1960-2006

A very sad sight on Kings Road this Saturday.

What do you reckon? Starbucks, Nero...Pret?

Also, Sloane Square may soon have to be renamed Sloane Cross.

Ripley's Game

As a thriller nowhere near as exiting or even as well-written as The Talented Mr Ripley, but Highsmith's highly civilised killer-of-necessity and the relationships that form around him remain intensely interesting. I might have been disappointed for the first 50 pages or so, yet immediately after finishing the last page I hurried over to Foyles and bought Ripley Under Ground.

Milan Kundera has recently written that it is the particular duty of the novel to unmask the transcendent beauty of everyday detail. Highsmith's darkly misanthropic narratives would therefore seem to fall well-outside the scope of what the Czech author considers most valuable about the novel form. And yet there is an obvious parallel, as her best stories sardonically tease out the hidden menace and meaninglessness behind ordinary existence.

I haven't seen the movie but I can't imagine that John Malkovich was particularly well cast. My mate Christofer would make a better Tom; the role requires disarming charm and excellent improvisation skills! (Highsmith herself praised Alain Delon as the ideal Mr Ripley.)

I wonder whether she had already been diagnosed with terminal leukemia − like Jonathan Trevanny in this novel − when she wrote it. She wasn't to die for another twenty years however.

Update: Just discovered that Wim Wenders' The American Friend (with Dennis Hopper) is also a loose adaptation of this story.

Packing

Someone asked me this week if I have a gun in Guatemala. The answer is no. Though contrary to what many might suspect, I do know how to handle firearms. I was a member of the Cambridge University pistol club (pre-Dunblane) and fired both revolvers and 44 magnums in competition against Oxford. I also had a little extra coaching from a friend's father who was a Colonel in the Military Police and one of the Army's leading marksmen. I was generally quite competent at marksmanship as a young man. I also tried archery, and was fairly good at that too.

However, I cannot imagine the circumstances in which I would be prepared to take aim and shoot at a real flesh and blood human being with the intent to kill, or maim. It's just so against what I believe in that it would make gun ownership fairly pointless in the circumstances referred to, especially when one considers the additional dangers that it usually presents. V knows of several people in her peer group who, like the King of Spain, accidentally shot and killed a family member at some stage in their formative years.

I have however had a gun pointed directly at me in Guatemala. I was walking alone up a quiet street in Antigua and when I reached a crossroads a car pulled up next to me. The driver's side window came down and out came the business end of an automatic pistol. The gunman was a youngish member of the country's elite en route back to the capital after what was presumably a coke-fuelled weekend. Imitating a suitable amount of recoil he made a bang bang you're dead mate gesture, cackled and hit the gas.

Losetodo

People working in Guatemala's media industry experienced an upsurge yesterday in death-threat related emails. One sender in particular, losetodo@hotmail.com, was spamming journalists with warnings about the fatal consequences that would apply should they continue to report on the February 19 murders of three Salvadoran legislators and their driver and of the subsequent elimination in jail of the four police officers arrested for the crime. Erick Salazar, assistant news director at Guatevision TV, claimed that the emails referred explicitly to individual staff member's families and their recent movements. Others received anonymous calls on their mobile phones.

The Queen

"Will someone please save these people from themselves," exhorts Tony Blair, meaning of course the blinking, blinkered Windsors, but the drift of this film is that he could equally well have been referring to the New Labour movement and the celebrity culture it wilfully nurtured.

Alastair Campbell was speaking at our offices a few weeks ago. He claimed that Stephen Frears has admitted to him that almost nobody was willing to provide himself and Peter Morgan with accurate reports of what went on in Westminster and Balmoral in the week after Diana's death, so that in the end they made the whole thing up. Yet some reviewers have pointed to the group of silent aids that are shown behind Blair as he ticks off his press secretary as evidence that certain scenes are more closely based on authentic eye-witness testimony.

