Rise and shine

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rango (2011)

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

Mis respetos.

Bésame Mucho no4 - Bossa Nova

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

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

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

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)

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

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)

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?

"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...

"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)

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)

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

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

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

"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)

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

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)

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 sole 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

"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)

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...

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)

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)

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."