Amidst all the wrecks...

One of our oldest friends here in La Antigua has a successful, long-established business on the Calle del Arco. I’ll leave readers to guess which one based on what I am about to say. 

He once explained to us the principle of all long-thriving negocios here: you have to be selling something pretty unique, something that the local would-be copycats cannot easily duplicate. 

Trends come and go in this town, almost all distinguished by the arrival and subsequent besieging of the first movers. Cyber cafés, spas, coffee shops etc. The general effect is of a xerox machine out of control. A phenomenon that economists tend to refer to the as the overgrazing of the commons. 

Outright clones like Pollo Granjero are a common enough phenomenon, yet few have the longevity. 

The other day we were reflecting on how many of the businesses that were here when we met have kept going all these years. 

Almost all the survivors have been offering something sui generis, have built a brand resistant to mimicry, or have always been the sort of businesses that never really had to turn an actual profit. 

There really aren’t that many on our list. Back then there was no Bodegona, no Frida’s, no Monoloco, no La Casbah...no Macdonalds or Burger King even. 

There were however certain establishments which even then gave the impression of having been around almost eternally, with the clear intention to remain unmoved on the same spot forever — Doña Luisa Xicotencatl, La Fonda de la Calle Real, Doña Maria Gordillo, Cafe Ana, La Mariposa, La Canche. Doña Luisa perhaps embodies the perfect package of brand, location and offering. 

Then there are those like Quesos y Vino, La Cenicienta and El Sereno which have evolved, changed premises, expanded, though one can still almost guarantee dining utterly alone at the latter. Others like La Hamburguesa Gigante that have persisted only as a disembodied name. 

Welten has changed too, but in ways that make me think that I am observing it today as if from a self-propelled deep submergence vehicle drifting through a deep ocean wreck. 

Rojo (2018)

Benjamin Naishtat's Rojo is a study in creeping ominousness, which looks at the lesser parochial evils that form the foundations of the greater evil of dictatorship.

Set in a made-up small town in Argentina in 1975, just before the Junta took power, the narrative tracks a cluster of incidents in the life of lawyer Claudio, played by Dario Grandinetti as a self-styled person of provincial substance whose moral compass is starting to spin.

Its most unsettling moment is an altercation in a restaurant right at the start and although it does its job in keeping the viewer rattled throughout, we also had the impression that the movie is never better than its opening sequences and that all its thematically-interwoven jitters never quite deliver as a whole.

There’s a Chilean TV detective that livens things up and I wish I had all the cultural references at my fingertips to know how seriously this character ought to be taken. One suspects there's an in joke going down here.

The Quake/Skjelvet (2018)

Sequel to 2015's The Wave (tsunami in the fijords), The Quake takes the nordic noir approach to the build up to an apocalyptic-level seismic event in Oslo.

The effects — set to a honking Hans Zimmer-like score — are generally excellent, with some of the best downwardly-mobile grand piano action since Laurel and Hardy.

Kristoffer Joner plays geologist Kristian, a Cassandra-esque figure who gets a lot more advanced warning than anyone ever had with a major quake, yet still fails to put it to good use.

Overall V found the film's take on the subject a bit '2012'. 

Being Norwegian, it delivers its silliness with such a straight face, that you are not quite sure if it wants to be taken in full seriousness.

The Dead Don't Die (2019)

Iggy Pop's coffee-craving zombie is perhaps the only necessary bit of attention-grabbing casting in Jim Jarmusch's largely un-necessary addition to the genre, overpopulated as it is with underused stars and plot-lines.

Think George Romero remade by David Lynch. This is not that movie. Instead it's a rather lame, struggling-to-be-funny parody of what David Lynch would have done with the dusk of the dead. 

Our own interest flatlined in direct proportion to the number of reanimated corpses on the street.

Extraordinary Levies

These transition periods between Municipal administrations in La Antigua are kind of fun to observe, at a distance.

There is a sudden air of financial urgency. Laws that have not been strictly enforced - especially those involving large-ish fines - are suddenly applied with a visible degree of jobsworthy zealotry. 

