Roads most Lawless

As a veteran of visits to over 50 countries, I have consistently listed Russia, Japan and Mexico as the three most deeply satisfying of this private collection. Yet all three also have their flaws, some of which also run pretty deep. 

As Graham Greene put it: "History in Mexico has to be very ancient before you feel safe from its influence."

One of the great pleasures of reading Greene's The Lawless Roads, the thoroughly ill-tempered account of his trip to Mexico in 1937, is the dawning realisation that this sort of travelogue could never find a publisher today. 

Now, I love Mexico, yet recognise that  a certain amount of controlled xenophobia is as much a part of the travel experience as is watching the World Cup every four years. 

Contemporary travellers appear obliged to be nice about the places they visit. And along the way show themselves in the best possible light as well. Selfie, selfie, selfie. Graham Greene did neither of these things. 

It would be fair to say that the dislike he developed for this destination quickly became mutual. I laughed out loud at his account of his recollection of how he would sit alone in the Parque Central at San Cristóbal de las Casas as passers-by took turns to strafe him with insults. “It was like being the one unpopular boy at school.” 

Even the wildlife seemed out to get him. His account of a mule trip (with dysentery) to Palenque - by which of course he was thoroughly unimpressed  - is hilarious. 

It is also worth remembering that the end result of all this discomfort was a masterpiece: The Power and the Glory. 

Herewith some of the choicest sound-bites from this book...

“Some emanation from the evil Aztec soil seems suddenly to seize the brain like drunkenness, then the pistol comes out.”

“The appalling strangeness of a land which should have been over the world’s edge.”

“All the monuments in Mexico are to violent deaths.”

“Hideous peasant pottery in the shops.”

“And seventy per cent of these people are real savages, quite as much as they were three hundred years ago. The Spanish-Mexican population just rots on top of the black savage mass.”

“I have never been in a country where you are more aware all the time of hate...cynicism, a distrust of men’s motives, is the accepted ideology.”

“How one begins to hate these people – the intense slowness of that monolithic black-clothed old woman with the grey straggly hair – removing a tick–blowing her nose – trying to put up a blind or open a lemonade bottle, mooing with her mouth wide, fixing her eyes on people meaninglessly for minutes at a time, slowly revolving her black bulk all of a piece like a mule. And that middle-class child in the black velvet shorts, the striped jersey, and the bright-coloured jockey cap. The hideous inexpressiveness of brown eyes. People never seem to help each other in small ways, removing a parcel from a seat, making room with their legs. They just sit about. If Spain is like this, I can understand the temptation to massacre.”

“One did want, I found, an English book in this hating and hateful country."

"There was nothing in this country so beautiful as an English village.”

“There was nothing to do all day but drink warm expensive beer in the only cantina.”

“A land where you grow weary of black and oily hair and brown sentimental eyes.”

“It is true what their admirers write of the Mexicans, that they are always cheerful whatever their circumstances; but there is something horribly immature in their cheeriness: no sense of human responsibility; it is all one with the pistol-shot violence.”

“That Mexican façade of bonhomie–the embrace, the spar, the joke – with which they hide from themselves the cruelty and treachery of their life."

On the capital: "The shops full of tourist junk, silver filigree and gourds and rugs and dead fleas dressed up as little people inside walnuts, all the fake smartness and gaiety, El Retiro and the Cucaracha Bar and the Palace of Art, the Avenida Juárez smelling of sweets, and all the hidden hate."

On the Cops: “The dirty whitewashed walls, the greasy hammocks, and the animal faces of the men – it wasn’t like law and order so much as banditry.”

On Mexican food: “It is all a hideous red and yellow, green and brown, like art needlework and the sort of cushions popular among decayed gentlewomen in Cotswold teashops.”

On Tequila: “The spirit made from agave, a rather inferior schnapps.”

My 10 Favourite Restaurants in Central America - The Top 5

Been thinking that it was high time that I updated my top 10 list as there has been a fair bit of churn lately. 

Playa del Carmen has shed its last entry, having joined the mad scramble for overpriced mediocrity, in much the same way Antigua did some time ago. 

1. Bangcook, San Cristóbal de las Casas

As I think I’ve mentioned before, this place could open up in London’s Soho tomorrow and would soon have a largish queue outside every lunchtime. The Mexicans seem to do upmarket Asian ‘streetfood’ especially well, though why this one landed here of all places is anyone’s guess. 

2. Oliva Enoteca, Mérida

Part of a family of 'Oliva' restaurants in the capital of Yucatán, this is the best of the bunch. A truly stylish blend of Mexican and Italian cuisine. The 'industrial chic' interior that their website righty boasts of makes for a great wine bar as well. 

