I don’t have any difficulty opening a window

I find it hard photographing a yeti

It’s easy for me to fall over

I have a hard time memorizing the Holy Koran

It’s not tricky for me to buy new socks

I can’t master the art of preparing a soufflé

I’m really quite good at dressing up as Boadicea

I’m hopeless at interrogating war criminals

I’m a dab hand at refining uranium

Besos para todos

-          Sheen

Is Alfred Hitchcock the world’s most overrated filmmaker? Or should that award go to Pedro Almodóvar? Well, I have enjoyed more Almodóvar films than Hitchcock films, but the few Hitchcock films that I have enjoyed have provided me with more enjoyment than the Almodóvar films, and if there’s one Hitchcock film that never ceases to please me, and I say this after watching it again recently, it’s North by Northwest.

I’m including this in our “Movie & Booze” section so I had better start by making some reference to the drink aspect. The main character, Roger Thornhill (or should I say Robert Kaplan, heh heh, nudge nudge, wink wink) as played flawlessly by Cary Grant, has the stunning good taste to order a Gibson when he’s on the train, dodging the law and being bewitched by Eve Marie Saint who is unergetically playing the part of Eve Kendell. Now, for those of you who don’t know what a Gibson is, let me tell you it’s not a guitar. Well, it is, but not only. A Gibson is like a dry martini but with a pickled onion instead of an olive.

Now let’s see.

I have personally asked nine barmen /waiters for a Gibson in the last nine days and not one of them has known what I was talking about. When I have explained what a Gibson is, they have either grimaced, giggled, winced or shrugged. The point of the matter is, there is a crass ignorance stroke cultural lagoonism going on here in Zaragozan hostelry and I don’t think we’re limiting this to Zaragoza, oh no.

Pickled onions will always have the edge over olives. This is as true for cocktails as it is for anything else and I will leave their multifarious applications to your imagination which I sincerely doubt is as salacious as mine but good on you if I err.

Other drinks mentioned in North by Northwest are Scotch and Bourbon. I poured myself an inch of Ballantine’s when Eve poured Roger the same; he had his with water and urged there be no ice and I believe this is what the experts recommend, but actually I usually go for a bit of ice although on this occasion I didn’t because everything was cold already: the whisky, the glass, the room, me.

And Eve Marie Saint is cold, too. I have never taken to that actress. She’s not icy or cool or anything, she’s just cold. And the thing between her and Cary Grant is a bit creepy. He was 54 when this film was made and she was 36. Hitchcock knocks off ten years and decides that Eve Kendell has to be 26 years old, for reasons best known to him.

A lot has been written about Hitchcock’s misogyny and sure enough, our Eve comes across as the most unreliable double agent the CIA could come up with and we get the feeling that Hitch wouldn’t have minded if her lover Vandamm were to boot her out of the plane as planned.

Vandamm’s sidekick Leonard is played by the wondrous Martin Landau, who deserved a bigger part before getting shot on Mt Rushmore.

Anyway. This is a great film all round and Cary Grant is enormous. And I challenge you to sip a Gibson next time you watch it.

Read and learn, o people

It’s early January as I write and I’m in the mood to look for role models to inspire people to be improved versions of themselves. Notice that I don’t include myself in that number – not that I’m unimprovable, but rather that I am my own role model… but more of that later.

One chappy I’ve always thought would make a super role model is Nahusha, one of the supporting characters in the great Sanskrit classic for all the family, the Mahabharata. Nahusha is a murderous, lecherous king who envies the gods. Unwittingly, he has been emulated in recent times by such fun-lovers as Silvio Berlusconi and Cristiano Ronaldo. If he didn’t have quite so much blood on his hands, he’d have a lot going for himself. He certainly gave as good as he got and never took it lying down. Let’s overlook his incestuous nature for now and grant him an AAA- score.

Patience is a virtue and resignation is a blessing, says the Prophet. He was almost certainly referring to the character of Ishvar Darji, the hard-toiling tailor in A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s 1995 novel. Ever optimistic despite the grueling realities of Bombay in the 1960’s which is tantamount to Zaragoza in 2011, Ishvar leads by example and dies by the sword of his own smile. Abject misery, gruesome sickness, dire poverty, yes, and your point is…? A born loser, his prize is to have been born at all.

