Movies on the move

I've been watching a lot of movies on the move over the past month or so and not had the time to write up my little reviews, so here, Kermode-style are some quick-fire critiques:

Shooter: A bit of a guilty pleasure this one, though I don't think Mark Wahlberg did quite enough to score himself a franchise.

Live Free or Die Hard (4.0): More guilty, less pleasure. This formula is certainly dying hard.

Exiled (Fong Juk): Johnny To has certainly taken the Asian action flick to a new place with this noodle western in terms of both sublimity and ridiculousness. Also in terms of location. Some of the street scenes in Macao reminded me very much of Latin America.

The Kingdom: I fell asleep in the mid-section, only to wake up at the moment the FBI appeared to have declared all-out war on the raggies in a preposterous extended action sequence that is very much Jason Bourne meets Black Hawk Down.

Breach: Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe are both superb in this tale about America's worst ever security breach and the curious pyschology of the man behind it. There's an air of sadness and ethical enigma about it, because the traitor has to be well and truly betrayed himself.

The Night of the Sunflowers (La Noche de los Girasoles) : Quite simply the best movie I have seen all year. I'll need to watch it again on a bigger LCD screen and write up a proper review later on. It's a gem thanks to its telling observations of Spanish ways. You could take the plot and the character outlines and remake it in the US and you'd most likely have a turkey on your hands.

Zodiac: seen in three parts on three different aeroplanes as it goes on forever and we kept having to land. As per Girasoles above, loved it, and will have to watch again properly some time.

Digipalooza reflected on

If I could find a way to summarise last week's conference with a short pair of sentences they might be...Thank heavens for the Canadians and The Chinese are coming.

Oh, and now that WWW has stepped down as our global practice head it looks like 'Katy' from Helsinki is the new Queen of the irreducibly complex process diagram.

Everyone worked hard to contribute, but a special mention has to go to Julie and her team for organising the first of several practice gatherings over the years that really felt as if it should lead to the formation of new dendrites between our isolated local consultants.

It was good to see old, relocated acquaintances from the London office again like Nicola and Nina. It was also good for me to jabber away in Spanish with Christian from the Latin American regional marketing team and Iñigo from Madrid. (Why do Guatemalans and Mexicans hate each other so much, Christian asked me!)

And thanks to HS for taking us on a wallet-sapping mall cruise and then helping us celebrate our purchases and the end of the conference by ordering that unforgetable Stag's Leap Napa Valley Cabernet and the Four Graces Oregon Pinot Noir.

There were times in Phoenix when my sardonic European soul was weighing rather heavily on me, especially when I was sitting amongst a group of (very) young American Mavens on their send-off dinner. I found the freshness of one or two individuals in particular rather humbling.

Having said that, sorry to any of the locals that we might have offended over the course of the trip, but both Gaylene and I are used to bitching away openly in another language with our spouses and it's a mighty dificult habit to break.

It's the little things...

Alison at the Consulate made me a delicious cup of tea and the American security guards there were all charming. They are all forgiven for leaving me stranded for three days in Phoenix!

No more loitering

I'm now sitting comfortably at the very smart offices of H&K on Cloverfield Avenue, Santa Monica, about 24 blocks back from the Ocean and right next door to the Yahoo! Centre.

I'm glad they put me in a quiet corner because I suspect I might not be smelling my best, though I'm surely not as malodorous as the interior of that Greyhound bus last night.
I'd had to blag my way onto it because the presentation of photo ID is usually mandatory. (I was eventually waved ahead with a polite "don't do it again!")

I've made some epic bus journeys across Mexico and Central America but this was one of the roughest I can recall. If parts of the US have felt like one big amusement park, I had a strong feeling last night that I had strayed outside of Mickey Mouse's Kingdom. When I decided to ask one woman about the seating arrangements, opening with the least hostile sounding "excuse me.." I could manage, she looked as if I had pulled a gun on her.

The driver (a dead ringer for MC Hammer in Men in Black garb) kept pulling over and opening up the bonnet to check out his engine. Getting stuck in the middle of the Sonoran desert seria el colmo I thought, but we struggled on to the outskirts of LA where we spent a couple of hours gridlocked in drizzle.

When I did finally get a cab from the bus station towards the British Consulate on Wilshire I rejoined the traffic jam and spent another hour or so on the freeway, but the cabbie was a Mexican and we chatted about el Tri's 2-2 draw last night with Nigeria and their forthcoming match up against Guatemala on Wednesday.

