Foolish Things

Oddly out-dated in certain ways as it took place before the Trump presidency, John Mearsheimer's lecture nevertheless serves as a superior backgrounder on some of the deeper causes of the current crisis in Ukraine...

A handful of observations for those that take the time to watch this. 

Putin is not one of those autocrats who has arisen from within a robust democratic tradition and trampled on it. Catherine the Great aside, Russia has always been run by one man and has forever regarded our western liberal values with at least a degree of suspicion. 

Since the end of the Cold War the USA has, as Mearsheimer points out, persisted in the belief that elected politicians will always be pro-American, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary. 

Of course the history of countries like Guatemala (and possibly also Chile) shows that in the fairly recent past the USA had few qualms about over-throwing legitimate democratic regimes. As the USSR started to founder, this policy evolved into support for 'voting', which meant either genuine democracy or an appearance of it, until the self-serving fantasy of the benign hegemon was fully formed. 

There can be no doubt that the US is "pivoting" towards eastern Asia and after Brexit the UK appears to want to come along for the ride. This is one reason that Macron, in the aftermath of AUKUS, has been so obviously desperate to appear useful during this current crisis, and there can be no doubt that Russia is also feeling the early symptoms of declining relevance. And acting on them. 

And yet I think Mearsheimer exaggerates the extent of continental Europe's potential decline in strategic importance to the US, for there are meaningful intellectual and cultural resources at stake there in 'the West' and during the Q&A he seems remarkably optimistic about America's own ability to shake off the rise of right wing extremism. 

Some of the institutions such as NATO (and perhaps also the EU) may soon appear even less fit for purpose, but integration is here to stay. The ultimate end product of this crisis will surely be a realisation amongst continental Europeans that they can no longer quite so easily lean on the Americans for their defence needs. 

Mearsheimer holds that Putin has been acting rationally and to some extent predictably. We drove our un-Russian values and our integrated institutions right up to his border and then acted surprised when he responded in a way that suggested the Ukraine sat within Russia's zone of vital strategic interests. 

As I have stated before, the correct and somewhat obvious alternative approach would have been to designate Ukraine as a neutral buffer zone as Austria was during the Cold War. 

Mearsheimer thinks that a lack of a proper peer competitor since the collapse of the USSR has led the US to "do foolish things" on the foreign policy front — the "reverse Midas touch" he repeatedly refers to in the video, which he says afflicts both Democrats and Republicans. 

One could question whether confrontation with China is really necessary or whether the US has subconsciously understood that it needs a proper peer competitor to force itself to think more strategically again and has followed this instinct towards the rising sun. 

The conventional foreign policy view is that we are now all 21st century agents and the old ways of balance of power politics are no longer relevant, so whatever happens next in Ukraine could serve as a very striking wake up call as the West has been dabbling in an area that it now cares about a lot less than the Russians and has ended up with a losing hand at the moment of confrontation — because the economic stick is demonstrably inadequate and Putin likely to act with the greater resolve. 

I believe the Russian President will continue to encroach gradually and in reliably ambiguous ways unless a response from the other side provokes him into something altogether more brutal. 

This was in part the meaning of the hairdryer session his spy chief was on the end of yesterday, the unfortunate squirming official having suggested all too un-ambiguously that the objective was to swallow the Donbas whole into the Russian Federation. 

Esos deditos...

Over six years ago Mearsheimer could see that Putin would attempt to wreck Ukraine rather than let it be swallowed by an advancing West. In doing this he is skirting the outer limits of a strategy which could wreck Russia too. 

Perhaps there are those on 'our' side who have considered ways of prodding him that direction — "Full Tonto" — hoping that the rational, well-considered strategy will unravel in the heat of the moment leaving the Kremlin to do some foolish things too, as Vlad discovers his inner Mr Hyde. 

F1-75

Back in 1999-2001 I had the privilege (and the sheer fun) of being responsible for the digital media presence of the Ferrari Formula One team, encompassing the Schumacher broken leg season which almost resulted in Eddy Irvine pipping the German to the Scuderia's first drivers' championship since Jody Scheckter in '79. 

