Perdida (2019)

New on Netflix this week, this is a Mexican movie that seems unsure exactly what it wants to be other than some combination of dark, sexy and perhaps a little nasty, yet made me imagine of a superior combination of these moods which might have been achieved if plot and character had been organised and presented better. 

Having discovered after the event that it is a remake of a Colombian movie from 2011, The Hidden Face, I now rather urgently need to know if the mis-steps made here were additions or reproductions.*

 

I think I already know how I would choose to re-make it. I'd actually like to see a French version. It would probably never get an English-language treatment, as it contains elements which some people within that culture might take as misogynistic, mistakenly I think, and it is these very which would actually need to be accentuated a bit to get the most out of the basic scenario.

 

* I have now downloaded the earlier version and checked and Perdida is an almost bizarrely perfect facsimile, right up to the very end where the Colombian movie handles one small detail a little better. 

 

 

National Greats

Between the Romans and the Renaissance England (geographical area) possesses a key quartet of available national heroes: Arthur, Alfred, Robin and Henry, all of whom have been served rather indifferently by Hollywood, when at all.

This is in part because each of them embodies aspects of our history which outsiders (and Americans in particular, either don't get or want to get), but also because their roles are even a little problematic in terms of our own collective narratives.

Take Arthur, for example. Much of his story as a 'native' British hero was invented by our French overlords specifically as a means of suppressing English alternatives. Yet these adopted myths contain a deeper and sometimes darker payload, Christianised pagan symbolism (or vice versa), which transcends the propaganda usage, and these have continued to fascinate poets, artists, composers and so on throughout history.

John Boorman's Excalibur has undoubtedly been the superior silver screen treatment which these have been treated to so far. Elsewhere Hollywood has occasionally confused this Arthur with his demi-historical progenitor, an essentially post-apocalyptic figurehead, representing a final burst of Romano-British resistance before the darkness descended.

If Arthur is a placeholder for not quite the end, Alfred the Great does the same for not quite the (new) beginning. He’s the man who didn’t lose, rather than the great victor, and his finest achievements were perhaps intellectual, which don’t translate well to American action movies. And it’s his enemies that everyone is really fascinated with.

Robin of Loxley, aka Robin Hood, is the English man of the hour that Hollywood has seemingly found most universal, specifically as a not too doctrinal redistributor of wealth — even if neither the rich he took from nor the poor he gave to are exactly the people we think of when these terms are mentioned today. (For Robin was not really the saviour of the actual, very poor, the illiterate peasant masses, who by definition were unable to read about him.)

In as much as he took up arms against the Norman state, he’s a kind of noble resistor and anti-colonialist, but his story awkwardly dovetails with that of the Crusades, material which cannot be handled today without some sort of lip service to Arab-Muslim, anti-western prejudice.

And then there’s Henry V, whose tale has been told, almost too well, through the course of three plays by Shakespeare, a state of affairs which makes it hard to re-tread any other way. In the last of these he is triumph personified, but the Bard had one eye on the bigger picture too, and Henry’s story is one of the reasons George R.R. Martin plotted GOT so that there were no definitive winners or losers in the end.

Our best medieval King, Henry sired our worst, sixth of that name. This might not have mattered all that much had he not died, rather randomly and prematurely, before his project was completed, and as a result his no-fault condition as the son of a usurper came back to haunt House Lancaster.

The Anti-Zionism Fallacy

First of all, because it apparently needs to be said, non-Jews have no established authority when it comes to policing the boundaries of antisemitism. 

And when they do start up with this, they only end up sounding like Elon Musk lecturing black people on the permissible uses of the term 'racism'. (Or indeed, worse, Musk appropriating minority black voices in order to do this.)

Secondly, I shall resort to a simple analogy to make the key point here...

As a non-Scottish Brit I am aware that there are aspects of the Scottish Nationalist programme which I do not favour (specifically the call for full independence), but I am also aware that I have an obligation to express these opinions in a manner which doesn't make me appear to be a total prick. 

The same is clearly also true of any bona fide Scot who might feel the same way. 

Stating that I am engaged in a fanatical fight against all forms of Scottish national aspiration, demeaning Scots, or perhaps stating that they all originated in Ireland, or similar, would certainly be a fast track to prickishness.

Nobody, no matter which identity or group with which they habitually align, has a fundamental right to oppose another human group's aspirations to nationhood. One can take issue with policy, with attitude even, but not the basic impulse. For that is bigotry.

Most of the above applies to non-Arab 'anti-zionism'. The Arab form is instead more often a kind of negative image of the typical aspiration to nationhood: a dogmatic anti-nationalism targeting Jews rather than any serious attempt to build a coherent and viable vision for Arab Palestinians. 

I have certain hard red lines when it comes to antisemtism, so when self-professed 'anti-zionists' cross them without shame, I am not interested in any subsequent bleatings about how their chosen cover story gives them a free pass. 

Whatever anti-zionism might be in the abstract, their version of it is Jew hate. This includes demonising Jewish nationalism, or juxtaposing it with Nazi iconography, to state the rather obvious.