No helmet? Pay up! Your burger bar acting like an antro? Start coughing. Behind with your IUSI? Hmmmm. Etc.

A Game of Chicken

The Sun’s front cover today features Corbyn as a big chicken; in all truth, a bit of a cock.

Yet I think Blair has really helped Magic Gramps by pointing out in advance — before all of yesterday's big noise — just how dumb it would have been to take the bait. 

I did enjoy Corbyn's Snow White and the apple analogy. It's a shame none of the tabloids did a mock-up of that. 

Once again I think the pre-campaign polls could be deceptive. The Tories will almost inevitably lose seats in Scotland and the south-east and may find it hard to remove Labour MPs in the north with the Brexit bunch breathing down their necks. 

And right now Boris’s personal popularity premium — even with his hardcore adulators — must be reaching third season Mourinho levels. 

If Labour and the Lid Dems act smartly, I can definitely see the current opposition getting themselves into a position where a coalition might be feasible. This would be a win-win because I cannot see the Lib Dems making the same mistake and not putting some dampeners on their governmental partners this time around.

All Hail the Rebel Alliance!

The Astoria Hotel, Leningrad 1985. Blurry photo by largely unamused Soviet waiter.

I had something of an Afro in those days.

It seems that Eddy Vaizey, front left, will have lost the Conservative whip today. We all knew he'd come good in the end. (His father was a Labour Peer.)

He finds himself in good company - the 'father of the house', the former chancellor, Churchill's grandson and my father's much-appreciated local MP for Newbury, Richard Benyon.

(Carlsberg, probably - in fact definitely - the best lager in the USSR.)

'Our House is burning'

Jeremy Corbyn's excursion into the Amazon during this morning's crucial Brexit debate was irrelevant, borderline nonsensical, and so typical of his inability to knuckle down on the essence of the current contention.

Westminster may yearn for sovereignty, but that does not include sovereignty over Brazil. Bolsonaro is surely Brazil's problem. (At least until the world finds a way to respond institutionally to globalised capitalism and the worldwide environmental challenges. G7 aint it.) 

It's worth pointing out that the Amazon forest's contribution to global oxygen production is around 6% gross, net levels closer to nil. All that biodiversity consumes the stuff as well. Macron's 20% figure is fake news and an excuse for Gallic grandstanding, if not outright meddling. His motives were possibly quite cynical, but along the way he has set off the more naive protestor instincts of Magic Grandpa.

When coverage of the fires came to my own attention, some time before the matter was taken up by CR7, Macron, the Beeb et al, the crux of the issue was the impact on indigenous reserves.

Brazil has reduced deforestation considerably over the last few years, but Bolsonaro's policies signal a possible up-tick for 2019 and a re-opening of the oldest wound in South America: the conflict between the modernising state and the patchwork of less modern, pre-Hispanic societies it would like to subsume. (Remember The Mission?). This is indeed a complex matter for careful consideration...by Brazilians.

By the time the media outside the region had hold of this story it had been re-worked to significantly bother their own educated metropolitan elites. "Lungs of the Earth' and all that. The indigenes had vanished into the intellectual underbrush.

A part of Brazil (Peru etc.) that is almost the size of Australia somehow now belongs to all of us, minus the knuckle-draggers of course.

It's on US

The somewhat ludicrous Beto O'Rourke is blaming his own nation for Guatemala's present dryness. Now, one can wholeheartedly blame the US for a lot of things down here, but this particular bit of finger pointing is actually rather lame. Liberal self-flagellation in fact.

As of 2017, of worldwide carbon emissions, the US accounted for 13.7%. The UK? A mere 1%. China on the other hand has now attained 29.3% (more than the whole of 'the west') and India's 6.6% needs to be understood in terms of a fourfold increase over thirty years.

Meanwhile, the highest emissions per capita are in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

Stopping this catastrophe is going to involve a while load of condoms as well as little Swedish girls taking the boat rather than the plane.

And the Mayab tended to suffer from near-apocalyptic droughts long before the greatest nation on earth even existed. 

