastline.

Lost interest yet?

In a move that was possibly designed to be heartening, the makers of Lost have announced that there will be three more full seasons before the series closes out in 2010. (I'm one of the saddos that hasn't missed a single episode.)

This news led me to suspect that many of the approximations to sense achieved over the course of Season Three have in fact been false dawns, but Wednesday night's show, The Man Behind the Curtain, was certainly a biggie, drawing in an extra 1m viewers stateside. It featured the long-awaited back-story of bug-eyed Ben and went some way to explaining the (unpleasant) fate of the Dharma initiative. Jacob has also been revealed, sort-of.

Doppelgängers

The question of whether there is intelligent life out there in the universe would seem to boil down to whether or not you consider yourself to be intelligent.

Based on a plug from the Professor I picked up Marcus Chown's The Never Ending Days of Being Dead in Foyles and read the first chapter: Elvis Lives.

In it Chown argues that if you accept the premises of quantum theory and inflation (a key part of the standard cosmological model), then you must accept that there is a being identical to you at a fairly predictable distance from your current location. Additionally, there may also be another identical you at an altogether unpredictable distance, the doppelgänger resulting from the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory.

And this is what is interesting to me about the current state of such parallel universe hypotheses, that there can be two absolutely identical individuals doing identical things, differing only in the theoretical reason for their being there in the first place.

I have a couple of issues with Chown's logic, which maybe someone better versed in such matters can help clear up for me:

1) Is "to all intents and purposes infinite" really the same thing as infinite? This seems quite crucial because the relative nature of the first type of infinity might prevent it from driving the rest of Chown's argument.

2) If there is a finite number of ways of arranging matter in an "infinite" bubble-universe, will all possible instances inevitably occur?

I had a similar quibble with Richard Dawkins's assertion in The God Delusion that there must be a version of me with green hair somewhere 'out there'. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the number of possible events that are realised in practice will be constrained by the number of possible histories that follow from the starting conditions.

Loadsa Pissarros

One of my cousins works for this venerable dynasty. For just how many generations have they been foisting impressionist art on us? (Lélia Pissaroo mightn't like to admit it, but some of her most notable pieces are rumoured to have appeared on printed paper napkins back home in France.)

Sci-fi Wi-fi

Turn your TV on after you've yanked out the aerial. One per cent of the static you see on screen is an echo of the Big Bang, the Cosmic Background Radiation or 'CMB'. How long before they tell us it's a public health risk?

Stupid people

The life sentence handed out by a US judge to a pair of vegans whose baby died six weeks after birth having been fed a diet largely made up of soy milk and organic apple juice, has led me to reflect on the wider political/cultural threat posed by stupid people.

Earlier this week veteran star-gazer Patrick Moore (pictured) complained that women were ruining the BBC, and by implication, western civilisation as a whole: “The trouble is that the BBC now is run by women and it shows: soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn’t have had that in the golden days.”

It strikes me that the cantankerous old astronomer is not alone in sensing the general rise of stupidity in our society, but has mistakenly blamed it on in-built gender impulses. Female stupidity is of course especially annoying to us men, just as male dumbness surely rankles with the opposite sex.

Perhaps there might indeed be cultural reasons why women have tended to be more emotionally engaged with matters that would strike the likes of Patrick Moore as trivial. Who can deny that British women are still more likely to be interested in astrology than astronomy?

But then Moore's probably not flicked onto Men and Motors recently. Personally I'd rather be locked in a room with someone wittering on about Paris Hilton and Peter Andre than a bloke desperate to share with me their love for Torquay United and everyday DIY projects.

Working in a marketing industry dominated by Hello and Heat readers (though not necessarily of the same sex or sexual orientation) I have often wondered whether capitalism has managed to keep itself going by appealing to the increasingly assertive demographic that just loves to be pampered. (Why else would we have the likes of organic avocado shampoo?)

Anyway, world stupidity is in many ways a bigger problem than say world poverty, and as with consciousness-grabbing crises like global warming, it may be becoming more dangerous with every passing day.