I'd left messages with the Consulate since Thursday morning but as luck would have it this was the moment they decided to call me back and better still, Alison − the Scottish consular official that I spoke to − promised to sort me out a one-year temporary passport today.

In the end she never even asked for ID, but I had already been on the phone to my bank in London and they had promised to dig my passport facsimile out of their archives in Fleet Street first thing tomorrow: looks like that won't be needed any more now. The people here at the LA office may still get that copy tomorrow, along with another from Atlanta.

We made a couple of stops on the way from Phoenix. First at a roadside McDonalds at a place called Quartzite, famed for its rock shops. There was a sign saying 'No Loitering' outside but I didn't really need to be told. Then we made an extra stop at San Bernadino where some people planned to change for a bus to San Diego, but the terminal was darkened and locked up and as nobody had the courage to get down, we drove on.

At one point the driver asked for a show of hands from the passengers to determine whether we were feeling over-chilled. We were. He then chastised us for not having made this clear when he delivered his detailed list of instructions with appended dos and don'ts as we pulled out of the station in Phoenix. "Like I said, I got ma own air up here."

Unlike the Galgos down south, the driver on these beaten-up American buses sits behind a sealed barrier that prevents passengers from coming up and making idle conversation. (In Guatemala it has struck me that this often helps keep the driver awake and out of the barrancos.)

I didn't get much sleep at all on what turned out to be an eight and a half hour ride, so I caught up with two weeks' worth of Mark Kermode's podcasts. Apparently the sub-title of Black Sheep is 'The Violence of the Lambs'. Haha.

Mallrat's diary

In the evenings downtown Scottsdale has the ambience of the inside of a hummer stretch limo.

It would certainly be a fun place to hang out if your idea of entertainment is dressing up like the latest victim on CSI:Miami and getting plastered in loud and dark restaurants.

For anyone else monontonous becomes a universal adjective, suitable for describing anything from the weather to the pink-beige Pueblo-style architecture and on to the food on the menus. (Not forgetting the follow-me muzak at the FireSky.)

I'm feeling the need to vary (and downsize) my diet. Last night in The Pink Taco we shared some cute little mini-tamales with strawberry sauce as our starter, but then these were followed by a burrito the size of a rolled-up bath towel. The other evening we celebrated the end of Digipalooza at a premium eatery called the City Hall Steak House where our 'petite filets' were accompanied by mashed potatoes and spinach soaked with so much full-fat cream that they reeked like the inside of the dairy at the Finca Carmona.

Today a cab driver (the only one I have came across who wasn't Somali) was telling me how real estate was actually quite affordable in the Valley until around five years ago when prices surged, peaking out in 2005. There's something of a slump right now and another local let on that these days you can get a four-bedroom suburban house with a pool in the area for around $280,000; which may explain why people have so much disposable income to blow on the bizarre mix of terribly tasteful and terribly tasteless goods on sale in the city's strikingly elegant malls. (A special mention here for the Cornelia Park store which today at least best epitomised this strange hit and miss American design juxtaposition for me.)

Luxuries do somehow seem more desirable here however. Today I bought V an iPod Touch at the Biltmore Town and Country shopping centre: a device recently described by Niall as "pointless". I also went to Borders and bought a copy of All the Pretty Horses which seemed like the right thing to be reading on this unexpected extension of my stay in the Wild West.

There are some seriously loaded people around here, but it's not really clear to me whether they made their money in Arizona or in more temperate states. There do seem to be rather a lot of banks in town. Yet in spite of this highly visible affluence there are also plenty of poor folk in Phoenix. The local high schools have a 30% drop-out rate and my world-weary cab driver described his hometown as "one of the speed capitals of the USA."

Noting that this is the hottest place in the country outside of Death Valley, he also told me that the last few months had been the most unbearable during his eight year residence in Phoenix. This was because it went up to 110 degrees and pretty much stayed there all summer. And after only four days here the ever-present aircon has left me with parched lips and bleeding sinuses.

The stress of the last couple of days has been amplified by my knowledge that V hasn't been making an ideal recovery following her accident a couple of weeks ago. She was fortunate not to break any bones (especially her skull considering that she landed head first), but the medics at casualty told her that it looked like she had bust every vein in her right leg, and over the past week the foot attached to that limb has been discolouring.