There was as yet nothing like the social media of today, so this online activity and associated offline support was centred on what was then a sophisticated web platform funded by key sponsor Shell International. 

The Internet Archive's Way Back Machine still hosts it in fragmentary and largely textual form, but the real thing was packed with desirable media. 

The annual launch was a major event for the tifosi. Every year we managed the website from 1995 my colleague Simon and then I would receive an email from the patrons of a small bar in Maranello — Ferrari's hometown — expressing their thanks. Not just congratulations, gratitude. 

This year Ferrari has revealed a car adapted to the significant shift in technical regulations that carries the designation — the F1-75 — which commemorates the 75th anniversary of Ferrari's first production car, though it is their 68th in the sport. Relative to the rest of the field it is unconventional, and it is gorgeous. 

I can't remember the last time I concluded that a race-car was a thing of undeniable beauty. I believe it was one of Mika Häkkinen's McLarens during my tenure at his key rivals. 

But this single-seater is cinematic. 

Ferrari has been a little off the pace on the racetrack for the past couple of years. I guess they may not even care if the F1-75 runs like a Reliant Robin at the first GP of the new season in Bahrain next month.

 

The uniqueness of Scuderia Ferrari is twofold. Firstly it is essentially the only Formula One team that is indispensable to the sport. Secondly it is a team that is supported in Italy primarily, but also elsewhere, no matter which pair of drivers are seated in the cars. 

The 2022 Merc, reverting to the more familiar and less woke silver livery, and the green Aston Martin are also easy on the eye, but the F1-75 is on another level entirely. 

I have a little model of the car in which Schumi went straight on at Stowe corner on lap one at Silverstone in 1999 after a loss of pressure in the F399's rear braking circuit.  It's not so lovely.IAt the time i was seated just behind the massed ranks of the bussed in Jordan VIPs and they all cheered the shunt, but clearly felt a bit sheepish almost immediately afterwards when its seriousness became apparent. 

Scotland's David Coulthard — V refers to him as 'necky', though in that characteristic he was later surpassed by Alonso — won the race that day in one of these markedly jorobado vehicles. 

There are Macbooks I considered nifty twenty years ago that now look like bricks. But every decade or so F1 seems to produce an archetypal implementation for the ages.  

F312B (1970)

Fair Play Mate

 

How was your Friday?

Along with hundreds of thousands of others I found myself devoting a considerable part of mine to the BigJet TV live stream from Heathrow in the midst of Storm Eunice. 

However entertaining Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood have been during the Half Pipe and the Big Air, surely the Beeb might find room for Jerry Dyer on the team? 

Go on...drop it, drop it....

I can't speak for everyone, but in my case at least, the Winter Olympics seem to have fostered a taste for live action with premium peril.

Maybe the jetwatchers have a gnarly argot too? 

Kind of fortunate none of those jets executed a backside pretzel followed by a face plant.

Open Position

The world looks and feels different according to how much one has at stake. 

In my line of work this can lead to unhealthy perceptual biases. One can try to train oneself out of them, but they linger, and there isn't really much one can do about that. 

Maybe a month ago Vladimir Putin might have eased up on amassing his forces at various points around Ukraine if some sort of strongish commitment to permanently postpone that nation's eligibility to join NATO had been made. But the western alliance played an odd version of hardball and softball at the same time and that surely tempted Vlad to go all in. 

He now has the kind of substantial open position that I recognise. He will know what he could potentially gain but he will also have a stop position behind him, and this will not be all the way back to the 2021 status quo and the Minsk Accords. We have surely gone beyond the point where he will simply recall half the Russian army to its barracks.

What might Putin's 'stop' be? He knows this is an important year in the US electoral cycle so making Biden look weak and ineffectual will be a must.* Exposing some serious faultlines in western unity, a nice to have. 

I now believe that he will not stand down before the independent status of the breakaway zones like the Donetsk People's Republic has been firmed up. Some permanent new lines on the map. 

He may not move directly on Kiev, at least not immediately. The brigades in Belarus are multifunctional, allowing him to split the Ukranian army's attention, implicitly threaten NATO members along the Baltic and keep the idiot in charge of that other ex-Soviet neighbour in line. 