 

 

The Migratory Trinity

Britain is the name of a place which has become synonymous with colonialism, yet it is also an island which has been invaded and colonised more than most geographical spaces on planet Earth. 

Throughout most of the Middle Ages it would be hard to say if England was a French colony or vice versa, and it took a war which famously lasted a hundred years to finally resolve this. (Kind of.)

The Conquest of Mexico could not have taken place if it had not been simultaneously an act of de-colonisation, for the Mexica civilisation had migrated down from the north and imposed itself on the peoples and cultures which had previously established themselves in the central highlands, and their desire to be free of a very brutal imperial system was very much part of the dynamic unleashed by the arrival of Europeans. 

502 years ago today

Those are three tiny snapshots of the nuances of History, of the kind which tend to get lost every time History is ransacked for the purposes of contemporary political invective. 

The first thing I would have taught about the past in British schools is that every single citizen is descended from people and things which migrated. For after the Ice Age the island was a blank slate. Empty. And then the boats started coming. 

I mention 'people and things' because the second lesson which needs to be conveyed in those classes is that migration always takes the form of a trinity: peoples, languages and cultures and these typically become detached and independent in their historical actions as the migrations occur. 

Our contemporary habit of focusing on only one element of this trinity, usually either ethnicity or culture is a modern misconception largely driven by our prevailing political grudges*. Indeed, we cannot hope to resolve many of our own world's migratory challenges unless we properly (and dispassionately) understand how the trinity operates.

The notion that all we need to do with migration is welcome it has an obvious appeal to anyone experiencing an urgent desire to be recognised as 'good' by their peers, but it is clearly not very sophisticated.**

Each of us has our biological heredity, often not as clear-cut as we would like to imagine, but we are also made up of the way our minds work and express themselves, and this has its own history of geographical movement from the dawn of homo sapiens in Africa.

The Mexico story mentioned above leads one to add one more element to the story of human migration, a kind of fourth horseman if you like: the non-human biological component that piggy-backs on the other movements. Stuff like germs, plus both wild and domesticated plants and animals. 

* One of the ways that we collectively ensure that our arguments relating to these matters are intractable, is by pointedly referencing one element, ethnicity, say, when it suits us, which often means when the other side is talking about culture, and contrariwise. 

** Just consider the so-called 'ex-pat' phenomenon here in Antigua, where some could be said to add the whole and others detract from it. See also the current spate of resistance movements in major cities like Barcelona to tourism, perceived as a more short-term and temporary form of migration. All hard to legislate for or even regulate, but surely worth a try.

 

Communication and Feedback

Much of the prevailing discourse about free speech has been implicitly solipsistic. There is an assumption that the most important thing is the ‘right’ of the talker, as if communications were always somehow one way and disconnected from listeners. 

Social media encourages this of course, because of the sheer ease of public speech and because within that environment we all speak to an auditorium that is at least partially swathed in shadow.

One way I approach this issue today is to recall how I learned to write my essays at Girton. From the moment I put pen to paper I had a mental image of my reader, singular, not an amorphous group of individuals with different biases, but one person with whom I had had regular face to face interactions, an individual who was by definition a lot more informed on the basic material than I was, and a lot more intelligent to boot. Writing for such a person is a genuine discipline.

For me the scariest thing about platforms like Twitter is to see this discipline turned completely on its head. Elite academic minds, well-informed and skillful with words, using the medium to communicate with the relatively ignorant, deliberately and with considerable guile. This version of ‘free’ speech involves carving up issues so that there is a notable slant, sometimes well camouflaged, but the overall effect is warped, propagandistic.

One of the most critical comments ever delivered by one of the readers of my essays was that I possessed a style which might convince anyone I knew more than I really did. But I took this as a sort of semi-compliment, as this was one of those skills one was driven to cultivate on the side, given the basic circumstances of the weekly supervision.

But if I had constructed my essays the way supposedly acute, reasonable and knowledgeable people now communicate into their chosen echo chambers, I’d surely have been on the end of some serious ear-bashings.

So, rather than concerning ourselves uniquely with the freedom of expression, we should surely also be simultaneously considering the proportion of public speech which is ‘talking down’ (or indeed screeching all around), the sophisticated getting off on positive feedback from the unsophisticated, and whether there are any trends therein worthy of our anxiety.

The Antis

There are certain aspects of the political programme of the Scottish nationalists, specific sentiments even, which I will readily express my opposition to. That said, I am careful how I express that opposition. 

For example...

I try to stick to the issues, steering well clear of ad-hominem attacks on the Scots, specifically avoiding characterisations which they might find deeply demeaning. (For instance, suggesting that anyone in their 'camp' is somehow inhuman and monstrous.) 

I will not refer to my own position wholly in terms of a negative outcome for theirs (e.g. I don't call myself an Anti-Scottishist.)

I won't call for them all to be driven back where I imagine that they originally came from. (Ireland?) nor will I insist that instead of granting them autonomous statehood they ought to be purged entirely from the political map. 