Many of the things that Europe's intellectual elites like to moan on about − media gossip, over-keen believers, teenage pregnancies, Yanks, street crime, soap operas, gameshows, poor people, rich people etc. are surely just white horses on the great wave of stupidity that threatens to submerge our way of life. (And Big Brother shows us that stupid people can actually provide worthwhile entertainment for non-dummies: a deeply worrying phenomenon as it gives the thick-pound some serious commercial clout.)

Remember, because they generally breed earlier and in greater numbers, over time the mass in things like mass media and mass hysteria inevitably includes a greater proportion of thickies. The chart that Al Gore uses to show the dramatic rise in human populations worldwide would be that much more terrifying if we could see within it the irresistible rise of the dumb-ass.

Is it already too late to reverse this worrying process of global dumbing down? Well, we probably won't be able to educate ourselves out of this particular tight corner. The trouble is that stupid people are immune to the didactive warfare waged against them, because they are of course inherently incapable of rationally assessing the consequences of their actions. Out in Guatemala you can get a real feel for how the "better education" delusion is applied (and thwarted) in practice, on issues like contraception and safe-sex in particular.

Yet just as trivial-mindedness is surely not limited to the fairer-sex, stupidity itself is not the sole preserve of the underprivileged. Indeed recent research has clearly shown that clever people are not disproportionately represented in the ranks of the affluent and powerful. And if Hillary Clinton is elected as the first female President of the US, she will take the helm of an institution steered by a couple of really notable dimwits in recent history. (She appears not to be the soap opera type herself.)

It is interesting to note that whilst essentially democrats at heart, many of the men that drafted the first American Constitution were presciently aware of the distorting effect that rising stupidity was likely to have over all "free" societies. And so they did their best to set up durable safeguards, but rather like the Thames Barrier, these will not hold back the tide forever!

Medial six...bleeding

My dentist fetched a discoloured little handwritten note from out of my file today. In it another specialist to whom he'd referred me in 1970 described my three-year-old self as "lively and unmanageable".

My dentist has been my dentist as long as I've had dientes. He's also the Queen's dentist, but he was my dentist first and I'm not much of a royalist anyway. I enter my fifth decade without a single filling, though he modestly credits this to my exceptionally robust gnashers.

I've been going to see him in the same building all this time too, though some time before I went to prep school he moved his room down from the third floor to the ground. I told the hygienist today (I've been tortured and admonished by her for about twenty years as well) that I can remember coming into that very room with its olive green paint and dreadful landscape painting when I was ten, because I was reading Joseph Heller's As Good as Gold, and can picture myself leaving it on the table before clambering into the chair. I never finished that book.

Virtual child abuse?

Linden Labs urges caution over the great Second Life child-abuse scandal:

"On Thursday May 3, we were contacted by German television network, ARD, which had captured images of two avatars, one that resembled an adult male and another that resembled a child, engaged in depicted sexual conduct. Our investigations revealed the users behind these avatars to be a 54-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman. Both were immediately banned from Second Life."

Er? Is it against the rules to have an under-age avatar, or to use that avatar to have consensual virtual sex with another, past-it looking avatar?

Temporada de hambre

Reuters/Alertnet have an interesting report today on Guatemala's hunger season, which may be felt especially hard in certain rural communities this year due to high grain prices, low grain yields, low demand for unskilled labour, a lack of wild fruit, and the presumed affects of El Niño. (Though it seemed to me in April that the wet season was actually starting early in 2007.)

The map inset could be taken to indicate just how bad the people living around Lake Atitlán are at fishing.

The report doesn't mention the significant rise in Guatemala's exports (24.4% in the first two months of this year), which could of course mean that more of the edibles have been heading out of the country.

The chart below provides a more complex perspective on Guatemala's seasons. I was out there last July for the la canícula − literally the dog days − which coincided with the latter stages of the World Cup. It's really the only time that the country gets a full head-on blast from the northern hemisphere's summer.

Rrretorno...He's back!

"Everyone expects for him to come flying down...."

Guatemalan immigration officials have however been on full-alert recently to prevent the coming of Jesus Redux.



Welcome to the Government of God!

Eathai?

'Eathai is a fusion of the words Eat and Thai', the menu at Busaba Eathai informs patrons rather pompously. No shit.

