Caballo regalado?

The Rainbow Cafe in La Antigua is up for sale it seems. The owner wants little more than $100,000 and yet claims it makes $70,000 per annum. Somehow those numbers don't make much sense to me, but the idea of owning an established cafe-restaurant does appeal.

Merck settles

So Merck has settled with the Vioxx plaintiffs. I wonder if their legal counsel, which was reportedly costing them $600m per annum, was anything like the school of suited sharks portrayed in Michael Clayton. (The plaintiffs' lawyers probably are...)

At the time I saw that movie I reflected that in my own experience in the communications business, bad corporate ethics calls are less likely to be the result of the machinations of cynical and sociopathic clever people than institutionalised incompetence − often enough exacerbated by the interactions of uncommonly dumb people. Hollywood likes its baddies to be knowing and smart however.

Update: MRK up $2 so far today. Yay!

Desde Barcelona...

Here are some pics from the Ojos de Brujo gig at the Roundhouse the other night. I have some great video clips too which I will sort out over the weekend.

Surfer tells me that there is something called the Cuban Music Awards going on at Floridita in Wardour Street tonight. I think the trumpeter in the pic above was Cuban because a bloke standing next to me kept shouting "vamo' coooba" whilst waving at him (and he doesn't seem to be part of the usual band line-up).

Meanwhile veteran Juan Luis Guerra basically cleaned up last night at the Latin Grammys. but Ojos de Brujo picked up the gong for Best Flamenco Album for Techarí. I wonder if they flew from London to Las Vegas to collect it?

Calle 13 got Best Urban Music Album for Residente o Visitante and Best Urban Song for Pal Norte. But mini-reggaetonero Miguelito lost out to some religious cack called Como se llega a Belén by Voz Veis. Arturo Sandoval got the award for Best Latin Jazz Album.

Here's Juan Luis Guerra's 'Best Song':

Ta negaiito

Calle 13's Grammy winning Pal Norte, featuring the Orishas.

There's a bit in the middle of the video that's a bit like one of those old Saatchi ads for British Airways.

That alpaca is cute.

Energy Emergency

A state of energy emergency has been declared by out-going Guatemalan Vice President Eduardo Stein.

The rise in the dollar price of a barrel of oil will clearly cause a great deal of short term pain to the local economy, but I really think it should spur them on to develop their ethanol refining capabilities and to reduce their dependence on the medieval bigots and freaks that control most of the black gold.

Stein is the most senior politico left in Guate right now because Berger has gone off to the XVII Iberoamerican summit in Chile with Álvaro Colom, the man set to replace in January. It goes without saying that previous transitions have been less amicable, but Berger apparently asked Colom 'sos rojo o crema?' and having received a satisfactory reply, booked him a ticket to Santiago.

It's the Latin Grammys tonight...

And one of the nominees is 8-year-old reggaetonero Miguelito who takes the genre to somewhere beyond self-parody. The phenomenon started when record company execs realised that Latin American kids, and not just the ones with tweezed eyebrows, were learning the lyrics of stars like Don Omar and Daddy Yankee by heart. When a competition was organised to find the best of these mimics, they then discovered that the resulting audience wasn't exactly dominated by the under-18s.

Secuestros relámpagos

Express kidnappings are on the rise in Guate. There were seven in the first five days of November, at least one of them in La Antigua. Women are the preferred victims. Their loved ones usually get a call within 15 minutes of the snatching and on average they are released within six hours once the ransom monies have been transfered to the kidnappers: generally beetween 10 and 20 thousand Quetzales ($1300-$2600, not a lot really). The kidnap gangs tend to use hard-to-trace mobile phones.

Back in 2005 there was a fairly crappy movie made about this phenomenon in Venezuela:

Slightly random Thai lightbulb ad

Presidenciable

This was the interview with Colom at the Tikal Futura, just after he was confirmed by the TSE as President-elect, that convinced V that he was "sweet and sincere":

Neowar

Umberto Eco has one of those fertile minds that helps us to comprehend contemporary reality by coming up with a whole new range of categories to slot it into. One of these is his concept of neowar, the conflict model for the globalised world.

During the cold war which followed centuries of paleowar, there was equilibrium at the centre of the two first worlds, but conflict was normative at the periphery, he notes. Paleowars had fairly clear fronts and the enemy was either systematically attacked behind theirs or rounded up and put in camps.

In the modern era of neowar however, the enemy is just as likely to be talking to us in our own homes using our TVs and broadband connections and we are much more likely to be sympathetic to them, or at least the 'innocent' victims on their side of the non-front that separates us.

9-11 was, Eco feels, the initiation of a permanent state of neowar in which disequilibrium arrived at the centre. The response from Washington was to immediately engage in the 'simulcrum' of a paleowar in Afghanistan and later Iraq.

The biggest danger he suspects, is that the rhetoric of paleowar (Crusades etc..) becomes the conduit for talking ourselves into a new macro-polarisation, which under the conditions of globalisation, would be unwinnable for both civilisations. The front of such a crusade would exist only in the politcal discourse; and anyway, history has shown how pointless an exercise the crusades were even in the context of the pre-Modern world.

This intellectual model is certainly interesting, but it starts to come apart the moment Eco tries to use it to explain the whole of our current confrontation with 'Terror'. Is there really more 'disequilibrium' at the centre now than there was say in the 1970s? Surely he remembers the Red Brigades in Italy? How does globalised conflict look to the Taleban fighter on the ground in Helmand province? In spite of all the dire warnings from our politicians and policemen, it strikes me that so far 'Al Qaeda' has proved far more resilient as a wager of localised paleowars on the periphery (albeit asymmetric) than as a bringer of death and destruction to our doorsteps.

Concepts like paleowar and neowar are useful, but instances of conflict in today's world are still likely to be different kinds of hybrid, especially when you look at how the various levels of participants (politicians, grunts, terrorists, insurgents etc.) actually internalise their motives.