And however much I may suspect that there are a bunch of Scottish nationalists who are card-carrying reprobates — as there are certainly some Russian nationalists one would not want to be stuck in a lift with — I do not discount the notion that it is possible to espouse a nationalist worldview in a largely benign fashion and that there are aspects of the associated cultural programme which are undoubtedly worth celebrating without caveats.

These are all important divergences of the kind we all need to bear in mind whenever we hear someone trot out the 'I am not antisemitic, I am anti-zionist' chestnut. 

Superficially there is indeed a clear de jure distinction between the two pathologies, but do those who claim this 'amendment' truly understand it, or are they simply disguising a bigoted worldview, or perhaps even dog-whistling an essentially hateful, racist project? 

Often enough they rumble themselves almost as soon as they open their mouths. One can almost immediately tell if the very idea of Jewish self-determination is abhorrent to them. 

And let's face it, any kind of 'anti-zionism' which holds that Zionism — the nationalist aspiration of some 80% of Jews worldwide —  is some sort of global Satanic conspiracy, is surely antisemitic by agreed definition. 

 

Le Hump

Having watched much of the Opening Ceremony again, in a far better mood than I was in throughout the original viewing, I have one or two more thoughts to share.

I believe I have experience, both first hand and less so, of examples of when French people appear to be noticeably rather less adept than others of vetting their own ideas, especially the big ones.

They’d come up with some truly great (but...) concepts and would immediately get Le Hump if one were to begin by enumerating some of the things that might not work out as planned.

You know the kind of thing. Maginot Line: what if the Germans come in over there? Le Hump.

My father’s business was large scale theatrical events and I recall him explaining (sometimes com-plaining) how constant the need always was to keep a close eye on the ambitions of the creatives.

The problem in Paris may have begun as an urge to in some way over-compensate for the pompous and pious solemnities of the modern Olympic Movement, its ever so slightly neo-fascist aethetics even, all of which the French probably feel rather responsible for, and rightly so. So from the outset, some sort of shattering of the boundaries of good taste and common sense was always going into the final recipe.

Even the best bits of the ceremony were hindered by little details that might have been addressed rather better in the planning stage.

As for the part they have since felt the need to apologise for, Thomas Jolly did try to allocate himself some plausible deniability by leaving it open to interpretation which, if any, great work of art and thematic mythological material was being referenced, but then his cast members went on the platform formerly known as Twitter and explained what they thought they were up to, and there we have it, one of those (likely) mishaps which were not given due consideration at sign-off.

Soft Targets

 

Yesterday saw the rather predictable surge in righteous indignation over certain aspects of the Opening Ceremony, with a subset of commentators scouring the footage for the remotest indications of satanic imagery.

Some even went back twelve years to the NHS bed sequence at London 2012 in order to propose a new exegesis involving demonic possession.

As Danny Boyle had some notoriety as a lapsed aspirant to the Catholic priesthood, Thomas Jolly is both Jewish and homosexual, and a man with an understanding of the term ‘republican’ which no longer travels so well across the pond.

Still, his artistic vision, if stoked by Hellfire, suggests that the latter may after all be a metaphor for the most extreme, everlasting form of ennui, for his ceremony was diabolically boring at times, when not fiendishly shambolic, aesthetically and organisationally.

I don’t have an issue with sending up religion per se, but there’s a time and a place for the full Charlie Hebdo, and with freedom comes responsibility — the responsibility to not just go after the soft targets. 

 

People who think The Last Supper is an article of faith rather than say, a painting by a gay man in the Renaissance are surely the softest of targets.

Slippery Slopes

Disturbing events in the USA over the weekend, (Pennsylvania not Miami) can, one supposes, either be put down to a deep level conspiracy or monumental incompetence. 

I currently favour the latter interpretation. (And let's face it, even if we lean towards the former...)

Perhaps these two doddery, barely competent men occupying the White House for the last eight years have somehow 'conspired' to disguise a larger problem. Rather than being anomalies at the summit of American power, perhaps it has become one-legged turtles all the way down?

As a detached Brit, my biggest beef with Biden during his term was the behaviour of his Secret Service goons at Buckingham Palace the night before the Queen's funeral. The self-conceit of this entourage was immediately apparent, but perhaps the resulting rudeness was itself a consequence of poor quality leadership, of basic incompetence. 

The rot, the hollowness, may now be irreversible.

B Teams in action

Following defeat at Waterloo and a subsequent failure to reconsolidate his political position in Paris, Napoleon made a beeline for the west coast in the hope of escaping to America, but he failed to secure passage on any ship other than HMS Bellerophon. 

There were many reasons to be disappointed with Ridley Scott's Boney biopic last year. The story was too sketchy and none of the characters psychologically interesting enough. 

I guess it will be a few years before we get another big budget take on Napoleon. If it were me, I'd be looking at the period between the calamitous flight from Moscow up to Waterloo. 

Hollywood tends to tell this story as a collection of minor incidents around the pivotal moment when Napoleon arrived back on French soil after getting away from his tiny realm of Elba, and the French army dispatched to take him back into custody instead cries 'Vive L'Empereur!' and joins him for the march to Paris. 