When Putin was just two years old the US sponsored a coup here in Guatemala which removed a legitimate democratically-elected government. Two years later the USSR sent tanks into Budapest. This was the world the Russian President grew up in and which he appears reluctant to consign to the history books. Being the last man stuck in that milieu possibly comes with some advantages. 

World leaders would appear to be playing a game of 3D chess where not all the key players are moving their pieces on the same levels of the board. 

Putin, for better or worse, has access to the most multi-dimensional perspective, encompassing the present strategic realities, history, myth, economic channels, comfy retirement, ethnic demarcations and so on. 

He knows that whilst westerners will don their retro WWII or Cold War specs at a moment's notice, in general they are now more comfortable arguing over pronouns and more localised controversies than actually responding to the global threats to their more essential interests in the manner of their grandparents. 

On a slightly, but not entirely separate note. I am no trained economist, but when the inflation first started to bite in the early part of last year even I could see clearly that it wasn't going to be 'transitory'. So when I heard the Fed making all those reassurances I concluded that either they are lying or they are incompetent. 

However, the mendacity option has a small caveat. Back in June 2021 we had emerged from the winter surge of covid in the north, but Delta was threatening and the central bankers were all probably aware that it might be too soon to tighten up fiscally. In the US the Fed kept up with the bond purchases and stimulating the economy, presumably in the hope that they'd have a chance to dampen inflation in 2022 when the covid threat had eased. 

In effect they had been staring at the same charts for so long and gambled that the pandemic would relent favourably rather than being topped off by a rapidly-escalating geopolitical predicament. 

Along came Omicron which created a small dent in the recovery. It also demonstrated that 'soaring' inflation really had to be a supply-side issue. And this raises the question — which again, even I could see coming — of whether hiking interest rates is really going to help all that much. Down here in Latin America, it hasn't. 

Back to Putin. He's been listening to Biden saying that the Americans won't respond militarily to any invasion of Ukraine, but instead come at Vlad and gang all guns blazing economically, and he must have had indulged in a chuckle or two. 

High levels of inflation and indebtedness (and wobbly corporate asset markets) mean that this could be precisely the wrong moment to pull a few levers to see what happens. 

* A subset of British analysts seem to think Putin can possibly achieve this by doing nothing — making POTUS cry wolf multiple times and then mock him when nothing actually happens. 

This would be a variant of something I long ago suspected the CIA were doing in the early days of the mainstream Web and USENET: seeding the digital media with stories that sounded like obvious conspiracy bunk in order to camouflage the outrageous stuff that was really happening in parallel areas.  

By inciting Biden to constantly declare the imminence of his invasion, Vlad could be hoping to make it harder for the West and its media to respond as vehemently and coherently as they might when it finally does occur. 

Rolling Stones

The Winter Olympics, aka Mil Maneras de Morir, is an ever more elaborate collection of ways for athletes to potentially do themselves serious physical harm combining gravity and ice...and Curling. 

We found ourselves with a small interlude of nothing else to watch than the latter sport last night — which sometimes feels like a real life reenactment of an electronic game, "except, more boring", adds V — right after the Men's Freeski Slopestyle final, and this perhaps encouraged us to contemplate the hidden perils that might lurk within the discipline. 

The best we could come up with involved a snapped broomstick.

A common enough hazard here in Guatemala at least. 

The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman

This ended up being a bit like a philosophical true crime docuseries exploring some of the greyer areas of our notions of free will. 

As ever with this sort of thing, I wasn't entirely sure how deliberately the key questions were being asked by the film-makers. And whether some of the stuff which had been rather obviously left out, had also been omitted in a calculated manner. 

Two extended cases of puppeteering by a man called Robert Hendy-Freeguard are detailed, in two distinct timelines, one in the early nineties and the other a couple of decades later in 2011-13. 

In the first a crime is very definitely committed and then somewhat less definitely so, and the open-endedness is even more conspicuous in the second. 

How much psychological coercion is required for the law to be broken? 

I think most of us will watch this and understand the ethical lines that were crossed, but will also understand why it is hard for the legal system to pinpoint exactly when a person has been deprived of liberty without obvious physical constraints. This conundrum has after all lain at the heart of our British notions of freedom ever since Hobbes penned Leviathan. 