Wahaca and Loco Latino

Talking of Tex-Mex output, the area within lunchtime walking distance of my office has two new Mexican eateries.

First up Wahaca in Chandos Place, which is a phonetic spelling of Oaxaca. They probably didn't do this just because we Londoners are the kind of morons that wouldn't be able to pronounce it properly (rat-a-too-ee), it also kind of makes sense from a Googling perspective too.

Not long ago I went to a Geek-meet with Frode and he looked a little put out when one of the specimens present ventured that Scrubbs, my Norwegian chum's favourite show, was nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is. Well, Wahaca is nowhere near as trendy or as tasty as it thinks it is either.

"Quite good," our Chinese intern Evi politely summarised, and it may not have even made that grade had someone not ordered what is clearly Wahaca's signature dish, the Sonora salad, (see the menu here) which arrives in a bowl with the oleaginous substance of a mutant Kettle chip.

I was also pleased to find some jalapeño seeds in the bar matchboxes. This is a clever response to smoke-free England. They are now in a little pot on my balcony and I will report back on their progress.

The rest of the formula is being violently tugged between an earnest desire to be more authentic and the inauthenticity of international cool. When did 'Mexican market eating' become a lure to anyone that has actually eaten in a Mexican market? And when did you last hear electro-tango tracks played in your local cantina? OK, some of the ingredients show a degree of extra effort, but I'm with AA Gill when he warns his readers off any restaurant where the opening gambit of the serving staff is "Have you been here before?"

Our own notably pushy waiter made a point of informing us that we wouldn't find any Tex-Mex nonsense like fajitas at Wahaca. Oh no. Maybe someone can explain to me why burritos are kosher and fajitas aren't, but I've had some of the best sizzling chicken in the Yucatán, which is quite a way south of El Paso.

What depressed me most about Wahaca was perhaps the realisation that V and I could do better. The idea has mucho mileage, especially when you read this article by la patrona, but they need to start by taking stock of the fact that you can't make a small portion of totopos look yummier by serving them in what looks like a mug without a handle.

In blatantly appealing to the donkey, sombreo and slammer crowd Loco Latino in Romilly Street has opted for the south of the border authenticity of the Mayan Riviera. The comedor ambience would be familiar to anyone that has been to the joint called Los Tacos on the Calzada in La Antigua, run by some of V's cousins: red checked tablecloths, red paper napkins and a bottle of hot sauce on the table. Loco Latino calls itself a bar, but the one inside the restaurant (there's a 'cantina' upstairs which I didn't visit) is the kind you find in East End Balti houses: lots of mirrored glass and bottles that generally don't move off the shelves.

The quesadillas there are a violation of the trades descriptions act, because there is but one, and it arrives bubbling in tomato and oil and looking much like (oval clay bowl notwithstanding) a microwaved Smart Price canneloni. The fajitas sizzled and were very tasty. The tortillas came in a little plastic pot and were a passable compromise between the flour tortillas you can get at your supermarket and the less flimsy corn variety that are the staple of Guatemalan cuisine.

Verdict: This is how to serve quesadillas (i.e. 3 not 2, with something alongside, all on a plate that is just a bit bigger than the dish itself). I still don't agree with AA that there's no such thing as good Mexican nosh. But finding it in London remains a chore. The best of the bad remains La Perla, and if they decide to put half as much effort into composition as Wahaca does, I'll be going back more regularly.

Mi primer amor

I was never a huge fan of Selena's Tex-Mex output, but there's no doubt she was a major vocal talent. I've always thought that J Lo's fame was in some ways borrowed (or inherited) from the the slain Chicana, because it was her miming to Selena's tracks in Gregory Nava's biopic that really launched her A-list career.

Nava had made a great movie in 1983 about a pair of indigenous siblings fleeing the civil war in Guatemala and attempting to make a new life in California: El Norte. It was one of the first things my Spanish teacher wanted to talk to me about in 1989 when I had passed the threshold of the cue-cards. Note to self: I must get a copy of the DVD.

This was a great mid 90s track from the Barrio Boyz which Selena fronted shortly before her death. She might never have made a movie star, but she sang better than J Lo and she would probably have gone on to sort out the Barrio Boyz' dress sense.

Most voted for

Apparently, more people voted for Colom than any other Presidenciable in the new democratic era in Guatemala, including current President Oscar Berger who defeated him four years ago.

Scott Adams in Second Life

"About 60% into the video, an avatar that looks like Dilbert appears and attacks me. It was art imitating life, imitating art beating the crap out of something imitating me."
Scott Adams

The new face of Guatemala

Yesterday Álvaro Colom told a local radio station that "I plan to convert Guatemala into a social democratic country with a Mayan face."

His is not an especially Mayan face of course, but the president-elect does seem to be a fully ordained Mayan priest. (Guatemalans have also been quick to point out his facial resemblance to General Miguel García Granados Zavala, president from 1871-3 and long-term incumbent of the ten Quetzal note; above.)

Whether or not his government-to-be will be strictly speaking either leftist or social democratic, it will probably be the first since popular elections were renewed in the 80s that has declared itself committed to helping the country's most impoverished groups as its #1 priority.

I am getting a real sense that the cambio so much promised by generations of Guatemalan politicians may at last be upon us and that the esperanza in UNE's campaign pledge that perhaps seemed a bit wooly before these elections is now beginning to infect all sectors of society there, even the newly-deflated, air-punching, chest-patting PP voters.

V has described Colom as 'Quixotic' (by which I think she means given to endearing fantasies) but his running mate is no Sancho Panza.

Instead, as the New York Times observed today, the future Vice President Dr Rafael Espada is perhaps the man that most embodies this potential for unifying the 'two Guatemalas'. Espada is a world-renowned cardiac surgeon and the first medic to assume the second highest office in the land. In a thirty year career (based mainly in Texas) he has regularly returned home to Guate in order to perform heart surgery on both its most and least privileged citizens. His charity operations are described in his Wikipedia article as 'gratuitous' surgery, and he was performing an average of ten of these outside the US each month before running for office with Colom.