Napoleon V2.0, the so called 100 Days, deserves a more detailed dramatic exploration. Rather than simply going back to where he had been rudely interrupted in 1814, Bonaparte decided to reboot himself as the people's sovereign, the true avatar of the Revolution. 

Or at least some sort of workable trade-off between the ideals of 1789 and the stability he later imposed. To this end he re-abolished slavery, having before de-abolished it, and re-jigged the constitution along more liberal lines, forming two chambers with powers alongside that of the executive. Ironically, it would be these deputies who turned against him after his decisive defeat by the allied coalition. Had this happy compromise been unbeatable, like Spain proved on Sunday, things might have become very interesting indeed. (Though Napoleon in America would have been worthy of a movie treatment in itself.) 

This coalition, which some have compared to a kind of proto-NATO, also had a strong core and some wobbly fringes. Wellington had to face his adversary with an army consisting of 30-40% Dutch and Belgian troops, some of which were little more than militia, while others had only recently fought alongside the French. 

Part of the Duke's problem was that since Napoleon had come a-cropper in Russia the British had gone to war with the US in 1812. Other than the whiteness of the White House the most significant consequence of this conflict was the fact that the best bits of the British army were stuck in North America when Napoleon marched on Brussels, in particular the majority of the regiments with relevant experience of fighting and defeating the French in the Peninsula War.

One could even say however that both sides undertook this most history-adjusting of battles with their second string squad members. Certainly, other than Ney, Bonaparte had very much a B team of advisors and military subordinates around him. His best hope of success, as with Putin vs NATO, was divide and conquer and/or pick off the weak parts of the alliance. 

It almost worked, but he made some critical errors of judgement and the weather didn't help. 

There were many different political and constitutional visions in play during this final phase of Napoleonic aspiration. 

We've seen these last few days how History can pivot on tiny details. Waterloo was rather like an great compilation tape of such 'sliding doors' moments, fully deserving of the title 'Now That's What I Call A Near Run Thing'.

The parentage of invention...

Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something > Robert Heinlein

 

This rather drôle quotation made me think back to some essays I wrote in my first year of Uni, specifically about some of the apparent great leaps forward in medieval agricultural techniques. 

 

As ever the issue in historical analysis is usually whether necessity is the mother of all invention. Heinlein seemed to say “yeah”, with a bit of a yawn. 

 

At some point since Heinlein's era, there seems to me to have been a fairly subtle adjustment to the meaning of the term ‘easier’ and a further complication in our understanding of the ‘something’ needing to be addressed. 

 

Innovation in contemporary capitalist societies is often driven by a need to create additional ‘value’ or ‘augmentation’ over firm solutions. Indeed, problem solving is generally avoided, as it generates a potential profit dead end. 

 

So perhaps we have seen a switch back towards the early risers, people who spend at least half their days configuring new problems that might need fixing during the rest of their waking hours. 

 

And it does seem that the outcome of this is more like ‘peculiarly driven men trying to find more complicated ways to do something’, i.e. acquire money and status, whilst almost tangentially, adding novelty to everyone else’s lives. 

 

Novelty was not such a big thing in the lives of medieval people.

 

Mentalities

When commentators blame formal bodies of ideas or 'isms' rather than people for the things they apparently find seriously problematic, they are quite often trying to camouflage another kind of ism altogether: race-ism.

"I'm not against Jews, I'm anti-Zionist" or indeed "Islam represents a threat to our way of life." 

And the people who don't mind being considered shamelessly bigoted tend to blame aspects of those groups they regard as complicit in propagating the phenomenon they hate, which are usually only tangentially related to it, if at all. 

Even when it's not one of these surrogate attributions, we are still dealing with a subset of the major fallacies which persist in our culture about how live action History actually works.

Neither Karl Marx and his book nor Mohammed and his book are directly responsible for the inhumanities later committed in their name. 

These detached dogmas function a bit like chemical agents which in some people engender, or more often accentuate, what historians often refer to as a 'mentality' (or more pretentiously, a mentalité.)

It is these that we need to watch most closely, not texts or the way people dress etc. The conflicts surrounding us are driven by complex dynamics which include impersonal situations and cultural factors, but ultimately it is nearly always the aforementioned mentalities which provide the key impetus.

If you understand how they form, you can start to appreciate how they can be either encouraged or discouraged.

Focusing on how people look, where they are from geographically, what information they consume and spread, can often be an unnecessary distraction. 

 

Off Night?

“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.” > Georges Clemenceau

In fact, Barbarism and Degeneration were standing just a metre or so apart at separate podiums last night.

 

Degeneration, by its very nature, hardly ever makes a comeback. 

 

I wonder what world those who say Biden had an "off night" are living in. June 27, 2024 is less the issue than say June 27, 2028. Can anyone seriously see him in the White House and functioning then? 

 

Harry Kane can have an off night. But if Southgate drops him and picks Gary Lineker as England's talismanic target man, any of the likely performance issues would need to be interpreted as more than just a blip in form.

The New York Times has now asked Biden to step aside, in the name of public service. That's a request that cannot simply be ignored and historians certainly won't ignore it if Biden does. 