The really cunning part of Freeguard's plan here was that he somehow prevented his victims from appreciating how they had been co-opted into acting as his accomplices by persuading them that they were accomplices in some other grand, fabricated conspiracy. Yet were they after all, accomplices?

I doubt I am alone in thinking that of all the complex psychologies on display here, it was this man's that became the most fascinating and ultimately entertaining across the three episodes. 

I have come across a handful of conmen over the course of my life and there has always been something almost coarsely obvious about them. 

Many of their sort seem to acquire followers who appear to be knowingly along for the ride, in effect conning the conner into believing they've been conned. 

The first I came across was a man who went by the name of Perry Shah who wined and dined my parents in Marbella in the early 80s, claiming to be a close descendent of the King of Afghanistan. From day one my father confided to me that this would lead inevitably to a request for money in a hurry once we had returned to London. Which, of course, it did. 

I have also come across a related species  — the snake oil salesmen — who are perhaps distinguished by their tendency to end up at least partially self-bamboozled by the fantasy world they build around themselves. 

Well below the threshold for legal intervention in our modern commercial world are those who would market a product that only really exists in fully-completed, functional form inside their own heads. One might posit that our global economy has come to depend on them. 

Winter Olympics, week one...

Seven days into Beijing 2022 and there are questions...

Where are all the medal ceremonies?

Why are the Aussies so good at snowboarding?

Why can't the BBC — given their carefree utilisation of apparently non-expert presenters and commentators elsewhere (Steve Cram on the curling...) re-deploy Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood to their other marquee sporting properties, such as Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final and the snooker? Please...

Why does Biden think it important mention that the Russians might invade Ukraine even during the Olympics? Like, the tanks could roll, even on Valentine's Day...

Anyway, no matter how hard the BBC have tried to make their presenters look like lost and lonely avatars in Second Life, the Chinese have really taken it to the next level when it comes to making the real look virtual...

The big chutzpair: Norwegian gold medallist completes final run holding national flag.

How Ruud

The Decrepit Fox

I have a theory — which President Biden is doing his best to disprove — that the older one is the less likely one is to assume that any dispute between Russia and Ukraine is something the rest of us ought to be forcibly sticking our noses into. 

To me, with my background in visits to the USSR before the fall of the wall and possibly even more relevantly, of study (in a high alcove of the CU Library) of the expansion of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, this looks much more like a complicated civil war than any straightforward clash of east-west worldviews. On some levels a bit England-Scotlandy.

Perhaps Biden is old enough to have some version of those never-updated 1930s goggles on. 

Yet during the Cold War everyone seemed happy to agree the neutrality of Austria, a nation that arguably was more naturally aligned westwards. Why not repeat the trick? 

As opposed to say, repeating Khrushchev's Cuban gambit. 

And why not accede to Putin's most basic demand — never to offer Ukraine membership of the competing club. Does NATO really want to assume that level of premium risk anyway? 

There are, I suppose, some strategic considerations given the present state of global geopolitics. John Lewis Gaddis, a recognised authority on such matters, has a handful of historical strategic moments for us to usefully ponder here. 

For example, he flags up the relatively advanced age of Pericles on the eve of the Peloponnesian War as a key factor in his apparent intransigence — or stubbornness. 

The Athenian leader took a number of steps which alarmed the Spartans, who made their revocation a key condition for avoiding war. 

Right to the end the Spartans tried to continue the jaw jaw, but in the end Pericles refused to even receive their emissaries. Gaddis sees this as the end product of the flexible younger Pericles — a fox — maturing into a hedgehog incapable of relenting. 

"Pericles at first steered with flows — a strategy of persuasion. When not all were persuaded, though, he began steering against flows — a strategy of confrontation." (On Grand Strategy.)  

In 431 the Spartans invaded and two years later Pericles was dead of plague, leaving his fellow Athenians to the ignominy of defeat. 

Gaddis draws parallels between the uncompromising Megarian Decree issued by Pericles with the US response to the invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950. Truman understood this as a formal test of American resolve, one which dismantled the existing walls separating vital from peripheral interests. 