Determination and a hankering for the superficially infeasible are boxes ticked on the calling card of Gibreel Farishta, he of The Satanic Verses, penned by the one and only Salman Rushdie. Enslaved by his passions, which ultimately lead him to murder and suicide but what the hell, Farishta is an inspiration for those of you who still think life is worth fighting for. And just because he believes he’s the archangel Gabriel doesn’t mean he’s off his rocker.

May they be an inspiration for you all.

-          Heen xxx

Accept no imitations

Sheen says :

Hi there, my lovelies. As 2011 grinds to a close, I thought it was a good moment to reflect on those things which rile us, that which we detest, etc. We have put up with it for at least a year and in many cases much longer and there comes a point, doesn’t there.

So, with no further ado about nothing, let me kick off with swans. God, I hate swans. They get away with murder and I don’t know if it’s the work of Hans Christian Andersen or Danny Kaye or what, but it appears that swans get carte blanche when they ought to be getting life. Just look at their sneaky eyes, their arrogant neck, their nouveau riche plumage… White swans are bad enough, but those black ones really take the biscuit – pretentious, hypocritical, reactionary… yeeuch.

Second place on my List Of Loathing (LOL) goes to instant coffee. Actually, this is really about the people who drink the stuff; I shouldn’t blame the beverage itself, ah well, what the hell, I hate it too. That taste of ash, that thin chalky acrid scour as it forces its way down the esophagus… Why bother, honestly, why bother. 2012 could so easily be the year that all that stinky poison that comes in glass jars is banned once and for all.

And rounding off my hating rating is Downton Abbey. This appalling nonsense has become a huge commercial success, a critics’ delight and a popular favourite, which just goes to show that the world of entertainment has gone to the dogs. It is touted as a “period drama series” and is even spoken of in the same breath as Brideshead Revisited but obviously some dolts have chosen to overlook the fact that Brideshead is art and Downton is otherwise. This sorry TV show is a foul pastiche of a period drama. Plot and artistry take a back seat, and costume and cliché take over. Sumptuous it may be, to be sure, but lacking all artistic merit.

Is good taste dead? Sigh.

oooh I can just smell that coffee

Didn't I just paint this?

I woke up one morning a few weeks ago aware I was able to do things I had never been able to do before. My fingers twitched. I realized I was looking at things in a new way. I knew I was a painter.

I got my hands on a piece of canvas and searched for the oil paints that I had bought years ago when I thought I’d have a go at oil painting, it can’t be that hard, I’d said, but it was and I’d put everything away in a drawer.

Feverishly I painted. I knew what I wanted to paint. It was a vase with flowers. I painted from memory. I didn’t need to see the vase or the flowers. I didn’t copy from a photo. I created a painting of flowers that grew in my brain.

I painted all morning and most of the afternoon. I finished suddenly. I knew when the painting was finished, there was no doubt in my mind, no cautious last-minute brush strokes, no wondering about patching up this bit there or that bit there. My vase with flowers was done.

I called my friend Alberto. He and I share a lot of tastes in art and books and films and stuff and I wanted him to have a look at my painting and tell me what he thought of it. He laughed when I told him I’d painted a vase of flowers that day and promised to come and see it the next day.

Alberto took a long look at it, then at me. He looked as though he was going to say something, but said nothing until I said, “Well? What do you think?” and he said, “Well, it’s really good. I had no idea you mastered this technique” and I could see he had more to say, but he didn’t want to, so I asked him if he had anything else to say about it.

 “Why did you copy this painting?” he asked.

“Copy?”

“Yes. I mean, it’s a nice painting, but why not paint your own?”

I was surprised, to say the least. Alberto then explained that the “original” was a painting by one Odilon Redon, a painter I had never heard of but there you go, I can’t be expected to know all the painters in the world, can I.

And, in fact, I’m glad I had never heard of Odilon Redon. That proved I had not copied the painting, that it was an original, it was MY original.

We looked for the Odilon painting online and there it was. Odilon Redon had got there before me. He had a thing about painting flowers in vases, I could see. He must have painted dozens of very similar paintings, flowers in vases. But I didn’t pay much attention to them. I shut the laptop down and immediately set about painting another vase with flowers, as soon as Alberto had left.

I know I painted this

No sooner had I finished, 24 hours later, I checked online and found the exact same painting had been painted previously by our friend Odilon. This was very weird. So I decided not to paint any more.

And who painted this?