Holiday (2018)

Isabella Eklöf's debut film is extraordinary. Can't quite see why it is only scoring 5.6 on IMDB. Critical reviews from the festival circuit were almost all positive, though an extended rape scene (comparable it would seem to the one Gaspar Noé shot for Irréversible) was cut from the version we saw. 

I'm not sure it was strictly necessary. The edits between scenes with implied information withholdings work especially well. And this does seem to be as much as chilling exposé of toxic femininity as its gender inverse.

Victoria Carmen Sonne's performance as Sascha is on-the-nose. I've come across a trope-tastic trophy wife here in LAG, with whom - on first acquaintance - I was struck by the most profound, direct, eye-to-eye experience of 'lights are on, but nobody's home'...ever. 

Narcisismo perdido; cascarón de carnaval; painted and hollow. Sascha is right there, and yet she isn't.

Misdirected Misanthropy

‘Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country… creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources..the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable?'

A reported snippet from the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter; seemingly a ‘white supremicist’ in much the same way that David Attenborough is.

As I have noted before self-styled terrorists and racists are often just people who have a general problem with humanity, whilst erroneously imagining that their beef is only really with part of the species.

Like David Attenborough I am something of an atheist and a bit of a misanthrope, so I have some sympathy with the problem if not the solution. 

The experience of ageing, of being part of modernity is sadly often one of witnessing ruination — of oneself and of the people and places one senses are being slowly wrenched away as time passes. 

Take Antigua. It’s not the place I first came to in the 80s. Like Crusius I could start to play the blame game. 

For a start, it’s possible to have a generic rant about rising population, over-stretched resources, moral decay, corrosive capitalism and so on while sounding both bewilderingly conservative and radical-lefty at the same time.

Where it gets a bit more interesting is when one starts blaming specific groups of people, particularly those than are in some way other to one’s nostalgic fantasies.

If these invasive/destructive types are generally better off or more powerful than oneself, one is usually deemed to be a ‘terrorist’, especially when one takes up arms against them. Here in LAG these might either be braying gringos or affluent hedonists from the capital.

If however they are less well-off and powerful than oneself — in the case of Antigua ‘indios’ from outlying communities who pile in to sell their crap and generally clog up the streets — then one is typically deemed to be a ‘racist’.

Crusius named Mexicans as his problem. Not the ones in Mexico, but the one’s he believed were churning up his turf.

If this is racism, it’s rather different to the kind of racism that drove certain Germans eastward in the last century in the hope of finding new space in territory then occupied by those they deemed lesser beings. With the Nazis one could argue that the ‘hate’ started first, its targets blamed for nothing other than their own existence.

With the likes of Crusius there’s surely something more situational going on, where Hispanics crossing the border become the surrogate for a much deeper problem with his existence as a member of Homo Sapiens.