Espada (an interesting surname for someone that opens people up) was himself was born illegitimately, his father a member of the elite who disowned him. After being brought up by his mother, he attended the public San Carlos University and through hard work, scholarships and good fortune went on to train under a noted surgeon in Houston, where he later became deputy chief of cardiothoracic surgery at the Methodist DeBakey Heart Centre. In his new role as a politician, he notes that many of Guatemala's impoverished Maya groups suffer from diseases that would elsewhere be considered more preventable.

His boss also yesterday praised the role of Cuban doctors in Guatemala and suggested that his government would expand cooperation with the socialist regime on that island, which may set a few alarm bells ringing in Washington.

Yellow School Buses

Apparently we now have something called the Yellow Bus Commission in the UK chaired by former education secretary, David Blunkett, who thinks their deployment as an antidote to the school run can help save the planet: "Even though the Americans have not paid a lot of attention to energy conservation and climate change, I think it actually does help," he told R5 Live.

Hmm, many of America's school buses end up spending a busy retirement as multicoloured chicken buses in countries like Guatemala, where they don't give the impression of being at the front line of environmental friendliness! (I did look for a photo which showed the black smoke belching out the back!)

Remember remember...

Tonight is bonfire night in London aka Guy Fawkes night, and boy did I get grief for that every year at prep school.

Is it ethical? asks Spiked with tongue in cheek.

London used to sound like Mogadishu for around two weeks either side of this important date, but the authorities have cracked down on the sale of fireworks over the past couple of years. The best displays are public, though on Sunday I missed out on Surfer's dad's rocket attack on the neighbouring township of Acton, which he likened to the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

St Andrew's, the prep school that borders Herons Farm, had its annual display on Friday night, and as ever it was a traumatic experience for all the horses, my father reported.

I attended the one in Battersea Park on Saturday by positioning myself on the Chelsea Embankment opposite the Buddha and just across from my father's notorious bachelor pad on Cheyne Row. (The clip below mostly comprises of footage I took of the finale.)

El Curando is a great little site for picking up authentic Chapin clobber, such as these wooden effigies of highland saint and sinner Maximón, the closest thing Guatemala has to our Guido, though instead of being roasted every year he is treated to fine cigars and wicked liquor. (They also burn the Devil every December 7.)

We have a friend in La Antigua whose principal collectible obsessions are ducks (feathered and felt) and authentic Maximóns, and it is the latter that makes him bonfire material himself, according to some of the more righteous members of our neighbourhood.

This one looks a bit like Saddam Hussein.

Right, I'm off to sit on my balcony and watch some more luces going up across the whole southern panorama of the capital. It's starting to sound like Somalia out there already. The only snag is that it is considerably colder out tonight than it was on Saturday.

Raffled and ruffled

The last time I met up with Xtofer he was fretting about where to spend an upcoming week-long break. This is where he ended up. Jammy.

Meanwhile Joel wrote to me at the end of last week to report the loss of his seismic virginity.

They had a 5.6 level quake in the Bay Area last Tuesday evening, epicentred nine miles from San Jose City Hall. Surprisngly this is said to be the largest seismic event in the area since the biggie back in '89.

Prowler

I had an unexpected feline visitor yesterday evening, thanks to the scaffolding which has been erected along the river-facing side of our building.

This cat had a beautiful mottled brown coat. It wandered in from the balcony door, had a good look around (giving my writing desk special attention, as seen here) and then departed in search of such other happy homes that the temporary structure might afford it access to.

Let's hope none are in the fur trade.

Viraje Obligado

Rudy today proclaims Guatemala's membership of the Latin American social democratic club. Listening to the radio early this morning you would have hardly thought this election was as close as it was. Almost everyone that rang in offered their congratulations to Colom and praised their fellow citizens for having rejected the past. Most were gente humilde and it was touching to listen to their gentle optimism and gratitude.

Manos flojas!

Ing. Álvaro Colom has won (52.7%). Late yesterday evening he made a (partly incomprehensible) victory speech and then rather brusquely refused to answer media questions about his plan to rid Guatemala of poverty. "Mañana..."

V found Alexandra and the gang at the table again when she went to vote. They pawed over her cédula once more and pointed out gleefully that their computer print-out had added one more year to her age.

There was hardly anybody else around. What had started out a very warm day had become markedly chilly. In parts of the country turn-out was as low as 10%, with some polling stations open for up to three hours before a single voter showed up, and thus far neither candidate has mustered 2m votes. Everyone seems to be a bit exhausted by the process and there has been no major aggro in the streets.

V changed her voting intention at the last minute − as she usually does − rationalising that she didn't want to feel responsible when the other lot messed up the country, so convinced she was that Mano Dura was all set to claim the presidency and that her vote would be meaningless. But now, somewhat unexpectedly, she's feeling like a winner!

Tough on crime has been temporarily seen off by tough on the causes of crime. This is how the BBC sees it. The murder rate currently stands at 5000 per annum. Let's see what it's like in 2012.

So it's adios to Otto and Mano Tiesa for at least four more years. The Washington Post can't quite believe that the candidate with the better hair lost. He also had the best campaign song, so here it is again, one last time:



Plus a less official and professional election broadcast found on YouTube:

Que tomas contra el malestar estomacal?

Is the question being asked of every election correspondent that calls into Emisoras Unidas from various parts of the country. WTF?

When I last spoke to V she was lying on the bed contemplating going out to vote; maybe. "Hay un calor sofocante," she told me and this same weather report was repeated on the radio just a few minutes ago.

Back in September they forecast that the rain would play a part again, but as it turns out it is the heat (and the fact that it's Sunday anyway) that has been impeding democratic activity in Guatemala so far today.