I remember that week well. It did feel like the capital had somehow fallen into the hands of 'the people' and that anything would be possible if 'the people' willed it. I also recall watching groups of crestfallen individuals clutching bunches of flowers getting off the Tube at High Street Ken bound for Kensington Palace and thinking thoughts akin to those expressed here by the Duke of Edinburgh: "Sleeping in the streets and pulling out their hair for someone they never knew...and they think we're mad." An odd mix of exhilaration and revulsion. The film captures those mixed emotions extremely well. And it's funny, gripping, charming and in places vaguely disturbing. It captures the would-be republican's dilemma perfectly.

Mark Kermode apparently still thinks it's a TV drama not a feature film proper. It certainly starts off that way, with some rather artificial dialogue, but Mirren and Sheen in particular do somehow manage to lift it up to another level of interest.

Things must be bad...

When even the Guanacos are worried about coming to Guatemala. It has been reported today that emails are circulating in El Salvador advising its citizens to steer clear of their neighbour, owing to the present state of criminalidad. Given that the murder rate can reach 20 on a bad day, Guatemala City is looking as attractive a tourist destination as Baghdad right now.

Meanwhile Manuel Antonio Recinos, director and Bladimiro López, alcaide of El Boquerón maximum security jail, plus 22 of their staff have been collared for the murders of the four senior police officers, themselves arrested just a few days ago for the assassinations of the three Salvadorean parliamentarians and their driver. Eye witnesses say prison staff openly allowed a group of armed men into the facility to carry out the killings.

Abandon all hope, you who enter here

A brand new gateway to hell opened up rather unexpectedly in the middle of Guatemala City this weekend. Three people died, apparently drowned in an underground river of sewage.

It seems that residents in the neighbourhood had been reporting strange tremors for some time and these have not abated since the sinkhole appeared. 'Illegal drains' have been mentioned in connection with the phenomenon. The story has been covered (with video) here by Polish TV news.

Update: I chuckled yesterday when V referred to this as "el culo de Judas". Appropriately enough, Telediario is referring to the affected citizens as damnificados. 40 families from el barrio san Antonio have had to be temporarily sheltered and Oscar Berger has been around to promise government assistance and ask for patience.

A developing story...

Now the four senior police suspects in the case of the murdered Salvadorean politicians have themselves been shot dead inside the maximum security El Boquerón prison and a riot is reportedly in progress at the jail with several officers taken hostage. It was of course a great idea to put them in a prison more or less controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha with its strong links to San Salvador.

The policemen had been linked to the crime because the vehicle they were using had a GPS unit which apparently placed them at the remote farm where the Guanacos were first held captive then executed and torched. No need for Horatio Caine on that one, but now we will probably never learn if the ultimate authors of the crime reside outside Guatemala.

That time of year again

This wonderful image of the jacarandas in bloom in Antigua's parque central was taken this week by Revue mag's ever vigilant Rudy Girón. (Presumably from the Ayuntamiento?)

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, kick-off point for Cuaresma (Lent) the season when Guatemala's pious citizens don the colour of their most resplendent trees.

I'm growing a little jacarandita here in London in our sitting room. It shares a pot with a substantial palm and I am too chicken to transplant it for the time being.

In 2007, after 18 years of visits to Central America, I am finally to experience Semana Santa (V's pics) in Antigua.

A few weeks ago Chanel 4's The Search saw contestants running around La Merced and having to destroy a multi-coloured sawdust Easter carpet in order to locate their next clue. The programme-makers then delberately confused the Agua and Pacaya volcanoes before taking the team to Yaxhá, Petén.

When I passed through the forest last December my driver offered to take me to Yaxhá but I declined because I really wanted to make a certain bus in Santa Elena and was anyway resistant to extra charges. I now regret this decision because these ruins are clearly some of the most spectacular in Guatemala. There's a part of me that wants to grind out the trek to El Mirador too.

Boken April

It’s clear to me now that with his Abril Despedaçado Walter Salles revealed himself as yet another director guilty of adapting a source in such a way that dispenses with the central kernel of meaning, leaving us with a disappointingly hollow bit of cinema.

On screen we see a rather pointless feud between two families of farmers in the ‘badlands’ of Brazil. Yet what Ismail Kadare had given us in his first-rate novel was something far more thought-provoking.

