Two Years Back in Paris

Today I celebrated two years back in Paris; though I have not made as much progress in certain areas as I would have liked in that time I can't say I regret coming back here. Today I visited an Irish dentist recommended to me by an American friend - I lost a filling last week - and I discovered that the man was born in the very same village I grew up in. What are the chances? That's not the real reason I feel at home here, but being only an hour away from Ireland sometimes helps.

Où est le Centre de Georges Pompidou?

The Pomipidou Centre, or Beaubourg as it is known to Parisians, celebrates its thirtieth birthday tomorrow. Conceived by and named after the late second President of the Fifth Republic, who died from cancer while in office, the centre was reviled by many of the same people that flock to it these days, i.e. the French left, who couldn't stomach a man of the right, albeit an impressively cultured one, putting his stamp on the cultural landscape of the city. Libération was one of the august organs of the left that slammed it in 1977 though their article on it in Saturday's paper was a great deal kinder. The building is now the third most-visited monument in France, after the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, and the Museum is the second most-visited modern art museum in the world, with only Tate Modern ahead of it.

I first arrived in Paris shortly after its refurbishment for the Millenium and I spent hours in there visiting both the National Museum of Modern Art, which is its biggest attraction, and the Public Reference Library, which is one of the most impressive of its kind I have ever seen. It is however a victim of its own success as the queues, particularly during winter are fearsomely long, and though I pass by the Centre about ten times a week, I don't go in much these days, preferring to use the MK2 Beaubourg cinema next door, though the Pompidou's own cinema is superb and great value for money. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano's structure, with its services famously on the exterior, has been slammed as a 'gas factory', which is, to my mind, rather a compliment. It took inspiration from the seminal sixties architectural comic-book-cum-pamphlet Archigram, and stands as that publication's most realised scion. Piano still has an atelier across the street on rue de Beaubourg, and though the surrounding area is disappointingly tacky, sandwiched as it is between the wholesale glumness of Les Halles and the commercialised Old World charm of the Marais, the building itself is still an amiable - and still audacious, behemoth. And the views from the top aren't bad either.

School of Hard Knocks

Thanks, once again to Dublin Opinion for this one, regarding the dashing of Ulick McEvaddy's hopes of turning Knock Airport into Mayo's very own Airstrip One. Ulick, you may recall, claimed a couple of weeks back that he was open to allowing US military flights refuel at the airport, while at the same time remaining reticent about his own lucrative impending contracts with the US Navy. According to a news report from the Mayo News, Mr Liam Scollan, CEO of the airport has stated that military flights will not be considered under any circumstances; indeed Mr Scollan said, in greater detail that 'we would not see serving military flights which do not have the support of the UN as consistent with the policy and aims of Ireland West Airport. We would have ethical problems and we wanted to make an unequivocal statement to people to say that we do not ever intend to handle those flights.' An admirable outbreak of backbone among Irish administration, something which has not been seen for some years now.

Knock will however be handling transatlantic flights soon enough, and Deppity John Perry from across the border in County Sligo, is claiming that he is responsible for this development, having bent the air of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg during the visit of the Big Cheese (and big supporter of the Iraq war) to Seanachie's homestead of Ballymote, County Sligo last summer. Well, he would, wouldn't he?

Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting in Sweden

Sweden, according to a piece in today's Libération, has just lifted its ban on professional boxing, which had been in force since 1969. A 'Comeback Gala' of eleven fights marked the return of the sport in Gothenberg on Saturday night. Boxing has long been a bête noir of middle-class lefties (but rarely of working-class ones) and Sweden has had it in for it for a long time: I remember, when visiting Stockholm's Olympic Stadium, venue for the 1912 games, reading that the boxing tournament was not held that year due to its illegality in the kingdom. Which obviously means that there was an interregnum of legality between then and 1969.

Pro boxing didn't go underground in Sweden, it merely moved across the Gulf of Bothnia to the Swedish-speaking Finnish island of Åland and it attracted a big following on satellite TV, numbering among its supporters former Prime Minister Göran Persson. Now only Norway, Iceland, Cuba and North Korea remain as countries where pro-boxing is forbidden (though of course the Cubans and the Koreans have little problem with the sport per se). Sweden is not going bananas in its tolerance of the sport though, the fights on Saturday night's card were all limited to four rounds of three minutes.