 

Much will now depend on how pre-prepared the Democratic elites (and Jill Biden, though for perhaps contrasting reasons) were for last night’s unfortunate performance of their near-anointed candidate. 

 

Some of the likely usurpers may have kept up a facade of loyalty through the primaries based on a self preserving, powder-dehumidifying rationale. 

 

Even so, there are good reasons for thinking the party will bungle this moment. They picked Biden four years ago as much for internal as ‘external’ reasons, and these may yet hamper their scope for decisive action now.

 

And if Biden has seemingly forgotten how his own son died, how great a grasp on reality can he be presumed to have right now? 

The Democrats appear to be carrying on like someone who has spotted the bite marks on their forearm, but rather than quickly dispensing with the limb, have found some fine, upstanding reasons to procrastinate.

 

Like, “maybe I won't turn into a zombie after all.”

But in truth there’s more to this than a decisive chop with the machete.

 

The Party heavyweights have to act like Tories and conduct a palace coup against their ruler. And then, perhaps counter-intuitively, not act like Tories in how they go about picking his replacement. 

 

Ironically, they may need to go against their instincts and perhaps also their convictions, eschewing a middle of the road, unity pick. 

 

If this election can be saved (and, by extension, American democracy and self-respect), they'll probably have to slot their own scorched earth personality onto the ballot.

 

They no longer have the luxury of a candidate who will defeat Barbarism just by standing there. 

 

Against this evil they may now need something more energising than a consensus idea of decency. 

 

 

Superior Moral Justification

 "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” > John Kenneth Galbraith

An interesting quotation, the truth of which has lately been complicated by the fact that in the updated account of 'modern', one can all too easily swap the word 'conservative' here for 'liberal'. 

Liberal civilisation began with the 'selfish' idea of the individual. This political being, now running amok, has undermined the fundamental conditions of that civilisation, adding layer upon layer of conformity and moral righteousness to the point that complete autonomy is most celebrated at precisely the moment it is near impossible. 

Pluralism has been almost imperceptibly replaced by its anti-heroic dopplegänger, Diversity, and personal independence from all constraints, biological or otherwise, opens up a new pathway to totalist enforcement and absurdity.

Marching, marching...

The pro-Pal marches in London and other European capitals have first abetted and then amplified a distorted antisemitic discourse across the continent, whilst at the same time doing nothing for the cause of peace...to the point of contrariety.

Some of the most toxic aspects of the chanting and tent-poled messaging have been propagated by people with the least direct connection to the region, its history and its cultural polarities, and this includes some of Europe's Muslim minorities who have moved within these mobs in order to express a crude and aggressive tribalism, which has in turn triggered elements of the far right within multiple societies.

 

Overblown

The Diane Abbot issue has been somewhat deliberately overblown and misunderstood from the start.

In the European context - and the phenomenon will vary both socially and geographically - if a black person enters a relatively quiet local bar in a comparatively non-diverse neighbourhood, the first thing that the patrons inside will tend to notice is the colour of their skin. This may not set off waves of prejudice, but that can happen enough times to be significant and extremely wounding.

I think that is the essence of what Diane Abbot was trying to communicate and although it is true that Jews and Irish travellers may not experience this to anything like the same extent, it was a major political blunder to mention them as a straight comparison, not least because the 'racism' faced by other groups is often qualitatively different and sometimes even more likely to lead to toxic ideological violence anyway.

Jews, for example, are collectively stigmatised as a source of societal evil. Antisemitism is about the use of the E word in reference to Jewish communities or collectives, and whatever forms of racism Diane Abbot has experienced, I would suggest it was tonally distinct. 

Anyway, the Labour Party would have been ill-advised to de-select her. There are far worse positions being adopted by other candidates, not least in my old London constituency in Tower Hamlets.

Visiting Surrogates

This morning V told me a story she'd heard about CR-7: whenever he has some mates over, the first thing he does is sit them down to eat some salads then, before they've had time to finish their healthy greens, he pulls them out onto his private training pitch to knock a ball around, after which he insists that they all jump in his pool.

I think most of us have rubbed up against individuals like that. They come in two basic varieties. 

 

A) The host who simply has no prior conception of providing an environment where his or her guests feel at ease and end up doing things they might find pleasurable. (To the point of retaining the notion of 'other minds' appropriate to an earlier stage of evolution.)

Or B), the person who is basically miserable most of the time and only ever gets to do the stuff they really want to do when they get to have some friends over and can use them as cover. 

 

I'm guessing Ronaldo is more likely to belong to group A, but I could be wrong.

 

(Breaking: Now that he has actually tee'd up a team-mate ESPN are calling him El Bondadoso. But, he was one assist away from the Euros record.)

Cuando Acecha La Maldad (2023)

As anyone who has come across the fictional work of Mariana Enriquez can testify, Argie horror is a thing.

What makes her stories stand out is the way she applies the genre as a lens for, examining (sub-journalistically) some of the profound historical issues endemic to her country. 

Demián Rugna appears less concerned with reportage and subtexts, but his extraordinary films are located in very specific Argentinian social landscapes. 

