Character Faults...

Over the past decade I've had untold opportunities to note how the people that build houses here in Guatemala have exactly the same ones as the people that build websites back in London.

Both start by underestimating the scale of the job, mostly because they are only thinking of the large-scale repetitive aspects of it. No need to focus on the detail is there, until it becomes a proper problem?

So, the Guatemalan builder throws himself enthusiastically at the familiar core tasks such as raising the walls, but when it comes to the multifarious little snaglets and clean-ups that will need to be attended to before the project can be declared complete, he at once commences to dodge them or even starts blaming us for changing the original scope. How is the patio drain now blocked by cement his problem? etc.

Once it becomes clear just how much extra aggro the final stage of the project is likely to generate, web-coder and albañil will both start looking to enforce an artificial deadline which will give them a chance of running away and starting the whole painful process over again somewhere else with another customer.

Both are also particularly bad at taking advice from clients. For instance, V told Don R that he should leave the PVC drainpipe inside the hole he'd made for it in the roof of our new store-room. This counsel was duly ignored - years of experience mean that underpaid do-ers always know better than people with a firm grasp of logic - and of course the hole was a different diameter once the cement had dried. Tok Tok Tok soon echoed around the patio as he re-widened it with his tools the next morning. As you can see from this pic, the pipe now fits, but it has some residual straightness issues....

Maya Deity of the Day: Ah Puch

Ah Puch aka Hun Ahau or God A is the Maya God of Death and is said to reside in the ninth and frankly least pleasant level of Xibalba. The Aztecs later gave him the much less tongue-friendly name of Mictlantecuhtli.

He is seen here in perhaps his most popular get-up, that of a rotting corpse topped by a skull. Bells also dangle from his wrists and hair-bands.

One of his nicknames is 'The Flatulent One', just one of his many ways of demonstrating a doggedly malevolent nature.

The head of Ah Puch was also sometimes represented as that of an owl and some indigenous people in the region still believe that the screech of this bird portends an imminent fatality:

'Cuando el tecolote canta... el indio muere.'

As well as the owl, Ah Puch's constant companions are the dog and the Moán bird, also perceived as creatures of foul-omen.

He ranks ranks fourth in number of depictions in the codices, appearing 88 times in the three extant manuscripts.

See also ahhh puchis?!

Quote of the Day

“I’ve got this thing...and it’s [expletive] golden. And I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I’m not going to do it. And I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”
Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevic on the current availability of Obama's old Senate seat.

Don R

Has a native Guatemalan talent for distorting received information. 

I thoroughly enjoy his discourses on world affairs, for in spite of the obvious difficulties he has with digestion, this is sadly a nation where so many don't even bother to consume. (For instance, there's a bright middle-class kid in our neighbourhood who was not only unaware that there were wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, he thought I was jerking his chain when I described the modus operandum of Islamist suicide bombers.)

Don R also has a collection of tallish tales gleaned from his professional life as an albañil. There was the time, he told us yesterday, when the immensely secretive Hermandad of the church of San Pedro Las Huertas invited him to fix a light fitting in their crypt and there, he alone amongst the uninitiated, caught a glimpse of their stack of glittering loot, including a diamond-encrusted golden crown and a grailish chalice, also studded with multicoloured gemstones. 

Then there is the story of how his spade once scraped the buried dome of a lost religious house whilst he was out digging a well on private land. (According to Don R, the owner of this finca is afraid to declare its existence for fear that the government will force him to sell-up cheaply.)

Indeed I've heard a number of such semi-mythological relatos about entombed monuments on the slopes of the volcano. The town cited in most of the guidebooks as the location of the Spaniards' first capital in Guatemala is Ciudad Vieja. However rumours still circulate that the precise location of the place where the Conquistador Don Pedro del Alvarado's widow Doña Beatriz de la Cueva met her mucky end in a catastrophic mudslide on on 9-11 1541, remains a secret kept from the backpackers. 

