Hecho en Mexico

In the middle ages the Catholic Church constantly had to decide how to handle grassroots devotion that claimed a greater authenticity than its own. Some of these off-message brand evangelists were barbecued, whilst others (the Franciscans for example) were skillfully co-opted into the service of re-authenticating corporate orthodoxy.

According to the WSJ Coca-Cola faces a similar challenge now. Many consumers down south are willing to pay the premium price of $0.25 a bottle for Mexican Coke, a regional variant perceived to have retained many of the nostalgic, hometown cultural references surrendered by the much-diminished Classic Coke brand. (It is also made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup.)

With market share at an 8-year low, there may well be executives in Atlanta that strongly favour co-opting this devotion, but the company is leaning towards the barbecue option largely because of the highly territorial nature of the bottling and distribution network.

Metapedians

I enjoyed Ben Vershbow's post on If:Book yesterday, which exposed the political culture of the Metapedians.

Their starkly polarised positions are reminiscent of the principal doctrinal factions of early Christianity that would eventually evolve into the fan-bases of the Blue (Venetii) and Green (Prasinoi) chariot racing teams in the hippodrome at Constantinople.

Deletionists chant garbage out, garbage out, whilst their ideological foes the Inclusionists preach that Wikipedia should be changed "only when no knowledge would be lost as a result".

Caught in the middle are the Mergists, dedicated to the kind of information housekeeping that would merge texts deemed not notable and encyclopedic enough for their own record.

There's talk of Wiki law, but no strong-armed executive figure like Emperor Constantine to organise the Wiki equivalent of the First Council of Nicea.

The clash between Immediatists and Eventualists is an important sub-dispute over whether the immediate or the long-term value of the encyclopedia should form the underlying principle of its expanding architecture (and external appearance).

Lunch in Guatemala

More avocados, when available.

The one given though is a basket of freshly prepared tortillas, wrapped in cotton cloth.

There's an old indígena that looks after a small sávila (aloe vera) plantation near our house who each day at midmorning prepares tortillas for sale on her comal, usually helped out by younger members of her family. There's always a queue.

The comal de barro is a large disk of baked clay which is usually placed on three stones above a wood fire. After they have been patted into shape the moist corn tortillas are grilled on it. My favourites are tortillas negras (above) made with black corn, which are usually reserved for special occasions and quite difficult to find in Antigua (though V's brother Felipe, resident in the capital, manages to consume them daily).

The issue then becomes what to eat with your tortillas. The most famous local recipe (and one that V hates with a passion) is Pepián. This is a dark, gungey cacerole dish usually made with chicken with coriander, cinammon, sesame seeds, various types of chilli, onion, garlic, and both red tomatoes and the little green ones known as miltomates aka tomatillos (which are next to impossible to find in the UK).

The fish I have most often found myself being served at lunchtime is tiburón (shark). Another frequently-downed seafood snack is Ceviche, possibly my personal favourite of all Central American delicacies. The principal is to 'cook' prawns, conch or even white fish in a potage of lime juice flavoured with parsely, tomatoes, onion and garlic. It is served with salty wafer-like biscuits.

In the area around Antigua the best ceviches are to be found in a small seafood restaurant on a backstreet of Jocotenango called La Naranja Pelada. The dining room is wood-panelled and decorated with specimens of local 'game' such as snakes, turtles and armadilloes.

Yet the best ceviche I ever had was in Mexico, at a beachside cafe called Los Pelícanos in the fuss-free Yucatán port Puerto Morelos. (Which sadly may not have been treated very kindly by Hurricane Wilma.)

I was once witness to an altercation a particular friend of mind had with the staff of a Mexican restaurant in Swallow Street when the dish advertised as ceviche on the menu appeared on delivery to be something altogether less acid-bathed.

Eventually the chef came out from the kitchen to defend his creation from the imminent threat posed by the Trades Descriptions Act. Hyperventilating even more than normal for a Venezuelan, he explained how he had discovered the recipe in a tiny fishing village in Ecuador, and whilst he agreed that it didn't look much like what most people would call a ceviche, he felt sure we would allow him some artistic license. He then explained the etymology of the word ceviche and how it really means "salad". He was soon back in the kitchen preparing prawns in citric soup for my particular friend.