You Either Have It or You Don't

I have begun to worry if I am a completely hard-hearted person for finding Nicolas Philibert's celebrated and universally loved documentary Être et avoir to be dull and, at times, annoying. The account of a village elementary school run by a single schoolmaster nearing retirement, a Mr Georges Lopez, the film was a huge hit on its release five years ago and was praised for the precision of its observations and the beauty of its filming. Having eventually seen it I can agree that Philibert has a good documentary eye and that his exteriors, at least, are impressive but my big problem with it starts from the very first interior, all garishly lit, to look like a fiction film effectively. Perhaps Philibert had one eye on the box office at the time.

In addition to this the film seems to be a romanticised view of school and childhood that has always been very popular in French cinema, fuelling such films as the two versions of Les Choristes, Louis Malle's Au Revoir les enfants, the better films of Claude Miller, such as La Meilleure facon de marcher and La Classe de neige, and which has also influenced the maddening popularity of that woman-child pipsqueak Amélie Poulain. Philibert, in the DVD notes, claims that he wanted to avoid nostalgia in the film, but if he thought he managed that, well maybe he needs a bit more distance from it. Overall the biggest problem I had with it was the fact that it was just a bit too dull. And I generally lap documentaries of this sort up. And M. Lopez then took the filmmakers to court after the film's success claiming a share in the profits because his teaching methods were supposedly part of the conception. The court dismissed his case, rightly judging that he was having a laugh.

Frêche Out of Socialists

Georges Frêche, President of the Languedoc-Roussillon region and former Mayor of Montpellier has been expelled by the French Socialist Party, because of comments he made late last year complaining about the number of black players in the French football team, similar to 'reservations' expressed by one Jean-Marie Le Pen during last year's World Cup finals. Strange that the expulsion should happen now, considering that Frêche was this week convicted of racism, having called a group of Harkis (i.e. Algerian Arabs that fought on the French side during the Algerian war) 'sub-human'. Frêche, himself complains that the expulsion was timed to coincide with Ségolène Royal's trip to the French Caribbean, where votes in this year's Presidential elections are to be won in Martinique, Guadaloupe and French Guyana. Frêche claims to be a 'good friend' of Royal, who, like him was elected a regional President in 2004 (in her case, of Poitou-Charentes), and he is a bit miffed at being hung out to dry now. Frêche also claims that he has been misinterpreted, just as he was in the Harki case. Should have kept your mouth shut then, Georges.

Platini Takes On The G-Force

Michel Platini, the greatest European footballer of the 1980s and one of the most likeable people in football administration (there is not much competition, admittedly) has succeeded in his quest to be elected President of UEFA, beating off the incumbent of seventeen years Lennart Johansson. One can forgive Platini his friendship with number one fool Sepp Blatter as he plans to restructure the Champions' League by making it more what it was before the bullies of the G14 muscled in, a genuine competition of Champions. More teams from the lesser nations will have a chance to compete and though this may not mean more exciting football at first after a few years it is likely that a greater spread of revenues will allow teams from countries such as the Norway, the Czech Republic, Scotland and elsewhere compete on a more level playing field with the big boys. The G14 is one of the more distasteful developments in World football in recent years, allowing a carve-up of spoils among mostly underachieving giants of yesteryear and some clubs that barely warrant a place in there at all, such as Paris Saint-Germain, who will possibly be plying their trade in the wintry provinces of France's Ligue 2 next year. To see some of these franchises stymied in their attempts to dominate and expect a God-given right to participation in Europe's most lucrative sports tournament would be a joy to see as well as being good for the game. Best of luck to Platini in his efforts to stop them.

Suffer Little Children

It's not often I post on a film I walk out of but the particular violence with which I raised myself out of my seat and left Little Children warrants mention. The director is Todd Field, a man who I have followed ever since he starred, over ten years ago, in Walking and Talking by Nicole Holofcener, one of the best US indy movies of the last twenty years, and, needless to say, one of the most underrated too. It was a charming, witty, unpretentious, low-key gem and though Field was one of the lesser lights of the cast, which also included Catherine Keener, Anne Heche, Liev Schrieber and Kevin Corrigan, he was given the best line of the film. Having had enough of hours of Shawn Colvin on a road trip, he moans to the women in the car: 'How much longer do we have to listen to this vagina music?' All the funnier for having been written by a woman.