He takes us up to the Rrafsh, his native Albania’s mountain plain. There we find Gjorg lying in wait for Zef of the Kryeqyqe, the young man that had taken his own brother’s life, thereby becoming one of a long line of black armband-wearing justicers that occupy the choice burial plots of their feuding clans.

The murder that Gjorg is about to commit is sanctioned by the Kanun, the mountain folks’ uncompromising law covering everyday matters of honour, hospitality and bloody vengeance. He is driven by orders from a distant place “the place of generations long gone” and by the desire to avoid the shame of his kin having their coffee cups passed to them under the leg.

After each murder in the chain it is possible for the family of the deceased to grant the killer a thirty day truce or bessa. Gjorg obtains this from the Kryeqyqes and immediately sets off to get a taste for life beyond his village in his few remaining days of what the yanks call normalcy. There are roads within the mountain province that are themselves protected by a bessa, exempt from the blood payment in much the same way that Park Lane is now exempt from Mayor Ken's Congestion Charge.

In this land newborns are welcomed with the prayer “May he have a long life and die by the rifle” and the strength of the Kanun can be assessed at any one time by noting the ratio of cultivated fields to fallow ones, for families that owe a debt of blood tend to abandon their farms and seek refuge in one of the dark, windowless towers of refuge that stand like sentinels in the midst of each village in the Rrafsh.

This is thus “the shadow land…the place where the laws of death prevail over the laws of life,” as wastefully murderous as contemporary Guatemala, yet perhaps somehow more heroic and virtuous for the way that death has been codified.

Indeed Kadare wants us to consider whether this blood-spattered civility is in some way beyond good and evil, beyond moral censure. To help answer this question for us he sends a pair of city-dwelling honeymooners up into this epicly violent land. They are the writer Bessian and his wife Diana, the kind of disconcerting female that one mountain man ruefully observes, is capable of "stirring up a lust for life – even without honour.”

Bessian wants his bride to experience the grandeur of this strange land beyond the aegis of the state, but what she in fact experiences forms a nice little parable about the dangers of serendipitous travel for all relationships, however strongly-rooted they may be in their home environment. Diana’s very brief intersection with Gjorg is enough to re-shape both their destinies, though Kadare is careful to keep the various strands of his narrative as separate as coherence will allow.

The author doesn’t neglect to show us the absurd, the petty and the downright base sides to Albania's Kanun. He introduces us to the Steward of the Blood Mark Ukacierra, bailiff for the Prince of Orosh, the sole beneficiary of the blood tax paid by each of the justicers. Unlike his more conventionally agricultural colleagues, Ukacierra must manage invisible fields irrigated by blood, and has of late been beset by premonitions of a drought. Only Gjorg’s murder of Zef had prevented March 17 from being the first blood-free date in the whole history of the Kanun.

Ukacierra’s husbandry of the blood-feud is one aspect of its distortion by brute economics that Kadare presents us with. He also has a character describe a man that makes a living from the fees paid for his wounds. We also see how incapable of making their own judgments the mountain people have become, deferring all important decisions to celebrity interpreters of the Kanun, such as the near-comical itinerant Solomon known as Ali Binak, who admits that much of his great wisdom is founded on quite simple adjudications.

The feud between Gjorg’s family and the unpronounceable Kryeqyqes had begun generations before when an unknown outsider had been gunned down in their village after spending the night as a guest of the Berishas. According to the Kanun the guest is akin to a semi-divine being, guaranteed the protection (and vengeance) of his hosts just as long as he doesn’t lift the lid of the cooking pot during his stay. (This part I strongly agree with. Dinner guests that make a nuisance of themselves in our kitchen are unlikely to be invited back!)

Whilst it has been especially hard this week to appreciate the compensating virtue and grandeur of life out in Guatemala, blood steward Ukacierra’s disdain for flatlanders is surely a more extreme version of the reaction I have against my fellow Londoners whenever I return from Central America. And when considering the complicated mess that he has quite literally grown up with, Gjorg asks himself if he has become more messed up because of it. “He tried to recall families that were not involved in the blood feud and found no special signs of happiness in them. It even seemed to him that sheltered from that danger, they hardly knew the value of life, and were only the more unhappy for that.”

