An 'unsurprising' end...

 

For English schoolsprogs of my generation this two volume Ladybird edition, 'Kings and Queens of England', was the go-to reference tool, pretty much up to A-level. First impressions of all our monarchs were fixed for life here.

The illustration above features a piece of misinformation, for William Rufus took the wayward arrow in the chest. His initial reaction was to reach down and snap the shaft. But he then sank to his knees and toppled forward, landing on his chest and pushing the arrow-head deeper, which killed him immediately.

In that instant all kingly authority and mystery vanished — and as with his father, Rufus’s lifeless corpse was treated as awkward junk to be despoiled and quickly disposed of, his brother Henry riding off ahead of the news to seize the Royal treasury at Winchester.

Ladybird took the line that the Conqueror's second son was most interesting for his 'unsurprising' end and for some sartorial updates around his kingdom.

By the time I reached university Rufus had become one of my favourite early medieval monarchs, largely because of his non-normative approach to the role, and because he had overseen the construction of both Westminster Hall (where he sat on a marble throne) and the wall around the Tower, but I do have to recognise that were I say Welsh or a devout Christian, I might have formed a rather different opinion.

His interference in Scottish affairs is also suggested in this text. In spite of what Shakespeare later had to say, Macbeth was a decent enough ruler up there. He even paid the Pope a visit in Rome. The Normans however, sponsored Malcolm "Canmore", Duncan's son who, having defeated and decapitated Macbeth, swore fealty to Rufus in 1091 in return for a range of benefits which the King of England of course reneged on. When Malcolm III and his son came south across the border to have a good old Scottish moan they were ambushed and killed in Northhumbria.

It was Rufus's treatment of his Archbishop of Canterbury that I used to find rather drôle. Just prior to a significant naval expedition, Anselm offered to bless the King's fleet and Rufus is said to have scoffed: “As to his blessings and prayers, I utterly abominate them and spew them from me!’

Now that's how to deal with "thoughts and prayers"!

The Archbishop was soon a refugee crossing the channel in a small boat, but in the opposite direction to the one we are currently familiar with. Before being allowed to set off, Rufus's men made him wait on the beach at Dover while his bags were searched for illegal correspondence.

The man who copped the blame for the apparent hunting accident which ended this colourful reign, a knight named Walter Tirel, insisted until his dying day that he was not responsible and had been hunting in another part of the New Forest that day.

Legend has it though that on the morning of the hunt a blacksmith approached the King, at that moment frazzled by a nightmare-hangover combo, and offered him six arrows. Rufus is said to have kept four and handed the remaining pair over to Tirel with the words, "It is only right that the sharpest arrows should be given to the man who knows how to shoot the deadliest shots.”

 

 

How Awful?

I might have described the Duchess of Sussex as ‘awful’ the other day on el feis, but this does not mean that I regard her as solely responsible for the simmering feud which currently divides the Royal Family. Blame for that can be far more widely shared.

That Meghan was a self-constructed work of status in progress, or put it rather more cattily, a social climbing wannabe Hollywood somebody, must have been strikingly obvious to all concerned from fairly early on.

That was her thing and she was clearly dead set on doing her thing, unless carefully directed to do otherwise, and so in a sense, she is one of the least responsible for what transpired, even though first she trod all over her own family before focusing on her husband’s.

Does anyone really think her personal agenda included a lifetime of dedicated service to Britain? Even Harry must have understood early on that she was highly unlikely to put the interests of the institution above her own and that he might have to be wary about trusting her with some of its secrets. What he described as her ‘successful career’ was at that stage just a well-defined tendency. 

 

Much has been made of her non-appearance at the Abbey and how much of a dead loss that made her husband look, with the most widely-shared analysis of the decision suggesting she wanted to avoid all the boos. There may be truth in that, but I have a hunch she also wanted to avoid being caught on camera mouthing the oath of allegiance to her father-in-law.

It is nevertheless not a given that her aspirations were entirely incompatible with a gently modernising Monarchy and its relationship with the British people. However, there is very little sign that any of the influential people around her had anything like a plan in place for addressing a problem which was bound to progress.

The individuals that social climbers rub up the wrong way tend not to be those at the pinnacle, but dug in a bit further down at a level the arriviste must traverse.