It's another oriental creation from Alan Yau, originator of the Wagamama chain, Berwick Street's dim sum paradise Yauatcha and the Michelin-starred Hakassan in Hanway Place.

I've been meaning to try out the Store Street restaurant for ages (the one in Wardour Street somehow appeals less) and so recommended it to my cousin when he came in for dinner last night.

He had the Mussaman duck curry with peanut and potato and I had the equally Koran-friendly Muslim beef curry with banana capiscum and cherry tomato, a dark and gunky concoction in a bowl from which protruded stew-sized chunks of meat.

The highlight though was one of the side dishes, Thai Calamari, cooked with ginger and little green peppercorns on their stalks. It was so good in fact that I had to go back at lunchtime today to have it once more. Right now I can't imagine myself having anything else for lunch...ever again!

I had another very good meal last week in Mar i Terra, a Galician-Spanish tapas bar in an old house left on its own beside the railways tracks between Waterloo and Southwark. Squid was once again a major element in the gratification.

(Phillip took this image of the eathai with his sexy little black Ricoh GX100 camera.)

Mi gato

Y mi chucho...

Ave Maree-ee-a

I noticed on Good Friday that the San Felipe procession didn't seem to have its own Virgin.

It turns out that la Santísima Virgen de la Soledad, comes out and does the rounds the next day. V's niece Jeannette is a tall girl and thus gets to carry the anda on the first turn each year.

Todos desnudos

18,000 personas en pelotas en el Zócalo de Mexico DF este Domingo − participando en la nueva obra de Spencer Tunick. Es un récord.

V me ha dicho que siempre escucha la frase 'todos desnudos' en Masked Ball de Jocelyn Pook, una pieza clave en la banda sonora de Eyes Wide Shut.

Por lo visto, este evento en la cuidad Azteca tuvo un triste final...demasiado previsible.

One nation under God

Thanks to Scott for this, and for passing on David Byrne's commentary.

Richard Dawkins's idea that religious indoctrination constitutes child abuse is not far off the mark in this instance.

Sunshine

One man's derivative drag is another's thrill-filled homage.

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's Sunshine brushes its lips eagerly against the outstretched hands of 2001, Dark Star, Solaris, Alien and Silent Running, but is it really such a fitting new liegeman for Sci-Fi's celebrated aristocracy?

Garland has certainly imagined a range of extraordinary situations to keep the tension levels pumped up but as we get closer to the surface of our local star it would have been nice to get a bit more beneath the surface of his characters. And it's a pity because there is some fine international talent in this crew, such as Michelle Yeoh and Hiroyuki Sanada, plus the ever cute Rose Byrne and that Irish chap with the fascinating eyes.

My own distress signal went out about twenty minutes from the end, when a zombiefied Colonel Kurtz-lite turns up in the observation room.

From then on I was never entirely sure what was going on. Big spectacle, used superbly early on as percussive accentuation of the drama, suddenly develops into an overwhelming visual commotion.

France chooses modernity

Ségolène Royal had a good deal of moral support from Spain's man of the moment José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a politician that has gained and retained my respect and admiration since that most particular of moments which catapaulted him to power.

Yet unlike Spain's governing PSOE (and to an even greater extent our own Labour party) France's socialists have yet to adapt to the realities of the modern, globalised world.

Modernised politics mean that most of the things worth setting fire to a Renault about tend to run on auto-pilot and voter apathy soon establishes itself as the norm once the citizenry have realised that there's nothing really important at stake when they mark their ballot papers.

But here in the spring of 2007 the French have still been able to hold an election in the full knowledge that their nation is confronted by a very serious set of problems indeed. Across the channel "am I bovvered?" is not really an option.

Oddly enough though, the more self-evident the crisis the more immoderate and potentially erroneous are the political solutions that push to the forefront. It is a phenomenon you see all over Latin America, and on this occasion the people of France have had to make a choice between two candidates whose apparent unsuitability for the highest office was off even that most slanted of scales.

The Lives of Others

Films put together with this level of intelligence and subtlety are truly a rareity.

Like its erstwhile rival for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Pan's Labyrinth, Das Leben der Anderen seeks to remind us unequivocably of the horrors of totalitarianism.