Part of the problem was that you don't go somewhere called Down Mexico Way to eat Ecuadorian fisherfolk food. Shortly afterwards the joint was renamed Destino and continued to serve unusual and often original dishes from across Latin America until it closed last month. A pity because the building was the site of the first Spanish restaurant outside of Iberia (opened 1926) and the stunning internal decoration work was commissioned by the soon-to-be-crownless King of Spain.

The PKD Android

I found out about the Philip K. Dick android yesterday. It reclines on a sofa in a specially-created 70s-style apartment. Its memory has been packed with every word the author ever spoke in interview, allowing the droid to mimic his habit of giving 5-minute-long responses to questions. People are reported to respond on an emotional level to its frubber features - one visitor ended up holding its hand!

Dark Enlightenment

Richard Dawkins would surely not agree that Science is a point of view in need of balancing, but someone at Channel 4 obviously felt the need to offset The Root of all Evil last night with a follow-up factual programme with more positive spin on the bells and smells.

Inviting a frothing evangelist to celebrate the order, structure and moral purpose provided by religious belief would have been a bit flagrant, so instead they got an historian to do it. (And then hid him on More4)

Michael Burleigh's Dark Enlightenment argued that people have spiritual needs, and life needs to have transcendental meaning, otherwise society just falls apart (Cue images of bimbo binge drinkers flashing their tits.) Unlike that of Dawkins, Burleigh's argument didn't hang on whether religious belief is True; it's just the only way we have to "tell the banal from the intelligent," he insisted. (And on that basis, who cares?)

Burleigh's TV essay was shockingly partisan and would have had a certain appeal to former members of the Taliban. Empty consumerism − western society's endless quest for new varieties of novelty and sensation − was traced back to the rationalism of free-thinking philosophes like of Voltaire, Diderot and the man Burleigh insisted on calling Immanuel Cunt. Little does it matter to him that these men lived long before Imperialism, post-Imperialism, Modernism and Postmodernism and that many humanist thinkers today are equally appalled by the Society of the Spectacle.

After the French Revolution, a process characterised by Burleigh as one of unmitigated barbarism, secular society made use of bogus versions of "the same mechanisms" to pervert true religious aspirations and practices in order to create "a new symbolic universe".

He didn't stop to ask whether the revolutionaries' suppression of revolt in the Vendée was qualitatively different from the Church-sponsored crusade against the Cathars or whether their surrogate secular belief system was inherently less true, as opposed to just less well-embedded in cultural tradition; designed rather than evolved. Isn't the whole business of moulding people suspect, whether it is done by church or state?

Burleigh bewailed the moral confusion of our age − what Durkheim called Effervescence − and the fact that liberals no longer seem able to provide a plausible account of what Western civilisation actually stands for. Yet can one really be so sure that Hitler was simply a product of Germany's "spiritual confusion" and that relativism is what all forms of rationalism inevitably degrade into?

Personally I wouldn't swap binge drinking for public executions, bear-baiting, witch-burning etc. whatever the order, structure and moral focus supposedly enjoyed by the people of the middle ages.

Autopsy: Life and Death

It was Chimp Week on the Beeb last week; this week it's Stiff Week on Channel 4.

As if himself recently ascended from the Underworld, Gunther von Hagens can hardly contain his enthusiasm for rummaging around inside someone else's exposed viscera. However strong your stomach there's something a quite disturbing about a man that looks like a cross between Freddy Krueger and Ivan Lendl doing live autopsies on telly.

Last night's 'specimen' was an 84-year-old woman that had, we learned, most probably expired as a result of circulatory decline. Tonight we have jumbo tumours to look forward to.

V and I maintain a fantasy list of interesting people we'd like to have round for dinner sometime. Last night she informed me that she's adding von Hagens to hers! Ghoulish goulash anyone?

The Root of all Evil: Part 2

The theme of this second and concluding part was religion as child abuse. Richard Dawkins argued that religion is a virus and that children tend to have very low immunity to it because natural selection has 'programmed' them to believe anything a grown-up tells them. Once infected many will thereafter remain in the permanent state of intellectual infancy we call Faith. (I had a fearsome Baptist nanny from Motherwell that used to read me Bible stories when I was very little and I recall my profound scepticism even then. But then I never even believed in Father Christmas.)

Dawkins concluded that religious miseducation (largely through faith-based schooling) is a "threat to progressive values and to the rule of law". Along the way he did less to alienate his own natural constituency than he had in part one, largely because the opponents he chose to engage with were less obviously certifiable, making these encounters appear less like a clash of intransigent absolutes.

