Pics from the archive (21)

Assorted graffiti carved by nineteenth century sailors on the capital of one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon (5th century BC) at Cape Sounion, a few hours drive south of Athens.

Taken Tuesday 30th April, 1985

Byron too inscribed his name on the temple but I couldn't find his mark. I tried and failed again when I returned to the cape in the autumn of 1995 whilst working on the online component of the Athens 2004 Olympic bid.

Nothing could really beat the all-nighter pulled in '85, when I watched the sun sink behind the temple, then stayed up to watch the stars arc across the night sky before daylight came up again behind them.

2012 for Dummies

Want the low-down on the upcoming shift in global consciousness? Well then, just click here to see David McCandless's superb 2012: End of the World? infographic.

I've spent most of this week writing up a big report on innovations in semantic technologies and visualisations for the staff meeting in Sofia on the 17th, and along the way I came across McCandless's stunning new book The Visual Miscellaneum.

Here are some of the other visualisations that he has recently posted to his blog.

The UK's deadliest drugs

H1N1: Is the vaccine safe?

Casualties in Afghanistan

Pics from the archive (20)

Foot-shaped Roman terracotta scent bottles, British Museum
Taken January 4th, 2002

The nails along the bottom of the left-hand bottle are arranged in the shape of an alpha and an omega and a swastika. I wonder why Roman perfumes came in patas?

First Words (16)

"He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to try to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything of that sort."

Yasunabi Kawabata, House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961)

Pics from the archive (19)

Prussia Cove, Porth-en-Alls, Cornwall
Taken 15th July 2003

Four years earlier Surfer and I watched the total eclipse of the sun from the top of the hill at the back.

A month or so ago I was reading Iain Banks's Transition and came across the passage where a lecturer insists that alien tourists would come to our Earth not to see the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall, but to witness an eclipse...which may well be a near unique phenomena amongst inhabited worlds.

So all you have to do to spot an ET, he insisted, is look out for the weirdoes amongst the masses gathered in anticipation of totality. Easier said then done however, because on that day in 1999 Surfer and I appeared to be in a very small minority of 'ordinary-looking' folk on that Cornish hillside!

Pics from the archive (18)

Amsterdam, taken August 1984

TV Viewing Diary: The World's Strictest Parents

This is the only episode of this series that I've tuned into and but I can't imagine there can many pairs of British teens more suited to exportation to the developing world...in this case Belmopan, Belize and the home of the Perez family.

Calvin and Rosie are soon pulling all kinds of strops as the discipline and worth ethic of their hosts is applied. A tipping point of sorts is reached when Mrs Perez threatens to tip them both outdoors, mattresses and all, unless they hand over their fags.

The BBC of course can't afford to be sued by the parents of reality TV participants with avoidable malaria infections, so the 'larning experience' proper seems to kick in from then on, with both teens appearing to have their perspectives rearranged by a stint at the Liberty foster home.

The programme suggests that its that much harder for children who have been abandoned by their natural fathers to learn respect for authority. It also reminded me of many of the reasons why I have come to admire the core values of the sociological midrift of our neighbouring nation.

Posadas and mordidas are go...

Driving back very late last night from the capital I spotted a festive warning flashing electronically above the Calzada Roosevelt: Cero tolerancia, 0% alcohol, 0% drogas. Shortly after passing the Mixco turn off, we were duly waved over by two agents of the PNC.

Now the trouble is that this zero tolerance policy segues nicely with the unofficial Christmas bonus drive operated by certain rogue elements within the force. Indeed, you might say that the two weeks or so before both Christmas and Easter are the key fundraising fortnights in their calendar...so we should have been ready for a bit of aggro when we planned to break out of our Panchoy comfort zone for seasonal shopping purposes.

We had both our licenses, the vehicle's SAT papers (in my name) and V — at the wheel — had both her cédula and her passport on her...but unfortunately I'd neglected to take my own passport into Guate with me. And so it was that I learned that not carrying my actual passport around (photocopies simply won't do) is an offence punishable by immediate deportation.

