Underachievement Singles of the Year

No long list here; the single has long declined in importance and now with the advent of the iPod and both legal and illegal downloading, the prominence of a song that 'leads' is in sharp abeyance. And, of course there are the cases of an admittedly great single being released, the fourth or fifth off the same album, depriving it of its emblematic force as the horse's carcass is being flogged for all its worth. There were a few good singles this past year, and two in particular that will be remembered for a long time and transcended the standing of a merely strong track. A great single does not necessarily have to be a great song, just typifying a moment in time will often do, though it would be hard to argue against the following two tracks being great:

Crazy - Gnarls Barkley

Sitting at a Parisian bar last summer I overheard a drunken Englishwoman ask the barman if he could put on 'that song by Gniles Davis'; her details were a little awry but she knew what she liked. The first single ever to hit number one on downloads alone, and then stayed there for nine weeks, is the sort of thing that Smashee and Nicees would call 'timeless' and there is a truth in that truism. While much modern soul is either content to wallow in the inert navel-gazing destined for Buddha Bar soundtracks to be played in H&M shops all over Europe, this grabs the fine floor-sweeping tradition and goes with it. Straight into things with the opening bassdrums, a string of simple minor chords and a stinging chorus that delivers the song's familiar argument, rescuing it from association with dozens of maudlin power ballads down through the years.

Though the album St. Elsewhere was not so spectacular it was nonetheless a good introduction to a duo possessed of genius and a show that is destined to run and run.


Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above - CSS

Canadian Rockers Death From Above sadly expired this year but not before they were subject to the greatest tribute song since Jonathan Richman pressed The Velvet Underground on how they got 'that sound'. It exploded on the net during the summer and though it never charted anywhere its word of mouth success was, well, phenomenal. Sythesizers, theremins, a killer bassline, clunky, ungrammatical lyrics ('you knew my dreams when they were in my head/you knew my secrets, even in bed'), and a middle-eight that invites all manner of silly dancing. Making love to the bonecrunching disco metal of Death From Above over a prolonged period of time might result in something calamitous such as compound fractures or muscular dystrophy but the comehither of lead singer LoveFoxx is sensible enough to propose the two activities one after the other. As if the song couldn't be improved, it was twice, on the remixes by Spank Rock and Diplo, both of which are available on the 12". It has to be heard.

Chronicle of a Death Foreskinned

Only a week before Christmas comes the news that Jesus' foreskin has gone missing, stolen from a shoebox in the parochial house of Calcata in Italy. I will leave it to Slate to fill in the details, but what I find shocking is not the relative fuss being made over such an item of dubious providence, but the relative lack of fuss being made. This is the godly prepuce after all, does a slight taciturnity on the part of the faithful betray a lack of belief in its really having once hung on the tip of Jesus' johnson?

Scapegoats in Libya

Six Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor have been sentenced to death by a Libyan court for their supposed involvement in the infection with HIV of 426 children. The seven, who have been detained since 1999, have been accused of being at the centre of an international plot to kill Muslims, orchestrated, of course, by Israel. Despite it being proved by dozens of independent scientific tests that many of the children had been infected for up to three years before the arrival of the nurses in the hospital in question, and despite expert testimonies such as that of Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who was among the discoverers of the AIDS virus, the court has decided to find a scapegoat for the failings and corruption of Libya's health system.

There is much hot air expelled by neocon elements about the threat to Western civilisation by 'Islamofascists', as they call them. While the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hizbullah are not in any way favourable to democratic values, in the long run they are unlikely to do much serious harm. Judgements such as these, allied with similar ideological retrogressions such as the rise of Creationism in the US and the UK, are a much greater threat. No more than anyone with a firm belief in horoscopes should be put in charge of public policy or administer courts, then neither should religious fanatics, with a disregard for scientific opinion be.

Underachievement Albums of the Year

Like any self-regarding cultural pundit worth his sodium chloride, Seanachie announces here his albums of the year, in ascending order (it's better that way - you get to scroll down in time to the drum roll):


10. Magic Potion - The Black Keys
It's not quite so good as their previous effort but Akron, Ohio's finest (possibly only?) bluesmen provided a more than adequate substitute for the White Stripes this year. The lyrics are hoary and shopworn, the riffs greasy like the change handed out in American gas stations before the advent of credit cards. In a parallel world The Black Keys would probably have been filling your tank. Download for a sample: Strange Desire.

9. Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not - Arctic Monkeys

Alex Turner has been described as a Hogarth for the SMS generation, which, the sheer pretention of that pronouncement notwithstanding, has a certain degree of accuracy about it. His lyrics are as savvy and as sharp as Mike Skinner's, and those of Paul Weller, Ray Davies, Ian Dury and others before that (perhaps going all the way back to Hogarth, Chaucer even). The music is serviceable, just as Oasis' was in the early days, but they are only 19-20 after all. They might get even better than this. Here's hoping for it; to a lifetime of rhymes such as 'Rotherham/botherin' him' and 'summat/stomach'. I bet they look good on the dancefloor too. Little bastards. Download for a sample (if you've been living on Mars this past twelve months):A Certain Romance.

8. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
Like the Arctic Monkeys, CYHSY got big on MySpace and their conquering of the world was predicted before the year began. The album manages to sound simultaneously accessible and experimental, not terribly unlike a certain New York band led by David Byrne, to whom they bear a strong resemblance. A friend of mine (currently exiled in Brooklyn) whined that they are 'for people that haven't heard of Talking Heads'. Talking who, Damien? There are enough low-key anthems here to keep light-fingered soundtrack programmers going for decades. Catchy stuff, despite themselves. Download for a sample: Heavy Metal.


7. Mi and L'au - Mi and L'au
This low-key gem was released in the UK and Ireland last year, but did not get here until January, an appropriate time for a winterly melancholic acoustic album written in a snowbound log cabin in Finland, the same cabin that adorns the cover. A couple on and offstage, the French L'au and Finnish Mi, have crafted a string of beautiful sad ballads, using as little as possible to wrench their melodies out of the chilly air. Friends of Devendra Banhart since 'before he was famous', their homecoming gig in Paris' Café de la Danse (supporting Vashti Bunyan) was a disappointment, marred by nerves and a few bum notes. But the weather's getting colder, and their album's on the turntable again... Download for a sample: Older.

6. Pieces of the People We Love - The Rapture
There are few bands that can afford to forego production by DFA and branch out instead for the very in-vogue Dangermouse, but The Rapture could. The result is a more sprightly affair than their brilliant debut 'Echoes'. The record bounces from the off, and even if there are not a huge amount of new ideas in the mix, this is music from one of the few rock bands that can make even seasoned dancers dance. Download for a sample: Don Gon Do It

5. Return to Cookie Mountain - TV on the Radio
Their name is as stupid as ever; the album's title is as silly as that of their first album, 'Bloodthirsty Babes and Desperate Youth' but TVOTR put not a foot wrong in the songwriting department. David Bowie popped in to sing, and though we don't know who did whom the favour there, the result, 'Province' was pleasing to the Underachieving ear. Elsewhere, Cookie Mountain is a wracked mix of trash guitars, electro-spirituals and the odd attempt at coaxing their pretentious fanbase into a bit of a groove. Foot-tapping stuff (albeit in slow motion). Download for a sample: Wolf Like Me

4. Gulag Orkester - Beirut
Zac Condon is only 20 (and was a year younger when he recorded this stunner) so he really ought to be out getting drunk and joyriding with his contemporaries; he's not legally allowed to drink in his native New Mexico after all. He takes his name from a nickname given to him by schoolmates because of his passion for collecting European folk music on vinyl (he was lucky he got away with a nickname, in most places he would have got an awful hammering for that). 'Gulag Orkester' with its broad range of instrumentation (ten years Sufjan Stevens' junior, he matches him for his virtuosity) and its assured assimilation of the music of the Balkans, the Levant and Mexico, might seem cynical and manufactured were it not for the age of its creator and the beauty of the plangent chants. Great title too. Download for a sample: Postcards from Italy

3. Nervous Cabaret - Nervous Cabaret
Elyas Khan, a Yorkshire man of Pakistani descent, fronts Nervous Cabaret and thus their music has been branded 'Qawwali punk' by hacks so lazy they file copy prostrate. There is a faint strain of the Islamic devotional music in the band's sound but they are more devoted, in fairness, to the high priests Tom Waits, Nick Cave and John Spencer, and Khan's voice, a voice so gravelly that it is might better be classified as 'lapidary', combined with an outrageous Yorkshire accent and mordant lyrics (check out the anti-tribute song 'Mel Gibson') ensures that the band are so original that they have thus far managed to avoid selling any records and getting any wide critical acclaim. Only the French have really plumbed for them, and if Khan, now based with the group in Brooklyn, has to leave England while public-school dullards such as Razorlight, Kasabian, The Kooks and The Guillemots prosper, the NME-prescribed future of British rock is bleak indeed. Download for a sample: Kid (sic)