Eugene Onegin

An interesting experience all round. I haven't before sat watching a screen next to people with blankets over their legs anywhere that wasn't at least 35,000 feet up in the air.

But this was The Metropolitan Opera, live via satellite in HD at the Greenwich Picture House. Such moviecasts are "a new art form," according to the LA Times.

Tchaikovsky's opera derives of course from Pushkin's verse novel, for me the definitive work of Russian literature, and one of those books that made a very great impression on me back in my school days. It's sadder than all of Shakespeare's tragedies put together.

Essentially it tells the story of a puffed up and dissipated trustifarian type that turns up in Hicksville on the Steppes and coldly tells an ingenuous young admirer to get a grip, only to later lose it himself when he spots her transformed into a dazzling trophy wife at court. The country girl can now match him in worldliness, but unlike other great heroines of nineteenth century literature, she shies away from adultery.

It was in the front row too that I saw Ralph Fiennes' uninspired cinematic version of the story with Christofer; he would never sit anywhere else. This time it was not a matter of choice but I had a plush reclining seat with plenty of legroom, so I wasn't looking or feeling as awkward and cantankerous as some of the people around me. We complain a lot about our teenagers in this country but it strikes me that our wrinklies are as quick to assume and profer offense as any hoodie on the highstreet. The amount of pushing and shoving that went on in front of the entrance to screen #1 reminded me of boarding an aeroplane with a bunch of Guatemalans. These are the people that keep me out of museums on Sunday afternoons.

The close up camerawork amplified a couple of the weaknesses of this production, uncluttered (i.e. sparse) sets and over-ripened cast members. Elena Zaremba as Olga in particular, is no spring chicken. "Good, but old" pronounced one of the whittering blue-rinse brigade behind me when she came to do her curtain call.

The conductor was the wayward-haired Russian Valery Gergiev who looks like he might have studied at the Chernobyl conservatory. His compatriot Dmitri Hvorostovsky makes an eminent Evgeny, though this time I noticed how little Tchaikovsky sets up the character in the first act. In truth this opera really ought to have been called Tatiana. I've also always felt that the real tragic hero of the piece is Lenski, and the Russian composer certainly gives mediocre man of verse the choice of the tunes, a beautiful duet with Olga and then a plaintive swansong before the duel. Ramón Vargas, a Mexican bel-canto specialist, worked his culito off to master Russian, and was a revelation in the role. Larisa Shevchenko is also superb as Tanya's nanny.

I was last at the Met for real in January 1989 with my then (American) girlfriend for the The Marriage of Figaro, which turned out to be a bit of a snore. I last saw Eugene Onegin live with Thomas Allen at Covent Garden a couple of years before that, and much appreciated the stageing of the duel scene, which included gently falling snowflakes.

When I arrived tonight my front row seat afforded me an excellent position for soaking up the singing of three young sopranos standing in front of the screen with their stiff dresses and flabby upper arms. They frumped their way through primary school classics of the English folk tradition as "Oh no, John no John no".

I later made my way to the exit reflecting on whether today's teens could be capable of evolving to replenish the ranks of the crabby sophisticates I left shouting "bravo" at the 2D screen. They probably do the same thing whenever Des O'Connor appears on their tellies.

A History of Violence

Joël recommended this one to me and I'm glad he did.

Based on a graphic novel, the action takes place against a knowingly-familiar tableau. (Which reminded me a bit of those made -for-TV movies that play on Living on weekday afternoons) A nice town with self-consciously nice inhabitants is suddently visited upon by some pretty pestilential east coast villains.

Tom Stall, a man seemingly gifted with the luckiest of lifestyles in all Indiana, is thrown into the media spotlight after defending his friendly diner against a pair of transient mass murderers. Shortly afterwards some mobsters from Philly come to Millbrook to look him up, claiming that Tom is really Joey Cusack, a misplaced member of their social circle.