Holofcener went on to direct quite a lot of Sex and the City while Field has himself become a director, starting off on a high with In the Bedroom, which was nominated for five Oscars five years ago. I have yet to see that but I can't say I really want to having seen enough of his latest effort, an arch 'serious comedy' about a paedophile lurking in suburban Connecticut. Kate Winslet is a young mother who starts an affair with a househusband whom she meets at the local playground. The Madame Bovary connotations are hammered home by the mention of said book at one of the local housewives' Book Club. And then there is the ever-so-ironic voiceover that sounds like it is filched from a novel by one of those tiresome young over-verbose Yank novelists such as David Foster Wallace or Dave Eggers. Film that sounds like literature is usually dubious enough; film that sounds like bad literature should be put down at birth. The local toughs have also started forming a vigilante group that is viewed with distaste by all the goodies in the film - Winslet and her lover (played by Patrick Wilson) and, of course, Field himself. The paedophile might be bad enough but those getting too het up about him are as bad; thus lies the moral of a film made by facile lefty thirtysomethings slagging off facile square thirtysomethings. One would have thought that Field would have studied American Beauty closely and resolved not to make a crock of shit like it. But I suppose some people's ambitions lie elsewhere.

In any case it is not below Field to cast the paedophile as the stock weirdo of modern legend, an ugly, balding, loner ogre to match those in traditional fairytales. First, while on an exclusion order from children's recreation areas he takes a dip in a crowded pool of kids in full view of their parents. When my disbelief got weary from being suspended for too long by this it gave up a couple of scenes later when the perv's Norman Bates-like relationship with his mother is revealed. That was as far as it got. When you are having your intelligence being insulted by utter shite as this it is time to go. Not surprisingly this film was in the running for Oscars, and Winslet picked up a nomination for her role as the frumped-up housewife. There is a good reason why I don't go to many Hollywood films anymore: even the ones aimed at adults, the so-called 'quality' pictures are infantile. And they still find the time to be pretentious, God bless them.

Foyled Again

Nordie Taigs have been put in their place by the High Court in Belfast, which ruled that Derry City Council does not have the right to change the city's name from the colonial-era 'Londonderry' to its rightful name, by which it is known to practically everybody in Northern Ireland, on both sides of the religious divide. As the name was granted (or shall we say, decreed) by royal charter in 1662, it can only be changed again by legislation or by royal prerogative. So, now they know up in Derry. Not theirs to give away, that name.

Black Book Back

Like most people that scribble things down, my notebook is one of the few things that I cannot stand losing, yet it happens to me far too often. Yet I usually get it back when it does. My current Moleskine has led as charmed an existence as the hero of a Jerry Bruckheimer production, having been lost three times in the past three months, and each time finding its way back to me, twice courtesy of strangers who work in cinemas and once courtesy of my sister, who found it on the floor of the Bernard Shaw on Dublin's South Richmond Street after a night's drinking just before Christmas. The latest person to return it to me was somebody who found it in the Gaumont Opéra cinema a few weeks back, lost after a screening of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (ironic, given that the black book of the film's title looks very like a Moleskine). French people are particularly good for returning items of little monetary value but of real personal worth such as notebooks - much more so, I regret to say, than Irish people, who are, in my experience, more likely to toss it into the bin on finding it. I owe the person who returned it to me today a wee present by way of appreciation and I should also be a bit more careful when leaving the cinema in future.

Whatshisname...

How offensive is it not having your name remembered? It happened to me a couple of months ago when a casual acquaintance shouted 'Dave' across an empty room at me and got disgruntled when I didn't answer her. I wasn't terribly offended - in fact I was a bit relieved as the lady in question is a bit of hard work at the best of times - but I am often sensitive enough about getting other people's names wrong. Having worked as a teacher for the last few months, thus necessitating recalling the names of about seventy different people every week, I have made a few mistakes along the way, occasionally because of genuine absent-mindedness, occasionally because of a bizarre mental block regarding certain individuals. And then there are certain people whose appearances morph into those of their classmates, at least from their teacher's point of view. Of course it is ridiculous, especially considering that these very people barely know one another and they probably have little in common so to hear their teacher confounding them is as perplexing as it might be hurtful.