Worried about the threat of gangrene she went back to a specialist and has been told to self-inject a third generation liquid antibiotic called Ceftriaxone mixed with a local anaesthetic called Lidocain. I'm feeling particularly foolish and helpless to be this much closer to Guatemala and yet fairly well stuck in the US for the time being.

Leaving aside my colleague's trip to the airport, today was fairly relaxing. We'd swapped the relentless chill-out of FireSky for the reverberations of merengue-hip hop and reggeton at the Inn at Pima, for when we checked in last night there was a Fiesta de Quinceañera in full swing there, but luckily the sound of it didn't carry to my block. The corridors might have had that three star smell about them, but the chichi-free comforts of this condo-hotel were refreshing.

I would have had a my first full night's sleep here last night had Christofer not rung me on my mobile at 4am to pass on the news from the Rugby World Cup. This sudden and most unusual interest in sporting activity on his part was largely due to its convergence with his longer-term interest in unfortunate things happening to French people.

Digipalosers

Gaylene managed to miss her US Airlines flight back to LA this afternoon, largely because she thought she was on a United flight, and the slowness of the latter carrier's check-in service contributed to the mishap.

In the end it may have been a blessing in disguise, because it seems that her original flight was seriously delayed and she ended up leaving Phoenix before it did. Although she will miss her LA connection, there's a later one, so it should work out OK.

Meanwhile we saw Lisa from Canada at Terminal 2 with the now familiar wild-eyed look of someone who has recently misplaced their passport. So perhaps I wasn't the only loskop at the conference after all!

A la Gran...

...Cañon.

Flying back from the north of the state today I suddenly remembered that my broker in Atlanta should have a copy of my passport on file: a bombilla moment according to V, when I told her. If I can get them to fax it to me in LA on Monday I will be in far better shape when I turn up at the Consulate.

There's no escape the chill-out music at FireSky. On the first night it occurred to me that it might still be playing when I picked up the phone.

Celeb alert! We have just spotted Michelle Williams, Heath Ledger's ex. It looks like she's here for a wedding that is about to get under way. They politely asked us to shift from the little circle of seats around the outdoor log fire so that they could take some photos of the family there. I warned them that the sprinklers tend to come on rather suddenly around here; yesterday one of our delegates took a direct hit in the back during our lunch break at that particular spot.

Right now, some very hospitable member of the hotel staff keeps refilling my glass with a sweet Californian Merlot called Little Black Dress, which features a discarded pair of red, high-heeled shoes on the label. Nothing like the wines that HS ordered last night. I guess I'd be feeling a whole lot better today if I hadn't cleaned my palate between the Cabernet and the Pinot Noir with that Margarita.

There seems to be a lot of PT Cruisers in Arizona...plus something from Chevrolet which looks like a bad Chinese knock-off of the Chrysler. (Made south of the border so they don't have to come far.)

Surprisingly though, it's hard to get a decent Mexican beer (Bohemia, Dos Equis etc.) at the FireSky. But there is an interesting local brew called 8th Street Ale from the Four Peaks Brewery. They're generally not too great at pronouncing Spanish words in this part of old Mexico either. (Cabeeza de Varca, press one for Espannol etc.)

Anyway, we're going out for Mexinosh tonight...The Pink Taco no less. (A review here from Chowhound). If it's authentic it will be the only thing in the southern part of the state that is.

I'd have to say that Phoenix is generally a rather dull, affluent place, in a low key kind of way. Fun if you like cafe-au-lait brunettes in tiny (but very smart) dresses; indeed, the young people in this town dress far more slickly than in towns like Houston. Much of the domestic architecture in Scottsdale is a bit 'low chaparral' and quite impersonal compared to say the suburban buildings of LA.

As for the resort hotels, it's like some over-indulgent interior designer has been let loose on the environment.

Pictures of the Grand Canyon

Pictures from the journey up there...which in many ways was just as impressive

Perdido en el corazón de la grande Babylon...

Today I begin my new life as an itinerant indocumentado in south-western USA. I will be getting the Greyhound bus service to LA tomorrow night. With no passport it will be hard for me even to book a room when I get there...though presumably I could get a job as a nanny in Beverly Hills.