Cuando Acecha La Maldad (When Evil Lurks), for example is situated at an intersection of the extreme rural and the very provincial. And the paranormal threat which interposes on this environment operates less on the level of metaphor than of clever suggestion.

After a raft of fairly samey nun movies, it had a freshness of approach which was genuinely startling. For me watching horror is like going on a familiar fairground ride. Under normal circumstances, not having any real personal affinity with any underlying superstitions or metaphysical codes, they rarely GET to me.

The film has been hailed in relevant parts of the interwebs as a masterpiece or at least a near-masterpiece, as it has a few forgivable flaws here and there, but is otherwise remarkable.

Last night we watched Rugna's previous offering Aterrados (Terrified), which turns out to be almost equally good, with a supernatural premise that the non-religious could comfortably decipher as science fiction, and again absolutely relentless from start to finish, eschewing the slow build favoured by Hollywood screenwriters.

The tension grabs you like a hand emerging from a crack in a wall and it won't let go until the credits roll...or indeed somewhat afterwards.

 

 

The Real Victims

One thing we've been seeing with extreme clarity these last few years is that once you allow everyone (on principle) to identify themselves primarily through their deepest sense of grievance, it is really not long before the thugs, manipulators and intimidators start piping up.

In fact, being bullies, they barge their way to the front of the queue, because there is nothing they love more than declaring themselves to be the ‘real’ victims.

 

 

Cult of the C Words

Our world has a stack of major issues: the Big Cs: Conflict, Corruption, Climate...and then there is the Cult mentioned in the title here.

Dedicated members say they so desperately want to draw attention to the other crises, but in fact only seem to want to draw attention to themselves.

In doing so, they are becoming one of the more intractable parts of the mix.

They apparently want us to think that the pressing nature of other problems gives them a free pass to act like someone with the mental age of a non-adult not yet permitted to vote (or even use the transport system unsupervised)

i.e. "Don't fixate on me being a dick...fixate on the thing I am exclusively fixated on in a completely non-constructive, narcissistic manner".

"And if you don't, then I will throw a real strop and start breaking things."

Dark Matters

“There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they're not really parallel, and two, they're not really universes.”

I was thinking about Douglas Adams a few days ago, as I also recalled the undoubtedly poor first impression I must have made with my father’s oldest friend Michele when we visited her Paris flat in the summer of 1982.

She’s the lady on the left of this group in Buenos Aires, 1948. Born a year before Anne Frank, she is now 96, yet still uses the Metro and is dreading the Olympics. (I am yet to sound her out about the snap election.)

That I have managed to maintain long-term regular contact is a wonder to me as our first meeting occurred when I was in my Harry Enfield teenager phase, and had my face permanently planted in ‘Life, The Universe and Everything’. Barely managing a grunt, I possibly fancied I was cloaked by an SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem field) in reverse polarity mode.

Having just taken in the penultimate episode of Dark Matter I have also been thinking about alternate realities lately too.

Douglas Adams had the sense that these are porous, intersecting. Certainly from the perspective of the writer of fiction, this would make them a good deal more interesting and creatively functional.

The basic problem of “many worlds” for writers was explored by Larry Niven in his story ‘All The Myriad Ways’, in which mankind has found a way to mine the multiverse for its intellectual property, but along the way discovered that choice is somehow meaningless, a realisation that leads to a spate of murders and suicides. If all possible choices are made, the creator of fictional narratives might as well give up, if not exactly euthanasiastically.

Inside the box you have your dead cat/live cat...or do you? Are these mere potentialities and ultimately only one of them is realised? But, if the smallest bits of our mysteriously granular reality can genuinely be in more than one place, WHERE exactly are these other places?

I mention this because we don’t actually need superposition and a manufactured box to take this particular journey, because it is a little mentioned consequence of our current standard cosmological model that many (and I mean MANY) different versions of us exist in basically the same physical space that we inhabit.

Indeed, it has been calculated that the nearest arrangement of protons and neutrons that exactly duplicates the one that I regard as ‘me’ can be found at a distance of 1 followed by a billion billion billion zeroes, metres from my current location. (My gut feel is that Guatemalans won’t have to travel quite so far in order to confront their doubles, but given the way distances work here, the trip may take a lot longer than one might otherwise anticipate just by contemplating all the zeroes.)

This rather startling ‘fact’ is a consequence of the theory of inflation in which we find ourselves in one of a likely infinite number of ‘bubble universes’, yet because the internal dimensions of this are ‘to all intensive purposes’ (as my mother used to say) infinite, and the number of different ways protons and neutrons can be assembled are finite, it follows that there is a good deal of duplication ‘out there’.

Popular science is always a bit cagey about the parts of theory that arise from evidence and the parts which are like placeholders for a lack of it. And alternate versions of ourselves that are a long way away are somehow less immediately intriguing than those that are perhaps right here in the box with us.