Of course the agente at V's window had something even more on-the-spot in mind, but part of this game is that the man in uniform can't actually bring himself to say it; he just assumes that the individuals that he is inconveniencing will understand the etiquette. "You haven't been stopped before have you?" he observed with a note of chagrin as we met his sharp statements with some of our own. (We are of course veterans of such stand-offs, but can hide it well enough.)

He eventually noted that he would let us off this time "porque usted es Guatemalteca", but I had the sense that V had worn him down a bit with her mindgames, and as if to confirm this, his well-wishes for the journey ahead sounded a bit like a veiled threat, much like a Mississippi sheriff might sneer "you folks have a nice day now."

Her best ploy was mentioning that his colleagues in Panorama were our friends and neighbours and making to ring up one senior named officer at the station there. She's carefully cultivated said law-enforcer; this is the kind of country where it's always handy to have a range of people you can call up in different situations.

Meanwhile the copper on scene had given it his best go too, insisting that she recite her cédula number from memory ( B2...is the peculiar marker of the true panze verde) and listing the various delinquents, including narcos and kiddyfiddlers, who'd been no match for his police-work over the years.

I must get into the habit of taking my passport out with me at all times, the policeman added...even when I nip across to the tienda.

The trouble is that I lose stuff. Last time I mislaid my passport (Phoenix, 2007) the British Consulate wasn't answering its phones and I had to trek across the Sonoran desert to LA in order to get their attention.

UPDATE

— 'Zero tolerance' is generally a seasonal rather than an everyday problem in Guatemala.

— The car in front stopped and its driver passed his papers to the police with a ten or twenty Quetzal bill inside. This is how the locals do it; they don't even have to apply the handbrake.

— If we'd been in the right-hand lane we could have driven on without stopping, but in this instance it would have been impossible to do so without llevandole al policia como corbata...given that he was standing right in front of us.

— Of course you don't need to carry your passport with you at all times, and I don't intend to start doing so from now on; though I might consider it when travelling outside my local jurisdiction, especially after 10pm.

— If it hadn't been my passport, it would have been something else, like the steering wheel on the right. They simply wanted their Christmas money.

— It is rare that the police in Antigua play the checkpoint fundraiser game or hassle tourists. Indeed Antigua has its own special force dedicated to helping and protecting visitors.

— I have never paid a bribe to the Guatemalan police.

2012 (2009)

We were warned...

Pre-warned is exactly how I felt when I sat down to watch 2012. It's as if the small print on the poster said 'Get comfortable, you will be here for a while ...rather a long while; your intelligence will be insulted at regular intervals...and yet you will find it difficult not to feel for the most part entertained'.

Amused too, I might add, for Roland Emmerich's movie is probably best appreciated as a semi-intended comedy.

Dr K's theory is that the reason it is here at all in Q4 2009 has absolutely nothing to do with the cosmological mathematics of Guatemala's indigenes (which is axiomatically correct, as Sheldon would say.) and everything to do with accountancy. For the producers need to maximise revenues across all media from celluloid to DVD and this will take approximately three calendar years to achieve.

The Maya don't get much of a look in here, though we are treated to a news report showing a neat circle of apparently indigenous elders who have picked the main acropolis of Tikal as the ideal spot for a mass suicide. The news hack makes reference to the troubling prophecies of the Quiche as opposed to the Quiché, which is a bit like the bothersome tendency of English football commentators of referring to Kaká as Caca. (How very gauché you might say.)

Yes it's long, and even longer when you realise that you going to have to watch its most destruction-laden sequences in slow motion action-replay mode. (...if only to spot the product placement for Comcast which tumbles into the chasm with the rest of LA.)