"The heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection. Decades devoid of reflection may follow." (On Grand Strategy) 

And Korea was undoubtedly on the path to Vietnam. 

Biden's own line in the sand appears to have been strong enough to provoke the Bear, but surely not strong enough to make any difference to the fate of Ukraine should Putin press ahead. 

As Boris suggests...

Nostalgia Fest #1

This marks the start of an occasional series on the musical compositions that today deliver for me the most combustive thwaaaack of nostalgia. 

Sometimes I may explain the urge to pine, but I won't feel obliged to. They might not be the greatest pieces of music ever composed, but they surely speak for themselves. 

I recall that in the undergrad circles within which I mixed, we were generally rather sniffy about Rachmaninov.

Rack-jack-me-off we use to call him. 

Liking anything quite so 'Romantic' was like heading off to the National Gallery and making a b-line for the room with all the Renoirs.

And yet my best friend at Cambridge had an old vinyl copy of this LP and I soon had a CD (and cassette) of the same. 

Whatever we thought of the music it was the man behind the keys that drew us in. 

And in the light of everything that has happened since, including the passing of my friend, I'd be hard pressed to name a single record of greater significance in my life.  

I can now say that I later had the privilege of being present at two live recitals given by Sviatolslav Richter, both at the RFH. On each occasion he played from within a shimmery pool of shadows, the only strong light on the score in front of him, which he leaned towards as if encountering for the first time. 

I've witnessed a lot of great great musicians perform on that same stage — not just classical, the likes of Stan Getz and Miles Davis as well —  and Richter has been the only one to read the music as he plays. Naked showmanship? Perhaps. The resulting mood of intimacy within such a grand auditorium is what has stuck in the memory. 

On both occasions it was also the pieces he threw himself at during the encores that exhilarated beyond earlier expectation. 

On the first occasion I was with my much missed friend, then on the second I was with V when Richter was doing the rounds for the last time just a few years from his death in August '97. His fingers must have been getting a little stiff already, for his bravura rendition of one of Bartok's bagatelles seemed full of small but noticeable errors and yet was almost indescribably thrilling nonetheless. 

The summer after my friend was killed I visited his wife and (very) small child in the idyllic Hampshire village they had shared. There was a degree of awkwardness surrounding the obvious fact, which she bravely recognised, that the contents of the house (such as the piano and my friendship with her late husband) had deeper roots in his life than she did. She waved towards a pile of LPs. This one was on top. 

The 355 (2022)

This espionage 'thriller' is so utterly formulaic it verges on parody. Though unaccompanied by any underlying sense of humour. 

Paris, France; London, England; Shanghai, China...

Lupita Nyong'go is the best of the international spy quintet here. I thought Chastain was also going to be good in a kick-ass role, but then she went to Morocco dressed like one of those ludicrous Americans one sees around here suitably atired for a rowing regatta on the African savannah. 

Before leaving Paris Penelope Cruz (no longer encumbered by her wobbly attempt at a Colombian accent) clearly had time to stop on the Rue Saint-Honoré to refresh her wardrobe. She was handed the most 'I never signed up for this' part, and visibly struggles with it, though in fairness has been almost no assistance by the screenplay. 

There's a predictability to almost every scene once the plot gets rolling, at least until the final act which first acquires an uncomfortably dark and nasty edge and then fizzles out rather bizarrely. 

It all kicks off with a drug deal that isn't a drug deal, right outside Bogotá, which still goes wrong, of course times two, and then we are off to a series of gratuitous proper city locations as our (initially) four female agency employees team up on an off-the-books chase after a 'drive' that can do every imaginable nasty thing to all of our connected stuff. 

They are of course forced to go 'rogue', simultaneously tasked with saving the world and clearing their own names. I then started counting the number of times during the Craig years that 007 lost or surrendered his official status. In spy movies this is becoming a bit 'hand me your gun and badge'.

The title is derived from Agent 355, the codename of a female spy for the Patriots during the American Revolution. We learn this basically irrelevant piece of information just before the end credits roll. 

How it started...

 

As for how it's going...Spotify's strategy of becoming the Netflix of audio has hit a few podholes.  

(PS: Back in the late nineties we sold our company to a pair of individuals, one of whom has come to be known as The Podfather.) 