So insert Meghan Markle, trepadora de lujo into an institution like the Monarchy and you can easily anticipate how the long-term inmates amongst the Royal staffers and courtiers might react. This would then release the gas of previously trapped snobbery, which Meghan would then be bound to characterise as the whiff of another kind of even less rational prejudice. All so predictable.

Harry has been unable or unwilling to understand the full dynamic here. In the version of events that makes the most sense to him, the UK media moved on effortlessly from hounding his mother to death to shamelessly bigoted attacks on his wife.

When he tells this story he sounds utterly sincere and believable, because he really does believe it. There is genuine pain there, and so one is obliged to empathise. (And along with Harry's hurt, it's not hard to tune into Meghan's all too real insecurities.)

Compare Andr-eeeeeew, who simply can’t avoid sounding like someone who knows he’s telling porkies.

But My Truth is not necessarily the Truth, at least not all of it, and the Sussexes' counter-attacks on the media represent not just a threat to the  Monarchy, but also some of the press freedoms that we all need to be careful with, even when abhorring some of the opinions we encounter. And we have an ancient right to practice irreverence that we can never allow to be swept aside by bullies and dogmatists.

Yet journalists have undoubtedly been mixed up with the impellent forces here. This was always going to become a sort of death spiral: Harry and Meghan would start to act more like self-aggrandizing celebrities rather than Royals and sections of the media would duly push back to the limits of the legal. Someone had to break out of the chain; a behavioural or attitudinal shift was required. Appearing to censure or punish the Sussexes seems only to wind up the mechanism.

Like any member of the hereditary elite Harry was, at least in theory, better placed to simply turn away from the media coverage. But Meghan's whole sense of who she is has always depended on the perception of others. These anxieties took a more toxic shape within their relationship because of Harry's residual feelings about the treatment of his mother.

 

 

Abasing Ourselves Again

"In 1965 the people of Britain may have been poorer, smaller, shabbier, dirtier, colder, more set in their ways, ignorant of olive oil, polenta & - even - lager. But they knew what united them, they shared a complicated web of beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, loyalties & dislikes." > Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain

Downhill from here...

 

 

From the tone of much of the reactionary, old-gitty discourse in today's Britain one could imagine that each time we gather (albeit virtually) for one of our tentpole events we feed the copy that came out of the copier last time back into the machine, resigned to the incremental deterioration in fidelity to a lost original.

 

I'm not sure this metaphor really works for me. I thought long and hard and came up with what I think is a slightly better one.

 

Watching the 'Coronating' of Charles in the small hours of Friday night/Saturday morning here I was reminded of the experience of having once been to see a smash hit West End show - like Cats or Les Mis - and then, many years later returning to the same theatre to witness the same numbers being performed in the same costumes amidst the same sets.

 

 

Any perception of immanent decay is subliminal, imbued with nostalgia. One perhaps misses the original cast, the ones on the LP, but not everyone is second or third tier (apart from the Archbishop) and there are some striking new performers on stage (Penny Mordaunt).

 

Another level to this, at least for the TV 'guests', can be suggested via recollection of Peter Jackson's 4K Ultra HD take on hobbiting. A modern production inevitably exposes some of the artifice, such that the most real sometimes also manifests as the most fake. 

 

For me, and I am guessing for many of my generation, the wedding of Charles and Di was peak Royalty, peak oh-so-deceptive sense of national unity. Remembering this now alerts me to the problem of mis-remembering...

 

 

 

Many moons ago V and I went to see a recital by Sviatoslav Richter at the RFH. The Russian master was already pretty old and somewhat error prone, yet his interpretations of certain pieces by Prokofiev and Bartok have stuck with me for life. I can return to the concert hall for a note-perfect, utterly competent rendition of these same compositions today and come away slightly disappointed. 

 

What am I really remembering here, the actual notes or a kind of composite myth of my own making? As one grows older one discovers that this is not a problem limited to live performance. 

 

Is there any space left on this bandwagon?

How unlike the Guardian to fail to contextualise the remarks of Belizean PM Johnny Briceño who, before opening his mouth to patronise Rishi Sunak over his Indian heritage, might have paused momentarily to engage brain...

 

 

Belize became a crown colony AFTER Britain had abolished both the slave trade and slavery.

 

According to the Garifuna's own version of their history, they were never really enslaved. In that narrative a slaver was wrecked on Saint Vincent and the surviving West Africans blended with the warlike Caribs on that island (who had only recently completed the extermination of the native Arawaks). Under pressure from both Britain and France they subsequently got in their boats and set off for the Bay of Honduras. They still speak an Amerindian-derived language. 