Viggo Mortensen plays Stall with just the right amount of impassivity. It's a bit of a tightrope act because he has to preserve our compassion as the body count around him mounts. Mortensen is perfect in the role because he combines a air of disarming boyish innocence with the ability to look worryingly malignant with the flick of his smile. He does hollow-eyed pretty well too.

Overall it's a very well cast movie. William Hurt and Maria Bello are both excellent. So is Ashton Holmes as Jack.

I liked the way that David Cronenberg appeared to be establishing the two guys we see outside a motel at the start as key members of his narrative, only to dispense with them fairly sharpish shortly afterwards. The director makes us sit back and enjoy the way certain kinds of dispute are best settled with violence, whilst he encourages us to reflect on why this is so. "I am a complete Darwinian," he has commented.

The story does have its shortcomings. One has to wonder what prevented Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris in Men in Black mode) from being a bit more direct in his approach. His exchanges with Stall somehow don't ring true. Fogarty doesn't seem to behave as if Stall were really Cusack and Stall doesn't act as if he might have had some (serious) previous with Fogarty. Based on what I was seeing, at times I did find it hard to really believe that Stall might himself have come to believe his own story so completely.

The Departed

Fans of Infernal Affairs will inevitably have some misgivings about Martin Scorcese's remake.

Yet it pulls you along like one of those permanently enthusiastic friends that goads you into turning up at a party you never really wanted to go to...and you end up having a good time in spite of yourself.

The script fizzes. That and the development of character are Scorcese's main developments of his Asian source, but these aren't exclusively enlargements of it. Nicholson is often out of control and the rendering of DiCaprio and Damon's roles actually detracts from what I personally take to be the meaning of the story. The police mole is a bit too likeable and the gangster mole is a bit too un-likeable; The interesting symmetries between the police inspector and the gang-leader are also lost, as well as the sense that we are witnessing a conflict between two competing codes of honour.

There was a pathos about the inverted situations of the two men in the Hong Kong thriller that Scorcese simply doesn't capture. In spite of all of DiCaprio's best efforts I never really felt especially sorry for Costigan and Sullivan's actions are blandly self-serving. You never have the sense that he subconsciously yearns to become one of the good guys.

Infernal Affairs had a certain epic quality, underscored by the Buddhist ruminations on the torments of the betrayer which flash on the screen at the beginning and the end. It's one reason why the underlying structure of the story was able to support a trilogy. Scorcese on the other hand needs to wrap things up in 150 minutes, so he is forced to tell us everything we need to know about his two leads in the first twenty minutes or so, and then to insert a rather artificial ending, courtesy of a new main character of William Monahan's creation. (Mark Wahlberg's Dignam, otherwise there to gas up the dialogue.)

Alec Baldwin's hammy performance (something of a reprise of his movie star from Notting Hill) is actually more amusing than Jack's. And the film actually ends on a strange note of comedy as we see a rat making its way across Boston's rooftops from the window of Sullivan's overstretched ambitions.

It was a nice touch to have the pair share the same shrink, and to suggest that Sullivan was altogether less cocky in the bedroom.

Anyway, give the man his Oscar I say!

Not just in the movies

Sergio had just come out of the bank when he was shot. Almost as soon as he was back in his car a man appeared at his window and asked for the money. "Que dinero?" he responded. That can't have helped, but who can tell if things would have worked out differently if he had chosen to comply. The man with the gun pulled open the door and commenced shooting.

Sergio had a passenger. That she lived can be put down to one of those lucky breaks that tend to sit in the armoury of the the more shameless sort of screenwriter. The gunman had an accomplice, luckily not as trigger-happy as his mate. He pulled open the door and fired twice at the passenger's abdomen. One bullet missed and the other hit the mobile phone on her belt. She played dead and today has a small bruise on her belly. She was fortunate also that the man on the other side, who wouldn't stop until he had let off fourteen rounds, was concentrating all his fire on poor Sergio.

Gettin' medeeval on ya

Various incidents this week have combined to make me happy that I still reside in a land where the leader of the opposition can imagine that tax-breaks might get the instiution of marriage back on its feet.