3. Rumfish & Vino, Placencia

Another gastro-bar, this one in the heart of Belize's preeminent mainland beach community. A previous winner of the Belize Tourism Board's Restaurant of the Year award. The menu is interesting, the grub generally excellent. Patrons tend to look as if they have been kitted out by Tommy Hilfiger, having just parked their yacht outside. 

4. La Esquina de Buenos Aires, San José

There’s no shortage of so-so surrogates for the keyed-up Porteño carnivore experience in these parts - think Antigua’s own NiFu NiFa etc. - but none comes as close to authenticity as this restaurant in Chepe. It really does feel like a little corner of Buenos Aires. 

5. La Playita, Bacalar

In a superb location beside the 7-coloured laguna (which works equally well, though differently, as a venue for either lunch or dinner, indoors or outside),  La Playita specialises in high quality finger-food, but the menu stretches to more ambitious 'Latin Fusion' dishes. 

The next five to follow soon...

Joie Maligne

However genuinely miffed at the sight of Notre-Dame burning the other day, my dark subconscious alter-ego decided this morning that it was time to have another read of Stephen Clarke's 1000 Years of Annoying the French.

I've been quite surprised at the levels of schadenfreude Monday's events have generated, even amongst fellow medievalists.

I'll admit to a little sniggeur myself when I saw Macron turn up on site with his studiously sombre demeanour.

Five years he says - that's rather conveniently around one year more than it will be his problem.

'Nigel Farage livid after learning that Stonehenge was built by Turkish'

The kick off points in these DNA tests are clearly a little arbitrary.

Mine informed me that my paternal ancestors took the wetter Atlantic route up to Blighty some time before the first Latin speakers showed up - so-called Celt-Iberians from what today is northern Spain.

Yet they'd undoubtedly arrived there from somewhere else at some stage. There is not a single person in modern Britain (currently*) unable to claim African ancestry, yet this is a fact which probably pisses off both those who do this most vocally - having more to do with more recent history - and those who think Nigel is a good bloke with their best interests at heart.

How long do one's ancestors have to have hung around in one particular geography for it to count as their place of origin? (St Patrick's Day suggests not long or not at all.)

*However....It might make Nigel even more cross to learn that this week an article in the New Scientist references the hypothesis of an academic at the University of Toronto who thinks he has evidence that ALL hominids might actually have evolved in the Balkans after all!

Cool Hunting in La Antigua

Some destinations in this region are briefly cool. It never really lasts. 

In the early noughties, Playa del Carmen was ickily cool. Back then I needed the digits of more than one hand to list the bars in that town which were hip in that familiar, incontrovertible way. 

Nowadays, I can’t think of one even. And I noticed on my most recent visit that the last truly deserving of the category - the Almirante Pech is no more.

Antigua has never been especially cool. This stems from the somewhat unusual disposition of this city in that it is at once markedly cosmopolitan and shoddily unsophisticated. 

There have always been places where you could bank on a banging night out such as El Afro (now known as La Sala), and then there’s La Casbah, which is never going to transcend its innate naffness. 

But cool, cool? 

There have been a handful of joints that deserve honourable mentions I suppose. When I first came here there was only one bar targeting a young, affluent crowd — Mio Cid — and it did have a certain grooviness to it. Chic? Not really. Anyway, in much the same way I am a bit too old for that sort of thing now, back then I was a little too young. 

Then in the late 90s, there were two more bars that were almost chilled enough. Onys — at least when it first opened — the place where we partied like it’s 1999; because it was. Plus Dog and Fox, which wasn’t around for very long, but will be remembered fondly. More convivial than cool perhaps, but the clientele were the real deal. 

But there was also one bar in town, actually quite hard to find, set inside a grotto which I'd have to admit was ACHINGLY cool. So cool in fact that you’d imagine that one of those hardened, professional cool hunters would cream in his pants before even making it to the counter to order a drink. Indeed, most of the people in it looked like professional cool-hunters, or cast-members out of high budget advertisement for premium booze. I’d never seen a crowd like it in Antigua, then, or indeed since. Where did they all come from? Where did they go? 

It hasn’t existed for nearly twenty years yet it somehow feels wrong to say out loud what it was called or where it was located. It was such a small, exclusive little space. We found it almost by accident and sometimes I wonder whether I simply dreamt it. But here goes...Mojitos. It was a Cuban bar serving actual Cuban beers, which was a bit of a big deal back then as everywhere served Gallo and pretty much nothing else. 

Being grotto-located, it was a sort of smaller cousin of Disco Ayala in Trinidad on that Caribbean island, which is set in a much larger and deeper cave system and is a fabulous place to spend an evening, though perhaps not cool, because I suspect capitalism might well be an inescapable ingredient of coolness.