The indeterminacy surrounding so many key events in Guatemala's history is fascinating to me. Maybe they simply don't offer decent courses in History or Archaeology at San Carlos University? The boundary between true history and folklore is certainly a rather blurry one here...as we saw yesterday, when I tried to give a verified account of the background to the Quema del Diablo tradition. Don R filled me in today that the Devil gets the bonfire treatment after dark on the 7th because that was the night that Lucifer took it upon himself to tempt the Virgin prior to the more sinless insemination which subsequently ensued. 

Infidel minds such as my own tend to wonder why the Christ wasn't born in September if the Immaculate Conception is said to have taken place on December 8th. (Maybe it was 'Express' as well as Immaculate?!) 

Outliers

Is the intellectually-coiffeured Malcolm Gladwell's new offering to the best-sellers lists. This morning I listened to him picking through its salient selling-points on a Mayo-less Mayo show. He explained that the driving interest behind it has been the precise nature of the talent which perpetrates society's outstandingly successful individuals. 

Gladwell cited research which tracks the life trajectories of students with genius-level IQs. Perhaps surprisingly, many of these turn out to be lowish achievers as adults, especially those from comparatively poor backgrounds. 

Yet family income is often not such a straightforward biographical determinant - Gladwell uses the 'ugly duckling' story of Jewish lawyers born in the 30s to show how disadvantages can sometimes morph into advantages, in this instance because discrimination forced these underprivileged young people into more marginal areas of legal practice - which subsequently became highly lucrative - and because theirs was numerically a very small generation, which meant that competition for college places etc. was comparatively limited. 

The month as well as the year of one's birth can be of great significance it seems. Individuals born in the first quarter of the year are far more likely to be picked early on for sporting success. Gladwell used as an example a successful Czech junior soccer squad with almost no members born after September.

His findings apparently back up other research which indicates that the minimum time you need to practice at anything in order to be good at it, be it basketball, dentistry or rock stardom, is 10,000 hours, or 4 hours a day for ten years. People forget, he notes, just how long an apprenticeship people like Mozart and the Beetles had. 

However, by far the greatest talent shared by the world's most successful people is an abiding obsession, Gladwell concludes. Bill Gates used to get up in the middle of the night every night to access a computer which was free to use for a couple of hours after 2am. He'd then come home and sleep for a couple more hours before setting off for school. It is this drive, and not perhaps his innate programming gifts, that marked him out for the top. 

In the last part of the interview Gladwell explained that the single biggest explanatory factor behind airline disasters was not the weather or indeed mechanical failure, but the culture of the pilot and co-pilot. Modern airliners need four eyes to fly them, he noted, and a consistent level of open communication between the men on the flightdeck. If the co-pilot is culturally hindered from criticising his superior, there's a much greater danger of catastrophe. 

Interestingly he then cited the case of the Colombian jet which came down in John McEnroe's father's estate on Long Island when it ran out of fuel. The co-pilot - whose job it was to communicate this crisis effectively to the air traffic controllers managing the queue into JFK - singularly failed to make his case strongly enough. 

Having observed the qualitatively different way that American pilots relate to their controllers using United Airlines channel 9, I think there may be a bit more to this - because the men on the ground add yet another cultural dimension. Perhaps Johnny Foreigner is a bit too reticent at times, but maybe us culturally-open anglophones can be a little bit over-dominant towards outsiders as well. 

V recalls the time she almost missed a plane at Heathrow after she took a wrong turn on her way to the gate and was sent all the way back to passport control and the original security check. The problem here was not that she wasn't strident enough with these functionaries, she insists, it was simply that she wasn't British enough. 

An extract from the book here.

Quote of the Day

"Like Teletubbies bouncing around a padded cell."

Mark Kermode on the action sequences in Quantum of Solace

(aka 'Pond of Wood')

The Eternal Biker

Surely the most interesting character I met on my recent trip to Belize was a bloke called Ian - a retired Yorkshireman who has been systematically riding through almost every country in the world on a Honda motorbike since 1999.

Having done Africa the hard way - as opposed to the "poofs'" way favoured by certain celebrity poseurs - he arrived in Tierra del Fuego back in 2003 and is, as I write, heading for that detached northerly state led by a certain moose-hunting/hard-shopping Governor.