However, the argument was still muddled in one important respect. On the one hand he wished to explain away all human spiritual urges as a natural extension of simian social ethics ("Chimps are DOS, humans are Windows 2000" was the rather insight-free analogy tossed into the mix by an LSE economist) and on the other it was clear that his specific targets were the systems of social control and religious oppression that have evolved around the three desert monotheisms tracing themselves back to Abraham.

Chimps don't conduct funerals yet our ancestors were conducting them for many thousands of years before Abraham and his one God. A programme that focussed specifically on the cultural distortions associated with widespread belief in a cosmos created and ruled by a single despotic lawmaker would have been more original and interesting.

Pleasantville

What might you call a movie about a pair of teenagers transported into the hyper-emoting parallel universe of Mexican telenovelas? (Un-pleasantville?)

In this case the pair end up in the suburban sub-reality of sixties sitcom Pleasantville. This set-up gives writer-director Gary Ross (Big) some great opportunities for gentle comedy that throws light (actually colour) on the handicaps of wholesomeness. But it only works up to a point, because ultimately the satire (especially the political kind) isn't really penetrating enough to justify the accelerated dramatic intensity of the second half.

Main Street, Pleasantville loops back on itself and the whole notion of the 'outside' seems incomprehensible to the town's inhabitants: Just like our own cosmos, but smaller.

The gradual imposition of colour on this monochrome microcosm looks forward to the accomplished digital effects in Robert Rodriguez's more recent Sin City.

Descontentos

A good number of Guatemalans took to the streets on Friday to air their gripes on various matters, such as the privatisation-oriented package of reforms recently presented by the Ministry of Education and the USA's newly-vigorous anti-migrant policy. (A third of the population is said to live on remittances sent home by the 1.10 million+ Guatemalans already living in el norte.)

Meanwhile INGUAT announced that the country welcomed a record 1,312,199 tourists in 2005 who collectively spent $869.9m. (Guatemala's third biggest earner. Exports top the list at $3,644.8m)

It was announced today that competition from China forced the closure of 51 textile and garment factories ("maquilas") in Guatemala last year leaving around 38,000 jobless. Many hope that this decline in the rag trade can be reversed when CAFTA comes into effect later this year.

Breakfast in Guatemala

I was daydreaming about early morning chapin nosh as I walked along the river towards the pier today.

Desayuno (breakfast) really is the best meal of the day over there. It typically includes huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs, often with chopped onions and tomato), pan frances ('French bread', actually tasty little pastie-shaped white rolls), plátano frito (fried plantain) and frijoles volteados (a thick, dry, dough-like serving of black bean paste).

Guatemalans eat a lot of fruit at breakfast times (as well as most other times). In the market in Antigua the papayas on sale are the size of giant marrows. The fewer the pips, and the smaller the diameter of the core they reside in, the better the papaya. This fruit (along with mango) contains enzymes which are especially good for the digestion and can also aid weight reduction, though the altitude over there speeds up your metabolism anyway.

Where we live in Antigua you generally have to get up around 6am if you want to get hold of fresh franceses before they sell out.

Many heat up their huevos with chiltepes, little green turbo-chillies that are split open and sprinkled over the plate. Other common accompaniments are requesón (rather like ricotta) and thick sour crema (cream).

Aguacates (avocado) like frijoles, are likely to be eaten at any time of the day in Antigua. The locals are known by the rest of their compatriots as panza verde (green stomachs) as a result.

The best plate of frijoles volteados I ever experienced (there was more to it than just taste you see) was served to me by a grey-haired waiter wearing a starched white linen jerkin in the dining room of the wonderfully wooden Hotel del Norte in Puerto Barrios, the main port on Guatemala's concise Caribbean coast.

Visitors to Antigua that have to pay for their own breakfasts are best advised to try out either Doña Luisa Xicotencatl or Café Condesa on the main square. Both are situated in charming old colonial mansions.

Doña Luisa's is one of the most well-known and well-frequented hanging-out spots in Antigua. Café Condesa has never been one of V's favourites though- she objects to the headphones that the waiters wear and the the over-elaborate nature of the "delectables". But just beside the main entrance on the parque you'll find Condesa Express which serves gourmet coffee grown locally by Goya; possibly the best cup of espresso coffee you will drink anywhere in the world, and a suitable antidote to the kind of caffeinated beverage you are likely to drink in Guatemala if you are not one of those people that pays for their breakfasts!