One class I had before Christmas included three French guys, all in their late twenties or early thirties, named Francois, Fabrice and Patrick, whose names, despite teaching them for six weeks, I could never place without recourse to a careful study of the attendance sheet and the respective types of pen and ink that they had used to sign it. In another class I more than once mixed up two middle-aged women, which caused them annoyance, and no end of embarrassment to myself. The other day I had my worst experience yet, worst because I had not forgotten the names of the students but I had nonetheless momentarily mistaken one for the other. And it looked worse still (or at least to my over-sensitive mind) because the two girls happened to be both black (and both sitting opposite each other in front of me); one was from Haiti and the other from the Central African Republic and both are, not surprisingly, noticeably different in both personality and appearance, but I still called the wrong name. True it is the only time I have mixed the two ladies up but I felt rather small at the time. Being stripped of your individuality is no doubt a difficult thing to take, and though the mistake seemed to be taken in good spirit by both - and by everyone else in the class - it still made me feel stupid. And there is the guilty idea that forgetting somebody's name reveals a blind spot that one would rather not have.

Logan's (Burger) Bun

I'd like to think I'm cutting-edge but I have to doff my cap off to the lads and ladies at Blogorrah for this astounding analysis of Johnny Logan's McDonald's ad (or is that McDonalds' Johnny Logan ad?) It's strange that it took Ashbourne's greatest export after Hunky-Dory's so long to pass through the Golden Arches. Would have loved to have got to this first but I'm an exile from my ex-isle. I'm still quite good at what I do, if you know what I mean.

What You Saying About My Mother?

Is Trevor Brennan this year's Zinédine Zidane? Ulster claim that the insults directed at him couldn't possibly have been sectarian. Of course not, though it is curious they are so sure given that not even Spanish football club presidents have ever claimed to be able to speak for every single one of their fans. The Nordies claim they were only slagging off Brennan's Irish pub in Toulouse, which given the general standard of those places in France, probably is a kip.

Sybille's Right

A few albums that featured in other people's lists of 2006 but only made it in their entirety to the Underachieving iPod this month: the first is Spank Rock's 'YoYoYoYoYoYo' (someone should write an AppleScript to easily reproduce all those 'yo's'), the Philly/Baltimore hip-hop group that I knew a little of last year from their scurrilous anti-homage 'Rick Rubin' and their fantastic remix of 'Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above' by CSS, which I have nattered about quite a lot here. In a year that was strangely quiet for US hip-hop, the album is set apart by its rough style and aggression, which has receded in vogue Stateside recently. The sound is dirty and the references a bit unexpected but it's a good one for dancing. Needs a few more listens though for that breakthrough.

As is the case with Grizzly Bear's 'Yellow House'. The latest bunch of weirdos based in Brooklyn to release an album last year, their production is a bit too lo-fi and wilfully obscure to grab you but there are a couple of songs that are particularly memorable: 'On a Neck, On a Spit' and 'Knife', which coincidentally is about to be covered by CSS, for a double-A-side, the flip of which will be Grizzly Bear's cover of CSS' own 'Alala'.

Best of all of is an album recorded in 1973, and which upon its belated release last year received little attention outside of France and Germany. The record is 'Colour Green' by the then-young German singer-songwriter Sybille Baier, who at the time of the recording was known only for a small role in Wim Wenders' wonderful Alice in the Cities. She has since lived in Florida and the release was prompted by an interest in the shelved masters by her son. Like Vashti Bunyan, who also emerged from obscurity in the past couple of years, Baier is a singer from another time, her beautifully wistful melodies picked on a bare acoustic guitar sounding bizarre when heard for the first time on digital playback. The most obvious comparisons are Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen before he started cluttering the studio with unnecessary instruments, but it is the note-perfect, unwavering whispers of Baier that make you grateful that this album eventually saw the light of day. Hopefully, she'll follow Bunyan's example and record a second one thirty years on, and like Bunyan's 'Lookaftering' it'll probably sound like the second was recorded six months after the first.

Goodbye Cruel Word

Upon hearing about a friend from Dublin, who has been cast off rather heartlessly by a friend of his, a highly-rated young Irish novelist who dedicated his second novel to the now-spurned friend, I got thinking about the capacity of writers for cruelty. People have long feared an acquaintance who could humiliate them in print, and Oliver St. John Gogarty will forever be better remembered as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan than for his own literary work after his unhappy cohabiting with the young James Joyce, though Gogarty was far from the only one lampooned by Joyce. It is often journos that inspire the most fear, such as Burt Lancaster's diabolical gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker in The Sweet Smell of Success but getting done in by a celebrated novelist, whose work is likely to last is probably the most traumatising. Clare Bloom was horrified to see herself reincarnated as an ageing alcoholic harpy by her former husband Philip Roth in I Married a Communist.