Update: in the west it may in fact be the cold that is fostering abstencionismo. However, in a poll conducted by the media, over 70% of respondents have instead blamed the 'quality of the candidates'.

Roger

I went to a rather unusual drinks party at Claridges on Friday night, thrown to celebrate the life of a family friend who died last April.

His three sons were our hosts and each made a fine speech. Only one found it hard to maintain the generally upbeat mood. (Another was sporting a diamond encrusted ring that would have put J Lo to shame!)

I hadn't seen any of them for over twenty years, which added to the general weirdness of the occasion.

My parents met Roger (here in a blue top matching that of his wife) on a cruise in 1966, and this pic was taken on board. Roger shared my father's love of Jazz, specifically the gypsy-jazz of Django, Stéfane and the Hot Club of Paris. I recall him as one of the few unquestionably good men amongst the adults I was exposed to in my formative years. "He deserved better than her," my father observed of Roger's marriage last week, which by the end of his life had evolved into an awkward ménage à trois.

The driver that took first my mother and then me home knew the former chairman of H&K David Mclaren, so we had a nostalgic chat. He almost flattened a copper that stepped out into the middle of the Victoria Embankment in front of the Ministry of Defence. This representative of the organisation just fined £175,000 for health and safety violations proceeded to give the man behind the wheel a lecture on maintaining readiness for these surprise (yet regular) anti-terror check-points on London's riverside highway.

They are of course fairly useless as the many of London's Jihadists frequent the East London Mosque and so it would make a lot more sense to stake out Commercial Road, a parallel artery to the north and east. But then that would appear to be harassment, and would be less visible to the Whitehall aparatchiks.

VIP La Otra Casa

Is a new movie from Guatemalan director Elías Jiménez Trachtenberg, which is on general release over there right now.

A government official called Juan Ramos is jailed for suspected corruption: an unusual enough premise in Guate. Apparently the rest of the film is about his struggle to get himself transfered to the VIP part of the prison and the plots hatched by his personal enemies that are geared towards ensuring that his stay behind bars is nasty, brutal and short.

The film has quite a funky website. Oddly, it has yet to be listed on the IMDB along with Jiménez's first feature, La Casa En Frente.

Voto por Otto?

Here, before the first round of polling, Alejando Giammattei advised Guatemalans not to vote for 'Ya-maté...al Obispo' and other robbers and killers:




It's still quite early over there, but so far the turn-out has been markedly lower than September 9. As before, the public sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks is prohibited today. It looks like it will be tight and the bomberos voluntarios are on stand-by across the country, because whichever man wins, there's bound to be some serious mayhem.

V has found a way to rationalise support for Mano Dura. She says it's a bit like choosing between her eldest brother, the one with carácter y decisión and her youngest brother, 'el mudo' with the mano aguada. Which one would she trust not to leave the door to the national shop open, she asks herself. Not an easy choice, she says, because both have their failings.

My main concern is that perhaps Otto won't actually be able to deliver on his promise of greater security, because a) UNE dominates the congress regardless of what happens today and b) the delinquents have paymasters who are likely to be in his immediate social circle. It's clear that the narcos have set themselves up for a win win too.

Eastern Promises

One of the most fascinating, and least tense, gangster movies I've ever seen. Possibly the most violent too.

"Is that it?" someone behind me asked the moment the credits rolled. Yes it was, and that was really fine with me, but I can see why some might still have had unresolved expectations.

If Cronenberg's movie has any faults they begin with the fact that Nikolei is somehow more complex and scary than any of the 'real' baddies and the fact that Semyon, the local leader of the Vory V Zakone, seems to be mysteriously under-staffed. These Russian mobsters are big on family but apparently short on goons.

It's never anything other than completely engrossing however. Yet compared to the MS-13, these Russians are a bit wimpy with their body art.

Refried Molotov

Yo ya estoy hasta la madre
de que me pongan sombrero
escucha entonces cuando digo
no me llames frijolero.

Y aunque exista algún respeto
y no metamos las narices
nunca inflamos la moneda
haciendo guerra a otros países.

Te pagamos con petróleo
e intereses nuestra deuda
mientras tanto no sabemos
quien se queda con la feria.

Aunque nos hagan la fama
de que somos vendedores
de la droga que sembramos
ustedes son consumidores.

Don't call me gringo,
You fuckin beaner
stay on your side
of that goddamn river
don't call me gringo,
You beaner.

No me digas beaner,
Mr. Puñetero
Te sacaré un susto
por racista y culero.
No me llames frijolero,
Pinche gringo puñetero.

Now I wish I had a dime
for every single time
I've gotten stared down
For being in the wrong side of town.

And a rich man I'd be
if I had that kind of chips
lately I wanna smack the mouths
of these racists.

Podrás imaginarte desde afuera,
ser un Mexicano cruzando la frontera,
pensando en tu familia mientras que pasas,
dejando todo lo que conoces atrás.

Si tuvieras tú que esquivar las balas
de unos cuantos gringos rancheros
Las seguirás diciendo good for nothing wetback?
si tuvieras tú que empezar de cero.

Now why don't you look down
to where your feet is planted
That U.S. soil that makes you take shit for granted
If not for Santa Ana, just to let you know
That where your feet are planted would be Mexico
Correcto!

Alli esta el cabrón!

And the slightly slower verion:

Para que me entierren...

Proshecto Gotan

A hueeeevo

Chinga tu madre

Siempre.....tienes que abrir tanto la boca,
metida en las cosas, donde nada te importa mejor no te
metas donde nadie te llama
aquí nadie te quiere, aquí nadie te extraña.

Dime (quien ?) te cedió la palabra,
te pones a hablar y luego nadie te calla.
Porque no lo piensas y no lo dices que nunca
te cansas de meter las narices.
Porque no te ahorras tus comentarios ?
porque te tendremos que escuchar a diario ?