These tend to involve the family we care about (barely) driving through highly elaborate and fluid catastrophes where the term 'near miss' is debased to the point of geeky frivolity. It's as if the director periodically feels the need to run his characters through a CGI simulation of the end of the world where the sense of hazard is comprehensively diminished by its own prodigiality.

As well as being highly detailed, some of these effects are rather ropey: a special mention here must go to the fiery outbursts from the 'Yellowstone Caldera'.

Character is not this movie's strong point either. It's as if the writers said to themselves 'OK, apart from the obligatory divorced couple and two kids, who else can we include in this mess?' Zlatko Buric's Russian kleptocrat Yuri Karpov is a welcome addition to the mix whose fate is handled appropriately, but this is not so for several others who either survive undeservedly (as far as genre tradition might dictate) or die quite horribly simply because they're in the way at the time.

Grade: B(+)

The Interweb for beginners

Amusingly mashed-up gobbets from the Beeb's digitalrevolution site.

Spanish Pedazos #7

V standing above the little Asturian fishing village of Cudillero, whose residents speak the unique Spanish dialect of Pixueto. Every 28th of June a long poem written in this tongue outlining the events of the previous year is recited to a figure of St Peter as part of the village's fiestas patronales.

The northern route of the Camino de Santiago passes through here so there's a pilgrim hostal down below in the main town, where big battleship-grey seagulls swoop out of the sky like Stukas and visitors fleeing them are likely to slip in the many puddles of cider left by the locals' highly visual but somewhat wasteful serving technique.

Legend has it that the Vikings first discovered and settled this cove on the northern coast of the peninsula.

Taken July 2004.

Pics from the archive (17)

Street scene outside the peasant market in Moscow.
Taken Tuesday 2nd April 1985.

The people on the far right are examining local classifieds posted on the exterior wall of the market - a kind of analogue Craigslist and what in the pre-Glasnost USSR was one of the few forms of petit-bourgeois capitalism tolerated in the Soviet capital...though the peasant market itself was entrepreneurial on a small scale. (I bought a wooden cochino in there which currently sits on top of my bookshelf downstairs.)

Pics from the archive (17)

A family conduct a sacrifice in the hills above Chichicastenango
Taken Sunday 15th October 1989

"With stench and smoak"

We hung around last night until the smell of burning devil was superceded by the smell of burning sausage.

That's not us by the way, in spite of any superficial resemblance. The one on the right had his own personal diabolical aura of stale sweat and alcohol.

Guatemala's new found interest in public safety means that the publicly-funded (red?) devil is no longer incinerated at the mid-point between the two petrol stations in the Barrio de la Concepción...or indeed on the cobbles directly above the Esso fuel storage tanks.

Last night's events were supposedly more environmenally friendly as well, because Lucifer himself had been put together using recycled papier maché and the Muni has anyway been discouraging citizens from burning their own somewhat toxic household diablos in the street every seventh of December.

This didn't stop the acts which followed la quema from letting off a load of dry ice (i.e. carbon dioxide). A pair of Gallo culitos frolicked a bit, then on came a passable bunch of young Guatemalan rockeros. (Deslumbre?) Barroco however, were a bit barrubish.

For us Brits the resemblence to Guy Fawkes night on November 5th is cheering.

After picking up our dinner we ran into this little procession on 7a Avenida Norte:

Screensnaps #10

A predatory Fried Egg Jellyfish wandering into a group of 100,000 Aurelia jellyfish in order to spear several of them with its tentaclces. (From last week's Life: Creatures of the Deep.)

TV Viewing Diary: Ugly Beauty

Waldemar Januszczak is unquestionably a more captivating presenter than Matthew Collings and clearly knows it; his contribution to BBC2's Beauty series was superficially more stimulating, but upon reflection...all over the shop.

You might think that all of modern art is ugly, corrupt and out to shock, he posits at the start, but watching my self-indulgent tour of Venice and whatever's showing there at the time will soon cure you of this misapprehension, he adds, sort of.