Northern Triangulation

Bernie Sanders observed at a recent Democratic debate that “We’ve got to ask ourselves...why are people walking 2,000 miles to a strange country where they don’t know the language?” Given that many of the indigenous people in parts of Guatemala struggle a bit with Spanish, they may not actually have to travel all that far before they start to experience communications difficulties. Yet the question is valid. Why indeed? I can imagine the sort of answer that Bernie has formulated in his own head. And the kind that he will expect his voters to come up with. These will, I suspect, be overly-informed by first world biases that beset both Left and Right in the US. Just hearing the question asked this way sets off my own shithole country dog whistle alarm. Google ‘Northern Triangle’ and see what you get. When I did it this morning the top item was titled ‘Central America’s violent Northern Triangle’. The term’s Wikipedia entry does at least explain that it is was originally formulated to frame discussion of economic interactions between these three nations, before finally moving on to the rate of intentional homicides in these parts. Intriguingly, this is also a way of looking at the northern part of the isthmus without considering Belize. Aside from the economic ties there are other ways in which this omission is instructive. Belize is a lot smaller, yet relatively more violent these days than the other three. Despite this, it is almost never mentioned in the context of factors driving Central American migration to the US. Now Google the top 100 news items on Guatemala and then do the same for Belize, before scoring them as positive, negative and neutral. I am sure you will surely start to perceive the signs of media bias even within this rather limited sample. President Trump did a safe third party deal with Guatemala supposedly in order to reduce the number of asylum seekers from El Salvador and Honduras yet Guatemala itself, (rather slightly) the least violent of the three countries, regularly sends more migrants north than its neighbours. Many of the Guatemalan migrants being detained right now at the Mexico-US border appear to hail from rural areas with a pronounced indigenous majority. The assumption in the external media is that these less-developed areas of the country must by definition be the ones with the greatest prevalence of the traditional litany of problems, the highest concentration of ‘appalling conditions’, as AOC puts it. They must also be the ones where discrimination is felt most severely. These assumptions are rarely if ever examined properly. 
In Guatemala the intentional homicide problem has tended to be highly localised — concentrated in specific micro-geographies — which have been used in effect to tar the entire the country with the same brush. (As if one could only ever talk about Italy in terms of the conditions prevalent just south of Naples.) Many of Guatemala’s rural departments with significant indigenous majorities have murder rates more comparable with Guildford, Surrey than New Orleans, Louisiana. Gang-related crime is also largely absent there. So to provide an answer to Bernie’s question that takes more than a moment’s reflection, one may have to look at both environmental and demographic factors more closely. One is also going to have to set aside first world conditioning which would otherwise project certain prejudices back onto this problem. For many of the underlying causes may not quite suit the standard progressive discourse.

Shithole Country?

I first came to Guatemala when I'd just turned twenty-one. My initial experience of the country was what you might call 'not propitious'. The vehicle that I was travelling in was pulled over by guerrillas and I faced a row of AK-toting teenagers. 

After this I made it safely to Santa Elena, crossed the causeway to Flores on foot, wolfed down a mojarra with some Gallo and have retained my fascination and affection for the country ever since.

So it pains me a little to read articles like this. One is left to conclude that at least the likes of Donald Trump come straight out with the 'shithole country' trope. 

American liberals on the other hand, produce an argument like this that is pretty much the same thing, but couched in terminology that makes them feel good. 

Statistcs 'compiled by non-profits' supposedly point to persecution of the LGBTI community here, but if one adjusts for the prevalence of powerful, interfering foreign organisations in Guatemala compared to many developed nations, how great is this danger, relatively? 

The problem is that this form of analysis has the inevitable tendency to associate countries like Guatemala with only the worst aspects of their social and political conditions. Just imagine that you were to do the same for the ‘greatest nation on earth’. 

To state that Guatemala is incapable of serving as a safe third country - without even reading the relevant agreement - is American liberal dog whistle for ‘shithole country’. 

(WTF with that donkey..?)

La Mara Apestatrucha

There's a certain well-lubricated set of gringos of an advancing age here in La Antigua. In the past we've referred to them as the 'Big Fish', not without a dollop of British sarcasm, for they are appear to be textbook cases of 'Big Fish In Small Pond' syndrome. 

The epithet is appropriate in another sense as well as they generally go about with the aspect of a fish that has been dragged down the road by a dog. 

In spite of this, many have married much younger local women — some on multiple occasions — and having opened some small bar or restaurant prance around town as if they were captains of industry or serial entrepreneurs worthy of a Forbes profile. 

Another common feature of the heavyweight lightweights that make up this gang — this mara — is that they appear to have scant regard for the rules and regulations of Guatemala. 

Badly Brung Up

Time passes but some things never change, such as the atrocious table manners of characters in American movies. 

The more wealthy and sophisticated they are supposed to be - like this couple in 1993's Sliver - the worse it seems to get...forks held in the wrong hand, stabbing almost sorrowfully at the contents of the plate. 

And in this scene it is the knickerless Sharon Stone who is supposed to be causing a stir. 

Even George Clooney does it. I bet Amal can barely bring herself to watch, thinking thoughts along the lines of 'Where was you brung up...the workhouse?'

Go Home

Someone I would very much like to tell to go home is a superannuated Trumpista from Texas who occasionally corners me in the Bodegona.