He had predictable horror stories about a recent pit-stop in Guatemala, where mechanics had insisted on fitting the only Honda shock-absorbers they could get their hands on, even though they clearly knew they weren't the right ones for his bike. More fun was had, he reported, treating the dusty road around the edge of Flores as a speedway track before biking around the whole of the lake itself.

Ian also had some great tales from Chávez's Venezuela and related how former-SAS soldiers now act as private mobile security units down in Jo'Burg, which means police responding to burglar alarms (a little more slowly...) tend to find the robbers stretched out cold when they arrive on scene. I believe the BBC braodcast a Louis Theroux programme this week on this very topic so I will have to look it up on iPlayer.

I asked him how his wife was taking this incredible hobby of his. "She has grandchildren to look after now," was his cleverly guarded response to this little probe.

From Alaska he will start to traverse the great land Sarah Palin can see from her window before turning south and commencing an extended tour of South-East Asia. It seems he really has no idea when he'll be back home in the Dales.

Here are some more commentary from Ian's drive north through Belize after he left Placencia.

Quote of the Day

"After three days without reading, talk becomes flavourless."
Chinese Proverb

La Quema del Diablo

The Burning of the Devil is celebrated every seventh of December here in Antigua and effectively marks the beginning of the month-long pyrotechnics season.

The tradition of setting fire to rubbish as an annual purification ritual has medieval roots, but here in Guatemala it seems that under Spanish rule wealthy households liked to mark the eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception by lighting up a lantern outside their gates. Meanwhile their poorer neighbours got into the habit of setting up small bonfires instead.

It's not entirely clear how Old Nick got involved in all this, nor why anyone would have thought fire was a fine way of purifying him out of their lives.

This particular cachudo met his end on the rough land behind our house, courtesy of V's nephews and nieces, one of whom had added a little surprise by surreptitiously placing a bomba inside the red piñata before tossing it into the flames.

Quote of the Day

"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."

George Bernard Shaw

Miel de Talnete

In an earlier post I sang the praises of one of our favourite culinary ingredients in Guatemala  - 'alcoholic honey'. 

Back then I thought the slightly boozey aftertaste was a result of some acetic residue in the rum bottle it was sold to us in, but have since discovered that it is the distinctive characteristic of this delicious, nearly transparent honey - made by little black, stingless bees of the region which like to live underground or under tree trunks: the Talnete bees (Geotrigona Acapulconis)

(El Talnete is also a town high up in the mountains of Honduras, roughly equidistant from the borders with Guatemala and El Salvador.)

Quantum of Solace

Oh dear. Sub-Bourne in the Sienna section and thereafter sub-Bond for most of the rest of the film. 

It's as if the script was cobbled together by a committee of individuals who either only half remembered or only half understood what makes a good 007 caper. The worst part was that, the nod to Goldfinger aside, the Bond it most reminded me of was Dalton in License to Kill, but even that had provided a more intelligent portrait of Latin American politics. (It certainly had better reason to be trapped in the 80s!) 

Having introduced us to Mr White and his oh-so-secret organisation, the action diverts into a Bolivian sideshow which we are invited to give at least one hoot about because it is somehow linked to the death of a character that we know Bond himself cared a lot about.

But as he goes about settling this score with a look of full-blown ennui, albeit pugnacious ennui - teaming up with the equally weary-looking Camille and a Felix Leiter who can barely keep his eyes open - it's ultimately difficult to devote much mental energy to working out what Dominic Greene is really up to. (Only Judi Dench as M comes over as confused rather than simply bored.)

Craig hasn't squandered the good-will generated by Casino Royale and has one or two good lines in the midst of his rather taciturn performance in the sequel, but the style of direction works against the qualities of the script, such as they are. 

Ian Fleming never flinched from taking on the Russians during the Cold War. Jason Bourne's excuse for not taking on Western society's current set of designated enemies is a good one - his conflict is an internal one to the CIA. Bond's writers are too terrified to pit him against anyone even vaguely Middle-Eastern (and think themselves too' modern' to provide him with adversaries like Hugo Drax in Moonraker), so what we end up with is a cop-out - with 007 running away, running around and running towards a blend of threats both internal and external, against a rather impressionistic backdrop of nasty geopolitical machinations, which are ultimately grounded on the trade of certain commodities. It's just not good enough. 