Deriba

In part 1 of The Asian Invasion on BBC4 last night Jonathan Ross interviewed seminal anime director Mamoru Oshii, creator of the Ghost in the Shell films. They touched on the rather interesting concept of deriba, a storyline-static part of the action that Oshii locates at the centre of his films, which serves to stall the forward motion of the plot so that the world the characters inhabit can be better explored. You can't help thinking that Star Wars prequels might have benefitted from a bit of deriba. Since the arrival of Spielberg the relentless pace of Hollywood productions has been all too well established.

Going...Going...Gombe

As one Tanzanian interviewee ruefully observed, several of the Gombe chimps are more internationally famous than any individual African President (and surely also more than a match for most of them in terms of poltical shiftiness).

Yes, it's Chimp Week this week on BBC1, which means a chance to catch up with all the amusing antics of those celebrity simians, whilst at the same time being sternly reminded that wild apes may vanish from the tropical forests in little more than a decade.

Unfortunately, the footage has been all but ruined for adult viewers by a Play School-style narration. You might think that if ever a bit of anthropomorphising was justified it is with our "nearest animal relatives" (with apologies to that deranged red state pastor that Richard Dawkins encountered the other night), but I'm not sure of the wisdom of pitching a prime time nature programme at the sort of little people that are already likely to harbour the suspicion that rabbits and even teletubbies are capable of complex cognition.

"What must he be thinking?", the narrator keeps asking of the domestically violent Frodo. And when her twin daughters get lost in the park, he observes of their mother Gremlin that "she must be going through what any mum goes through when her kids don't come home". Except of course that chimps don't appear to have a a very deep understanding of the concept of death.

The Root of all Evil

Having more or less suggested at the outset that carol singing sits at the summit of a slippery slope leading to rucksack bombs on the tube, the Grand Inquisitor of Unbelief went on to confront some formidable spokesmen from the theo-fascist herd. You could practically see the steam coming out of his ears during these exchanges.

It's not hard to see why the Professor's adversaries insist on dealing with him as a rival truth rather than as an alternative way of looking at truth. Dawkins's own breed of absolutism seems to beg to be treated this way − it's as if he's bidding for his own patch of unhallowed turf in Jerusalem.

V admires his "extreme" position and the way he matches intolerance with intolerance. Yet when it comes to religion she is far less worried about the fundamentalists than she is about common-or-garden Roman Catholic hypocrites and the kind of routine acquiescence to handed-down ignorance that she grew up with in Central America.

For Dawkins there are no half-measures in irrationality. In a very interesting post from last December 3QuarksDaily pin-pointed some of the philosophical problems that arise from the notion that scientific enquiry addresses a background of fixed, absolute reality and how, for Dawkins, any hint of deviation from this is tantamount to stating that "snow is green".

At one point in the programme last night he let slip a telling comparison with fascism which reveals a weakness in the strict association between Faith and the evils he would eradicate. Didn't the secular totalitarianisms of the twentieth century demonstrate that a straight swap of Reason for Faith doesn't necessarily guarantee an end to collective delusion and violent oppression? Perhaps religion isn't so much the root of all evil as one of the better excuses for it.

Dawkins faces the same old dilemma that has afflicted rational westerners since Plato - ours is an elite ideal that yearns to be populist, and at the same time wants to forget the historical lessons which show how the realisation of that dream nearly always leads to trouble.

Life in the Undergrowth

Richard Dawkins returns to our screens tonight, once again vainly attempting to convince licence-payers that religion of all kinds is a pernicious waste of time.

Just before Christmas I came across a recent interview with Dawkins in which he made two interesting statements, both of which on the face of it bring our positions on the underlying mechanisms of nature just that little bit closer: "Mutation is random in the sense that it's not anticipatory of what's needed" and "Natural selection is a guided process".

Of course it would be bizarre (to us atheists at least) if genetic code at the species level had a specific end goal in mind, yet I have always suspected that immaculately random mutation is unlikely to be the only mechanism at work in evolution. Some sort of tentative teleological effect might instead occur as the result of a probabilistic bias within the whole ecosystem (or perhaps as a set of genetic tendencies which the organism's own genome adjusts according to environmental cues.)

Evolution might have begun 'randomly' (though still quite probably given the chemical conditions) but over time life may have acquired − through further evolution − the capacity to proactively manage its own gradient up what Dawkins refers to as Mount Improbable.