The grotto is still out there, but is now a high end space for romantic dinners, which is a little bit of a shame.

The city with the highest density of cool I've come across in the last year or so is Medellín. There's really nothing to compare with it in Central America, except possibly Panamá City. 

In Mexico both Mérida and rapidly-inflating Querétaro with its tech industry are moving in that direction. 

And in spite of what I just said a couple of paragraphs earlier, Havana is irrefutably cool. But it's an effect of the sum of the delights of that great city, rather than particular venues. 

Meanwhile, there appears to be a new contender in La Antigua: Mystic Bar, which used to be called Ocelot. Readers of this blog from almost a decade ago will recall that said establishment was a highlight in the portfolio of crooked, right-wing investor Jeff Cassman, alias Mark Francis, who left these shores to spend some time in a federal lock-up on an embezzlement rap. Later on it became rather more mundane and Welsh. 

Mystic Bar may or may not become cool. But it will need to overcome a slightly inauspicious start. First the decor, which seems to be the work of the same folk that did this weekend's velación at San Bartolo. 

And then there's the fact that it has only just opened its doors and already has 1000+ followers on Instagram, most of whom appear to reside in India and Pakistan. Now, while it's possible that all these people are guilty of the same innocent mistake, there's a chance that these are paid-up followers — and buying your mates is the very definition of un-cool. 

Brexit: where we are at....

Opposition to the process of a negotiated withdrawal from the EU has been varied, but in simple terms there have been four main tendencies in Parliament. The first three are quite easy to identify: the no-dealers, the no-Brexiters and the DUP. 

The fourth isn’t quite as obvious, but it is essentially a less intelligible, and certainly less principled, tribal tendency. 

Both the main parties have an eye on future electability, while being aware of an awkward disconnect between their base and many of their MPs. The Labour Party for example is grounded in a Remain-leaning membership, but dependent on less woke folks in the working class constituencies they will have to win to return to power. Hence their pie-in-the-sky, supposedly ‘jobs friendly’, non-policy after the referendum. 



Meanwhile, on the government benches, fundamental disagreement over the European project has long been a critical weakness, threatening to sunder the Tory Party, which is ironically why Cameron originally came up with the cunning plan of promising a referendum he didn’t think he’d actually need to hold.

In such circumstances one could say that neither party can respond to the Brexit referendum result coherently without compromising internal unity and/or their next manifesto.  

The big mistake of the no-dealers in all this has been to imagine that their best interests were being served by tagging along with the other recusants, including the DUP, who care a lot about one issue, but not so much about Brexit at all. Rees Mogg and co have perhaps stumbled on their ‘half a loaf better than no bread at all’ analogy a little too late. 

The no-Brexiters on the other hand, appear to have been tactically-astute thus far, though they were handed a critical lifeline by May’s own mega-gaffe - calling an election and losing her majority - since which EU negotiators been able to exploit her single-issue, DUP weakness pretty effectively. 

To have ‘her’ deal pass now, she will need to get both the no-dealers and DUP to capitulate fairly comprehensively in the next few days. She also needs to induce a sense of weariness in a significant number of opposition MPs. 



The no-dealers are almost certainly the only grouping in Parliament who care enough about Brexit to cave under this pressure. If the deal, and its backstop, remain un-altered, the DUP are likely to remain non-compliant. 

Still, a more general sense of exhaustion could yet get the PM over the line. 

Two Tribes Go To War

Our two party parliamentary system has always been notably more tribal, - adversarial even - than numerous European counterparts, but until the combined effects of globalisation and its reaction (populism), started to hollow out the centre, this hadn’t led to the sort of intractable, conspicuously brainless ideological positioning in the legislature that has become all too familiar in the US.

People's Votes

The trouble with referendums is that they feed the illusion that politics is all about binary choices that lead to fixed political destinations. Yet one of the reasons we have a Parliament is that political decision-taking is to a very large extent a never-ending negotiation, where the goal posts are in constant motion. ('The People' too, is ever in flux.)

It is perhaps also worth reminding ourselves of the obsevation made by Prof. Niall Ferguson that ‘The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history’ and plebiscites, along with assorted other mechanisms for sudden, drastic historical changes of direction, are very much an open invitation to unintended consequences.

Brexit was presented as one of those issues that could be farmed out to ‘The People’ for a simple YES/NO answer, but if we have learned anything since 2016 it was that this was deeply misguided.

A second stab at this would suffer from many of the same fundamental flaws. I find myself, like many MPs perhaps, torn between what I would want to see happen now (viz that petition) and what is actually in the national interest.
In the Sunday Times today Gisela Stewart, former Chair of the Leave campaign, argues that it’s a myth that ‘the people’ made their decision in an uninformed manner. 