I am still struggling a bit with the box in Dark Matter though. There’s only one layer of realities where its construction makes sense, so in all the others did it just materialise like a TARDIS, and why does nobody seem bothered? (The reason why the TARDIS first appeared as a London Police telephone box is that, out of the factory, it came with its own version of the somebody else’s problem field.)

What exactly is superimposed inside this big cube? Is it just the choices of whoever is inside and has taken the drug? In other words does it somehow isolate only the universes which apply to the ‘free’ choices of one human individual, and if so, doesn’t blending two conscious minds into this process add a level of unappeasable confusion?

For want of a better phrase (the one that springs to mind belongs to a parallel reality where politics were never corrected) causation is the dead cat in the box here. It doesn’t ‘choose’ to be alive or dead, it just is...or isn’t.

Our latest little 🐈‍⬛ has been dubbed ‘Hanky’ after the affectionate apodo Michele always applied to my father, born on the same date, with the name Henry on the certificate, but some time later occasionally referred to as Hank following his evacuation to an American high school environment during WWII. 

Firulais Tasting Menu

 

One of the most jarring — off-putting even — restaurant names in Antigua, Quiltro being the affectionate name Chileans give to their street dogs🐕. A bit like Chucho here. 

I suppose we might put this down to a small failure of hispanohablante linguistic due diligence, if not alongside, then surely somewhere on the same spectrum as the Mitsubishi Pajero (“Wanker”).

Restless energy somtimes gets found out...

In the beginning there was a ‘false’ quantum vacuum filled with ‘restless energy’.

In this early environment energy violates its own basic rules like vampires that refuse to die when you stake them, by seemingly appearing from nowhere, but then disappearing again, apparently too fast for this to matter (somewhat literally). 

 

I have seen this compared by one science writer to borrowing your dad’s car at night and returning it before he notices. 

 

And that reminded me of the occasion I did just that, well, almost. 

 

V and I took his jag up to Oxford for a university party c1992, up and down along the M40. What a joy! That engine...

 

The first problem to be solved was the parking space back in Chelsea. (No ‘garage’ in this instance, you see.) Finding the original one empty on our return late at night would have been too much to expect. 

 

At that stage we were living in a small mews house behind my parents’ home. My father was retired and so unlikely to use his car at the crack of dawn, but that was precisely the moment we had to go out and watch carefully as the spaces emptied out as the day shift departed. As soon as the relevant spot transitioned into another sort of flawed void we gleefully re-filled it. 

 

All in all it seemed like the perfect crime. But we were undone by one small detail. We’d played with the driver’s seat settings and not managed to get them back to the precise position he was accustomed to.

Rumbled!

 

 

Hit Man (2024)

Richard Linklater's Netflix offering is almost compulsory viewing over here as one of its stars is the daughter of Ricardo Arjona (still) officially the world's most famous Guatemalan (but, for how long..?), an actress who is also (still) Hollywood's second most famous 1/2-Guatemalan behind Oscar Isaac, and now seems to have become Aquaman's real life girlfriend. 

 

The movie is almost great and she is almost great in it. She seems to be channeling one of those arch Latina female archetypes laid down by the likes of Salma and Sofía. One kind of knows that part of the over-acting and over-emoting we see is here called for by the role, but which part? She's helped by the fact that we've lately seen her in Andor doing non-identarian 'normal' quite successfully. 

The premise, that hit men are a fictional contrivance we have all come to believe in is kind of fun. There are a number of other typically heavy ethical and existential ideas in the mix which the director handles with insouiciant levity.

 

We watched it on the back of a series of movies which turned out to be unexpectedly, creep up behind you, dark. Linklater adds a barely perceptible swerve into darkness at the end of this movie, one of those with one foot still planted on the light side. I have not quite made my mind up how well this ultimately works

Absurdity Perpetuated

The thing I find most absurd — to the point of unethical — about the role of UNRWA within the Middle East conflict is the way it embodies an ultimately exclusive perspective thereof.

If there can be any justification for the UN in today's world of nations, it is as a platform for the application of multilateral thoughts and actions, cutting across perilous polarities.

As an institution UNRWA was perverted at the stage of its foundation by outside interference in its charter. Even so, under its initial leadership, facing considerable, open hostility from the Arabs, attempts were indeed made to follow the standard playbook, rehousing and rehabilitating the displaced peoples of the 1948 war.

Yet these efforts were actively resisted by the Arab League as likely to lead to acceptance of some of the humiliation of defeat in the war they had started. 

 

So already in the 1950s a single clear political goal (the eradication of the Jewish state) was prioritised over the living conditions and overall wellbeing of hundreds of thousands (now millions) of Arabs. Remember that the next time you see or hear the term "refugee camp" in a mainstream media report. 

 

And now, decades after UNRWA's efforts to resolve the initial problem were stymied, the organisation has become fully politicised and Palestinianised, perpetuating, not just though obstinacy, but actively through education as well, the need for its charges to subsist on aid provided by foreign taxpayers — backed by the utterly partisan rationale that this situation manifests to the world a dogged refusal to ever accept Jews as political equals, and a forever rejection of the international imposition of partition in the twentieth century. The latter represented what the UN was set up to do. Discover and manage compromises. UNRWA absolutely does not. 