An Ex-Parrot

 

Around 3am on January 16 2017 The Blue Parrot died in a hail of bullets. Its untwitching corpse still lies where it fell on that night the BPM Festival closed for good in Playa del Carmen. 

Not resting or stunned; definitely deceased. 

I took the above and rather poignant pic above last month of the defunct venue which has now been abandoned for half a decade behind boards that have been fully doodled on. 

According to reports, the incident began with a 'disagreement' at the front entrance on Calle 12. Three members of The Blue Parrot's security detail were listed amongst the fatalities, which rose to a total of six in number following the passing of the last in hospital around a week later. 

The sound of gunfire created panic inside and a mass movement towards the barriers on the beach side (to the right in the pic above) during which a young woman was crushed to death. 

Beach side...

Take another look at the original photo above. Where has the beach gone? 

I am sure that when the stampede started it was still there. I had participated in a largely Israeli rave event at the same venue the previous May and the beach was definitely present. 

When V and I used to go to The Blue Parrot in the late nineties and early noughties there was a smallish wooden dance floor right behind where those boards are lined up now. There were no barriers back then because there was no entrance fee and one could approach and enter from the beach. 

The playlist there was poppy, but to the rear there was a sandier shape-chucking space which resembled some of those fantastical locations then available to mover el esqueleto — virtually — in Second life, to an altogether trancier soundtrack. 

V, in da house

We have fond memories of taking a break from what I then considered the best bar in Central America and walking towards the shoreline to take in the twinkling lights of Cozumel on the horizon across many metres of now vanished white sand. 

The Blue Parrot was at that time a nightspot within one of the leftover boutique hotels from the Bohemian, 'old Playa' era. The sand came all the way in and surrounded the bar with its swing seats which, during the sun-lit hours, was the centrepiece of an initially private beach club. 

2012

The highlight was always the 'Fire Dance' which commenced around 2am...

Dancing on terrain since reclaimed by the Caribbean.

In the late noughties the hotel part of the set-up became an off the twig 'Norwegian Blue' thanks to all the clangorous competing clubs which sprung up along Calle 12. 

The sea is now finishing the job that the noise started. (That other beach club in the foreground of the first pic has maybe a couple of years left thanks to a stack of sandbags.)

One can endure the cacophany. And I suppose one can also endure climate change right up until the moment one can't. But the bullets...

Last Tuesday someone showed up at Mamita's Beach and shot the Argentinian manager dead. 

And there was another incident just a few days earlier at the Xcaret resort, which authorities (somewhat) excused as the result of a deadly dispute between Canadian guests with pre-existing criminal records. 

There is no question however that the level of vice and its associated violence has reached unprecedented levels in and around Playa during the pandemic months. 

There has been talk of up to a dozen belligerent small gangs (boutique cartels?) contending for territory along the coast whose sobriquet The Mayan Riviera rings ever more hollow. 

I took this snap on the evening of the Sunday before Christmas when I'd been left a little agape by the extent and variety of heavy-calibre options on display in a resort that has kind of had to reinvent itself as 'family friendly' since it ceased to be the Mexican Ibiza at the start of 2017. 

That same morning I had been walking down La Quinta almost alongside three members of La Marina bearing assault rifles and this did not deter a figure from darting over from a shopfront to offer me some cocaine within earshot of my ostensible escort. Les peló. 

La Quinta was always a tight channel of occasionally bizarre verbal inducements. I used to write them down in my notebook, in part because they were typically vague yet comprehensive, though nowadays they are almost always highly specific and as such, unremarkable: "You want weed, blow, girls?" And reduplicated almost every block, the prefix of "hey amigo" now invariably dispensed with. 

An hour further south, Tulum's travails have been well documented: algae, property piracy, Instagram etc. Ironically its demise may have been accelerated by that very shoot out around the GOT throne in the entry passage of The Blue Parrot, because the EDM crowd was thereby collectively displaced an hour southwards, to largely ruinous effect. 

Shots have been fired as well as lined up in Tulum too.  

I took this pic as I departed on my last visit during March 2021, which with hindsight, may very well be my last visit. 