For me, this particular issue is fairly irrelevant. Even if every one of the 17m+ who voted to leave had a comprehensive grasp of the options and issues behind that decision, can one really say anybody had a proper sense of their own and the nation’s stake in the matter? This has only - and could only - become manifest in the intervening period, and then in a not entirely transparent manner.

'You the public have had enough...I'm on your side'

Theresa May might not generally walk or talk like a Trump, but today she quacked like one.

Appealing directly to ‘the people’ (plebs) over the heads of their elected representatives might help her get around the current crisis, but it paves the way for further populist deteriorations in our democracy.

Looking 'Presidential' is increasingly not a very good look at all.

And I suppose from a purely selfish, ex-patty perspective, I have been rather enjoying all the 'arcane procedural rows', more than I know I would all the blather about knife crime and the stream of NHS pieties.

Not that these will get much of a look in when we leave the EU in a frenzy anyway.

Triple Frontier (2019)

This movie stars two half-Guatemalans. So, that's like one whole Guatemalan! 

The title led me suspect that it was set in one of my favourite destinations in all of South America - the point where Perú, Colombia and Brazil meet on the Amazon river. 

But no, it's actually located in a mashed-up, geographically-discombobulated version of that continent, much of it actually shot in Hawaii. 

It has a fairly ludicrous premise which is part Ocean's 11 and part Sicario. As it progressed I had cause to recall other flicks like The Wild Geese and even Alive. 

So, basically pretty silly, but quite entertaining. 

As with Velvet Buzzsaw I ended up wondering how Netflix is able to sign up so many big name actors to this sort of dross.

Lakeside

Recent events up at the lake have reminded me of two works that sit at pivotal moments in the development of budget long-haul travel.

First there’s Alex Garland’s The Beach which presciently pinpoints the era when the molotera of young backpackers stopped being explorers and morphed into something more akin to colonists, or at least semi-resident populations with a damaging impact on local communities and the environment. The fate of the beach used in the 2000 movie version of the novel is further testament to this phenomenon.

Then there was a documentary I saw in the early 90s about a wealthy old German with a substantial lakeside property on Atitlán who was quite aggressively resisting the efforts of the inhabitants of a nearby indigenous village to construct their own road which would connect them to the main highway and thus to the rest of the world. The film exposed the multi-dimensional nature of developmental issues.

One wonders if those villagers now realise that they should have been more careful what they wished for.

Brexit Pathways

Even the most committed, foaming at the mouth, no-deal Leaver surely has to admit now that the hardest form of Brexit that could ever get the nod from this Parliament is the arrangement negotiated by May’s government with the EU. So they’re all going to get behind it now, right? 

Some may well flip next week, but the fact that others won’t tells us something important about the mentality of modern politicians. 

Put yourself in their little heads and at least three pathways appear to remain...

1) Out is out. Take the deal on the table and leave sooner rather than later. See what can be done down the road to harden things up a bit.

2) Wallow in factional bloodymindedness. The DUP, the ERG and (at least part of) the Labour Party are demonstrating how ideology likes to shoulder barge reality. 

Corbyn rather optimistically assumes that a failure to deliver Brexit will be taken by the country as a containably Tory debacle and that May’s personal disaster will become the springboard for his own ascendancy. Good luck with that. 

Meanwhile, unconsciously at least, many euro-sceptic MPs will be aware of just how politically-irrelevant any sort of Brexit is likely to make them, while a full on ‘betrayal of the British people’ might grant them a salience in the medium term that they’d otherwise never achieve. 

3) Find a way to get around the problem of ‘this’ Parliament and this particularly inept PM. The trouble with the latter is that Tory rebels called for a confidence vote way too soon and lost. However, they might still be able to get May to leave before the UK’s own leave process is finalised. 

A general election remains the nuclear option likely to blow up in the face of both main parties.

Credos

Many years ago when I was an undergraduate, long before such things as Twitter mobs existed, the anthropology department at my university was teaching students that the human incest taboo was entirely a social construct.

This being the same university where DNA was discovered - indeed some of the conversations I had regarding this bit of claptrap were held in the very same PUB where DNA was discovered - it didn’t seem unreasonable to approach the matter with a modicum of scientific scepticism.

Yet when I did so, even those young anthropologists, who otherwise appeared politically unengaged, reacted with cultish hostility - in much the same way their modern equivalents today responded online to the female academic who dared to suggest that any skeletons unearthed by archaeologists are either male or female and that a ‘trans’ set of bones would be pinpointed according to the original sex of the individual. 'Gender' being invisible to archaeologists.

Meanwhile over in my own department historians had only just stopped giving any credence to the notion that the Black Death killed almost nobody given that the massive social changes that occurred in the century after 1348 could not possibly have occurred as a result of a pathogen....because Marxism says so.