I’ve always had a penchant for Tolstoy. I love his rolling, roaring, rumbling blockbusters, packed with stirring adventures, colourful characters, exquisite details and deep philosophical musings. But when I mention Tolstoy, at a cocktail party, say, or in the dole queue, or at a black mass, wherever, people always come out with, “Oh but he’s so booooring”. This is almost always because his stuff tends to be on the long side.

Recently, I unearthed a copy of Hadji Murad, Tolstoy’s posthumous novel, which had found its way into an old suitcase that, in its turn, had found its way into the attic. It was in good company: several other childhood favourites such as the “Swallows and Amazons” books and Trotsky’s “Lessons of Spain” were nestling in the same case. I must have been about ten when I read Hadji Murad, understood precious little, decided to pretend I adored it, and squirrelled it away again, lest Sheen should locate it.

Anyway, I recently reread it and now I realize that I have the perfect ammunition to employ when any interlocutor accuses Tolstoy of being long and boring.

War and Peace is 1386 pages long, Anna Karenina is 788, Resurrection is over 500, but good old Hadji is just 150.

And yet, despite that, Tolstoy crams in everything the heart could desire. Adventure, politics, love, existential grief, betrayal, duplicity, death (plenty of the latter)…

And yet, come to think of it, Hadji Murad wouldn’t be the right choice to use as ammo for one simple reason: I don’t think very highly of it.

And yet, it is held to be a great work of literature. Harold Bloom not only refers to it as “canonical”, he even goes a bit overboard and says it’s “the best story he’s ever read”. No, honestly.

I don’t get it. The novel is based on a true story. Hadji Murad was, by today’s standards, a Chechnyan terrorist. He sided with the Russians when he fell out with his comrade Shamil, who imprisoned his family, understandably enough. Then Hadji got pissed off with waiting for the Russians to kill Shamil and rescue his family, so he decided to do the job himself. He killed a few Russian soldiers and a few of the locals and then they chopped his head off.

All the other characters in the book keep going on about how brave and noble Hadji is, but hang on, he betrays his fellow freedom-fighters, he abandons his family, then ignores his new allies, and ends up killing people on both sides. Now maybe there’s something I have missed, but it seems to me that even Tolstoy is rooting for this guy, this great, proud, indomitable spirit. Is there some devious irony that I am overlooking?

Certainly, the other characters come off worse. Czar Nicholas is a pervert and a coward; the peasants are like sheep and the soldiers are all hooligans.

The story starts near the end of Hadji’s life, as though we just got to watch the last episode of a TV series, so we don’t know that much about the guy’s previous exploits (presumably glorious and possibly treacherous and/or gory so maybe Tolstoy doesn’t want to show us this), or much about his family (enough is revealed about his son Yussuf, however, for us to see that there are some issues Hadji ought to be working on, such as when Yussuf is tempted to side with Hadji’s enemy Shamil, just to spite his father).

It’s quite an exciting read, fast-paced in parts and glumly introspective in part, but I think you would have to sympathise with Hadji to enjoy the tale fully, and I don’t. And if you look at the man’s life objectively, you know fine well what’s going to happen to him, and it’s almost a relief when he gets his come-uppance.

I am sad to say I don’t read Russian, so maybe one of the causes of my disappointment with this little novel was the translation. I didn’t find the prose particularly attractive and another thing that I found irritating was that it was peppered with unhelpful footnotes. Anyone who has read any Russian literature already knows that a versta is just over a kilometer, an isba is a small wooden house and lapti are something like clogs. So why not just write kilometer, hut and clogs and have done.

I’m going to put my copy of Hadji Murad back in the attic now. I will give it another read in about ten years’ time and maybe by then I will have worked out a way to get more out of it. Meanwhile, I have other fish to fry.

I am planning to deep fry a succulent-looking whiting that I fished out of the lake near my house when I was scuba diving in the Caribbean this morning. I aim to dust it with oatmeal and let it frazzle in mongoose fat for approximately 6 minutes. I shall serve it on a bed of rocket science and will not be forgetting the hunks of crusty white loaves that memories like this are made of.

Приятного аппетита!

They’ll stone ya when you’re watching the news

And they say the Greeks need more austerity.

Fire more teachers, bail out the banks,

That’s the way to reach prosperity.

 Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.

Mona tried to tell me

None of that was related

So I waited

And got deflated

Speaking to some French girl

Who says she knows me well

But she breaks just like a little girl

Because the risk premium has them all in stitches

Waiting in line for their geranium kiss

Watching the euro gnaw the bones of the hand that fed it.