"It's dark," said George, yet it isn't really as black as some of the moments within del Toro's fantasy. Hauptmann Wiesler represents a system of oppression that eschews physical torture and the impulsive pistol shot to the head in favour of driving its victims to despair and 'self-murder'. You have to doubt whether the likes of Capitán Vidal would have wasted so much time and effort on the surveillance of suspects that could instead simply be framed or arbitrarily disappeared.

Whereas del Toro tokened the evil of poe-faced political absolutism with elaborate and garish monsters, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck chooses instead to restrict the tones of both his images and of his character's ethical imperatives to shades of grey and its closest neighbours on the palette.

Both films are the kind that you immediately want to see again. George had in fact only just seen it for the first time the night before. He and I experienced the Soviet Union at first hand in that landmark year of 1984 and after leaving the Chelsea Cinema last night we discussed the absence of primary colours (apart from the incriminating red of the typewriter ink) in the German writer-director's stunning debut film. We both recall the striking reds and blues of the political posters around Moscow and Leningrad, yet behind them the washed-out gloom of the Russian capital was nevertheless umistakeable in '84.

Compelling as it is, in one important respect the plot left us both wondering. What singular event turns Wiesler into a thought criminal? One minute he's tossing seat-covers to the sniffer dogs and the next he'd reading Brecht with a canny grin. Surely he would already have spotted the emptiness of his existence at some point before this particular surveillance gig? Perhaps it is the cynical, non-ideological origin of the operation against Dreyman and the wasteful suicide of the dramatist's friend Jerska that generate this seemingly unlikely spark of humanity.

Some years after the wall however, it's clear that poor old Wiesler has still not overcome his predeliction for over-snug, achromatic leisurewear.

Earlier George and I had watched Chelsea relinquish their Premiership title in the Duke of Wellington (technically Westminster: the other side of the street is where Chelsea proper begins) surrounded by soused sexagenarians, and accompanied by George's girlfriend Paula, a lifelong United fan. I do enjoy Jose Mourinho's interviews after his (always the better) team has come unstuck in crucial games. It's a necessarily intermittent form of entertainment, because if it happened too often diminishing returns would set in and I guess he'd get the sack, or become less arrogant.

The government's anti-descrimination legislation has reminded me just how much fun it is to watch pissed-off bigots on TV too. I'm sure that someone can come up with a new gameshow format to keep them on our screens after all the fuss over homosexual couples checking into Yorkshire B&Bs has died down.

Misa Mexicana

There's been a recent spate of commercially successful recordings of Hispanic baroque music.

This latest offering from Andrew Lawrence-King and the Harp Consort on Harmonia Mundi juxtaposes parts of a mass composed by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Puebla Cathedral's Málaga-born chapel master (from 1629) with examples of the popular dance-forms of Iberian, African and indigenous lineage.

These include the villancico, and the xácara, which Andrew Lawrence King explains in his notes, was "sung in the dialect of the back streets of Madrid and traditionally accompanied by an ensemble of guitarists dressed in black Spanish cloaks, with daggers hidden in their sleeves."

Lawrence King also perfectly captures the wider appeal of the Latin American baroque as "the complex cross-currents of conservatism and experiment, of naïveté and sophistication, high and low art, intellectualism and sensuality." Indeed, you can get a similar kind of buzz from admiring Guatemala's great baroque churches and the modern rituals performed in and around them, where stodgy formal piety is often still jauntily syncopated with colloquial spontaneity.

Other highly-recommendable disks in this genre are Bolivian Baroque by Florilegium, a compilation of choral pieces by Domenico Zipoli with a number of anonymous compositions. Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla and Zipoli's music also features on the two excellent releases from Jeffrey Skidmore and Ex Cathedra: New World Symphonies and the Moon, Sun and All Things.

Los Sin Nombre (The Nameless)

Five years after the her daughter has apparently been abducted and murdered in the most macabre of manners by a shadowy cult of pain-aholics, agency exec Claudia receives a chilling phone call: "Mummy, it's me...come and find me."

Jaume Balagueró's film has the good sense to remain pretty senseless right up until the very end.

It was certainly giving me the willies when I started watching it late the other night, but I had had an underlying, less visceral fear that it was going to be one of those horror flicks where the wave function of suggestion collapses midway through, leaving a concrete plot conclusion which is nowhere near as interesting (or scary) as all the dreadful possibilities previously insinuated. But no...