Se sabe en tu casa y en todo el vecindario
hay que estar a escondidas porque sabes que carga el palo
tu abuela, tu vieja y el puto de tu hermano
se pone borracho, se pone marihuano
me quiere joder y quiere chupar
porque no chupa faros me deja de molestar
a mi y a mi gente, a mi brother compadre
busca algun pretexto pa romperle la madre
Para que nadie se quede sin hablar,
para que todos chinguemos igual.

Chingo yo chingas tu chinga tu madre.

Sabes que me caga de sobremanera,
lugar donde vaya siempre tiene que ir mi suegra.
Yo lo único que quiero es que se muera
yo lo único que quiero es que se muera, como sea
Si vamos a salir es con chofer,
yo pienso que lo hace por joder.

Si estamos en la sala y nos vamos a la cocina,
seguro nos observa por detrás de la cortina.
Si nos vamos a ir al cine, nos manda con tus primas
y cuando me despido nos
observan tus vecinas.
Para que nadie se quede sin chingar y pa
que todos chinguemos igual.

Chingo yo chingas tu chinga tu MADRE.

Te vas y ya no quieres verme nunca mas
me vale que te vayas, te deseo que seas feliz.
El destino ha sido cruel pero así tenia que ser
la verdad nunca te he amado solo te quería coger.
Creías que me tendrías para siempre,
te crees una mujer tan solo porque usa brasiere
pero te has equivocado nunca estuve enamorado
y he fungido mis orgasmos las mil noches que te ame.

Chinga yo, chinga tu, chinga tu madre(x8)

Siempre en domingo...
chingen a su madre, a los de caló...chingen a su madre
a los televisos...chingen a su madre,
los de molotov...chingen a su madre.

La vida es un ratico

I suppose Juanes must be very marginally the second most famous Colombian singer-songwriter in the world.

His new album, titled as this post, has been produced by Gustavo Santaolalla, who I saw in concert a couple of weeks ago at the Roundhouse with his electrotango combo. It's growing on me quickly, especially the track called Tres.

As with Guatemala's own three-time Grammy winner Ricardo Arjona, it's the mix of rock with local traditional rhythms and heartfelt,well-crafted lyrics that makes this music so appealing. Here's a clip I found of YouTube of Juanes singing the title track from this album:

La revancha del tango

It's only just occurred to me that it might be an idea to upload some of my older vids. They're lower res and hence a bit longer. This one comes from the superb open air concert given by franco-boludos Gotan Project in the quad of Somerset House, back in the sweltering August of 2003. For the first twenty minutes or so they performed behind a semi-transparent tela onto which all sorts of iconic Argie stuff was projected.

At the time Surfer reckoned that they were being supported by none other than Animal from the Muppets.

Five portions

This morning V talked me through a heart-rending clip on Guatemalan TV news in which a man from Tabasco saved his parrot from rising flood waters. I'm not sure how ashamed of this I should be, but I usually find footage of stricken animals in these kinds of natural disasters more affecting than the state of the human beings. It still pains me to think of an image of a dog stranded on a roof surrounded by water after Katrina hit Louisiana.

V and I went on to discuss the vegetarian side of our own animals' food preferences. Cherry clearly adores bananas and wolfed down three last night, making plaintive "una mas porfa" noises after the consumption of the first two.

She will eat the meat of the papaya but leave the skin, but that's fine because this is the cats' preferred part of the fruit. Their favourite treat is the stalks of coriander that have previously been floating on the surface of some broth. It's a wonder to watch them delicately pulling this through their tiny mouths. They are also partial to macuy, a local edible weed. Unlike Cherry, they won't give a chunk of banana more than a sniff, but can't get enough of fried plantain.

I suggested to V on our call that an animal she was sure someone referred to as a 'pinche Doberman' was perhaps more likely to be a Doberman Pinscher!

Here in the UK the mother of all stupid studies has attempted to scare us out of eating red meat, apparently a major cause of cancer. Logically then, the Argies, South Africans and those tribes that hunt antelope all the time should be riddled with aggressive tumours, especially as they barbecue most of it. Somehow, I think not.

Endureciendose?

I knew it. The last poll before they all go to the polls, and Otto has suddenly scraped a five point lead.

V was telling me today how she was unexpectedly invited into a neighbour's house in Jardines today and served up a delicious portion of the mother of all fiambres.

Fiambre is the traditional dish of the Day of the Dead in Guate, and Rudy's post yesterday will tell you everything you need to know about it. Basically, you get around ten different varieties of sausage and chuck in anything else you might find in the fridge. The slide show showing the preparation is worth watching. (What's that blue thing?)

Look who's spamming me

I seem to have found my way onto some email list of cédula-carrying Chapines.

The big story this week in terms of my day job has been the ruthless retaliatory action taken by Chris Anderson against a few careless members of the PR profession.

It's hard to work out who is the shark and who is the cleaner fish in this tale of a symbiotic relationship gone bad.

Both parties depend quite squarely on other people's more productive labours.

It's a spat that has reminded me of Laurel and Hardy's slapstick comedy where neighbouring shopkeepers go to war.

However, a bloke called Dan appears to have extracted quite a lot of free business advice out of the comment trail.

Mobile marketing in Guate

Two journalists from El Periódico, Enrique Castañeda and Hilda Mérida have informed the human rights prosecutor in Guate that several death threats were sent to their mobile phones after they began investigating the financing of Otto and Mano Dura (Partido Patriota).

The journalists assert that Mano Dura is linked to both organised crime and drug-trafficking. (A bit like the other lot...)

“We have received threats and suffered intimidation ever since the start of our research into the structure of the PP and its financing of Otto Pérez Molina’s election campaign,” Enrique Castañeda said. He added that he could not name “any one person or party in particular” but the threats had increased the more their investigation went on. Meanwhile Pérez Molina claims to know nothing about the investigation and adds that he has a clear conscience.