Peter Carey's former wife has suffered similar treatment in his last novel Theft: A Love Story. A friend of mine met Carey at a reading about ten years ago and he remarked at the time on what a lovely chap he was, exactly the sort that would get torn apart mercilessly were he to be a character in one of his own novels. It appears he might be a different sort altogether in print. There is a degree of sadism necessary to create fiction, a willingness to inflict the gravest injustices on one's own characters and often people you know yourself. And it is not uncommon for the bitchiest of writers to be people who are as demure and mild-mannered as can be in everyday life. Beckett, though not one that anyone recalls as being a social wimp, was someone that got annoyed with what he perceived to be fools around him and he attributed his return to France on the 1st of September 1939 to the parochialism of the Dublin literary set in the Palace Bar on that very day, ignoring the events on the continent; he said that he would 'prefer to be in France at war than Ireland at peace'. But Sam had already a bit of previous with those very same local poets, having rather cruelly using former psychiatric patient Austin Clarke as the base for his poet Austin Ticklepenny 'turning out his pentameter per pint' in Murphy. I was at college with Clarke's granddaughter and we always kept our copies of Murphy out of her sight. I don't know if she has ever read it.

Climates, Clandestini and Revolutions

There are few film directors that would cast themselves as a rapist in a film, much less resist making the character an out-and-out villain. The Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, in his latest film Climates, has done just that and what is most disturbing about his character's rape of a female friend is the fact that the woman calls him again and seems to be on good terms with him. Distasteful and morally dubious as this is, it is nonetheless credible, as viewed within the film's narrative. Ceylan's character, a lecturer in architecture, is an untrustworthy, supercilious sort, who lies to his estranged wife in a vain attempt to win her back, only to change his mind again. But, every villain has their reasons, as Jean Renoir once said, and even this unpleasant man's quotidian life, so impressively delineated, is compulsively watchable. The penultimate scene where he lies to his wife and reduces her to tears is both uncomfortable and familiar to anyone who has gone through a painful break-up. There is also a dream-sequence where the younger wife, Bahar - played by the director's real-life wife Ebru - imagines she is being buried in sand by her husband. It is one of the few I have ever seen in a film that is in any way persuasive.

After his previous film, Uzak, which was an arthouse hit a couple of years ago, Ceylan proves himself to be one of cinema's finest chroniclers of human emotions. In Uzak, a depressive Istanbul photographer puts up his country cousin and the relation between them quickly becomes strained. There is a similar air of pessimism in Climates, though one shot through with a beautiful visual texture - Ceylan is also an accomplished photographer - and the performances, though quiet and intimiste, are far from the catatonically mannered ones so familiar from countless arthouse releases. Marital difficulties make up a significant sub-genre of cinema, with classics such as Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage and Antonioni's La Notte and Red Desert. The Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa, who is also a fine observer of strained relationships disappointed last year with Un Couple parfait, his first French film, which was a bit too talky for my liking. Until his next film, Climates is a more than adequate surrogate, one that confirms Ceylan as one of Europe's most redoubtable filmmakers.

There were two other decent European films I saw last week. One, Italian, entitled Saimir, directed by Francesco Munzi, about an Albanian expat teenager, who lives with his people-trafficking father and who weathers a number of cruel blows before taking things, rather foolishly into his own hands, and extracting a certain justice. It is a tough film that reminds one of the Dardenne brothers' work, La Promesse, though it has a more stately style and it lacks the Dardenne's Hardyesque eye for a crucial event that sets in train an irrevocable, tragic sequence of events. A bit jilted in parts, it is nonetheless an assured film.

The other film is 12:08, East of Bucharest, a political comedy about a local TV station's attempts to mount a televised inquest on the fifteenth anniversary of Ceaucescu's fall into whether the local town actually witnessed a revolution, meaning, did people actually protest before 12:08 on the 22nd of December 1989, at which time the dictator abdicated and dissent became safe once again? The film is a bit lopsided as the second half devotes a bit too much time to the programme itself and the central conceit of erroneously-claimed heroism is a bit jaded, having been used to claim allegiance to everything from the French resistance to participation in the Easter Rising. But there is some sharply mordant humour in the film, particularly in the depictions of the pompous textile-manufacturer-turned-TV-station-owner and the haplessly indebted alcoholic academic, who claims to have been at the fore of the local revolution all those years before. The film won the Caméra d'Or last year for its young director Corneliu Porumboiu, just thirty-one years of age, and he uses his experience as a camera operator on such a local television station for much of the humour. And there is a subtle lyricism in his direction also, such as the two montages of the streetlights turning first off and then on that bookend the film, and which also serve as a metaphor for the hesitant revolution of the town's history. Though, like the superior The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the film does not make one terribly keen to visit Romania, it is further evidence of a remarkable cinematic renaissance in the beleagured country. Porumboiu is a director to watch out for in the future.