If history does present one clear and obvious lesson it is that dogma tends to poison almost everything. This is largely because it starts by being factually-selective and gradually becomes more and more hostile to evidence that won’t prop up its key tenets.

I’m not so sure about that incest taboo hooey, but a good deal of dogma undoubtedly starts with the best of intentions.

Many of those who were around at the start of French and Russian revolutions were moved by the spirit of what today we would call ‘social justice’. And of course many of these same people were soon not around at all.

The anti-semitism that festers beneath the hard-left’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is there because of the venomous influence of dogma. An individual has a personal, emotional response to reported events - empathy for the plight of the Palestinians - but that individual acknowledgment is soon subsumed within a collective dogmatic position. Uncomfortable truths that don’t add to the sense of righteousness are deemed conspiratorial, absurdities that do, are cherished.

It’s truly hard to hold a sensible discourse with someone in the grip of dogma, because they will always refer you back to the echo of the original individual impulse, rather than the calcified set of convictions that now drive them.

Velvet Buzzsaw

Dan Gilroy wrote and directed the generally excellent Nightcrawler and here he has reunited Jake Gylenhaal and Renee Russo for a considerably less biting satire on the art world. 

Is Netflix the problem? It didn’t seem to creatively hamper Alfonso Cuarón. 

Yet as with Soderbergh’s Unsane - which I think worked better - the immediate question seems to be what are so many famous actors doing in something so televisual? 

The problem is compounded by the fact that they are playing characters that reminded me of people I used to rub up against in London’s media industry, many of whom were considerably less A-list and fascinating than they imagined themselves to be - and the trouble with making a movie about such folk is that it can end up having the same set of defects as its protagonists. 

While Velvet Buzzsaw' was essaying satire I think I must have had the demeanour borne by John Malkovich throughout: somewhere between terminal ennui and self-disgust for simply being there. 

As for the horror elements which kick in later on - a predictable sequence of grisly denouements - these are barely above Doctor Who level in terms of visual effects, scariness and mildly comic set-up.

No Idea

This was shared by a friend on FB yesterday. 

Given that almost no statement in the above text is true, the essential lesson to be picked up here is surely about the ways that ‘fake news’ tends to override our instinct to fact-check before sharing by presenting us with carefully-calibrated untruths that some would actually like to be true. 

It would not be all that harsh to describe this particular set of untruths as a form of Islamist propaganda which targets both modern Muslims and western liberals, with an aim to sow doubts about the foundations of western ‘arrogance’, whilst at the same time suggesting that the Islamic cultural tradition in Europe is somehow more indigenous and authentic. 

Yet let’s not forget however that Islam was the third and last of the great monotheistic misapprehensions to emerge out of the middle east. As such it has its own very pressing authenticity problem which, in effect, requires constant glossing over. 

It is like an MS Windows to Judaism’s Mac OS, a fact that shows how much easier it is to be hostile than admit being derivative. 

In the seventh century Muslim armies started sweeping out of the Arabian Peninsula into the Med, overrunning territories we know today as Spain, Egypt, Turkey and Palestine - all firmly Christian at the time. This uncomfortable fact is glossed over more than most. (Though of course that faith had been largely imposed by the Rome and its successor states.) 

Once Jerusalem was theirs, the Caliphate built its mosque on top of the ruins of the second Jewish temple (complete with fairy tale about Mohammed and his horse) in much the same way that Spanish Catholics would later build their cathedral on top of the what was left of the central acropolis of the Aztec capital, or indeed try to convert the Great Mosque in Cordoba into a Christian place of worship — by carrying out an aggressive act of suppression and replacement. 

Today they would insist that the Dome of the Rock is at least equally Holy as the sites venerated by other faiths, which I suppose is fair enough, even if this penchant at times seems to suggest that it somehow got there first. 

These arguments for primacy between the 'great' religions are perhaps the oldest extant form of culture war in modern civilisation. 

(For the record. The medical school at Salerno was founded in the 9th century by Christian monks. It was later famed for 'Islamic influence', but as a result of the crusades and so hardly in the way suggested above. Bologna is in fact the oldest university in Europe. Academic dress at the time of its foundation was rather different to that today. The cap and gown are said to have originated in Oxford and Cambridge around the thirteenth century as warm-weather variants of clerical dress common around the region then. Western European clerical dress has complex origins in both late-Roman secular clothing and eastern, pre-Islamic attire.) 

The Big Stink

Whoever is (repeatedly) using an unmarked tanker to dump their sewage in this drainage outlet in El Panorama, please cease, or face the consequences. 