 

A chunk of people in Belize are descended from soldiers who fought under Lee in the Confederate Army and were resettled after the Civil War. Do they deserve their share of reparations? 

 

A significant number of Mayan Belizeans arrived in the 80s having fled the genocidal policies of Guatemala's military regime. Would Guatemala need to chip in? 

 

Northern Belize's population is weighted towards those descended from refugees from the Caste Wars, in which the Yucatán, at the start an independent state, was attempting to put down a revolt amongst its indigenous population. Who's on the hook here? Spain, Mexico or the Governors of Yucatán and Quintana Roo? The UK provided sanctuary.

 

Perhaps ironically, there is one large, ethnically-homogenous group in Belize which might get some mileage out of a gripe about British imperial policies, now the country's most economically-powerful demographic: the Cantonese. 

Three days to go...

I'm not a doctrinaire monarchist. It's not a system of government that I could honestly recommend to any new nation. 

In the case of my own nation however, I do appreciate how it forms a sort of glue holding the entire rickety contraption together.

And I'm with Aussie singer-songwriter Nick Cave when he says he's on board for the strangeness, driven by an 'inexplicable emotional attachment' to the royals and the show, ceremonial, shit etc., which goes on around them. 

Having a family as the head of state has certain functional advantages for the UK over an appointed or elected one. Come Saturday, when the most personal and irrational aspects of the constitution are on display, we may be tempted to forget how it is the impersonal nature of the system, the way that it transcends transient public officials and their partisan gripes, which characterises this form of 'rule'. 

Speaking of gripes, those made here by a GB News gribbly repeat some familiar Republican misdirections. The monarchy is not fundamentally a failing scheme for bringing in the tourists funded by taxpayers. 

The Crown is an wealthy institution managed by the state, which collects the income and pays a salary to working members of the royal family. Most of the value of that work occurs not in the tourism sector, but around the services and the voluntary sector and involves genuine effort. Princess Anne participated in 214 separate events last year. 

Coronation-pooper here is typical of a certain sort of Tory voter who disagrees with state hand-outs in principle, be they to the hard-up or the occupants of palaces, for their worldview is essentially selfish and invisible-handy, and the voluntary sector is not something that keeps them up at night. 

The irony here is that the notion that membership of the Royal Family entails a premium luxury, instagrammable lifestyle paid for by the dumb British proles was exactly what led to the Meghan problem. Yet the moment it dawned on the Duchess of Sussex that things were in reality a tad more complex (and potentially onerous - the dumb proles actually expected something in return), she hot-footed it back to California.

 

“The very purpose of a knight is to fight on behalf of a lady.”

Sir Tristan/Tristram and Sir Lancelot (right), seen jousting here might have been mythical members of the Camelot community, but their official heraldic arms have been legitimately on the books. 

 

 

Knights, rather like the later and typically more proletarian Pirates, were a well-defined roughneck subculture within western society that in theory lived according to high, almost utopian ideals, but in practice generally didn't.

Tristan,son of King Meliodas, was always my favourite Arthurian hanger-on, clearly less intrinsically dickish than Lancelot, Gawain and oh-so-bloody perfect Percival.

In Malory I always looked forward to his periodic encounters with Palomides, the box ticking Middle Eastern infidel at the Round Table, notorious for his unrequited hankering after Iseult. (One felt for him as no magical love potion was required to make him keen for the bean.)

 

 

Artifice Girl (2023)

The 'action' here has been divided into three distinct chapters, sadly an over-used ploy by independent film-makers, which often ends up making all too clear the sense of diminishing returns from a single conceit, leaving the viewer with a firm idea which of the acts they might watch again and which they'll readily forget about almost immediately. 

The concept here, the use of an AI which appears on screen as a lifelike 3D-modelled teenage girl in order to trap kiddyfiddlers in chat rooms is at its most fascinating in the Now+ context. This, we surmise, might just be about the happen.  

The speculation is carried forward first twenty years and then fifty. The AI, Cherry, has 'matured' into a super-intelligence with feelings so well simulated that even 'she' cannot tell how they might differ from ours. 

And yet she has also remained a particularly entitled-seeming, whiny, white American teen. 