Manu Chao incidentally has one of the best live acts I've ever seen. This clip from Lollapalooza; though he'd have been a welcome addition to our own Digipalooza this week.

Shit happens: pooponaplane.com.

Our crisis comms expert Brendan is relating the sad tale of Continental Airlines Flight 1669Y, where a citizen journalist was on hand to file the story of "poop running down the aisles."

Most bad news gets onto social media sites now before the mainstream media get their act together, Brendan notes, and it will usually be updated far more regularly there too and of course, has the potential to remain available for viewing for a much longer period.

And yet it remains the case that "the reputation of the media is made during crises," so the way journalists interact with so-called gotcha stories emerging online is very relevant to us.

I was once a Continental Flight with a bust bog too. The steward eventually solved the problem by pouring about twenty coffee jugs-worth of water down the hole. Fortunately, no cerotes became mobile.

The day's programme is almost done and I have survived the challenge posed by that big tray of chocolate brownies. It's a real shame we missed the presentation from author David M. Scott during our airport excursion, but he has kindly given a copy of his book on The New Rules of PR to every delegate and Niall blogged about it on Collective Conversation.

Consumer Marketing meets Web 2-dotology

Right now I'm trying to eat a little plate of nachos without making high decibel munchy noises. Some of the tostadas are red! I've seen black corn, but red...

Gaylene and I had a dash to the aiport at lunchtime to report the loss of our passports to the United Express baggage handling office run by a pair of Mary-Sue types with low concentration levels, who might even have been endearing in a situation other than this. Gaylene's had been handed in; mine hadn't. There's probably some Chicano at Heathrow's Terminal 3 this evening: "Orale compadres! Me llamo Gooi Oward, dejenme entrar porfa!"

Deportation may be my best option for getting out of the US within a week now as the GB Consulate isn't answering its emergency line (even citizens reporting deaths need to leave voicemail and wait by their stiff). Just getting back to LA will present difficulties as I have no other government-issued ID with me.

Anyway, there are a lot more bullet points in this afternoon's presentations. I'm feeling a bit acribillado already. Right now a colleague from the LA office (also a history graduate/major) is talking about the attitudes and behaviours we all need to adopt in order to fully integrate digital communications into the offering. In a slide headed Web 2-dotology she recommends that, where relevant, we harness some of the structured understandings gathered by other disciplines such as sociology and pyschology.

Aha, another amusing video to watch. This one from Windward Reports:

Social Media 101

My colleague Niall has been live-blogging the conference all morning, but now it's his turn to stand up (along with James Gregson and Peter Imbres) and give us all an update on our collectively-agreed social media principles, which have now been approved without changes by our legal counsel. Thanks largely to his approach to this matter, H&K is recognised as a leader in the field.

The use of social media within the organisation remains a fundamentally political issue and it is my own view that any set of collective principles should, as far as possible, permit the basic polarities to survive, just as within our democracies we allow lefties and righties to sit in the same chamber, provided that they continue to pay heed to some fundamental code of conduct.

Niall went on to explain how we, as paid communications professionals, ought to approach perceived inaccuracies on Wikipedia. Rather than immediately proceeding to make edits ourselves, we should try instead to interact with the article-in-question's editors, pointing them to references which back up our complaint, and maybe also suggesting a time-frame for them to make changes to the article. After this we might feel we had permission to make the edits, but he added that one of the problems that we still face is that the guidelines on article mods published by Wikipedia are themselves subject to community-based editing.

Niall pinpointed the three most common, and invariably tricky, questions that our clients ask us about blogs:

• Should our CEO write one?
• Who are the most influential bloggers on topic X?
• One of these blogger people has said something negative about us; how should we respond?

Our own presentation tomorrow will return to the clearly recurring topic of why engaging with bloggers is fundamentally different to traditional media relations. Paul Gillin mentioned the less predictable motivations of bloggers this morning. Niall has just added that bloggers are far more likely than mainstream journalists to tell the world when you misjudge your pitch to them. The key learning here is that, on a campaign by campaign basis, communications professionals need to invest the time to establish whether a particular blogger is an appropriate subject for outreach.

Paul Taaffe

In the first afternoon session our global CEO challenged us to think about the ways that Digital communications could take our profession to entirely new places. One could think of the practice of public relations as broadly about managing the interface between the different publics within a society, yet even in some of the most developed nations it has often really involved little more than media relations, leaving the advertising industry to take the overall lead in terms of creative initiative and content generation. Digital, Taaffe argued, gives us a real opportunity to snatch this initiative back.