Far-Right to Life

A surprising news article in today's Libération, which reports the attendance of 15,000 people at a pro-life march in Paris yesterday. Though France is generally considered to be well advanced in terms of family-planning and organised religion holds little sway in determining public policy, there is nonetheless a strange anomaly in its attitudes towards contraception. For instance, contraception itself was only legalised in 1972, a mere nine years before Ireland, which is surprising considering the cultural gulf between the two countries in matters of sex and family-planning. France also holds, along with Ireland and Sweden (in all, three countries that could not be more unlike one another) the highest birth-rate in Europe. What is not so surprising is the news that many of the marchers were members and supporters of the far-right, both the Front National and Phillippe de Villiers' Mouvement pour la France. De Villiers, however claims that he is not in favour of repealing the Veil law, which legalised abortion, but that he supported rather 'real family-oriented policies that permit women to keep their children.' Not all that different from the stance of a good many pro-choice activists either.

Party to Information?

Absent for the weekend due to a surfeit of activity caused by people being in town. I went to a curious party on Saturday night, which was held in an outhouse on the grounds of L'hôpital St-Louis, Paris' largest hospital. Why the hospital authorities decided to allow two hundred drunken revellers to occupy a building on the grounds is unclear, especially as there was neither a bouncer nor any admission fee. Not that there was any trouble though. Most strange was the decor of the room where the party was held; a long room that had the air of a parish hall, it was decorated on all sides with murals of pornographic cartoons, depicting various orgies and obscene images. The party itself was a much more restrained affair but the decor does limit the potential use of the building for other activities. Who organised the soirée was also unknown to me and, as there was no cover charge and everyone was free to bring their own drink, and most did, the financial motives of the organisers are equally puzzling. Not that I am complaining, the music was top-notch and the place was full of beautiful women. But I have a sneaky feeling that if I try to seek out this event again that it will have disappeared, venue and all, as if it were only a dream to begin with.

Pinter Plain Daft

Harold Pinter, Nobel-prize winner, celebrated playwright, wretched poet and would-be 'scourge of Tony Blair' (that he cannot be because one thing Pinter is quite bad at is political oratory and rhetorical debate, despite the basic soundness of his cause) was yesterday awarded France's top honour the Légion d'Honneur, an award of such dizzying prestige that it got pinned to Bruce Willis' chest a few years back. As somebody that admires Pinter's plays and who sympathises with the essence of his political views I wish he would keep his mouth shut on Iraq as his comments are embarrassingly stupid, inefficacious and serve only to discredit the anti-war left with their intemperance and inane, personal attacks. Pleading that he doesn't care anymore and he's on the way out isn't a very good excuse.

English Chavs in Racism Shock

I can't watch Big Brother from here, though, to be honest I haven't watched an episode of the show since Nasty Nick Bateman got bumped off it back in the first series. Since then it appears the nastiness has become more in vogue if the reported treatment of Shilpa Shetty is anything to go by. What is it actually like there? I get only reports from British media sources that divulge little of the magnitude of the story; there have been good pieces in The Guardian by Hari Kunzru and occasional fruitbat Germaine Greer. Kunzru's piece is particularly interesting as it notes the slightly pompous disposition of the Bollywood actress, which ruffled the feathers of the chavs a bit too much. As horrendous as the racism is, I can't find it terribly shocking either. Did anyone seriously think that English lumpenproleterians, with zero awareness, never mind knowledge, of Johnny Foreigner, would act any different when put in a room with an Asian actress, who, unlike them, can actually be called genuinely famous, known to hundreds of millions of people? Trying to exonerate one of the other tenants, who, it was suspected had called her a 'Paki', by claiming that he only called her a 'cunt' is one of the greatest pieces of mendacity yet proffered by Channel 4. And there is some stiff competition for that.

Being detached from it all I suddenly feel the yen for British TV, if not quite Big Brother itself. The farrago and its ins and outs remind me of those questions that people in English-speaking countries asked expats living in Paris at the time of the banlieue riots; the riots were far bigger news abroad, where images of burning cars fifteen miles from Paris translated as the city itself being on fire. Is Big Brother all that big over there?