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.

 

 

 

Disturbia (2007)

 

This turned up a few days ago on Netflix and we were presently surprised to find that it was not one of those movies we had completely forgotten that we'd seen before because we're like, old.(How frustrated I used to get with my father when he could apparently watch a James Bond movie for probably the third time as if almost completely new to it. Like sensitivity to caffeine, I guess this is one of those stages we all kin of get to in the end.)

Blue Velvet it isn't, but it's a fun portrayal of sinister misconduct in the California burbs.

 

Key points...

Prior to this there was no previous appearance of Shia LaBoeuf which didn't set me thinking 'how the hell is this guy a movie star?', so it was striking just how charismatic a lead he was here.

 

Carrie Anne-Moss was more than a 'one hit wonder'. Who knew?

 

This film is dated by a couple of things, but most obviously by its tech, right on the cusp of the pre-smartphone era, which makes it especially interesting from a cultural perspective.

 

It also feels a generation old by virtue of the way the 'love interest' is deployed and the archetypes she has to conform to. I was reminded of a movie I saw in Boca with my aunt and uncle back in 1985, The Sure Thing, starring world-leading antisemitic twat John Cusack, where the tropes of the white male adolescent fantasy girl were even more in-yer-face. 

 

In Distopia we were possibly at a transition point, which is particularly interesting given the debate surrounding the role of Zendaya in Challengers and what we might have lost as well as gained since in terms of genuine, gender-balanced 'sexiness'. 

 

One of the most charming aspects of this movie is the way there is no real mystery to be solved because the psycho isn't taking even the most basic precautions to cover his tracks. I thought David Morse was also really good here and wondered why he's remained relatively low key for the past 17 years.

 

Challengers (2024)

This week Novax Dojovic has accepted a wild card to play in a comparatively minor tournament ahead of Roland Garros, presumably in the hope that he will learn how to win again on time for the upcoming Slam. He might even have had a potentially second round re-encounter with Andy Murray had not the latter contrived to lose in his opening match.

So, life imitates art, just a little bit, though there's no hint of any ménage à trois in the coverage I have seen. 

Maybe the problem I had with Challengers (beyond knowing a bit too much about professional tennis) is encapsulated by this image, which reminded me immediately of Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También, along with the fact that it handles a similar situation so much better. 

 

Zendaya, fresh from being the best thing in Dune Part II overcompensates a bit by being the 'meh' of Guadagnino's movie. 

Part of the problem is that the natural tendency of her features to resolve at rest into a kind of grimace (cara de huelepedo as they might say around here), really rather ideal for her role on Arrakis, is less appealing here as the aura of a supposedly universal love object. 

She convinces most as the younger, on court, ball-bashing version of Tashi, but far less so I think as the thirty-something 'MILF' of the more contemporary scenes.
 

 

 

That said, I didn't find any of them believable as players and at each of the key moments of their relationships something seemed to have gone missing in what was otherwise a heady mix. 

It's possible that Zendaya has been comparatively let down by the dialogue, scripted by Justin Kuritzkes, the real life version of the husband in Celine Song's Past Lives, that other notable cinematic love triangle of the past twelve months.

She might be movie's poster 'star', but I was left with the impression that both the writer and the director were more interested in the two boys. Again contrast Cuarón's classic in which Luisa's withheld inner torment is very much part of the trio-dynamic. Here Tashi's injury comes after the bond has formed and the story is really about as interested in the psychological impact of it as it is in her status as a working mother.

 

Big Lies

Big Lies. When I was growing up it seemed obvious that it was 'the other lot', the people trapped within authoritarian, ideologically oversaturated, basically insane societies that had to negotiate their way around these.

And yet when I made my first trips behind the Iron Curtain (never to North Korea to be sure) what I actually came across was more like ossified misinformation and people who seemed to both simultaneously believe and disbelieve depending on circumstances and things like fear and chauvinistic impulses. 

Today when I look at the leading exponents of the illiberal way, like China for example, I see extreme spin, propaganda, enveloping the actions and intentions of the CCP, but otherwise a practical and basically rational approach to most matters. 

 

In contrast it is the soup of US life that has become overloaded with the dumplings of untruth. Biden stole the 2020 election, Israel is committing genocide, Pizzagate, an individual who went through puberty as a male is a woman if he says so etc.

Big lies all of them, but don't waste your time arguing with the people that insist on believing them. These and others could each be debunked using a short memo, let alone an essay, but that's not the point. Believing them and helping to propagate them have become badges of belonging, functioning much like the Big Lies of religion. 

You will never talk any of their champions out of them, for their lives have come to depend upon them, and this is true even of the associated massed ranks of individuals whose credence is based more on personal and professional convenience.

I came across nothing similar in the USSR. perhaps because the religious mentality had been suppressed there for decades.