After all, where there is real communication - a relationship rather than a set of discreet transactions - our approach should be more effective in the long run. As David Muir told us this morning, a lot of the negativity online seems to stem from the fact that the trust-based conversations between consumers and the people that sell them stuff are not taking place to the extent that the technology would now appear to allow.

Over lunch Niall had also made the point that advertising has always been about buying into things, and that their approach to social media properties is little different. We on the other hand, really do have to change our ways.

Paul Gillin

Author of The New Influencers and a blogger since June '05.

Spoke about how social networks have harnessed the power of personal publishing, transforming me comms into us comms and how innovation in this sphere has been galvanised by cheaper open source software.

A few other factlets and interesting observations from his speech:

• 65% of Facebook users need a daily fix
• The average age of US network evening news viewers is now 60
• It is now cheaper to keep information than to delete it
• Influencers "dwell at all levels" as blog authority becomes more diffuse
  
• The economics of mainstream media is rooted in a dying form of scarcity: "the economic model of newspapers is unsustainable" (discuss..?)
• Negativity has the greatest impact when it amplifies a common problem
  
• Bloggers respond to different motivations and often actively seek out engagement
  
• Peer trust is now crucial, but some peers are more equal than others!
  

There are many different ways to measure the impact of social media on the market, he concluded, yet "what's the ROI?" isn't always the right first question to ask.

He finished up with a Kodak moment...



This was one of those internal productions that 'somehow got out'.

The new marketing environment (2)

A few more points from David Muir's preso which I didn't blog about at the time:

• There is still a major misalignment between media usage and ad-spend (in favour of traditional media of course)
• Broadcast skills will become more important as the barriers to entry to providing TV-like services come crashing. In this environment more and more firms (such as Boeing) are experimenting with formal co-creation schemes.
• People's online behaviours have changed significantly with broadband, but regulators have also played an active role in fostering the rise of social (and controllable) media.

The new marketing environment

Our first keynote speaker is David Muir is CEO of The Channel, one of WPP's knowledge centres.

He made the telling point that customer rage online is more often than not driven by a sense that organisations simply aren't listening...when the technology for doing so is seemingly at its most prevalent ever.

Here are some great YouTube clips that he showed us in illustration of the permanent changes sweeping the comms industry:










See the selection of remixes for this last one!

FireSky

Unas fotos del hotel en Scottsdale...que ayer en la noche se parecia a un poco a un sim en Second Life. Ayer estuvo mas de 90 grados aqui, pero parece que se quita el calor bastante en la noche. La conferencia empieza en 15. Voy a tratar de escribir el blog en vivo...

Hay mucho Mexicano aqui. Orale!

Arrival in Arizona

Have arrived, exhausted, in Arizona. 21 hours door to door. Here are some pics from the windows of both flights.

White Noise

In The World According to Clarkson there's a piece in which he laments the way that certain "high-brow" authors (as opposed to the writers that he himself reads; Tom Clancy et al.) tend to waste all their beautiful prose on rather formless narratives.

Having just finished the latest offering from Phillip Roth, Clarkson quips that "It's almost as though Roth rang the publishers and asked 'How long would you like my next novel to be?' And when they said 250 pages, he said 'Oh good, I've finished'."

DeLillo does seem to wind up White Noise at the point at which he reckons he's said all he has to say...though there is a somewhat manufactured confrontation in the place of the final act.

This prescient novel from 1984 is not so much about amusing ourselves to death as amusing ourselves from death. (Neil Postman's book was published a year later.)

Its central proposition, that technology and the culture of consumerism that it underpins, serves largely to fixate us with a kind of pervasive replenishment which thereby diverts our attention from the decay around and within us, is one that always resonates with me when I have recently returned from Central America.

The book takes us into the daily life of Jack Gladney, described by a colleague as "a big harmless, ageing, indistinct sort of guy." Jack is America's leading expert on all things Hitlerish. In today's world he would work for the History Channel, but as the story finds him at the dawn of the cable era, he has instead carved an academic niche for himself at a university in a provincial east coast town.