2. Silent Shout - The Knife
If this album were as good as its predecessor, Deep Cuts, it would be number one, no bother, but Seanachie receives no retainer from the Dreijer siblings and so they occupy the number two berth. Not that I can really talk, as I was inexplicably unmoved by The Knife until this year. From the brooding disquiet of 'Forest Families' and 'Marble House' to the nostalgically techno-edged singles 'Like a Pen' and 'We Share Our Mothers' Health' (a commendably subtle use of an apostrophe to shame many a native English-speaker) the album is a grower from the inside out. Melodies are where you least expect them, dance beats where you least wish them to be, and the lyrics - skewed as ever in an alternative Swinglish - bear years of scrutiny. Download for a sample: We Share Our Mothers' Health.

1. Cansei de ser Sexy - CSS
Underachievement featured these charming Brazilian shitkickers as far back as July, as an antidote, if I remember rightly, to the horrors of our first encounter with Sandi Thom. Since then they have shortened their name for the international market, gone global, provoked grown men to act like teenage girls in their presence, gigged every single night and thus far kept their sanity, and released this accidental masterpiece. Accidental because they formed two years ago effectively as a joke and made it big, first in Brazil and then abroad via the Internet. But the band's self-declared technical limitations are scarcely noticeable among the ingenious synth-loops, the tight basslines and the guitars that switch effortlessly from the funk licks of 'Music is My Hot Hot Sex' to the power riffs of 'Patins'. The lyrics are also brilliant, and draw from the same strange well of global English as The Knife's, including the disarmingly beautiful 'Music is my boyfriend/ Music is my girlfriend/Music is my dead end/Music is my imaginary friend/ Music is my brother/Music is my pregnant daughter/Music is my sister/Music is my favourite mistress/ My music is where I'd like you to touch'. The album is a must-have but there is also a trove of stuff available on Limewire and other sites, such as their fantastic double-cover of 'One Way or Another' and 'Teenage Kicks', the Portuguese-language thumper 'Bezzi' and those two amazing remixes of 'Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above'. Of which, more soon. Gig of the year too. We can tell our grandchildren we were there. Download for a sample: All of it.


Seanachie also liked:

• The Greatest - Cat Power
• Riot City Blues - Primal Scream
• First Impressions of Earth - The Strokes
• In My Mind - Pharrell
• Nice and Nicely Done - The Spinto Band
• Broken Boy Soldiers - The Raconteurs
• #3 - Suburban Kids with Biblical Names
• The Warning - Hot Chip
• What the Toll Tells - Two Gallants
• Clor - Clor
• Jacket Full of Danger - Adam Green
• St. Elsewhere - Gnarls Barkley
• Ballad of the Broken Sea - Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
• Ys - Joanna Newsom
• Mr Beast - Mogwai
• Kingdom Come - Jay-Z
• Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
• The Life Pursuit - Belle & Sebastian
  

Checking Out the Girls

This time last year I caught, as the last film I saw before Christmas, the superb documentary Avenge Just One of my Two Eyes, by the Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, in which he examines the contemporary popularity of Jewish suicide cults such as Samson and Massada in Israeli society while also observing the often pettily sadistic treatment of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli Defence Force at the illegal wall that cuts the West Bank in two. One of the last (new) films I will see this year is also Israeli and deals, through fiction, with the same topic, the constant stop-and-checks of both Palestinians and Israeli Arabs by Israeli conscripts on National Service. What makes Close to Home, directed by Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hagar, especially interesting is that the soldiers involved are all female, privates and officers alike. Only once do we see a man in uniform and the film focuses rather on the stiflingly boring patrols effected by the reluctant young women in West Jerusalem. There is much in the film that has been seen before, such as the women contriving ways to doss the day away and keeping a watch out for their superiors while their comrades smoke cigarettes and get their hair done. In a way it is like The Last Detail without the foreboding of that film's prisoner's fate. The two main characters, Smadar and Mirit, despite their smouldering sexiness (it may be the uniforms but the striking thing about all the women in this film is how incredibly alluring they are, even the more mannish officers), have a wonderfully Beckettian comic quality to them; the slightest twitch - many of which are the actresses' own - and each bewildering look radiates far beyond the immediate moment. Rich comic moments include the episode on a bus where a busybodying civilian 'tests' the ladies out by pointing out his own unattended bag as a suspect item, only to be threatened with arrest by them for his cheek. Outraged he screams to bystanders: "Chutzpah! Chutzpah!" with a verve not sensed in any of the English-language uses of that word. There is also the scene where Smadar and Mirit are detailed to the lobby of the Sheraton hotel for the duration of the Jerusalem Arts Festival, while an only-slightly-less-attractive pair of soldiers are left guarding the service entrance - the wan resignation of the latter couple recalls Keaton or Chaplin or even Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films.