Greengrass keeps the Bourne plots racing so fast that you have little time to notice the shallowness below the surface.  Here Mac Foster demonstrates that there is more to this than simply shaking the camera so that viewer is only barely aware what's going on. There's enough depth of character in the Ludlum-derived series that Bourne's loss of Marie matters to us, and his relationship with Nicky has also started to intrigue, but Q of S's attempt, pardon the pun, to bond 007 with Mathis serves only to reveal how garbled this series has become. 

And series it is, unfortunately. Such is the lack of resolution surrounding the 'Quantum' gang and their friends in high places, that one is left with the impression that another convocation of scribblers will soon be tasked with picking up from where Q of S left off. But I find myself better disposed to finding out the truth behind all the various conspiracies and secret organisations in Lost and Heroes than I do with this now fumbled reinvention of a venerable franchise. 

GRADE: B--

Quote of the Day

If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out? 

Will Rogers, 'Oaklahoma's favourite son"

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed The Bishop?

This weekend seven prisoners were beheaded by fellow inmates at Guatemala's infamous Pavoncito prison. A impromptu game of soccer ensued...

A similar fate befell one of the men found responsible for the political murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi on April 26 1998. This was Seargeant Major Obdulio Villanueva who, as Goldman reports, encountered a form of justice five years later in the Centro Preventivo: 

"They hacked off the top of Villanueva's skull with a machete. Psycho scooped up Villanueva's brain matter with his hands and flung it into the faces of the cornered Sector 7 prisoners, screaming "Bring us Lima!" But Lima was nowhere to be found. They seized on a felt soldier doll that Lima kept by his bunk. The cholos decapitated the doll and shoved its head inside Villanueva's decapitated head, in through the neck and up, so that the doll's face showed through the brain matter."

Villanueva is one of the more interesting figures in this complex drama, especially for us. For it was he who had earlier carried out an on-the-spot execution of the milk delivery man employed by La Finca Carmona, the vast estate just outside Antigua where V was born. (Indeed, her father used to run the dairy business there.)  

The name of this unfortunate milkman was Sas Rompich and on that day in February 1996 he'd made the fatal mistake of having a few Gallos before setting off along a road on which President Álvaro Arzú was gently hacking with his wife alongside him, with his EMP bodyguards - Villanueva included - in tow. Captain Lima, another one of the future Bishop-bashers, attempted to hault the on-coming Isuzu and ended up falling off his horse and breaking an arm. Goldman relates what happened next:  

"The pickup then crashed into a parked car by the side of the road. Apparently confused and panicked, the milkman accelerated, then rocked into reverse, and another officer jumped onto the pickup's running board and reached in for the ignition, trying to bring the vehicle under control. Someone else shot out the rear tyres. A guardsman drove his car against the front of the pickup, blocking it, and someone went right up to the pickup with a nine-millimeter pistol in his hand, reached in through the window, and fired three bullets into the milkman, including one into his ear, killing him instantly."

The version(s) of events I had heard from locals before reading Goldman's book was significantly different, but such is the delight of Chapin anecdotology. Only last night V filled me in on another gruesome local incident which involved a naked corpse and extensive fingernail scratches on the wooden door of a house in San Bartolo. 

Anyway, the man with the 9mm was Villanueva and for this act of over-keenness in defence of his head of state he was eventually sentenced to do some jail time here in Antigua. Indeed on the night of the Gerardi killing he should have been in his cell, which anywhere other than Guatemala would be a reasonably water-tight alibi. It turns out however that the prison authorities' only non-negotiable stipulation for their charges was that they attend the morning roll call,  and the Sergeant Major had been known to spend nights outside in Antigua's hotels. 