Francisco Goldman has been on tour pushing his new book The Art of Political Murder, Who Killed the Bishop? Two of its pages insinuate the existence of 'new evidence' that it was in fact Otto who dunnit, and this has helped to keep Goldman busy in the run up to Monday's election. The finger has been pointed at Mano Dura by Ruben Chanax, a park vagrant who used to sideline in espionage.

Here in the UK we have been marking the Day of the Dead...election.

Otto Rambo and Álvaro Creeper

Not sure how Rambo fits into the Halloween pantheon!

In an interview with El Periódico the Menchurian ex-candidate has described the current elections as 'illegitimate', heaping scorn on the role of the TSE and indulging in a general whinge about the clientism in Guatemalan politics.

The SKY interface

I haven't had much of a chance to play with SKY+ as our building hasn't been wired up for it and so I got myself an Archos instead as a way of making scheduled recordings.

So it is the original SKY box interface that I have to live with, and it continues to be a source of frustration. I was discussing with my cousin last night over dinner ways in which micro-content could be better aggregated and browsed and much of the same principles apply to the multiplicity of channels now available from SKY.

SKY does allow you to designate 'favourite' channels which can then be flicked through using the blue button. At first you were allowed only 15 but this number was doubled (?) a year or so ago.

It's still not the best way to navigate favoured areas of the content. One gripe and several suggestions follow:

• The absence of a BACK button that will return you to the time-location of the last menu you were on is a major annoyance
• You should be able to press one button during a programme that will set up an alert for that specific programme or series regardless of the particular channel or time
  
• You should be able to view a menu with just your favourite channels and be able to use that to browse through their programming over the next few days in the usual manner
• That same menu should enable you to view a series of alerts for the day. You would be able to select and click which of these you wanted to watch and, overlaps permitting, SKY could then transmit these to you as a continuous custom channel.
  

Obviously tagging would also add a great deal to the digital TV experience. What fun it would be to use tags to create your own news stream. I'm thinking too of how they might be usefully deployed to block certain types of trivial story or programme ("Britney", "McCann" etc.)

My cousin thinks there's definitely a niche for a new kind of blog content aggregator. It would learn from your reading habits ('More of this..' etc.) and could, I suggest, present content in more than one dimension. In other words similar articles might be presented as stacks rather than lists (as you currently see in live.com and its like) which could then be opened up if the reader wished to drill down in that dimension.

I reiterated my view that blog platforms need to wise up about printable layouts and give readers more scope for visualising lateral links, trackbacks and comments. It would also be useful to be able to quickly access a custom page showing all or some of the contributions by a given commenter, or indeed to see where else in the blogosphere certain bloggers have themselves contributed.

iPod Touch

I love the iPod Touch. I hesitate to call it my iPod Touch because I bought it for V to replace her broken Mini, but when the time comes to hand it over... I suspect that my hand may be trembling.

Still, there are a couple of minor irritations. The battery on my 80GB 5th generation iPod never seemed to run out, but the larger touch screen of the new device is clearly rather power hungry.

And when you are in the middle of a playlist and turn the Touch on its side to activate cover view, the artworks displayed come from the general album list not just the ones that are germane to the playlist you are actually in. Maybe there is a way to toggle between views, but I haven't found it yet.

There are one too many extra finger movements involved in daily use too. To skip a song you generally need to activate the screen and then unlock the device. The playlist option is hidden one level further down than on an iPod Classic, so you have to press down on the More... option first to access that rather essential menu.

Aguadandose?

I still don't quite believe it, but Álvaro Colom would appear to have pulled ahead into a narrow lead in the final week before the presidential election. With UNE on 39.4% and PP on 35.1% it's still a technical empate, but Colom has done well to improve his polling in the capital, where both candidates trailed to Giammattei in round one.

Unlucky Chapin

Scott sent me this update on the story of Guatemalan illegal immigrant Pedro Zepeta who somehow amassed $62,000 working as a dish washer in the US but had most of it confiscated by the TSA meanies at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International as he tried to re-migrate home.

According to Scott "the guy most likely had taxes deducted from his paycheck, like many illegals, and certainly paid into social services he never received. And at his pay level he would have gotten refunds if he had filed."

Once

Every bit as tuneful, funny and poignant and as I expected it to be, but also somehow borderline annoying.

It just felt a little bit smug about its Sunday afternoon scruffiness, about its amateurish camerawork, about its awkwardly unconsummated romance between 'Guy' and 'Girl'.

The performance from the 17-year old Markéta Irglová is impressive, but I couldn't help wondering whether a more experienced professional actress would have left me with a better idea why such an otherwise forthright individual would keep veering away from snatching up this one chance to get it on "with the right person". Did she not fancy him? Or did she have other hanky panky issues? You just couldn't tell.

Still, I wish I hadn't known in advance that their friendship would remain platonic (at least for the duration of the on-screen action). Kermode's interview with the leads spoiled that part of the concept for me.

The songs have been composed to order, the better of them by The Frames lead-singer Glen Hansard, who plays the lonely busker. Some seem to go on a bit longer than strictly necessary, but I can see why several critics have been impressed with the way writer-director John Carneyhas made them integral to the story. Indeed, without them Once would seem a bit too much like real life!

Still, a great little indie-flick; I can see why it won the audience award at Sundance.

Books we can't read

Spiked has published a semi-courageous piece on the Five books on terrorism you aren't allowed to read which, at a time when the Saudi monarch is in our midst here in the UK, strongly implies that the totalitarian enemies of freedom understand our libel laws better than many of our authors and publishers do, and can therefore conduct medieval-style book-cremations via a more modern kind of proxy.

The Saudi 'billionaire' in question could well be none other than Central America's favourite creative accountant, Khalid bin Mahfouz.

King Abdullah apparently thinks we're being slack in addressing the threat posed by the Salafist nutjobs that have been his country's second most significant export. (If there was a 'good bit' to The Kingdom it was the opening title sequence which did its best to explain the foundations of Abdullah's power and reminded Americans how many of the 9-11 terrorists had been his subjects.)