Though I am unsure whether Bilu and Hagar intended this the film serves as an indictment of the IDF's treatment of Arab civilians - it is nobody but Arabs that are targeted, the Israelis do not shirk at racial profiling - and often the soldiers conduct their checks with a ham-fisted sense of duty, such as the scene where Smadar instructs an Arab boy to throw his falafal in the bin even though the inspection is complete. The opening scene, over the credits, is fascinating in its forensic study of the conveyor belt inspections in a check-point cabin, the cubicles of which resemble a cross between a doctor's surgery and a clothes boutique changing room, which renders the clinicalness of the inspections all the more discomfiting. There is however a bomb attack which allows the filmmakers to remind us that the patrols, however objectionable they sometimes be in their application, have a purpose, and it is likely that many Israeli citizens would have few pangs of guilt watching the inspections. But it is this neutrality of tone that allows the film to succeed in lowering the guard of the Tsahal method. It is something that is symptomatic of Israeli society itself, which is a paradoxical mix of advanced egalitarianism and frankly racist political policies.

With regard to Israeli film the last few years have seen a number of excellent films such as Raphael Nadjari's Avanim, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's To Take a Wife, the documentary work of Mograbi, as well as the continuing corpus of the country's pre-eminent filmmaker Amos Gitai, films that extend beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict to incorporate themes as varied as the struggles between secularism and religion, domestic violence and people-trafficking; there are some in Europe however that think that such films should be subject to a 'cultural boycott'. A letter signed by a number of artists and critics, including, regrettably a number of people I respect a lot such as John Berger and Brian Eno have called for Israeli cultural institutions to be shunned because of the Israeli government's increasingly rogueish behaviour. While Berger points out that he does not wish individual Israeli artists to be targeted, the problem is that such a boycott rapidly fosters an attitude of ignorance among the culturally-correct of Europe, one that is as dangerous as the vituperative harrassment of critics of Israel on US university campuses by the Israel lobby, led by snakes such as Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz. The upshot will inevitably be that genuine criticism of the Israeli state by its own citizens will go unnoticed in the West. Besides, would the supporters of this measure have appreciated a situation where the likes of Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba would have been sanctioned because they happened to be living in South Africa under apartheid, a regime they all fought long and hard against? By the same token, we could propose boycotting films from Iran, thereby depriving us of some of the greatest filmed work in the world and a vital alternative mouthpiece for progressive forces in that country.

The Weekend's Fitba'

Celtic narrowly fail to bury Rangers' title ambitions once and for all but they still remain seventeen points clear at the top. Meanwhile here in France the title race is already all but over, following the 4-0 demolition of second-placed Lens, in their own Stade Félix-Boellart, by Lyon, who are now effectively assured of a sixth successive title. St-Etienne, local rivals of Lyon, by whom their regional supremacy has long been usurped, moved into Champions' League qualifying position following a 3-0 win at home to Valenciennes. Admittedly les verts occupied a similar position this time last year only to fall behind catastrophically in the New Year; but at least this winter is no African Nations' Cup to decimate the squad as happened during this year's tournament in Egypt. Lyon's dominance of French football is so complete that it is hard to remember that the last club other than them to win the title was Nantes, back in 2001. The once-great Breton side have fallen badly and for the third season running are battling relegation, currently lying second-last in the standings. In an effort to stem the rot they have signed up Fabien Barthez, until recently unwanted by most football clubs in the known world.

Ahmet Ertegun RIP

Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records and one of the most enlightened people ever to run a record company, has died following a fall at a Rolling Stones gig, aged 83. The Turkish-born ambassador's son founded Atlantic in 1947 with Herb Abramson, perhaps one of the finest examples ever of a successful Jewish-Muslim business collaboration. Artists on his roster were among the best such as Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Booker T and the MGs, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and today, Missy Elliott and The Streets. Ertegun started off a jazz fanatic and later broadened his horizons to incorporate newer forms of blues-based music. Atlantic might belong these days to Warners, as it has for a long time, but the quality is still to be found on its label. May he rest in peace.