Anyway, I am increasingly wondering whether the Big Lies are the real problem. If you don't believe them, you're fine, right? Except you may not be, because the Big Lies have been clearing a pathway for a host of smaller, sometimes more state-of-the-art lies and the people pushing these are often individuals who would otherwise seem far more worthy of our trust than someone wearing a MAGA hat or waving a Jihadi flag.

The Big Lies are perhaps a bit like Russia's 'meat-grinder' battalions, softening up defences and locating weaknesses that can be exploited by better-prepared, more sophisticated units later on. Defenders gleefully mow them down and become complacent.

Let us not forget too that 'the other lot' are playing a role in this. They might not be foisting Big Lies on their own populations, but they have clearly seen the value in financing and otherwise promoting the 'grass roots' mendacity that has formed within western democracies.

A la Grann!

Seems that, following Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorcese is set to make a movie of another David Grann book, The Wager.

It's a great tale from the half century before the USA existed, but it features some of the usual distortions of contemporary American history-telling.

One of the sailors on board the shipwrecked vessel was called John Duck. Grann initially reports him as a free black man. In the latter stages of the book, the author then reports how Duck and two other English sailors are left behind in Patagonia where they are 'rescued' by indigenous locals before making their way up to Buenos Aires, where Duck alone, apparently suffers the terrible, inevitable fate which then stalked his race: kidnapped and sold into slavery.

Except this is NOT what happened. The factual version of Duck's story has been carefully adjusted in line with contemporary expectations in what is becoming a rather familiar way.

Firstly, Duck had an English father and was thus of mixed race, known then as a mulatto. His 'free' status would not have been so unusual.

When he and his comrades were found by the Tehuelches, all three were immediately enslaved by these local indigenes and held as involuntary household servants for a number of years.

At some point the Tehuelches 'redeemed' (i.e. ransomed off) the two white sailors, who eventually made it back to Britain without Duck.

It is uncertain why the Tehuelches held onto Duck, though one of the others later claimed that their 'hosts' felt that Duck, by way of his complexion, was one of them, and this feeling may ultimately have been reciprocated.

This same 'rescued' friend and colleague additionally related that the Tehuelches, who also liked to enslave white women, had provided each of them with a Spanish wife, so it is conceivable that Duck did in some way put down roots with his South American captors.

The two ransomed Englishmen were imprisoned in Buenos Aires for over a year in very tough conditions before being allowed to return home as released POWs, and it is also possible that Duck had consciously decided not to risk Spanish colonial hospitality while the war dragged on inconclusively.

Anyway, nearly all the interesting parts of this story have been carefully suppressed in Grann's book. Duck is depicted as a black man and he is kidnapped and enslaved by white men. That is the kind of historical narrative Americans expect to read nowadays, so that is the history they have been given, because it feels like it ought to be true, even if it isn't.

Such are many American 'facts' today: fabrications which identify as virtuous; improvements on truth. This comes as second nature to Hollywood of course, but 'journalists'?

I think what bothers me most here is the notion that Grann had read the first hand accounts, but in spite of / because of his status as a staff writer for the New Yorker, felt comfortable with reporting another version of the story that was only indirectly rooted in reality.

We tend to blame social media for placing us in silos, for a breakdown in manners and so on, and there is truth in that, but there is also a worrying trend within traditional media, which has spread out of the USA, the end result of which is that much of what passes for contemporary political debate is little more than a set of interlocking arguments over narrative treatments.

Growing up I came across many historians whose interpretative output was coloured by their backgrounds and political biases, but this overt promotion (and acceptance) of known falsehoods within academia — as well as the various kinds of public media we are still liable to trust — has clearly metastasized within our intellectual culture.

Leo doesn't seem like a natural fit for any of the key protagonists. The gunner John Bulkeley perhaps.

Ant-Zionism is not a safe space...

Many of those who insist that Anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism genuinely appear to be convinced that it isn't.

Should we believe them? After all, we don't tend to believe white people who insist that they are not racist any more, even though in the main they do seem to understand what racism is, or at least used to be.

A majority of Anti-Zionists on the other hand don't seem to grasp what antisemitism is at all. They seem to think it's a less important and possibly unnecessary sub-prejudice within racism, a misdemeanour version of the offence, so to speak, which they feel has to be primarily about skin pigmentation and relative oppression (at the hands of Europeans).

It's not. It is the symbolic attribution of blame on the Jews and Jewishness for the worst evil your own codified worldview has been able to come up with. At base scapegoating, but often something that becomes far worse as it veers away from the facts.

This is why Jews have been Christ-killers, pitiless capitalists, unrooted cosmopolitans living beyond nationalist sentiment, polluters of the Aryan line and now, racist colonialists, perhaps even Nazis — surely the most historically-libelous form of antisemitism yet conceived.