Thomas Jones's LRB review of this book provides a strictly chronological account of the murder, investigation, trial and appeals process, thereby indirectly revealing that Goldman's story is so much more than this. The Guatemalan-born novelist has a broader scope in mind and successfully uses this most infamous event in the country's recent history to paint a fascinating and broad picture of my new homeland...even if some of it is tainted by the sensationalism outsiders are occasionally prone to! [That dastardly Captain Lima should have an army doll with him in his prison cell is just one of many dazzling little details that we are treated to, for which we have to thank Goldman's native storytelling sensibilities I'm sure.] 

Two men I nevertheless continue to admire come out rather badly it has to be said. One is Álvaro Arzú, our neighbour and now Guatemala City alcalde, who as President was most probably at least vaguely aware of what was about to go down....or so Goldman insinuates. The other is Mario Vargas Llosa, who wrote a rave review in El Pais for a book which exonerates the military entirely from blame in the death of the clergyman who just the day before had blamed them almost entirely for the majority of atrocities committed during the civil war.  (Arzú, it seems hasn't himself been above handing out free copies of Who Killed the Bishop? by Bertrand De la Grange and Maite Rico.)  

One of the juicier, more overtly chismoso parts of Goldman's investigation makes mention of a casa de citas in Zone 2 run by the mysterious gilded oligarch and femme fatale Martha Jane Melville Novella, linked via a series of expensive gifts to Gerardi's twisted housemate Father Mario Orantes (now doing time as an accomplice in the murder - he is thought to have let Lima, Villanueva and the 'shirtless man' into the Bishop's residence that night) and to Arzú's son Diego who apparently belonged to this upmarket homosexual 'tryst house' circle. With a hefty dose of supposition, Goldman also links Arzú's other son Diego to "a disco nightclub owned by EMP officers in Zone 14, where trafficked and heavily consumed. Someone who possessed information about all this, and who was himself in a powerful position - a general, for example - would be able to bend a number of people to his will, including the President."

Changeling

Clint's new film is masterful, not least for the way it synthesises a potentially unruly, multi-threaded 'true' story into a taut and gripping cinematic narrative. 

Judiciously stylising the backdrop of 20s LA and to some extent the dialogue action as well, is one way the craggy old director has gone about  achieving this feat. Jolie and her flapper hats deserve much credit too, but this is an ensemble cast. I was especially impressed with Denis O'Hare's asylum doctor to the extent of re-watching his scene with Mrs Collins several times. 

Oddly enough, the plot element suggested by the title is ultimately the least well formed, as the knockoff Walter passes through this story leaving a modest trail of unanswered questions. 

GRADE: A-

Trip Pic of the Day: Paw Print

Spotted beside the Macal river below Cristo Rey as the mists went wispily on their way.

Not sure what kind of beastie left it, but it would surely have been big enough to get my attention had I surprised it on its morning errand. 

Obama's approval ratings...

Across Latin America. He has some work to do down here in Guatemala. 

Quote of the Day

"How many times does the end of the world as we know it need to arrive before we realise that it's not the end of the world as we know it?"

Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker

The end of the world is certainly chic this winter, what with Survivors on telly and both Blindness and Quarantine showing in UK cinemas right now.  It strikes me that it is easier to imagine a near complete apocalypse than a more partial one, though the latter is a scenario that right now appeals to me creatively. What would it be like to exist where the disorder within civilisation is chronic and fluctuating rather than the more acute scenario imagined by the likes of The Happening. There's something of this in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but the break with the past is still pretty definitive there. 

On a separate note I listened to a podcast yesterday in which a number of leading economists reported back from the wild frontiers of their profession. Nothing I heard dissuaded me from the notion that this remains one of the shallower academic disciplines. 

It seems to me that the basic problem economists face is the abiding one of complex non-linear systems. One way to deal with them, and this was the path of traditional economics, was to pretend that non-linear reality could somehow be reduced to predictable linear realities. So traditional economics simply assumed that underlying the way that we collectively value and consume stuff, there is a set of consistently selfish and rational individual decision processes. 

Technological advances in the last two or three decades have permitted economists to venture out away from their restrictive models - indeed, the processing power available today allows all kinds of individuals in both the academic and commercial worlds to develop models have have at least the semblance of deciphering the behaviour of networks. 