Of course I'm in no position to prove it. It just sits better with my wider belief that the universe is structured in such a way that the relationship of the wholes to parts is bi-directional.

Richard Dawkins typicaly presents the idea of intelligent design as just another one of the straw men he's used to hacking down with his characteristically nimble and sophisticated intellectual brutality. When it depends on the existence of a designer outside the system intelligent design theory has some rather obvious weaknesses, but what if the designer is the system?

Dawkins is a purist when it comes to beliefs; he strongly discourages adherence to any that are not backed up pretty conclusively by empirical evidence. Yet last year's EDGE World Question − what do you believe is true even though you can't prove it? − emphasised the importance of gut-feel and imagination to contemporary research as science and philosophy move ever closer.

Over the Christmas break the BBC repeated David Attenborough's extraordinary series of nature films Life in the Undergrowth. For me at least, the programmes (especially the one entitled Intimate Relations) served to reinforce my as-yet-unjustified belief in the existence of a web of mutual influences that complements and extends the processes that Dawkins popularised in The Selfish Gene.

We were most impressed by the night ants that spend the nocturnal hours blocking the entrances to their daytime rivals' nest with little pebbles so that the resulting inconvenience prevents them from polishing off all the available grub in the area while the sun is still up!

Voices of the Old Sea

There are many more ways of being pre-modern than there are of being modern, or postmodern even.

That important insight fed the literary imagination of Norman Lewis, perhaps the last century's greatest travel writer, yet it has seemingly slipped past Kwame Anthony Appiah who made The Case For Contamination in last Sunday's New York Times magazine: An article described by the Consumerist as "stellar". It is certainly thought provoking.


The Princeton philosopher's argument can be summarised as follows:

• Yes, globalisation can increase worldwide homogeneity but it also has the potential for creating new cultural blends
• It would be wrong to trap people(s) within islands of traditional homogeneity that they long to escape and which in many cases no longer make economic sense
• Much of what we take to be authentic traditional culture is simply the result of earlier mixtures
• There are two basic approaches to international culture today: cosmopolitanism and counter-cosmopolitanism, aka fundamentalism. (Though I'd say there's a case for recognising laissez-faire free market capitalism as a powerful third option.)
  
• Fundamentalists are universalist without being tolerant. Cosmopolitans believe that there are many values worth living by and nobody can live by all of them. (Though it might be worth trying...)
  

I doubt that Norman Lewis would have been greatly enthused by this Rushdie-like call for accelerated intermingling and hybridity. An article he wrote in our own Sunday Times magazine in 1968 about Amazonian massacres led to the formation of Survival International, an organisation which seeks to protect tribal peoples and their often unique pre-modern lifestyles.

After several business careers involving cars and cameras, Lewis worked as an intelligence office for the British government before settling down as a man of letters. In all he wrote 13 novels and 14 travel books. He had a natural gift for going incognito: "I'm the only operson I know who can enter a room, stay there 5 minutes, and leave without anyone having noticed I was there." Colin Thubron once described him as "the most anonymous person in the room".

In Voices of the Old Sea his narrative presence on the page is characteristically elusive, which at first I took to be one of the many literay devices which distinguish this work from the less remarkable kind of travel journalism.

In 1948, citing obscure medical reasons Lewis sought to share the confined life of an isolated community and picked the fishing village of Farol on the Costa Brava, "drawn by its reputation of being the least accessible coastal village in north-east Spain." (I couldn't find it on a modern map of Catalunya. Perhaps Lewis changed the name to avoid furthering the contamination.)

Farol's inhabitants were "non materialistic, generous, poetic and superstitious in the extreme". Not religious in the usual sense however. The only time the local priest was ever likely to see the male members of his flock in church was when they arrived with a bride, and even then they would often mutter counter charms throughout the wedding ceremony. Anyone that attended confession was regarded with deep suspicion by the rest of the community.

Lewis spent three successive seasons in Farol and his account of the first, where incipient modernity was just a nagging itch, was for me the most enjoyable. The first to feel the logic of modern "economic sense" were the neighbouring peasants of the dying cork forest. Lewis paints a sad picture of their attempts to pick up basic fishing skills as their traditional livelihood vanished remorselessly.