The movie is spatially and visually sparse, which means that the content is above-averagely talky. Indeed the second act feels like a compact convention of Basil Expositions on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Again, this stagey-ness worked best in the first chapter, where I was reminded of a certain kind of highbrow television play that we used to see more of in Britain of my childhood. 

Although there are some hefty ethical issues on the table, it's the ones under the table that started to bother me as the movie progressed. 

And the story did not seem to allow for how the world outside these rooms might have changed across the decades. For example, twenty years after the first deployment of the entrapment by CGI avatar ploy, would it still be just as effective?

Yesterday's news suggests that we may soon be collectively convinced that almost everything online is some sort of AI fabrication or 'hallucination'.

The trouble with these fictional narratives about future consciousness is that a contemporary human writer can of necessity never fully get inside a mind which has transcended human intelligence. All the smartest dialogue in Artifice Girl came from the wetware. 

I wanted Cherry to tell us more about being a mind with no body. After all our physical forms are really a key part of our perceptional apparatus. 

I've been wondering myself if the tipping point for this technology will come when it steps outside the position where biological life has evolved to exist and survive within a reality which has been partially 'imagined' by nervous systems. 

There's a clear difference between reality as it exists objectively (and yet can never really be comprehended by our current empirical approaches) and reality as we perceive it. What if AI could self-evolve from its protected environment and take up residence at a wholly novel and distinct point between these two?

Text in a Notebook

I’ve been carrying some existential niggles since my recent trip. In such circumstances, rather than diving into highbrow non-fiction tomes, I will tend to seek relevant associations and validation in fiction, specifically the minimal kind.

With Cortázar, one does not have to limit oneself to finding those jolting, epiphanous intuitions between the lines, because his stories are suffused — as Anatole Broyard noted in back in 1983 — with “imminent metaphor” (did he mean immanent?) and a “musical expectation”, though adding that for him they work better on the level of hypothesis than literary synthesis. I’d maybe agree that Cortázar isn’t one of those writers who necessarily ought to be read in the original (like Garcia Marquez), though it helps to know a bit about his locations. 

This collection lacks the two small tales I often return to: Axolotl, possibly my favourite short story not written by a Russian person, and Casa Tomada. But it does have one which has hijacked my attention this week, Texto En Una Libreta (Text in a Notebook), set in Buenos Aires at the time my father was living there at the end of the 40s. It too begins with a jolting premonition which, by the last lines, has become all-consuming…

It has come to the narrator’s attention that more people are entering the A Line on the subte than leaving it. Initial explanations include bureaucratic incompetence and ‘atomic attrition’, an esoteric scientific hypothesis involving the nullification of individuality in large crowds.

Through a process combining speculation with investigation, he realises that a disturbingly expanding pool of citizens, pale and sad, have chosen to live a limited life in constant motion, literally below the surface of the mainstream. Downward Mobility.

That’s the simple synopsis, with its uncertainty as to whether we are dealing with individuals who have lost touch with reality or whether reality itself has chosen to ghost them — and given that 75 or so years on we now inhabit a society possessing AI which capable of experiencing “hallucinations”, I’d say Julio deserves his place as one of my bathroom books.

'Melanated Sister'

Colourblind casting, even in a supposedly fact-led docuseries, is often to be commended...at least when adequately buffered from nationalistic and racialistic point scoring. 

From a 'neutral perspective' this newsworthily controversial example is no sillier than Welshman Taron Egerton playing the Dutch-Indonesian lead in Tetris recently. 

 

The problem seems to be however that it reportedly comes with a provocative Afrocentrist soundbite, plus the fact that most Septics will not begin to appreciate even the upper layers of this issue.

 

Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, descended from one of Alexander’s generals via some very resolute in-breeding, and so Greek, no hang on a sec, Macedonian. (Cue tedious Balkan bust up).

The Ptolemy clan didn’t marry out much, even affairs were conducted within a very select gene pool, but let's allow that she conceivably may also have been just a tiny bit Egyptian, whilst not forgetting that the Arabs were later, medieval entrants onto the continent, invaders and colonisers, so we are left to conclude that there might just have been some Coptic optics (most honkytonks: huuuuh?). 

 

That most unfortunate term ‘African American’, used typically as a euphemism for schematicised racial polarities in the US, inevitably initiates a form of invisibility for many indigenous ethnic groups on that continent. 