 

We are collectively being made to pay, indefinitely, via one of our own international bodies, for the westernised wickedness of imagining a trade-off.

12th Century Influencer

A remarkably well-informed if rather judgemental review of London as a venue for city breaks in the twelfth century by Richard of Devizes, then a monk and ‘influencer’ at St Winifred’s in Winchester. 

Richard was the first to use the term Holocaust to refer to the mass murder of Jews, then also a feature of London life.

Indeed, the Chronicon he penned, from which the above is an excerpt, is written in character — that of a French Jewish cobbler providing travel tips and up-to-date goss on the goings on in England and the Crusader states of the Levant. 

Some modern scholars have interpreted the document as a cunning satire on some of the antisemitic prejudices of the time, sending up in particular a regional-historical variant of the blood libel, in which Jews were thought to prowl around Winchester hunting young Christian boys in order to carry out ritualistic murders.

He also famously described Robin Hood’s erstwhile foe ‘bad’ King John as a raging madman who "emitted foam from his mouth", another characteristisation/media cliché which has survived almost 800 years. 

Libel as Propaganda

The purpose of the genocide libel is really rather simple. It’s not your war, but making one side in this war a violator of international norms gives you a cover for your strange obsession with it, which might otherwise be characterised as antisemitic. (It also obviously geared to undermine the moral case for the formation of Israel after the Holocaust via a cynical appropriation of Jewish history.)

The war is several generations old. One side basically just wants to survive. The other side, the one that started it, is consciously conducting a fight to the death. Whether this necessarily infers a war of extermination is moot.

This conflict should have ended decades ago, in compromise, but one side has ‘eternalised’ its sense of grievance deriving from the war’s origins and initial result. This has been done by decking out the culturally-specific sense of lasting dishonour that defeat engendered as a ‘calamity’ worthy of more universal empathy.

Hobbes said in Leviathan that nobody weeps for an old calamity, but he was English and perhaps never came across an Arab with a grudge. Nor did he ever have to deal with a multinational body like the UN intent on codifying such grudges into perpetual, unresolvable problems. 

 

 

Otherworldly Beaches

Playa La Entrega: my favourite beach in Mexico (in Oaxaca, where the Pacific is occasionally worthy of its name.) 

 

Unless one grows up on the shore, beaches are a category of place that one starts to idealise from early on. 

My first family holiday outside of Britain involved a stay on the comparatively beachless Atlantic outpost of Madeira. 

Thereafter we started to spend time in the summer on the more sheltered Mediterranean island of Mallorca, and it was there that I started to form an idea of the 'perfect beach'.

And this may in part explain my current preference for La Entrega because the Mallorca of the seventies was then dotted with tranquil calas (secluded bays) with pristine shallow water covering soft yellow sand. 

The fact that I have not been back to the Balearics since the start of the following decade has probably helped me to uphold this 'unspoiled' ideal. 

For the archetype of a tropical Caribbean beach that I would later encounter has been degraded by repeat visits and an accumulation of perceptible flaws over time. 

Indeed my very first visit to the shores of Mexico occurred at this point just north of the main jetty at Playa del Carmen at which I arrived with a pair of friends from Cozumel. There was then at least 30m of white sand between the sea and the nearest building or grass verge. On returning from Tulum in the late afternoon we spent an hour or so building a massive sand castle as we waited for the next departure of the rust-bucket vessel that acted as a ferry between the island and the mainland. 

That beach is clearly now all but gone. This calamity has been decades in the making, but its recent acceleration has been astounding. When I came here during the pandemic in 2020 the beach was in a state, but the sargasso was being actively resisted with heavy machinery and there was still a good 15m of sand in front of that horrendous arched sculpture at tye front of the Plaza. 

Once we stopped going to Mallorca, subsequent sunshine sojourns tended to take place on the Costa del Sol and the non-Mayan Riviera. These coastlines have suffered considerable loss since, but not so much environmental as sociological. 

For example, Monte Carlo Beach was always a gravel pit, but in the eighties, it still functioned as a sort of time capsule where one might experience the almost phantasmal presence of the glamour and mood of a bygone period, specifically that of the Belle Epoque. 

Meanwhile, over in Marbella, what lingered there was the remnants of the culture that had endured on that littoral up to the moment Franco threw it open to pleasure-seekers, and to some extent for a decade or so afterwards, beyond the death of the dictator. 

For even as the jet set plonked themselves down on these otherwise unremarkable beaches, they found themselves cohabiting with Andalucian fishermen of the old school and it was juxtapositions like these which made the experience interesting. 

The last time that V and I visited the Marbella Club back in the early noughties there was not a hint left of traditional uses of that coast. 

And this left me with that sense that has been gathering in Antigua lately, of an environment somehow hollowed out by the exorcism of its ghosts. 

There are places which have an ambivalent relationship with the present moment, where one can vaguely sense — if not actually see — layers of historical apparition made possible by what could be described as only a partial decoherence of the localised past. 

And then suddenly one is left with only a few empty or inauthentic signs and the vulgar noise of modernity.