Requiem

Good atheist as I am I nonetheless have a fondness for films with religious themes. Not religious films such as the dourly devotional The Greatest Story Ever Told or The Passion of the Christ, nor Martin Scorsese's ethnic tourist trips The Last Temptation of Christ or Kundun. I really couldn't care less about the major personalities of world religion, on film at least, but it is the religiosity of ordinary people that I find fascinating. The obvious examples are Bresson and Dreyer, two-thirds of Paul Schrader's 'blessed trinity' - strangely enough, the third, Yasujiro Ozu, was so disinterested by religion as to be practically secular in his gentle, old-fashioned work - and there is also Lars von Trier, and even the anti-religious cinema constituted of such films as The Magdalene Sisters, Ken Loach's Raining Stones, Bunuel's Viridiana and The Milky Way. A film that is so remarkable as to bear immediate comparison to both Bresson and Dreyer is the second film by the young German director Hans-Christian Schmid entitled Requiem, which is one of the most moving portrayals of mental illness and undying faith that I have ever seen.

Requiem, based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, tells the tale of a 21-year-old German student Michaela, played by the brilliant Sandra Hüller - resembling a young Diane Keaton -, who is raised in the sort of diabolically-strict Catholic family that every Catholic dreads waking up one day to find it their own, and who suffers from an exceptionally debilitating strain of epilepsy that threatens her college career, and which she despairs of ever escaping. Tied to her strident faith, nurtured by an embittered harridan of a mother and a loving but sadly powerless father, and her obsession with an obscure martyred saint, her mental well-being wavers to a point that nobody, even her devout parents and parish priest, are capable of absorbing it in a way explicable to them.

Though it is likely that Michaela's illness is purely corporeal, the temporal location of her situation, after the loss in certainty among the German catholics, renders her trauma all the more unsettling. Her psychosis is not accepted, even by the clerics and the faithful, as spiritual due to their own faith's wavering, until it is too late. When exorcism finally takes place, it is much more disturbing than in William Friedkin's film because, as well as being patently inappropriate, it takes place amid an environment of such selfless love, with even the embittered mother casting off her coldness in her daughter's hour of need. We see a world of unconditional love and one where rationalism has supposedly killed off all lingering traces of religious superstition, but Michaela, in her conviction that her illness makes her special, constitutes a nightmarish throwback to the past. There is a great similarity to von Trier's mighty Breaking the Waves but this film avoids von Trier's algebra of suffering, a schematism that misled many of his critics into accusing him of rampant misogyny (it is there in his other films but exists only as a decoy in Breaking the Waves). Requiem rather progresses in a sober fashion with occasional fits of activity as the heroine tries to live a normal social life, and consequently suffers further seizures. The film's combination of static shots and intimate handheld camerawork recalls the Dardenne brothers and the opening two scenes draw the viewer in rapidly like no film since Rosetta. The film is set in the mid-70s but its period detail is for the most part restrained, no kitsch set design or platform shoes; the one concession to the era is a fantastic scene where Michaela almost breaks down trying to replace a dried-up typewriter ribbon. It is a scene that will be familiar to anyone that has felt unreasonably stymied by household obstacles, but it is rendered frightening by the intensity of Hüller's performance.

After years of so-so output, German cinema is once again a major creative force, which, to be honest, is the least that can be expected of Europe's largest country. As well as popular hits such as Goodbye Lenin! and Downfall there is also a new wave of young directors such as Schmid, Christoph Hochhaüsler, and Henner Winckler. Like the recent films of the last two, Requiem is distinguished by its heartfelt sympathy for young people, and its effortless dramatisation of their stories. But that boils Requiem down too much. There is an awful lot there. That's why I am going to see it again tomorrow.

Miles Offside

The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi started off life in film as assistant director to the magisterial Abbas Kiarostami, an apprenticeship he achieved as a result of reading John Baxter's biography of Luis Bunuel, and being inspired to write to Kiarostami and ask for a job, just as Bunuel did in his youth. As cutting one's teeth in cinema go, it doesn't get better than that and Panahi has not squandered what he has learned. His debut film The White Balloon, a beautifully subtle children's film set on Iranian New Year's Eve won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 1994 and since then he has won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2000 for The Circle and also made Crimson Gold, two films which are among the greatest made anywhere in the world so far this decade. Panahi studied closely Kiarostami's method of filming and mounting fiction among a reality so fluid, shifting and uncertain that one never knows where the film might end up, forever being at the mercy of the vicissitudes of Iranian power changes, between judiciary and legislature, a quality that, as I have noted elsewhere before, is not too different from the 'Great Satan', the US.