How many times can you recall an RPG fired in the direction of the (apparent) good guys that actually frags someone in a recent Hollywood movie? The Kingdom added to the body of explosive near-misses committed to film. I think some FBI guys might have taken a hit in Clear and Present Danger...?

The part of the Spiked article that made me sit up and think was Michael Griffin's assertion that his pre-9-11 account of the Taliban 'whirlwind' was somehow innocent, because subsequently "everything has been shovelled into a ditch of what the West wants everybody to believe about Islam, terror, the Taliban al-Qaeda and so on. You can no longer find books that deal with the pure, unadulterated information about history." Hmmm....all pure information becomes marketable content in its own special way surely.

Rob Lyons, the deputy editor of Spiked was on Breakfast this morning claiming that recycling is generally neither necessary or helpful. Their business plan seems to be to work out what the current groupthink is and then concoct a bendy but not entirely flimsy counterpoint.

Apparently it's still illegal to watch David Kronenberg's Crash in Westminster.

A notebook someone might read

Umberto Eco says he writes articles simply to get his thoughts in order; in effect, to work out what he actually thinks about a given topic.

Blogger Rohan Maitzen of Novel Readings also noted last week that the value of blogging for him was "sorting out my thoughts more carefully than I sometimes do in a notebook...because of the chance that someone else will read them."

Interestingly though, he goes on to question the value of the blogosphere as a medium for dialogue and exchange. I've always thought that it has been a bit oversold in this respect. Comments are very much a secondary element of the experience, especially for those that get their blog fix through RSS readers. (Strangely, some basic changes to the standard blog interface would I think improve our ability to browse and collate comments and of course print out those posts which do feature a long trail of reader addenda.)

Maitzen thinks that the tensions between specialist and generalist content within the same blog may work to reduce the volume of discussion there, and adds that where there is a level of chatter, it is often"dominated by a fairly small number of contributors, most of whom seem to know each other well and thus to be engaged in their own special game of point-counterpoint."

Dolphins v Giants

I'm sure if the two NFL teams facing up to each other at Wembley yesterday had played it like the guys in this amusing clip (forward passes notwithstanding, perhaps not entirely unlike that pub rugby team alluded to by Lawrence Dallaglio in his forthcoming memoirs) then more of the locals watching might have really got into the game!

Oddly though, this 'laterals' lark seems more popular in American college football than in the major league.




Anyway, I think I actually understand American Football better than Rugby, even though the latter was compulsory at my school. I've followed Gridiron on and off since Superbowl IXX which matched up the two greatest quaterbacks of that era, the Dolphins' Dan Marino and the 49-ers' Joe Montana. My uncle lived in Florida and was a Dolphins fan so I kind of inherited the affiliation.

The Dolphins lost comprehensively in '85, and it's something they have been doing a great deal of this year too, with yesterday's encounter, nominally a home game for them, offering no relief. (The 49-ers also got stuffed later on, courtesy of New Orleans.)

Surfer was always a Giants fan. They scored their touchdown yesterday thanks apparently to the muddy and broken up conditions of the Wembley turf, under which a defensive linebacker 'had the turning circle of a transatlantic liner.

Virgin Maries

Having made four transatlantic trips with Virgin Atlantic over the past couple of months (and signed up for their Flight Club) this comes as unwelcome news.

Many years ago when Surfer and I were Miami bound, we had to stay overnight in a hotel near Gatwick because of a transport strike, and that evening we ran into a bunch of American aircrew getting shitfaced in the bar.

"Ah cun drink until ah puke all over muhself" I distinctly recall one of them informing us. We looked out for him the next morning on our flight.

'Er indoors

This business of extending political dynasties through spouses and siblings seems to be catching on.

I was listening to a radio station called Tango 2x4 last night as the results from the Argie election came in. Cristina Kirchner, wife of the incumbent, who earlier this year mysteriously stepped aside in her favour, appeared to have it in the bag already after only one round of voting.

What are Guatemalan Presidential candidates doing to ensure that when their allotted time in office is up, they can hand over to their significant others? Not a lot. Colom in particular can have little expectation of ever making use of this constitutional loophole. Mrs Pérez Molina crops up in the video below. Somehow I don't think she will be pulling on the Presidential sash any time soon either. (La señora Arzú has some potential though.)

The clip presents Pérez Molina as 'El General de la Paz'. However, two members of V's family (both of whom I had down as hard handers) have forwarded to me this week a PowePoint presentation that invites more nuanced consideration of his military record.

The General has claimed in an interview that he never actually killed anyone during the Civil War, a not-inconsiderable achievement given the number of people that did end up dead in the Nebaj region where he supposedly operated. The presentation includes testimony from a woman who claims that 'Commandante Tito' pistol-whipped her then shot her in the face. Ok, she didn't actually die per se...

The Dresden Codex

An exact replica of the Dresden Codex has gone on display this week in Guatemala.

The Maya codex, one of only three in existence thanks to the pyrotechnic tendencies of early Spanish missionaries, was acquired by Royal Library of the court of Saxony in 1739.

It contains astronomical predictions of startling accuracy as well as texts on sickness and medicine. 12 of its 74 pages were damaged as a result of the Dresden bombing raid in 1945. (The hieroglyphs in the upper lefthand corners of the pages were erased.)

I've not seen it, but five years ago I did get a chance to view the Madrid Codex in its somewhat hidden location at the wonderful Museo de América.

Elizabeth

Swimming Pool, that somewhat subtle Gallic piss-take of the English, may actually have been retaliation for this, a not-so-subtle dig at the French. I mean...Eric Cantona as his excellency the French ambassador!

Anyway, it has tee'd me up nicely for the sequel which is out next week, and for Vince Cassel's newest OTT pantomime performance in Eastern Promises, which Xtofer saw on Saturday and recommends highly.