CCTV Nation

Turns out that once you have security cameras in this country, it suddenly becomes hard to imagine life without them.

They do however engender a certain sort of paranoia about the nature of one’s fellow citizens. 

For example, some individuals in this village appear to wander around on some sort of loop, rather like in The Truman Show. You can practically set your watch by them. Indeed, a worrying number of the people in the catchment zone of our cameras tend to resemble in their motions certain non-human characters in computer games. Or what I used to refer to as ‘bots’, before the term acquired a Russian connotation. (V has specifically compared them to some of the walking figures in Grand Theft Auto, Vice City.) 

One easily-recognisable character used to pass at more or less the same time every morning at an almost absurdly fast walking pace, sporting an oversize black wig and a thick grey sweater (no matter the season). We nicknamed him ‘Sinibaldi’. 

About once a month something truly bizarre is captured:  e.g. a few days ago someone drove round the corner at full speed and tossed a tiny kitten out of the window. 

In previous months we’ve seen a woman, possibly a working girl, defecating before consuming her own faeces, closely observed by the man at the wheel of the car she’d just got down from. 

Another time there was an all-night orgy going on inside a PNC patrol car parked right in front of our house. 

I've uploaded the footage of all the above-mentioned incidents to Youtube: unlisted of course! 

Anyway, it’s always kind of amusing to scrutinise certain known dodgy characters taking the kind of evasive action that reflects an ignorance of both wide angle lenses and night vision technology. 

Our newest neighbour opposite has recently installed a set of cameras along the length of his wall, which are obviously rather more fancy and sophisticated than ours. 

So now pretty much everyone in the immediate area has security of this sort except, rather ironically, the one household that could most do with it. 

Another nearby household is taking it to a whole different level with a drone, which has repeatedly invaded our airspace. 

As for the kitten, we’ve adopted him. He’s an extraordinarily sweet and sociable little thing. 

Expecting a different result...

The United States has a long and infamous record of dicking around in the internal affairs of the hemisphere's less powerful countries.

Most of these interventions have worked out along the lines of La Rancherita's grenade attack on that bus in Guatemala City last week.

Mexico, however, retains the dubious distinction of being the one Latin American nation that has been most triumphantly crapped on by its northern neighbour.

Here John Bolton wants us to believe he's inadvertently doing a Baldetti...

Green Book (2018)

I had flashes back to Planes, Trains and Automobiles; here, but in a good way I think.

The director is one of the Farrelly brothers, so this might be characterised as a super-woke take on Dumb and Dumber, along the lines of Dumb and Prodigiouser (...although tragically pretentious).

The brother of the passenger has apparently observed that the driver wasn't his friend, but his employee. That remark made me think of some of my mother's 'employees'. 

The fact that Dr Shirley was estranged from his brother was duly emphasised in the movie.

The Girl In The Spider's Web (2018)

Jean Baudrillard almost certainly never made use of the term 'soft re-boot', but he might as well have done, as it accurately encapsulates our present society's almost pathological need to hyper re-hash all the 'ideals' that circulate within it.

What he did say was this: "We live amid the interminable reproduction of ideals, phantasies, images and dreams which are now behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable indifference."

It's odd that Lisbeth Salander should already be 'behind us' after little more than a decade, but so it is, as here she's been flicked from her spoon into a chirmol that's part (or sub-) Bond, part Bourne and part Bron/Broen.

Like Daniel Craig's 007 in The Quantum of Solace, Claire Foy's Salander is the right protagonist in the wrong material. 

As for Sverrir Gudnason’s Blomkvist, he's the archetypally superfluous man here.

Inside and Out

Ever since Einstein theoretical physicists have made the point that there is ‘nothing’ outside the cosmos. 

Indeed, Carlo Rovelli makes the point explicitly in his latest book The Order of Time — that there’s no point in asking what exists outside of space and time, by which he is possibly really stating something rather tautological: that there is no space and time outside of space and time. 

And when one delves into the nitty-gritty of the theory he most closely adheres to —  Loop Quantum Gravity — one discovers that there isn’t really any space or time inside either, as both are relative phenomena that manifest themselves subjectively as a result of the networked behaviour of particles. 

It’s not an atheistic position per se, failing to fully deter the religiously-minded, as they tend not to be looking for the Divine within space and time. And rather than agreeing that there is nothing on the outside, they’d be more inclined to assert it is where one would find everything — a perfect, absolute, first cause. 

This is actually a key point that Richard Dawkins doesn’t seem to get. It strikes me that it reveals how — perhaps counter-intuitively — the biological sciences are not the ideal stick with which to whack religion, because their perspective on our predicament is essentially internal to the system. (Hence all that nonsense about giant spaghetti monsters.) 