Economists have been shamelessly pilfering from parallel advances in other, perhaps deeper, disciplines such as psychology and neuroscience and the result has been a whole range of new ways forward such as Behavioural Economics and Network Economics. But these are still very early days and the results from all this complex number-crunching often remain unsatisfactory, even when compared to intelligent intuition. And 'people respond to incentives' is not a very profound insight on its own. 

I did Economics to A-level at school. In spite of the views expressed above I still think some sort of basic (and compulsory) instruction in this field should be included in the syllabus from an earlier stage - though perhaps it would be best to style such a course as 'Risk'.  

A citizenry with a better understanding of risk, with a sharpened perspective on long and short term goals would be one that is particularly well equipped to deal with this already rather challenging century. It would nicely set-up those with commercial inclinations of course, but would also have wider benefits across the student base. 

One last puzzle gleaned from the podcast was this. At times like these, when we all have a sense of lost certainty and lost control, to what extent does heterodox thinking break more easily into the mainstream? 

From what I have so far read of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine gratuitous experimentation in times (and locations) of societal distress may not always be a good thing. But I certainly have a sense that 2008 is one of those historical moments when old myths are floundering and new ones are pushing to the forefront. 

The US is certainly experiencing one of its periodic eras of political re-invention. It will be interesting to whether, as Simon Schama appears to believe, it has a store-room full of alternative, but equally American, ways of existing in the world. 

I detect notes of both glee and trepidation behind the budding 'Post-American' publishing phenomenon. (e.g. Parag Khanna's The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order and Fareed Zakaria's The Post American World.) Many of us would like to see a more multilateral world - both politically and economically - and some might even take pleasure in seeing the bully get a bloody nose, but if America really is in decline, how can we ensure that the set of ideas that transformed 'the West' at the end of the eighteenth century continue to prevail within global civilisation? 

Proud Products

Marie Sharp's habanero sauces are to be found on most of the restaurant tables in Belize. 

The best of them however is a rarer delight which usually has to be tracked down in the Chinese supermarkets. This is the 'Green Habanero' sauce whose principal added ingredient is the nopal (from the prickly pear). 

Even V, usually no fan of hot sauces, can't get enough of this gourmet delight. These little bottles, along with larger ones filled with Duurly's Parrot, are one of the main reasons my bag feels rather heavy each time I leave Belize. 

[REC]

Jaume Balagueró specialises in Spanish horror movies that feel at once strikingly novel and derivative. I liked his Los Sin Nombre, Darkness less so.

[REC] is set up to work on several levels. Most obviously it is a fairly standard zombie flick, where a captive group of individuals are systematically predated by an ever-growing number of neck-munchers. On this level at least the film has neither memorable fatalities nor eye-catching special effects, which is probably why the shot-for-shot English-language remake Quarantine will be one to pass on

[REC] is also another one of those 'found footage' horrors ostensibly shot by one of its potential victims, in much the same way we saw with Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project.

Yet this is also where Balagueró achieves a degree of noteworthiness, for we are following the camera-eye-view of a late-night Spanish TV show called While You are Sleeping as their team tag along with a squad of Barcelona bomberos on what is anything but a routine call to an apartment block.

Balagueró crafts from this situation a satire on both reality TV tactics and on Spanish urban life. During pauses in the mayhem, bushy-tailed reporter Angela interviews some of the residents sealed into the zombies' new playground, including some Asian immigrants, a grumpy old couple and a poncy Argentine. Their observations on their predicament and about each other make highly entertaining viewing, especially  to anyone who has ever tuned into TVe shows such as España Directo.

Like La Noche de Los Girasoles (a better movie in my opinion) there is something uniquely Spanish in the sensibility of [REC]. Where else could the explanation for this undeathly outbreak be presented as such a confounding blend of science and Catholicism gone bad? Parochial social satire is probably the USP of Balagueró's vision here, but as we saw with the adaptation of other European films (such as Les Visiteurs), it's precisely the sort of thing that tends to vanish on Atlantic crossings.

[REC] 2 is on its way apparently...

GRADE: B+