The fishing community of Farol was run along largely matriarchal lines and inundated with cats. The peasants were stoutly patriarchal and supported a famished pack of man's best friends. Lewis affectionately nicknamed them the Cat People and the Dog People respectively. Both had long looked up to the family of Don Alonso, the local landowner. Now a marginalised figure, Lewis reports how the old don spends his days cutting out obituary notices attended by a stunted old crone who was once a celebrated beauty who sat for portraits in Madrid. He informs Lewis (Appiah please note) that his people want "strong leadership and limited horizons".

At the start of season two one of the largest of the abandoned cork mansions had recently been occupied by the corpulent and effective former black-marketeer Muga, who made no secret of his determination to turn Farol into a tourist destination. One of the first manifestations of the forthcoming makeover was a road along the beach, which the fishermen feared outsiders would use to stare out to sea, thereby bringing ill fortune to the catch.

Muga appreciated that visitors from the wider world "had to be protected from the unpleasant facts of life" which meant that many aspects of coastal life, starting with the food, had to be made gradually more tasteless. When Lewis first arrived in the village the returning fishermen would sit in small groups in the bar beside a massive carved figure of a mermaid and recount the day's adventures in blank verse (in Castellano, deemed more poetic than their native Catalan.) By the time he bid farewell to Farol for the last time the bar has fallen under Muga's management and the mermaid has been packed off into storage somewhere. Yet the fishermen were still hoping that the tourist 'plague' would follow the course of all epidemic diseases and die off leaving them to return to their pescas.

It's a wonderfully well-written account of localised social change charged with Lewis's disarming humour and plenty of strange Spanish customs - such the local vinicultural tradition of drowning of a mouse in the first barrel of newly-pressed grapes. It's hard to tell how much embelishment Lewis allowed himself; I would say a fair bit. (He wrote the book many years later from old notes.)

"I am looking for people who have always been there", he once observed, but ultimately it is the uniqueness and the taste of confined lives that Lewis appears to regret the loss of, not necessarily their unsullied authenticity. (However it's probably a good thing that the inhabitants of Villanueva are no longer burning out the brains of live bulls according to their own ancient customs!)

There are many values living by and you cannot live by all of them - such is Appiah's cosmopolitan creed for the globalised world. It's just a shame that the "many" might be becoming a few without the need for further intervention by the massed ranks of the intolerant.

Incidentally, during the 50s Lewis misplaced his first wife Ernestina in Guatemala when she commenced an affair with a relative of the then president. His (now sadly out of print) novel about indigenous insurgency in Guatemala The Volcanoes Above Us sold 6m copies in the USSR, for which he recived a country dacha in lieu of royalties.

Le Pacte des Loups

A big, brash French beastie that bites off more than it can chew. It is after all possible for a film to be too stylish for its own good − especially when the style isn't itself the main content (as in Kill Bill for example).

The starting point for Christophe Gans' gory eighteenth century mystery is the myth of La Bête du Gévaudan, which the French are wont to characterise as their history's greatest enigma.

Brotherhood of the Wolf makes no secret of its very mixed extraction - many will be able to trace its lineage to precursors as divergent as The Matrix, The Beast, Dangerous Liaisons, The Name of the Rose and the Hammer horror films. Period authenticity has been compromised by the ecclectic mix of styles which inflect many aspects of the production, from the martial arts sequences to the rather distracting soundtrack.

Gans loosely tracks the known historical events for the first half of the story before really letting go. By the end we have discovered (amongst other things) that Monica Bellucci's character Sylvia is an Italian prostitute working as a secret agent for the Papacy!

We were both left highly entertained, but also feeling that the whole spectacle could have been turned down a notch or two to good effect.

Early Scribbles

The extraordinary finds continue at San Bartolo up in the Petén jungle: 10 glyphs, painted on stucco which are said to be 2300 years old (300-200BC) making them the earliest known examples of the Maya script. (Too early in fact to be deciphered.) They were discovered by archaeologist Boris Beltran last April and were yesterday being catalogued in a laboratory in Antigua.

Evo and Zero

V and I have a bet on. She reckons that the next time Latin America's new celebrity Presidente Evo Morales returns to Europe on an official visit he will have acquired a suit, perhaps a first token of longer-term corruptibility. As for me, I like to think he'll still be wearing the burgundy, buff and blue stripey sweater (or similar) that he sported yesterday on arrival in Spain and which he kept on throughout subsequent visits to the Spanish Parliament and Royal Palace.

The Bolivian president-elect's first question to José Luis Zapatero was "is it really you?" referring to the prank played on him recently by wags at a Spanish channel who rang him up impersonating the Spanish PM and nearly caused a major diplomatic incident.