Theoretical physics on the other hand is poking ever closer to metaphysics, and often in ways which parallel religious perspectives. The Big Bang for example can be spun to resemble a moment of ‘creation’. 

The pantheism/monism of Baruch Spinoza is another way of spinning the problem. 

Like many modern scientists, he believed it would be a total waste of time to talk of transcendent realms outside the cosmos, to hold out for eternal spiritual stuff to counteract contingent material stuff. 

Spinoza instead thought of the cosmos itself as the absolute, as a kind of God, albeit an indifferent one. For him the absolute and the contingent, time and eternity are all part of the same system, but it is our human condition to only experience the bits, not the whole. 

However, there’s another way of addressing contemporary theoretical physics which is significantly more encouraging for unbelievers. In this view the hidden, fundamental reality is not perfect order, but perfect disorder such that everything we experience is a pattern that has somehow emerged from chaos and is steadily returning to it. 

One can insist that evolution is directionless and purposeless, as it most assuredly is, but the fact remains that it is bucking the more universal trend towards ever greater disorder.

Cobarde

Corbyn's 'all options are on the table' equivocations have similar roots to the cowardly calculation that led David Cameron to propose the referendum in the first place - an unwillingness to campaign with the familiar message of class-based tribalism when there is a real danger of his base being subjected to a flank attack by populist irregulars...

Entangled Party-cles

Both of Britain's main parties are in a sort of quantum state of equivocation right now and it is the particular nature of their leadership at this crucial time that is largely preventing them from returning to a more usefully determined condition. Corbyn has in mind that May should materialise into a properly dead cat by ruling out No Deal. She of course prefers to remain in the superimposed state that was rejected by unprecedented numbers yesterday. In turn Theresa would like Jeremy to manifest as a dead cat by opting for the No Brexit position most of his party members appear to favour...but of course he knows that he cannot do that without simultaneously collapsing her into the sort of live cat that would recognised as the only leader still standing up for Brexit and the large swathes of the embittered working classes that Corbyn himself aspires to represent. May’s indeterminacy is at least partly naïve. She seems to believe it is the best way to deliver on the ‘solemn promise’ she made to the British people, even if almost nobody else does. Corbyn’s indeterminacy is of an altogether more cynical nature. May is also not recognising that ‘The British People’ is not a constant in this equation either. Since the referendum roughly 1.8m individuals have ceased to belong to that variable and a similar number have attained voting age. Do politicians need to honour promises to the deceased? How different the whole situation might be if this rather rare pair of entangled particles were both absent, along with at least some of the uncertainty they bring with them...

Low-lying Letterboxes

Somewhat surreal experience first thing today when I turned on BBC Parliament. Minutes before the No Confidence motion and a key debate in what is becoming the political crisis of a lifetime, a new law proposing a ban on 'low level letterboxes' was being put forward.

I'm all in favour of protecting postmen's extremities and making things a bit harder for would-be mail-pilferers, but...

Click-bait

V has been getting more than usually paranoid about social media recently as we are being bombarded with Facebook ads for the well-known restaurant in the capital owned by our newest neighbour.

Meanwhile, I have been quietly satisfied with the way he has been spending his money on us, albeit inadvertently, though one of these ads did entice me to get up and make a spaghetti alfredo, when I wasn’t feeling especially hungry...

Truculent Folly

Some of the grand historical barriers mentioned here had what is generally known as 'practical value'.

Trump may be the last person alive that thinks his wall would have it...at least amongst those coming at the issue from a (supposedly) informed position.

All those strange birds that used to whisper in his ear about beautiful walls, travel bans and the like, have since flown the nest.

They surely knew that the wall would primarily be a symbolic act of defiance against the pressures of globalisation. The Donald apparently doesn't.

Britain's watery Brexit 'wall' features much of the same awkward disconnect between practical and symbolic value.

And its construction remains beset with some quite serious inconveniences — such as as fact that our ‘island nation’ actually consists of one island plus a sizeable chunk of another one.

Brits have been left asking how much they are prepared to pay for symbolic satisfaction, though the older generation do appear more inclined to dismiss the question, having discerned that it won't be them picking up the tab for their momentary exultation.

And in said tab there lies another distinction between Trump's truculent folly and ours — there’s no way to suggest that the people on the other side are the ones that are going to pay for it.

Those Heir-bnb Shutes

Welcome Home is a bit of B Movie mediocrity is set in Todi, a gorgeous Umbrian town that V and I had the pleasure to visit in January 2002, shortly after the fateful introduction of euro banknotes. (An acute taste of the chronic pain to follow.) 

In a more abstract sense it is set in the liminal space between Wop-o-philia and Wop-o-phobia. 