At the time I rather glibly quipped that the first gringo/a to die in the crossfire would — out of sheer statistical necessity —  have to be either a DJ or an Instagram influencer. 

In the end it was the latter. Anjali Ryot's final dispatch from the front line featured fetching poses from some of the boutiquey beach-side cabañas which now tend to cost more than a night at one of London's luxury hotels, and yet — perhaps revealingly for the medium within which she had established herself — she was to perish inside a rather grotty taqueria called La Malquerida set well back in the increasingly Kabul-esque township that has metastasised along Carretera Federal 307. 

On that same visit I went to check what had happened to Las Ranitas, the charming Yucatec eco-guesthouse run by a French couple I had discovered around fifteen years ago. Perhaps rather fancifully, the decor always reminded me of Jessie's beachside hide-out on Cozumel (in reality Isla Mujeres) in Against All Odds. 

The Froggies themselves eventually sold up and moved to Mérida, and the new owners immediately expanded (i.e. ruined) the place by taking the roof off the sala (above) and adding a humungous palapa plus the inevitable DJ and Yoga units. Even before this changeover, the appearance of Bulgari soaps in the bathroom and a preposterous American 'mixologist' by the drinks cupboard had signalled trouble ahead. 

Up and down the beach I wandered last Spring, certain I was in the right place, yet I couldn't find it. And then I remembered I'd passed another of those empty stretches behind boards. And there it was, or rather wasn't, because when I pressed my eye to a gap in the barrier all I could see was weedy desolation. It was as if Las Ranitas had never been there. Only a a scattering of ripio remained. 

Perhaps someone should similarly press reset on that whole stretch of beach. 

 

Who did this?

 

Dog looks guilty next to overturned gold vessel, Alexandria 200-100 BC. (Mosaic).

The Girl Before (BBC Mini-series, 2021)

 

This was the Beeb's extremely classy mystery-thriller offering for the festive period, based on the bestselling book by J.P. Delaney. It was so good on the eye that I feel I might have been a little distracted from some flaws which would have been more apparent on paper. 

The basic set-up is this: two women (neither of them a 'girl', as such) sign a seemingly mephistolean contract involving the lease at remarkably low rent of a somewhat fanatically ideological modern house in London, which comes with rules and a sort of life of its own. Soon we learn that there has been a three year gap between their tenancies and that quite a lot of bad stuff happened to 'the girl before'. 

The present day occupant Jane, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is quickly beset by worrying parallels before deciding (at the point most of us would have just moved out) to conduct an investigation. 

In the end the stand-out stars turn out to be Jessica Plummer and Ben Hardy, playing the previous residents. This is because Jane's character is rather obviously an inscrutable contrivance decked out in stylish winter coats. 

Yet for the format to function both of the women have been left unencumbered with significant relationships beyond a single friend and romantic partner. 

These days thrillers struggle for credible no mobile phone moments. Here I found myself at the next level: "Surely she'd have an Apple watch?" (Other ways of being permanently online are available.) 

David Oyelow plays Edward Monkton, the militantly minimalist architect, a walking red-flag, but also obviously not guilty of any serious crime to anyone familiar with the genre. If that's a spoiler, you are indeed a newcomer to this sort of thing. 

Boiling Point (2021)

Movies shot in one single shot, without fakery, are a very limited sub-genre. The fakery usually adds a sense of technical showboating, as it did with Birdman and 1917, but the real deal, Victoria and Russian Ark (in particular) is usually dramatically very effective. 

And so it is here, though I suspect the effect is more superficial and inextricably allied with the tension — or shared stress — at the heart of this tale of a beleaguered head chef, restaurant and open kitchen during the busiest pre-Christmas evening of the year. 

That this is a best viewed just the once* set-up is endorsed by the ending, which is very powerful yet in a sense diminishes some of what has come before, because it settles the issue of whether this has been a story about one man on the edge, or a collection of little tales about individuals within an institution, on the edge. 

I had to reflect that some of the mini-dramas had been left incomplete and had functioned only as distractions allowing the director Phillip Barantini to re-tabulate his cast out of shot. 