Later as he began his speech from a podium in front of a full gathering of Spain's lawmakers, Morales observed that he couldn't really believe that he was in the same place as so many important people and that the whole thing was a bit of a dream come true for him. He will no doubt find a kindred spirit in Zapatero, who still has the aura of a man who thinks he might wake up from his rather pleasurable political reverie any minute now.

Nationalisation without appropriation was the message Morales then delivered over lunch with a group of Spain's leading industrialists. Foreign companies operating in Bolivia must act with "respeto...mucho respeto". Concerns were generally assuaged. Zapatero agreed to write off $120m of Bolivia's debt which Evo says will now be spent on improving educational programmes. (Surely he could also buy himself a suit?)

Meanwhile the balaclava-clad rebel formerly known as Subcomandante Marcos has announced that he will undertake an awareness-raising tour of all 31 states of Mexico prior to the presidential elections, adopting the new moniker of Delegado Zero. According to Government spoilers, the real identity of the pipe-smoking Zapatista leader is Rafael Guillén, a middle-class university lecturer before the postmodern non-revolution in Chiapas.

Bride and Prejudice

The other day V and I were waiting for a take-away pizza when a middle-aged Indian man approached the counter and placed his order. His final instructions to the man with the paper cap were: "Please tell the chef that I would like it well done."

In my experience second only to Argentinians in this respect, a good number of English-speaking Indians exhibit enormous comic potential when it comes to delusionary social pretensions. Llenos de mierdas as Guatemalans would say − not so much full of shit as full of shits. Many seem to feel that they have to constantly compensate for the fact that everybody else might not be able to intuitively detect their inner social status (especially when material circumstances are unable to offer any clear pointers).

Bride and Prejudice is not really a film for grown-ups. Gurinder Chadha has refined all the deeper, maturer and perhaps thornier matter out of Austen's scenario and to a great extent this has deprived the updated story of any adult thematic payload. Yet it strikes me that in some senses the medium is the message; what we have here is a celebration of well kept-up superficial appearances. (There's one scene in particular, set at a private residence in Windsor, where the gag reflex needs to be stifled quite forcefully.)

There's a buzz of xenophobia in the scene where Darcy introduces Lalitha to his battelaxe of a mother, but this coy, kissless film was never really going to explore the sociology of interracial union. And anyway the very striking Aishwarya Rai is just a bit too light-skinned for anyone to bother much about the ethnic angle to this singsong romcom. (Though at least she's not blonde and nose-jobbed like most of Mexico's adored feminine icons.)

You can almost hear the stammers when Roger Ebert delivers his plaudits on the lustrous beauty of Aishwarya Rai: "Never sweaty, never short of breath. What a smile."!

He also inadvertently reveals his dependence on the IMDB in his review, as he suggests that Rai is "not only the first but also the second most beautiful woman in the world", surely a reference to the error in her IMDB biography which appears to state she was both the winner and the runner-up in separate Miss World competitions. In fact she became Miss World in '94 after coming second in the Miss India pageant. She can certainly act, so let's hope she's offered a role or two beyond banal Bollywood kitsch.

La Bête

AKA The Beast, The Beast on Heat and Death's Ecstasy.

The first time you experience Walerian Borowczyk's horny horror classic from 1975 you may die of shock − that is if you don't die laughing. Should you survive through to the end you will certainly never look at bedsteads in country hotels in quite the same way ever again.

The kind of bestial bonding that goes on in the various versions of King Kong is remarkably tame in comparison; after all, the big furball just wants a blonde Barbie to play with.

Borowczyk's creature clearly has more lustful intentions, but the message of the film appears to be that even the most cachondo of canines is no match for the corsetted female libido − a fact which sends the usual ripples of terror through the cassocks of Catholicism. I could never understand why The Exorcist was banned for so many years, but in the case of The Beast I'm surprised that it was ever un-banned! The gist of it has been ably summarised by one user on IMDB: "It's the only film I have ever seen which attempts to mix a fairy tale, a sort of comedy of manners and faked explicit bestiality."

This was our second viewing and we were still fairly shocked and amused as the DVD version has plenty of extra moments that were deemed unsuitable even for viewers of Film Four Extreme a couple of years ago. Still, we were able to pay a bit more attention to the rich gothic symbolism, including a fetishistic approach to woodland molluscs.