I'm quite sure there are plenty of folk in Guatemala who would like their own government to deal out the kind of punishments currently favoured by the Saudis. This week al-Riyadh has reported that four Sri Lankans were executed in a busy market square on Monday and their headless bodies were afterwards tied to wooden beams or 'crucified' and put on public display ,"as a deterrent".

This is way too medieval for my taste. However, reading up this week on the Anglo-Saxons and their menu-based bloodfeud/weregeld system, it has occurred to me that something similar might just slow down the escalation of violence over there. The power of the state was similarly un-dependable in the Dark Age kingdoms. If there were serious financial disincentives to causing murder and mayhem perhaps people would think twice before shooting someone 14 times. Maybe David Cameron is on to something. Or maybe not. Tax-breaks wouldn't really work in Guatemala anyway.

For the past day or so all of Guatemala's crime-solving capabilities have been directed at the headline difficulty of the three dead Guanacos. They had even asked for FBI assistance. But now four suspects are in custody: two high-ranking police officials and two police investigators. All four, according to Radio Sonora, were assigned to a special unit to combat youth gangs.

The Menchurian Candidate

IGSS de puta! Look who is going to stand for President.

The race needed a little help anyway. According to the Angus Reid Global Monitor, the current state of the candidates is as follows:

Álvaro Colom (UNE) 43%
Otto Pérez Molina (PP) 18%
Alejandro Giammatei (GANA) 5%
Fritz García Gallont (PU) 4%

Daylight robbery

A day in the life of a Guatemalan highwayman...filmed by the robbers themselves. Looks like the full version had a jolly marimba soundtrack, removed for this edit!

River of blood

"But fix your gaze on the valley because we near the river of blood in which those who injure others by violence are boiled." (Virgil, in Dante's Inferno)

"The scene is Dante-esque," observed Julio Rank, spokesman for Salvadorean President Tony Saca, on viewing the charred remains of his lately deceased countrymen. (It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that George Bush, the King of Spain and 11 other regional heads of state are visiting Guatemala at different times over the next month.)

Just before catching the clipper tonight I had a call from V. Her earlier telephone bulletin and my own reporting of it had some inaccuracies. It was not Sergio's teenage son that perished last night, but Sergio himself, shot 14 times in his car.

And so for the second time in a month I found myself heading down river on the boat with my eyes leaking for a dead Guatemalan that in truth I hardly knew. Yet this I do know: Sergio was completely harmless, and he was the number one cuatazo (best mate) of V's brother Felipe. I wept for the pain this will have caused his wife, his young family, and of course Felipe. And for the extravagant senselessness of this murder.

It was in fact Sergio's father that stood as V's padrino, and his younger brother Juan Carlos that met his end in that aviodable industrial misadventure back in 1994 (which provided me with my first experience of a Latin American velorio).

Between ourselves V and I had often derided Sergio, por tacaño, por capitalino. Our last face to face meeting occurred a couple of Christmases ago at Felipe's bountiful table at which he had arrived with a large group brandishing a couple of bottles of Gallo between them. We exchanged glances as others spoke, two parts curiosity and three parts mistrust. But harmless he certainly was. Having been made redundant by a bank a few years back, he set himself up as a freelance money-changer, a career-change which must ultimately have exposed him to the blistering savagery of Guatemala City.

Possible reputation damage

Oscar Berger's government today opined that the murders of three dodgy Salvadorean politicians over the weekend could damage Guatemala's international image. This would presumably be its well-established reputation as the place to live if you want to knock off a Bishop or torture your girlfriend...with impunity. The elimination of individuals that are themselves representative of, shall we say, a dubious track record on human rights, will only serve to confuse foreign observers as to where the country actually stands on the slaughter of innocents!

Another day, another death

This time V's godfather's teenage son, gunned down yesterday in a robbery incident in Guate. This is the closest that the current storm of mindless violence has got to us. The teenager's elder brother also died a few years ago in the kind of stupid industrial accident that Guatemala specialises in.