 

The director of the series has only gone and made this oh-so-explicit with her tactless and gobsmackingly patronising comments following the inevitable fall-out on the Nile: “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister?...I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that.”

 

Oh deary dear. So now the only authentic way to be African is to look like someone descended in the main from black Africans from the western side of that continent? 

There is a bit of a backstory here, because for much of the late twentieth century African American counter-culture appeared to admire and lean towards the Islamic identity of North Africa, but has since turned a little more lukewarm on the matter. 'African Americans' are nowadays more likely to be found asserting their birthright to be as culturally insensitive and blithely ignorant as any other sort of American. 

 

Right now there is a superficially progressive tendency for ‘African Americans’ (presumably Rami Malek does not identify as such) to seek out historical narratives beyond the Atlantic slave trade and the struggle for civil rights as a wider source of pride, yet there is obvious potential there for exporting cultural distortions and simplifications which are inevitably going to rile North African peoples for whom ethnic frictions often run deeper and are in a sense more ‘live’ than Netflix/Hollywood is ever going to allow for. The detail is never superfluous…but try convincing that lot. 

 

And observations from series director Mahmoud al-Semary such as "Why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter," are unhelpful at best given that perhaps the more pertinent issue is why people apparently need her to be black, for that is the more obviously counterfactual position. 

 

Anyway, let’s face it, how could this role ever be cast today without setting off a chorus of complaints?
 

That said, if you make a historical documentary about someone else's history and offend them, you surely need to show a modicum of appreciation of how their discomfit might not be fully explainable within your own models of skin tone biases.

 

I guess the best ever representation of this Queen will remain the one in the Asterix books, pointy nose and all.

 

.

 

 

 

Ghosted (2022)

For most discerning viewers Dexter Fletcher's romantic espionage comedy for Apple is likely to end up in their top 5 terrible films of the year. And yet, they are unlikely to find that have been as entertained by the other four.

The critics have been tearing into this movie. Much has been made of the lack of on-screen chemistry between Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.

In truth the Cuban-Spanish actress has been given a bit of a hospital pass by concept, character and dialogue (plus a quease-inducing Cuban refugee backstory) though she could have learned her lesson from that cameo with 007.

But at least she appears to be trying. Evans flickers in and out of zombie transition and he's one of the producers.

All Rather Moot

Somewhat urgent village gathering in the moot hall beckons this week...

1) Why was a pleasant little green space in front of our property dug up for an expensively useless well, when most longer-term inmates of this facility were already aware that any water sucked up out of that hole would be inadmissible for domestic use? Who’s budgeting for the upkeep of our new, white walled zoo with its resident white elephant?

2) Why is our home now surrounded by three separate sets of CCTV cameras courtesy of TIGO? Who’s watching these streams and can we access them if necessary? Will they discourage the anti-social activities of our neighbours? (For example, one presumes that certain members of the local law enforcement community will find a new venue for their vehicular orgies).

3) Why do the men in purple and green fatigues fill the potholes with cement and depart laden with sacks of heavy minerals, like Pedro de Alvarado and his larcenous louts on the Noche Triste?

 

Emily the Criminal (2022)

I would have given this **** but it shed half a * at the last, in part because the epilogue is all right, but in a sense a little too all right.

Anyway, I much enjoyed it and I'm going to have to say why I enjoyed it beyond the fact that I tend to like pretty much everything Aubrey Plaza is in, and that is going to involve a small spoiler.

There's undoubtedly a well set up expectation here that this is going to be a movie about a young middle class woman who experiments with the fresh-off-the-boat criminal underworld and gets in over her head, and let's just say that writer-director John Patton Ford successfully subverts it.

And it's worth adding that Theo Rossi is just as much a good reason for watching this movie as the ostensible star.

 

 

Aftersun (2022)

This is an extraordinary piece of film-making, one that would be a strong recommendation to just about anybody with an interest in the ways in which profoundly emotive stories can be told in this medium. 

 

In her BAFTA-winning directorial debut Charlotte Wells gives us what she has described as an emotionally autobiographical recollection. 31-year-old Sophie reconstructs a holiday in Turkey spent with her father Callum, twenty years previously. 

Superficially rather inert dramatically, the film is an extraordinary amalgamation of available emotional connections which I suspect not everyone will pick up, at least not at the same magnitudes or distribution.