Last time he insisted on warning me about the crazed policy proposals of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who, he hissed, was dead set on introducing post-natal abortions.

It really does seem to be the Donald's key strategy right now to pre- 'energise' these muppets - as it is more than likely along the way to skew the Democratic selection process towards the potty end of the spectrum.

The Wedding Guest (2018)

I suppose Michael Winterbottom wanted to make The Trip to India but Steve and Rob weren't available, so instead he got Dev and Radhika and loosely fastened them to a plot about a road trip necessitated by the need to flee an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

Ben Keningsberg of the NYT began his review by suggesting he had been expecting a romantic comedy. 

Really? He saw THAT poster and still couldn't get past Dev Patel's type-casting? It would have to have been called Two Funerals and a Wedding.

The thing is that I really enjoyed this movie. The dialogue is almost perfectly tight.

It's almost as if, after having to put up with Rob Brydon's prattling on for three whole movies, Winterbottom self-consciously eschewed the logorrhea to excellent, enigmatic effect.

The Intruder (2019)

Not so much a collection of tropes as one big trope, The Intruder's rigid predictability is actually part of its charm. Remember Unlawful Entry from 1992? Well this is that movie (along with several others) plus a few zeitgheisty tweaks. Race is seemingly not an issue here, yet as in Jordan Peele's Us, it kind of is, as the film's title can refer to either the original owner — sporting a red baseball cap in one scene — or the new one: a mixed-race branding guru from San Francisco who brings a particularly ghastly modernist sensibility to home improvement in the Napa Valley. He has a wife who is dangerously sympathetic towards his potential nemesis and a best friend who is one of those obvious dead-men-walking from the moment he is introduced. And as Ray Liotta did back in '92, so too does Dennis Quaid here with a trope-transcending central performance.

Beneath Us (2019)

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this is that - unlike say 1983's El Norte- you could imagine MAGA-cap wearing Trump supporters finding some soothing confirmation of their worldview here. In the main they are hardly what you would call knowledgable consumers of irony. At a stretch it could even be used south of the border as a propaganda film for ICE, a sort of soft alternative to the wall. Nevertheless, for liberals at least, this is a satirical, 'social' horror about undocumented migrants being used as captive slaves by members of the wealthy white elite in America. Yet I suspect it could just as easily have been set right here in Antigua within the milieu of a certain kind of gringo household complete with casual, grey economy servants. Such a switch would work primarily because director Max Pachman stresses two rather interesting points - that the view of the 'dream' of abundance from beneath is inherently corrupt and conjoined with noxious attitudes, and that said prosperity is ultimately also a travesty — for the affluence of those above is shown to be entirely based on the aggressive exploitation of an over-needy underclass operating in a more authentic economy and thus largely undeserved. And this is why, when (slightly unflattering) comparisons will inevitably be made with Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017), the movie I was most reminded of was the excellent La Zona (2007).

Birds of Passage (2018)

An essentially ethnographic proposition, which has been cleverly blended for added accessibility with a familiar pop cultural narrative, but then made subtly more weighty and mysterious by being framed as an ancient epic of the oral tradition. Think Nat Geo meets Narcos, meets the Godfather meets Homer. 

And it generally works pretty well. The end result is that, despite its appearance here as a windswept, post-apocalytic wasteland, I ended up wanting to visit the Guajira peninsula and its Wayuu occupants and Gallego and Guerra's film joins Burning and Shoplifters in consideration for my favourite flick of 2019. 

Quibbles. It makes the standard 'based on true events' claim at the start, but apparently there is no evidence that either the Wayuu or the Peace Corps had a significant role in Colombia's Bonanza Marimbera. 

And if one is paying attention here, they might just as well have been dealing in coffee rather than weed, because most of the unfortunate events derive from character faults and social fault-lines that were there anyway. And on a couple of occasions I found myself thinking 'he really didn't need to do that', which would be a serious failing in any epic of the old school. 

Rapayet's kingpin crib in the desert has to be one of the best stylised locations in recent cinema.