Each time the sin attributed to Jews is different, and so too is each strain of antisemitism, but these distinctions don't somehow invalidate the charge. 

Your antisemitism might not be the same as previous variants of the mental pathogen, but it belongs to the same lineage. Projecting onto Jews the antithesis of your own ideal is always going to be antisemitic, and the more fanatical this creed, the more likely that your antisemitism will be both irrational and vile.

Religious Colonisers

One of the many absurdities behind the new form of antisemitism which goes by the name of Anti-Zionism and tags the Jews as imperialists, colonisers and racists is that of the three monotheisms that emerged out of the Middle East, Judaism is, according to any sensible reading of the matter, the least inherently imperialist.

Islam is the extreme case in fact, with global conquest baked in as a core objective from the start.It’s properly codified into the scripture.

Next most imperialist is the eastern Orthodox form of Christianity, particularly in the Russian flavour. This is because in the contemporary world it represents a near unbroken tradition where the Emperor and the Patriarch have acted in tandem: the result a near theocratic form of statehood which has tended to be authoritarian domestically and often highly expansionist beyond its borders.Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill are its most recent exponents.

Western Christianity is more of a mish mash. Oddly enough one still hears rather naïve people claiming that Christianity is the Sermon on the Mount, as if none of the rest of the stuff which accreted onto that organically afterwards really counts.

Adoption by the Roman Empire was a solid start for any religion with imperialist ambitions, but in the West at least, secular authority soon started to disintegrate.The Popes attempted to refashion the dominant secular power to suit themselves with the so-called Holy Roman Empire, but this ultimately led to conflict, German disunity and a whole later, far more toxic forms of imperialism.

The rather self-serving way the Arabs tell it today, the Crusades were the first serious example of European ‘white settler colonialism’ that they had to endure. 

At their inception though, things were far more complicated. The leaders of the early Crusades, the Normans, were colonisers because they were basically Vikings, not because they were fanatical Christians, and on arrival in the Med they started to promote sophisticated societies where all three monotheistic faiths were tolerated and enjoyed a measure of equality.

And outside of Franco-Norman acquisitiveness, the basic urge behind the Crusade was to re-establish Christian control of an area between Syria and Libya which had been overrun by Islamic hordes, with the re-taking of Jerusalem itself seen as the bare minimum. So, a counter-strike rather than an opportunistic invasion for profit.

By the conclusion of the Reconquista, the Spanish version of Catholicism had undoubtedly incorporated something of an explicit global territorial mission, but there nevertheless always remained a defensive component to this. Iberian navigators headed west in part because they believed they would be able to to locate and collaborate with pre-existing Christian societies in ‘the Indies’, which might offer the possibility of outflanking aggressive Islam, which at that time once again threatened to overrun Western Europe via the Balkan route.

There was always an inherent tension between church and state in the western form of Christianity and this would be transplanted to the New World. Christianity may be have evolved to become more than the message on the mount, but dig hard enough and it is there, as is the persona of the Messiah as a non-violent, redistributive, Jewish, anti-imperial radical.

Past Lives (2023)

 

I came to Past Lives with possibly more positive expectations than I have for any film of the past few years. I ended up spending much of its running time mentally untangling the action from my somewhat thwarted anticipations, though that is not to say I was struggling with disappointment. 

 

 

 

 

I suppose I had been counting on something a bit more like early Kieślowski, with potent pauses, intrusions of the uncanny and so on. Maybe the title had suggested that to me. What it turned out to be was a story which took me back to my own brief platonic re-encounters with my first love, three years and then eight years after we first met.

 

It’s now clear that the semi-autobiographical nature of the material led Celine Song, by necessity, to go light with the metaphysical ostentation. We do however get this line: “It’s an in-yun if two strangers even walk by each other on the street and their clothes accidentally brush. It means there must be something between them in their past lives” — which echoes a narrative conceit that I have lately been toying with: a tension between what one consciously knows about people and places and a more shrouded, yet insistently protrusive form of knowledge, lurking below. 

 

There are some striking insights here into the drives which underlie changes of continent, from both the perspective of grown-ups and then the growing-ups with transplanted ambitions. Nora’s observation that the apparition of Hae Sung in New York made her feel simultaneously more and less Korean was a gem.

 

Visually, Song’s debut as a film-maker is a proper treat. Her camera work and shot composition hardly ever falls short of fascinating. And no matter what is happening on screen from a dramatical perspective, she seems to have considered ways to frame each scene in a way which makes it inherently more interesting. My favourite was one where soon-to-be-Nora’s parents are seen in a shambolic shared study area, smoking, and keep the kids in the doorway as they discuss their new anglicised monikers.