The screenwriter clearly influenced by the particular paranoia peddled by those articles about Airbnb host-voyeurs, though perhaps not by the associated plugs for handy apps that largely deal with the problem.

This movie is deeply silly. There's a rabbit stew scene that is practically on the plane of self-parody. The female interest is 100% a male interest. 

Yet the final 20 minutes or so up the levels of silliness to a point that almost redeems all that came before.

Anti-colados

Yesterday a member of the local ex-pats group on FB wondered out loud why there were native Guatemalans colados therein. 

The comment stream was soon disabled. 

An obsession with the protection of purity is a key part of the American mindset.  I’ve written (ranted?) here before how the puritan origins of the USA still inform its politics quite dramatically. 

Whether we’re talking walls to keep outsiders out, McCarthyist purges - on both the left and the right  - #metoo, no-platforming and so on, the neuroses of self-purification persist.

These amorphous, pitchfork wielding, context unaware, puritanical mobs have gone digital and have thus spread beyond the borders of the US in a way that no wall, however beautiful, can prevent. 

The contagion has reached British politics undoubtedly.  Our barrier wall will be Brexit and the end it promises to the free movement of foreign contaminants.   

Yet perhaps this is not so new or indeed alien. If you trace back some of the more educated leavers’ obsession with parliamentary sovereignty in historical terms, you eventually reach the 1650s and the English civil wars, an era when puritanical mobs were very much de rigeur.

This did not bring me joy....

Netflix has clearly stumbled upon the idea for one of the worst television programmes ever made. It's so bad that for the first ten minutes or so of episode one I was convinced it had to be on of those satirical fly-on-the wall documentaries. 

The format is derivative — resembling in its essence Dog Whisperer — that show where the patronising bloke from Culiacán enters the homes of annoying people ostensibly to sort out their unruly pets, but ultimately managing to resolve at least some of their #firstworldproblems along the way. 

In 'Marie Kondo' for pets read houses, houses owned by even more annoying people and frankly not all that untidy by global standards. One senses that the whole set-up is offensive, racist even, but it's not clear whether it's middle-class, white America or the Japanese that are being most savagely mocked.

It reminded me of what Ben Elton used to say about the Ferrero Rocher ad (Ambassador’s party): that it was impossible to take the piss out of it because all the piss had been pre-removed in the making of it. 

Replicas

This is a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie in so many ways. 

First the most obvious: it’s about a man of science who via an unorthodox experiment chooses to defy nature and mortality. 

I say man of science, because while Keanu’s character Will Foster has plenty of bizarre technology at his disposal, the screenplay is noticeably almost entirely science-free. 

Then there’s the fact that it consists of several not-entirely-compatible plot premises seemingly sown together. 

At the start the movie seems to be about a man in a medical facility in Puerto Rico attempting to transfer the conscious minds of dead soldiers into a robot. As quick as a flash however, it’s suddenly about a bereaved man cloning his dead family in order to create synthetic replicas that may or may not think and act like the originals. 

This conceit surely has the most potential and Replicas may well be a textbook example of an enticing premise made lastingly toxic by one epicly-bad implementation. 

Should we have expected any less from the people who brought us London Has Fallen and The Day After Tomorrow?  (Not to mention 'From the producers of...') 

The lameness of the last thirty minutes or so can best be explained by suggesting an alternative final act of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece in which the doctor and his creature have to escape from an assortment of incompetent goons dispatched to kill them by Frankenstein’s boss, and for reasons which remain largely opaque to say the least. 

And yet, it was vaguely entertaining. The Keanu effect again, perhaps. 

Destination Wedding

The critics were almost unanimous in preemptively reprimanding anyone who chuckles through this movie. For only a truly BAD person would warm to this misanthropic bilge...right?

So, hands up. It's a fair cop. That said, it is almost ludicrously over-written, to the extent that I wondered if I'd have enjoyed just reading through the screenplay more.

Perhaps I'd have actually enjoyed just watching Keanu reading every line...

Bird Box

Bird Box has been Netflix’s festive end-of-the-world offering with a star cast worthy of Christmas mass-casualty favourites of old like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and so on.

It’s been billed as the scariest movie ever.

There's a case to be made that it's at least the scariest since the last one about one of the five senses getting an awful lot of people unpleasantly killed...which wasn’t so scary after all.

Does this mean we have three more of these to go?

Don’t eat that tamal!

Did someone just fart?

You can’t touch this.

Hammer time...

Afterwards we discussed how progressive it might be to depict a woman in her mid-fifties having babies and then bringing them up with a b/f pretty much exactly half her age. 

V quipped that it's OK because he was wearing a blindfold most of the time!

John Malkovich was great. And he's even better as an over-the-hill Poirot - dodgy accent aside - in The ABC Murders.