It was made a year after Ringu, and from the visuals alone you'd have to suspect that Balaguero had been influenced by that seminal piece of Asian fantasy-horror.

Bizarrely two of the key actors (both Spanish) have been dubbed.

The catchy theme song, My Black Dress by Berkeley punk band Fang, sounds to me a bit like a mix of Goldfrapp and Mecano. The video contains visual excerpts from the movie.

Utter disbelief

There's an article in this month's EDGE by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman entitled Why the Gods aren't winning. Contrary to the fears of Dawkins and the brights and our relentlessly scaremongering media, patriarchal monotheism is not, they argue, on the comeback trail.

Instead disbelief now rivals the great churches in terms of numbers and influence, making 8.5m converts worldwide annually. In most secular nations, 4/5 of people accept the premise of evolution by natural selection; in Korea 40% of the population claim not to believe in a supernatural God. Islam is the only religion to have increased its global proportional representation over the past century, and this say Paul and Zuckerman is largely down to "unprotected sex".

It is, the authors proclaim, the first emergence of mass apostasy:

"No major religion is expanding its share of the global population by conversion in any circumstances. Disbelief in the supernatural alone is able to achieve extraordinary rates of growth by voluntary conversion...Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-econmic conditions retains a high-level of popular religiosity."

What of the US you might ask? Well "benign, progressive socio-econmic conditions" kind of excludes them according to these American scientists. Nevertheless they point out that there are now 30m atheists in the US, more than all the Jews, Muslims and Mormons put together and also a more substantial denomination than the Southern Baptists.

The trouble across the pond though is Darwinian economic competition and the concentration of wealth in a narrow elite, conditions that inevitably lead to more persistent bible-bashing, Paul and Zuckerman attest. Everywhere else in the modern world the opportunity to lead a long and stable middle-class life reduces the need to believe in supernatural protection from calamity. But for cultural, economic and historical reasons many Americans remain in a state of existential unease.

This logic has a number of important, if not fatal weaknesses. Firstly, the areas where the most bibles are bashed in the US are not necessarily those where socio-economic competition is at its most Darwinian.

Secondly, studies using identical twins have shown that there is a genetic component to religiosity. Now we know that the descendents of slaves in America are more likely to suffer from hypertension and other conditions because they have inherited the genes that helped their ancestors survive the appalling conditions on the Atlantic crossing. Could it not also be the case that since becoming the promised land for those puritan folk on the Mayflower, America has consistently admitted close-knit populations whose very heredity might just incline them to a bit of theistic delusion? (There will of course be any number of geographical and cultural factors that may over time have reinforced such a tiny bias.)

Thirdly, and more tellingly I'm sure, we now live in an increasingly globalised world. Within our modern secular democracies things might look evenly prosperous and secure, but zoom out a bit and the very dynamics that Paul and Zuckerman claim foster a firmer belief in supernatural interference (vast disparitries of wealth and opportunity, violence and insecurity) are operating with considerable impunity.

The writers of this essay have also brushed over some of the important distinctions within the religious and non-religious groups in their pie-charts. For instance they lump agnostics in with atheists, a tactic that would no doubt have Richard Dawkins repeating his famous jibe about people with minds so open that their brains fall out.

And they have also merged bells n' smells Papists with Pentecostals. This week's Economist has an article about the battle for the faith of Latin America, which the Catholic Church has of late been losing. The Pope is on his way to Brazil where 15% of the population are now 'evangelicals'. Up in Guatemala the proportion is now 30%, achieved not as a result of out-of-control unprotected protestant sex, but through careful courting of predominantly lower-income, indigenous groups (and the odd blatant bribe).

Of V's seven siblings, only one has "changed religion". He explained to me on Good Friday why he chose the "ecstasy over the agony". His children are still being brought up as catholics, though Paul and Zuckerman suggest we are more likely to base our beliefs on those of our fathers than those of our mothers. (Which leads them nicely to the stat that church-going is now more common in the US among women.) As for V herself, she gives consideration to the "weasel God" of pantheist Baruch Spinoza!