The cleverness of the film's construction lies in the way Wells has superimposed two streams of retrospective awareness — Sophie's direct memories of the holiday as she experienced it in the late nineties with a host of small details often at the fringes of the action which suggest the ways she has since digested the meaning of things that she witnessed or perhaps later imagined. 

From apparently trivial and disjointed moments we are led to transmute from these materials our own version of an implied bigger narrative, with even the lyrics of the songs on the soundtrack reinforcing this alchemy.

As suggested above, viewers will I think tap into Aftersun's wells of joy and sadness in accordance with their own emotional biographies. I could write a far longer piece on the reasons why I got an especially hefty dose, but then the review might become a little too personal. 

I would point to the fact that the times I felt closest to my own father during my early childhood were those when we only had each other for company, particularly during the mornings on our holidays in Spain.

I'm also sure I've mentioned before a fascination with any story set within a hotel, and I discovered here an association with another (albeit emotionally distinct) coming-of-age drama, Éric Rohmer's Pauline à la Plage (1983), an evocative, light-hearted film which sparked my adolescent interest in European cinema.

 

 

 

Hunger (2023)

'Is it good because it's expensive or expensive because it's good?'

This is one of the key questions overtly leveled at the audience of Hunger, a dark and stylish expose of the Bangkok foodie scene...along with 'what is the true price of that hunger to be recognised as special?'.

The head chef as anti-hero operating on the edge of societal norms has become a familiar archetype in the past decade. Lately we've had Nicholas Cage in Pig, Stephen Graham in Boiling Point and, of course, Ralph Fiennes in The Menu. Like the Mozart of Amadeus, these men are celebrity geniuses awkwardly dependent on the patronage of an often dumb and compromised elite. 

Chef Paul (Nopachai Chaivanam) has lifted himself up from a position where, as a child, he found himself licking caviar off a kitchen floor, to be the most sought after kitchen tyrant in Thailand. 

He runs a centralised culinary business called Hunger, but his main trade appears to be catering for extravagant private events: parties thrown by socialites and cryptocurrency moguls barely out of adolescence and those spicy social broths consisting of politicians, the military and law enforcement. 

An unlikely new recruit onto the Hunger team is Aoy, played by the altogether longer-named Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying. She has been discovered operating a wok at her family noodle shop by Chef Paul's underling Tone and, clearly gifted with a natural talent for frying, soon has to establish herself on the team by perfectly flame-cooking the most expensive, thin-slice cuts of beef (A5 Wagyu).

Chuengcharoensukying is a former model with possibly the most beautifully-encased eyes I have ever come across, and in this film it's these work well in combination with a series of sudden jetitas that tweak her facial muscles, thus projecting her see-saw journey between gratification and consternation in this unfamiliar world. Crucially, Aoy arrives at a moral compass moment around the midpoint.

Her boss has come to see himself as above the law and above taste and yet recognises that the only way for him to escape prejudice is to twist it to his own ends. And even as we see that, on some levels, his pandering to the rich can benefit the poor, he firmly believes the notion that food can be made with love is the sentimental excuse of those mired in poverty. 

Aoy is the bearer of a hand-me-down recipe for ('cry baby') noodles which embodies a clear counter-argument. It's clear that director Sitisiri Mongkolsiri ultimately wishes all the decent folk amongst his audience to ultimately understand that they'd much rather consume a dish prepared by Aoy than Paul. Indeed, he reminds us of his previous gigs in the horror genre almost every time Paul's morsels are consumed.

Beef (Netflix)

 

Like most of its leading characters, Lee Sung Jin's Beef is full of flaws and it takes a while to appreciate these as more endearing than downright annoying.

There was enough entertainment value alone to keep us going through to say episode five, (where things start to properly take off) but I did ponder whether the killer Netflix algorithms had been stirred by completion rates. Anyway, my doubts largely stayed in Vegas. 

The protagonists and their secondaries are complex and yet subtle individuals and they all seem to need a bit of narrative space to properly calibrate within the story. (V was led to speculate whether they had a full roadmap for the story when they started out.)

One of the aforementioned flaws is that the quality of the writing for dialogue fluctuates and is sometimes at its weakest in the most crucial moments. Not really a spoiler, but the ending is disappointingly ambiguous in its ambiguity. I suppose there might just be a follow up to this 'limited' series. 