Jack has a history of marrying and divorcing women that are connected to the so-called 'intelligence community', including one who reviews new fiction for the CIA. But most importantly, Jack is afraid of death. Very afraid. During the course of the narrative his own demise becomes more directly calculable when he is exposed to a massive cloud of toxic gunk, a misadventure that occurs at around the same time that he discovers that his wife Babette shares his hidden terror to such an extent that she has prostituted herself with a pharmaceutical company executive in order to be able to participate in an illicit trial of a new drug called Dylar, said to cure the human mind of this most corrosive of anxieties.

"Terrifying data is now an industry in itself," Jack muses."Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us." And yet fear itself, his kind of fear, doesn't seem to be news.

The best explorations of these kind of themes in the novel come whenever Jack interacts with his friend and colleague Murray, quite literally "a visiting lecturer". Together they pinpoint that the whole point of technology is that "it creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other," and that "it's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies."

Look at any grey-haired man in London and you have to remind yourself that he wasn't always so; that all of us are in motion and it isn't, strictly speaking, forward motion. In much the same way that one notices the seasons much more when one swaps the city for the countryside, distance from the intense modernity of the First World provides more transparent access to the human life cycles in motion. Away from the constant agitation of newness, there's a more multidimensional panorama, more cruel and outrageous, and therefore more natural.

The first thing I always notice in Guate is that the under-30s and their preferences are far less dominant within the society. I think DeLillo might agree with the proposition that the ever greater extension of youth in our culture is a form of repression. In effect the market seeks to prolong the period before which people generally become 'estranged from the goods they consume'. Right, I'm off to the Apple Store...in Phoenix.

Orgullosos de ser Chapín

(Thanks to Blog de mi Guatemala for this one.)

Cafe La Escudilla and Riki's Bar

When we were building the house we used to eat here almost every other day, taking advantage of the convenience of its fresh, low cost mix of local and international dishes and its tranquilising patio ambience. OK, the service was always surly and slow, but it didn't seem to be a deal-killer...until a couple of weeks ago that is.

We were enjoying a pleasant evening here in September with a guest and when we came to pay the bill we found that the waitress had charged V twice for her main course; on purpose. With minimum embarrassment she came over and explained that in fact she clearly recalled that V had been part of a large group that had dined in Cafe La Escudilla a month or so before and that the monies left with respect to la cuenta had come up short, so now they were making up the defecit. Gracias.

As the only non-Latin at the table it might be thought strange that it was I alone that went red in the face with anger at this particular moment. V and our guest were perhaps too stunned to react. I at least had the certainty that I wasn't even in the country when this extra dish that I was being asked (actually told) to pay for was reportedly consumed.

V had indeed been part of that big group, gathered by a long-term German resident of Antigua. She had departed before most of the others at the table and had left sufficient quetzales with her friend to cover the cost of her own meal. Our guest on that evening, himself a restauranteur and a close relative of an important local politician had, needless to say, not been part of this particular group of under-paying diners, but this did not prevent the manager of La Escudilla from coming over and accusing him to his face of being a liar and a cheat.

This new manager, clearly a prize idiot, is also a gutless specimen, because he refused to come up to the table to interact directly with my consternation. Instead he hovered at a safe distance and proceeded to call over the security guards from the entrance and dramatically instructed them not to permit such 'gente sin verguenza' to return to his restaurant. He needn't have bothered as his attitude and behaviour had already done the trick. I have never been treated with such shameless disrespect in any restaurant anywhere in the world.

Why wait until we'd finished our meal to spring this on us? And why would this fool risk the reputation of his employers for the price of one plato fuerte ordered weeks earlier? My strong suspicion is that the sum in question had been discounted from the salary of the waitress and that she had therefore instigated this fracas. The gente sin verguenza are surely those that manage their staff in this way.

I did of course refuse to pay for the extra meal and when the bill came the waitress had written on it "Ojo...no pagó la milanesa', and then asked for a tip!

For a decade Riki's/La Escudilla was by far and away the busiest evening venue in La Antigua, especially on Fridays and Saturdays. The Rough Guide still speaks of queues, but in truth both the gilded youth of Guate and the trendier foreigners have moved on, and thanks to this kind of kamikaze management it's starting to look like it did in the early nineties when it was a funeral parlour. We'll be going to the Rainbow Cafe instead from now on. (Rudy likes the breakfast there and we enjoy their open mike evenings. Their fajitas may not sizzle, but they're a delicious and very affordable dish nontheless.)