From then on we're not really sure if the documentary is about the beauty of ugliness, the ugliness of beauty...or even whether it is anything but an idiosyncratic sub-section of modern art that is the focus of all this enthusiasm.

So, as with Collings the topic is diced up into several categories of beauty of undefined size and importance, with an assortment of examples supplied:

— THE BEAUTY OF EMPTINESS
He takes a rowing boat out into the lagoon in order to talk about the 'cosmic haziness' of Turner. Anish Kapoor's reverie-inducing sculptures and the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto also feature.

— THE BEAUTY OF DEATH
Art, he offers, is about finding beauty in our short, meaningless existence. So Damian Hirst's dead flesh in a perspex box belongs to an age-old traditon.

— THE BEAUTY OF MOTHERHOOD
An odd choice, that one. He turns back to Tiepolo to show us how artists have given us visions of motherhood based on our hopes rather than facts. And then he's waxing lyrical about the poetic art of Yoko Ono. (Motherhood??)

— THE BEAUTY OF TEXTURE
Seemingly ugly 'found' textures can be ravishing, Januszczak asserts. Spanish artist Jorge Otero-Pailos has preserved the last dirty wall in the Doge's palace by taking an impression using a latex skin. While the marks of pollution — and a certain amount of history — have now been erased from the real thing, Otero-Pailos's recreation of the pre-restoration surface with all of its skanky textures has been put on show at the Biennale.

There's truth in this, for I have certainly found the little chapels along the Calle de los Pasos and the facade of the cathedral itself a bit less 'ravishing' since they were treated to a paint job.

This section also included an aside on Karl André the 'balladier of the banal' and Jeff Koons, purveyor of the ugly beauty of kitsch — which 'looks dumb but isn't' and addresses our 'deep appetite for shallow things'.

— THE BEAUTY OF THE NIGHT
Suddenly we've left Venice and gone to Tokyo, where the neon-lit skyline has inspired artists like Tatsuo Miyajima. I was rather taken with his Sea of Time, where little red electric numbers flicker in a still pool.

— THE BEAUTY OF MYSTERY
Essentially the kind of aesthetic experience you have when you see something that makes you think 'How friggin' random is that!'. Example: Maurizio Cattelan's horse.

Humpday (2009)

"What exactly about two straight dudes having sex on camera is a great piece of art?"

Such is the question that Ben (on the left) asks his more self-consciously Kerouackian college buddy Andrew as they lie beside each other in a motel bedroom, having dared each other into making a gay porn movie for Humpfest.

Married Ben has found the interlude between college and yuppy lifestyles to be disconcertingly short. Andrew on the other hand is still on the path of the 'motorcycle adventurer dude'.

The set-up is highly promising and the first forty minutes or so are indeed very funny. Many have had one of those mates who appears more like an elephant in the china shop of one's life as relative rates of personal development/compromise diversify after graduation.

Andrew's reappearance in Ben's life and the chums he quickly acquires in Seattle's alternative art scene are wryly observed by writer-director Lyn Shelton, who has pulled up just short of the full-on mockumentary style...which at times leads to the rather distracting impression of an invisible extra participant in a number of scenes.

Having turned up out of the blue one night around 2am Andrew is soon being equipped with a mattress in the spair room by Ben's bleary-eyed wife Anna, who can barely remember him from the wedding. The next evening the friends (minus 'er indoors) get stoned at a hipster house party and somehow get fixated on the idea of making an amateur gay porn movie, the USP of which will be their inherant straightness.

The defects the film develops from this point stem from Ben's question above. Does Shelton want to be funny, complex or indeed arty? She has a go at all three and comes up short in each case, and during the (anti-)climax at the Boning Motel we start to see her script for what it essentially is: a tale about men written by a woman, fashioned to make women laugh and men feel awkward. But by this stage the awkwardness has ceased to be either particularly amusing or observant.