 

I remember how South Asians forced their way into the televisual mainstream in the UK in part by playing up to stereotypes — sometimes a little worryingly — and there have been signs of a similar phenomenon in the US as East Asians seize their moment in both film and TV. 

 

I think I can also see a pattern in Netflix shows in which we come across female characters who have achieved wealth and status in America via an activity which would barely scrape them a living anywhere else  e.g. ‘Plant Lady’ — though Amy here does seem to know how to survive in the dry wilderness, more or less. 

Here however this does ultimately seem to be part of the existential enigma under examination along with the essentially corrupting and self-hatred inducing nature of the Californian variant of material aspiration.

 

 

Escape the Matrix

 

I’m not a huge fan of these, but this one definitely gets a pass.

 

 

Bukowski's Bar (@cafebreriaelpendulo on Calle Hamburgo) will also on request provide — ungrudgingly — a slickly emplasticado, beautifully designed visual guide to their food and drink offerings. 

I remember the first time I was refused a paper menu. It was in Manhattan, mid-pandemic, and I pulled my best hapless tourist routine, and as there really weren’t many outsiders in New York at that time, they duly sympathised with me and located a slight tatty old list of their victuals, complete with pre-inflation pricing.

But then, last year I was again refused a paper menu in Colombia, along with some pompous posturing. This was almost a walk-out moment, yet I was detained by the challenging assertion of the waiter that this was somehow MY problem to resolve.

I’m not some sort of slavering luddite. I established myself in the field of technology, but that also means I have a few opinions around appropriate use.

As a traveller, I know how hard it can be to keep a single device charged during an active day right through to dinner time without juggling opportunity costs i.e. do I shoot that video or is my tummy rumbling a bit too much already?

 

And in this particular city I anyway lost my roaming privileges for extended periods.

Beyond these perhaps personal gripes, there are some other matters at stake here. If I were a dad I believe I would resent the implication that I could not so easily regulate my offsprings’ use of connected devices at dinnertime. (This works the other way a bit too: the etiquette of dining out was imposed on me from a very young age, yet once I had been seen to absorb it, I was permitted a degree of independence, such as my own menu, which I valued.)

And then there are some rather obvious usability issues. In their latter years I watched my own parents struggle with large print tabloid-format menus. And even at my age I am yet to find a QR-accessed presentation as easy to navigate intuitively as any printed one.

And let’s face it, Colombia, along with Guatemala and Mexico recently showed themselves incapable of competently coding and deploying a fully-useable online health verification form for all visitors — and this against a backdrop of what I would describe as an overall decline in consideration for accessibility and usability across all Web platforms in the past decade or so, but with mobile a particular offender. (I reckon el Feis insensitised us all to terrible interface design.)

 

Anyway, try this wooden one out. First one takes a nostalgic trip back to a late 90s landing page and then, if Comidas y Cenas are selected, one reaches a barely readable PDF presentation of the printed menu. 

Fallen Column

 

I do not believe in ghosts, palmistry, John Cage, love or God > Gore Vidal, former resident of La Antigua Guatemala.

 

He lived in the house next door to the ruins of El Carmen. 

 

Anaïs Nin visited him there at a time when he was laid low by a near fatal case of Hepatitis A, picked up, he claimed, from eating from pots in the market. (Possibly in front of what is now the Cooperación Española, but before the big quake of '76, the parque central was also still used for stalls.)

 

In the 40s, visitors to Vidal's house reported a single fallen column from the convent lying across the entrance to his living room, which guests had to navigate around.

All of Antigua

In my recent post about El Manhattan you might have gathered how one might have struggled to find anywhere even remotely resembling a zona viva in Antigua back in the eighties — I mean, just how effortlessly did the city's single 'hot' nightspot transition into life as a supermarket? 

It wasn't until the early nineties that Antigua started to reinvent itself as a playground, the key drivers at first being the potential players from the capital, but soon the tourists were also taking their assigned role, particularly as the number of Spanish schools began to contract and a less serious sort of visitor started to predominate. 

From the very first day I came here it was clear that the life in Antigua had a strange underside or undersides. (Viz the 'retired' goose-steppers that used to gather for lunch at Welten.) What has changed over the years is the make-up of these semi-sequestered shadow worlds. 

In the early phases of transformation the old conservative elites remained resolutely dug in and the new commercial would-be elites, also mostly Chapines, faced off against them across a still very perceptible No-Man's Land. Yet, as with almost all unfilled spaces in Antigua, this was soon chocka with random people, many of them outsiders.  