The use of body art by these Russian gangs to establish personal histories and trust relationships would appear to be similar to the tattoo culture of the maras in Central America.

On the back of watching this film on Four on Saturday I decided to view episode one of The Tudors. Oh dear. It's like Rome with tons more sex and a generally less conscientious attempt at narrative history.

Sedona and the San Francisco peaks

I suppose I can see why so many people come to Sedona to catch a cosmic tan. Even flying over on the way up to the Grand Canyon one could pick up the buzz that seems to emanate from its ruddy sandstone strata.

And to some extent it is still with me. If I do return to the Southwest next year, it's one place I'd like to make the overland trip to. That and Flagstaff.

Impressive from several thousand feet up too were the San Francisco peaks, a field of perky miniature volcanoes just beyond San Francisco mountain. Up until that point in the journey I had been finding it hard to attune my senses of scale and distance, so empty of human constructions were the ponderosa pine-covered hills to the north of Phoenix.

Grand though the Grand Canyon itself undoubtedly is, it somehow doesn't seem to deliver the same out-of-history experience that you can get from smaller scale European locations. "It seems a bit dead," Gaylene observed of its eerie quietness as we wandered around its sheer edges. (Of the places I have visited in the last couple of years, the Pont Du Gard near Nîmes is the one that springs to mind as a prime example of the sort of place where the sense of deepened temporal perspective is almost immediate.)

Savila

For the first since her accident V has this week reported an improvement in the condition of her leg. This she puts down to the regular rubbings with the extract of savila (aloe vera) that she has dedicated herself to.

We're fortunate that there is a densely packed plantation of these little miracle workers close to our house in La Antigua. We even have a couple in our garden...and in London there's one sitting in a pot next to my laptop right now.

The results of the X-ray she had this week confirmed a horizontal crack in the bone. The doc says she must continue to rest for four more weeks, so she would have missed her flight on November nine. Fortunately she called up the airline and re-booked for December. They didn't seem to mind that her ticket was technically no longer valid. Phew.

Timon Altwegg's concert on Sunday was great, V tells me. However, if the tendency of classical musicians to keep going off an coming back on at the end when the audience is applauding is bad enough at big venues like the Barbican, it is especially "wanky" at more intimately-located recitals such as this, she reported.

Altwegg has been married various times to women from Latin America and made a point of inviting a small group of xx chromosome admirers back to his suite at the lovely Posada de los Leones after his performance...so it seems the whole recital thing may after all be a bit of a pick-up routine.

The Walker

Perez Hilton was moaning the other day that there haven't been any good gay male leads since Brokeback Mountain. Doesn't this count? (OK, it was largely filmed on the Isle of Man.)

To like this movie I think you have to be able to appreciate the rather unexpected dignity of the character that Woody Harrelson plays.

Like all the other protagonists in Paul Schrader's movies (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper) it features what he describes as a 'night worker'.

Carter Page III spends his evenings as an escort for the Washington wives of permanently absent congressmen. "I'm not naive, I'm superficial," he boasts early on. Yet we learn that this character, based in part on Vidal and Capote, has leaned to superficiality as a response to the fraudulence bordering on evil that he has detected in his immediate family background and in the world he inhabits as a well-informed hanger on.

Carter Pages I and II were men that commerced in slaves, tobacco and votes. His father might have been judged a high-achiever by his peers in high-end politics, but he was, according to Carter, a 'crook', the kind of man whose rejection of his homosexual son could be repaid with a complex if incomplete rejection of his own.

In addition to Harrelson, the female cast which includes Lauren Bacall, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily Tomlin is superb. What Schrader's film gives us is not only the standard Hollywood take on DC dastardliness, but the extra level of the displaced other-halves, and then there's Carter Page, the outsider at the canasta table, struggling to belong and not belong in his own remunerative way.

The plot ultimately revolves around the murder of a lobbyist which sees the walker placed under suspicion and ultimately abandoned by his clientele. "Never stand between your friend and a firing squad," Lauren Bacall advises him early on before the firing squad has swiveled round to point in his direction. A true whore, Page is the most honourable individual we see in this story, the only one capable of genuinely struggling with the choice between dishonesty and disloyalty.

As a take on modern politics it reminded me somewhat of Carlos Fuentes' The Eagle's Throne.

And another...

There are a few videos on YouTube which show the reality of the Madrid Metro too.

Carries you within

A lovely little ad for the Madrid Metro that uses Alberto Iglesias's music from Medem's Lucía y el Sexo. (Specifically Me Voy a Morir de Tanto Amor.)

I can't imagine Red Ken getting away with anything like this for the London Underground.

When fusion leads to meltdown

Many years ago I bought V a dress in Marbella that she has never really forgiven me for. Her favourite prop whenever it is time for one of those general remonstrations, she likes to whip it out from wherever she currently has it stashed. Fortunately I haven't seen it for a while though, and on Sunday I rather fancied that it had found a new owner in the person of the lead singer of LaXula, support band for the Bajofondo bunch.

Nothing I can say about this little ensemble will beat the blurb on their fliers:

"LaXula leads audiences on a journey of wonder and decadence. A plaintive fiesta of influences from Flamenco to Arabic, Tango to Roma, laced with indie-rock psychedelia...Deeply routed [sic] in an ancient feminine spirit, this travelling band of captivating musicians and alluring performers present sensuous and bewitching music, with a remarkable stage presence that brings together burleseque glamour and gypsy defiance. Take notice now!"

A further list of influences are cited on the band's MySpace page along with their 'herstory'. We had bands like this in Britain back the 80s, but they were more fun.

Bajofondo Tango Club (4)

The last and possibly best little medley of video excerpts from last Sunday's concert.

I also took a set of pics that night which capture what was going on in the shadows behind the crowd that had pushed up to the stage!

Bajofondo Tango Club (3)

Argie-rapper must have been off the day they were dishing out gangsta-chic!