The underlying, under-developed aspect of this narrative is manipulation. As the big day approaches Ben and his wife become less likeable — in his case, almost creepy — while Andrew's vulnerability comes to the fore. If Ben is being driven by the urge to unsuppress an aspect of his nature which committment to Anna and a white collar job had curbed, Andrew 'just wants to finally finish something' in his life. This is as deep as Humpday gets, and working with the same premise I might have further developed the conceit of a yuppy couple taking psychological revenge on a footloose friend (Rather like a reversed-out thriller along the lines of A Perfect Getaway where at first you think the charismatic intruder will end up posing a threat to the conventional couple into whose lives he has suddenly erupted, when in fact it is they who are the twisted fucks!)

Update: If the whole thing was improvised I can see why the standard of comedy and observation fluctuated. Given that the characters and situations were not made up in real-time, it still strikes me that whatever motivations the actors had established for their characters and whatever guidance Shelton provided at the outset lacked the staying power for either a really funny or a really thought-provoking ending.

Grade: B

Pics from the archive (16)

Igreja da Misericórdia in Viseu, Portugal.
Work commenced in 1775 under master mason António da Costa Faro.

Taken September 2002

Mega-bash

The ex-Prez has been throwing an all-day shingdig at his pad just up the road. From early on the denizens of Jardines were out washing their cars, cutting their lawns and putting up helpful little signs like this in anticipation of the influx of illustrious guests for the wedding reception of ex-Prez jnr.

The area was packed with vans sent by countless leading local caterers. We watched as the men from Tikal Futura in their burgundy waistcoats queued for tortillas at a street corner. Perhaps nobody thought to lay on a few canapés for the staff.

From our francotirador's-eye view of proceedings, we had possibly the best seat for the firework display which kicked the evening session off at seven. It's V's birthday and she loves pyrotecnics, so this was a special treat.

Alluring smells have been wafting across the valley ever since, starting with roasting coffee beans. Right now there's a scent of Asian-Fusian nibbles that has us playing with the idea of jumping in the car and going out for a Chinese. (But in truth we haven't quite recovered from last night's GMT-birthday celebrations.)

We reckon the organisers of today's bash knocked on a certain neighbour's door and offered those within a bribe so that they wouldn't hang up any washing this weekend. There's stuff on the line almost every single day, but it's been clear of trapos since last night, and thus presents a less obvious eye-sore to guests arriving at the entrance of DV (The local n'er-do-well who was sneaking around at night pulling up all the new flowers in order to flog them off, would also appear to have been socially cleansed well in advance of the condominio's grand opening.)

From up here we can also see how the entire lotification has been turned into a huge valet parking lot for gas-guzzlin' 4x4s and other smart motors this evening. Guests step out beneath an awning and are ushered into minibuses which take them on a two-block jaunt over to the parrot-infested driveway.

We ran into ex-Prez himelf in his Kawasaki Mule last night. He's inclined to stop to chat with V, but this time he decelerated a bit, waved jovially then put his foot down to get around the corner, almost spilling the two bodyguards riding al fresco at the rear.

Pics from the archive (16)

Taken August 2005

"I would like to tell capitalists that Dubai does not need investors, investors need Dubai and I tell you that the risk lies not in using your money but in letting it pile up. It is dormant and dead if it is merely a figure in an account. I tell them not to hold onto it and kill it in safes, let it breathe and be active because money is like water - if you lock it up, it becomes stagnant and foul-smelling, but if you let it flow, it stays fresh. If it does not flow, it will become stagnant and its colour will change. When I encourage you to invest, I am not asking you to put your money into a fire - I guarantee that your money will be invested in carefully studied projects. I want to be frank with you - I have the courage to take decisions and to bear the responsibility for the consequences. Do you have the courage to be frank and decisive?"

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Duabi owes 107% of its GDP

The ironies of the Sheikh's foul-smelling water analogy can be fully appreciated here.