Barantini is best known as an actor (Band of Brothers etc.) and the depth in this movie derives principally from the performances rather than the dialogue. The likes of Stephen Graham and Vinette Robinson are absolutely superb here, especially when silent. (Jason Flemyng is also excellent as the TV celeb chef on a sort of personal black op, but he and his guest have also been served up some of the better lines.) 

I was reminded a little of Sally Potter's The Party from 2017, but that had a superior screenplay, an ultimately more collective dramatic line, and was more prepared to explore the opportunities for explicit farce. But then as a restaurant critic observes in Boiling Point, one should be wary of critiqueing on the basis of that which is absent...

One critic, Mark Kermode, refers to one of the restaurant's customers that night as "Chekhov's nut allergy", thus referencing the Russian writer's famous observation that details in a story (such as the presence of a pistol) must ultimately contribute to the way the narrative develops i.e. if there's a gun amongst the obvious props, it's going to have to be used at some point. 

But Chekhov was surely also aware that foreshadowing can be resolved in multiple and sometimes surprising ways. Here the nut allergy 'seed' germinates almost exactly as we could have predicted. 

I also ended up thinking about the changes that occurred in the British dining out scene during my father's lifetime. He was far from a man of simple tastes and was himself a pretty decent cook, yet increasingly found himself a little alienated by the menus he would confront, even in fairly informal English country restaurants. 

At least until the 80s the very better restaurants in London served very good, yet unpretentious Mediterranean food. The only 'Asian' options were Chinese, which along with Indian restaurants were notably uncomplicated. 

* This is an elongation of an earlier short film from 2019, also shot in one take, which I do now wish to see. 

Digital Overlay

I cannot recall a worse bricks and mortar bookshop than Amazon's on Columbus Circle. Its paltry collection of titles has largely been organised by way of an advert for the discrepant decision-making of algorithms fed by the virtual behaviours of users on the main websites and whilst using their Kindle devices, which nevertheless reveals the potentially insidious nature of any blurring of the physical and the digital. 

If online services have been developed on the 'free lunch' principle, with payment taken in part through a more or less subtle invasion of privacy, the use of QR codes or even verbal requests for personal connection information like mobile phone numbers now seem to routinely occur at the point of sale in a 'real world' setting when the customer is paying full price for the product or service. 

Choosing the blue pill in The Matrix always seemed like a non-choice — to do nothing more than remain within a plodding and possibly synthetic reality — and yet now we see that it involves the conscious espousal of sometimes bafflingly blurred or 'augmented' realities, an inferred collective assent which underpins Zuckerberg's vision for the Metaverse, a space, we are to understand, where the physical is always enhanced not tarnished. 

As Slavoj Žižek observes in the masterful review he wrote of The Matrix Resurrections without even seeing the film: 

"It will thus be nothing less than metaphysics actualised: a metaphysical space fully subsuming reality which we will be allowed to enter in fragments only insofar as it will be overlaid by digital guidelines manipulating our perception and intervention. And the catch is that we will get a commons which is privately owned, with a private feudal lord overseeing and regulating our interaction." 

 

Novakunarse

The current situation in the Australian Federal Court hearing is both bizarre and depressingly familiar. 

It's as if everyone knows that it is at least partly the result of corruption and the manipulation of influence, yet nobody is prepared to state that in front of a judge, and so both sides present arguments that are, in a sense, beside the point. 

The Immigration Minister seems to have a better attorney at his disposal, and yet he has still allowed himself to be drawn into a pointless debate about counter-factuals. 

Of course there could be civil unrest, whatever happens, just like the Australian Open has been kind of spoiled, whatever happens, but only if Novax is made to leave now will the kind of behaviour and attitude he has shown with regard to public health protocols be seen to have been duly censured. 

And during the week Djokovic missed a really glaring opportunity to recover at least part of his reputation by voluntarily withdrawing in time to avoid a three year ban, avoid the confusion surrounding the draw and order of play tomorrow, and avoid having to make a belated apology for any misunderstandings and/or trouble caused after a forced deportation — or indeed after pressing ahead into a tournament featuring 127 vaccinated players (and thousands of spectators obliged to be masked and double-vaxed.) 

Apparently we will get a decision later today, just not the full explanation for it!