As time did its thing with the generations, the battle lines became even more blurred as the younger members of older families became more overtly commercial in their instincts. 

At some point a bizarre new subculture emerged, consisting of individuals you might think would struggle to attain even a level of passable mediocrity in any other environment, but have somehow risen to the top of Panza Verde society — or at least that's how many seem to see it. Chefs, painters, writers, lawyers (oh God, the lawyers), restauranteurs, architects etc. 

On the face of it this should be a largely harmless phenomenon. That's how I saw it for quite a while, but then the nocuous personal experiences started to stack up and I began to peer a bit deeper at this apparent anomaly. 

When you have a well-connected clique of individuals with a strong yet largely delusional sense of personal authority, there is untold potential for detrimental behaviour. 

Maybe delusional is the wrong word, because I think it is clear that many of these people are in fact broadly aware that they could not behave the way they do anywhere else and this must be stoking the temptation to act like a dick. 

Anyway the effect of all this is that there are now multiple groups of joined-up individuals here who think they own the place, so the old model of straightforward polarity between old and new money, upcoming and past it, has to be set aside. 

Which brings me to a slightly tangential matter.

One of my mother’s favoured prefixes to any highly subjective opinion was “All of London"...with its implied mass collective reinforcement. 

 

My response was typically an eye-roll much like this…

Only very occasionally did I bother to point out that we were living in a city of around ten million people.

In effect, “All of London knows...” meant that a small subset of those she regarded as belonging to high society possessed some sort of privileged knowledge. 

 

Of course, only a subset of this subset were leading what might semi-subjectively be regarded as significant lives, such that the uncounted remainder of the city's population might have needed to care about the contents of their heads.

Anyway, a phrasing which seemed patently absurd in the UK capital back then is far more jarring in its Panza Verde equivalent, even in reference to what is overall, a significantly smaller concentration of human beings.

Nevertheless one does hear it and — even more face-plantingly — it is sometimes uttered in English: "All of Antigua...",  by non-natives who have assumed a sense of ownership and status here, often of the sort outlined above. 

My take on this is that the best one can really hope for here as an individual immigrant is to be known for one's essence. e.g. "he's a good bloke". Any craving for, or projection of, a greater significance is borderline pathetic and likely to be socially undesirable.

Inside (2023)

A movie, in which a man is almost obliged to treat another man's valuables (so very valuable...) as things of no value, a situation we may have come across before in numerous post-apocalyptic treatments, but here instead we have an art thief, a character called Nemo with a real sense of the lasting value of art, trapped inside a sort of high rise personal museum and thus subjected to an individual end of the world outcome.

 

We were both absolutely riveted from beginning to end, yet afterwards when I sought out some corroboration on the interwebs instead came across a slew of fairly sniffy reviews. 

Undeterred, I reflected that much of this reminded me of sections of the critical response to Triangle of Sadness. I am not sure if this is an American thing or a Millennial thing, but there appears to be a novel orthodoxy out there which requires any story straying into social critique to come sparkling clean about where it stands on ‘rich people’ or controversial cultural issues in general. Ambiguity is fully cancel-able.

The complaint is framed as an exciting premise that the writer and/or director somehow under-exploited. For sure, various directions in which this particular situation might have progressed are explicitly teased, yet ultimately left implicit. What's wrong with that? 

Also, if you observe the art in the background, much of it has this same hard-to-pin-down quality, and one must always remember that the now notorious metropolitan elite which creates the value here, however opposed to the status quo and pro social justice they might be, have never had any desire to see their sophisticated world sacked and burned by barbarians. So the digs at Ruben Östlund's insider-satire leave me thoroughly undaunted. 

I think I may have been recently guilty myself of wanting another visually stunning yet ultimately indefinite movie — Infinity Pool  — to be the film I might have made myself given the basic idea scribbled on a napkin. That's just silly.*

Anyway, Inside is a firm recommendation, a rare one-hander that finds interesting and not too absurd ways to overcome the limitations established by the single character in constrained circumstances conceit. And Willem Dafoe has become the embodiment of must-see-cinema in the US.

 

* We might however have preferred that just as Nemo had an electronic window on the outside world, that the outside world had a way of looking in on him. That said, not showing what he could observe with the telescope was a masterstroke.