Sure, occupy Wall Street and the Puerta del Sol

But where are you tonight, sweet Marie?

Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner

Daniel Defoe

1719

Page 100, Line 1:

In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to

Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie

1980

Page 100, Line 1:

were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I stepped on to the

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

1877

Page 100, Line 1:

sister-in-law, and astonished everybody by her boldness – she wanted

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

1997

Page 100, Line 1

Her dress has got a tear

La mala hora

Gabriel García Márquez

1962

Page 100, line 1:

Trinidad había encontrado los nidos. Explicó cómo

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

1958

Page 100, Line 1:

It was in the second year of Okonkwo’s exile that his friend, Obierika,

Nick Hornby

How To Be Good

2001

Page 100, Line 1:

whole of the meal, even though my mother talks so much that

Valour has its bounds as well as other virtues, which, once transgressed, the next step is into the territories of vice; so that by having too large a proportion of this heroic virtue, unless a man be very perfect in its limits, which upon the confines are very hard to discern, he may very easily unawares run into temerity, obstinacy, and folly. From this consideration it is that we have derived the custom, in times of war, to punish, even with death, those who are obstinate to defend a place that by the rules of war is not tenable; otherwise men would be so confident upon the hope of impunity, that not a henroost but would resist and seek to stop an army.

But forasmuch as the strength or weakness of a fortress is always measured by the estimate and counterpoise of the forces that attack it —for a man might reasonably enough despise two culverins, that would be a madman to abide a battery of thirty pieces of cannon—where also the greatness of the prince who is master of the field, his reputation, and the respect that is due unto him, are also put into the balance, there is danger that the balance be pressed too much in that direction. And it may happen that a man is possessed with so great an opinion of himself and his power, that thinking it unreasonable any place should dare to shut its gates against him, he puts all to the sword where he meets with any opposition, whilst his fortune continues; as is plain in the fierce and arrogant forms of summoning towns and denouncing war, savouring so much of barbarian pride and insolence, in use amongst the Oriental princes, and which their successors to this day do yet retain and practise. And in that part of the world where the Portuguese subdued the Indians, they found some states where it was a universal and inviolable law amongst them that every enemy overcome by the king in person, or by his lieutenant, was out of composition.

And, to this purpose, in reading histories, which is everybody’s subject, I use to consider what kind of men are the authors: if they be persons that profess nothing but mere letters, I, in and from them, principally observe and learn style and language; if physicians, I the rather incline to credit what they report of the temperature of the air, of the health and complexions of princes, of wounds and diseases; if lawyers, we are from them to take notice of the controversies of rights and wrongs, the establishment of laws and civil government, and the like; if divines, the affairs of the Church, ecclesiastical censures, marriages, and dispensations; if courtiers, manners and ceremonies; if soldiers, the things that properly belong to their trade, and, principally, the accounts of the actions and enterprises wherein they were personally engaged; if ambassadors, we are to observe negotiations, intelligences, and practices, and the manner how they are to be carried on.

Notwithstanding, we may on the other side consider that so precise and implicit an obedience as this is only due to positive and limited commands. The employment of ambassadors is never so confined, many things in their management of affairs being wholly referred to the absolute sovereignty of their own conduct; they do not simply execute, but also, to their own discretion and wisdom, form and model their master’s pleasure. I have, in my time, known men of command checked for having rather obeyed the express words of the king’s letters, than the necessity of the affairs they had in hand. Men of understanding do yet, to this day, condemn the custom of the kings of Persia to give their lieutenants and agents so little rein, that, upon the least arising difficulties, they must fain have recourse to their further commands; this delay, in so vast an extent of dominion, having often very much prejudiced their affairs; and Crassus, writing to a man whose profession it was best to understand those things, and pre-acquainting him to what use this mast was designed, did he not seem to consult his advice, and in a manner invite him to interpose his better judgment?

Just a thought. Anyway, enjoy the new season.

Love, Sheen XXX

Heen says, admiringly:

So simple, so clever, so deep and so light. If only I could write as well as Ha Jin I would be able to tell you why this is such a good novel.

Hemingway and García Márquez stare like flowers on a quilt that ripples, hanging on a washing line in China, my China, my home China, my own China, second half of the 1900’s.

The intellect nudges the gut. A sparrow pecks in the dust and the soul shrinks.

It’s great you came back to read this. You will thank me for W_______________ as I thank you for w________________.

Now get hold of “Waiting” by Ha Jin and close this window.