Panahi's new film Offside focuses on the efforts of women, mainly working class Teheranis, to watch the decisive Iran-Bahrein World Cup qualifier of last October, in defiance of a law forbidding their presence, for the typically insane reason of 'defending their honour'. As in The Circle, which treated of the efforts of Iranian prostitutes and other 'loose livers' to evade the moral police, Panahi is courageously on the side of the fairer sex, and in this case his film was successful enough to persuade head head-the-ball Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to change the law and allow women into the stadiums. The film starts, as ever with Pahani, in media res, on a bus carrying football fans out to the stadium on the outskirts of Teheran. There are a number of women who find themselves coralled by the military police on duty for infractions of the law and Panahi constructs the drama around successive episodes that show up the law, and by extension Iranian society, for the insane absurdity that it is, such as the bravura sequence where a young woman, desperate to pee, eventually persuades her inflexible guard to let her go to the toilets. When there he instructs her to avert her eyes from the coarse Farsi graffiti on the toilet walls. The fact that the earthy female captives give as good as they get renders this act doubly absurd.

The women are all photographed without their chador, though crucially not with their hair uncovered (a restriction that Kiarostami circumvented in Ten by filming a shaven-headed young woman), though even still, filming women in baseball caps and military uniforms, in intentionally androgynous get-up is a risky and courageous act by the director, not to mention his actresses. Things such as these demonstrate how Iranian film directors must make do without freedoms that Western directors take so for granted that they abuse them readily, restrictions that have paradoxically turned Iranian cinema into one of the most thematically and formally inventive in the world. The film ends with celebrations among captors and captives alike as Iran qualify for Germany - though the fate of the women is still uncertain - and Panahi's filming of the street celebrations afterwards is breathtaking in its technical mastery; to shoot such a film on the night of the game itself - and much of it in the stadium - is astonishing. But then Panahi, like his mentor Kiarostami and the Makhmalbafs, and other filmmakers like Abol-fazl Jalili, has long been accustomed to fit his fiction to the template of everyday life and its potentially recalcitrant permutations. Offside may not be as rounded nor as possessed of such depth as his previous two films but it is still a remarkable feat of filmmaking. And, despite Kiarostami's mastery, Panahi has, by now made Teheran his own; when the provincial soldiers scold Teheran women for their outrageous morals, you can feel the glint of pride in the eye of the camera. Proud of being offside in the Mullahs' Iran.

A Poster In Au Petit fer à cheval

For a number of years I have been going from time to time to Au Petit fer à cheval, a charming little old-Parisian bar on rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais, which takes its name from the horse-shoe bar that dominates the front room, rendering space at the bar at a premium. It's not a regular haunt but it is welcoming enough whenever I go there and it is a ninety-second walk from my workplace, making it ideal for a morning coffee. The place is not as fashionable as it was about three years ago, when a fire temporarily closed it and thus forced the actor Romain Duris to find a new watering hole; the new place was the shabby brasserie La Perle five blocks up the street and which the crowd duly flocked to. For all those years I have stared at the large 5ft by 3ft poster of a now-forgotten 1959 French film by Claude Autant-Lara named La Jument verte (or The Green Mare, as it is known in English). It has piqued my interest for a number of reasons, mainly because Autant-Lara, who is best known for his Simenon adaptation En Cas de malheur starring Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot and who died six years ago this week - the very same week as the great Robert Bresson - was forced to stand down as an octogenarian European Parliament candidate for the Front National in 1989 after he described the Nazi gas chambers as a 'string of lies', sterner words even than his boss Jean-Marie Le Pen's infamous 'detail of history' remark.

But, apart from this there is the presence of Jean Aurènche and Pierre Bost as screenwriters, stalwarts of postwar French cinema, and who were at the time being vilified as purveyors of le cinéma de papa by Truffaut and Godard, only to later be rescued from oblivion by Bertrand Tavernier, writing the script for his superb debut film L'Horlogier de Saint-Paul, itself a Simenon adaptation. The film comes with the warning 'interdit aux moins de 18 ans', which made it racy enough for the day, as is attested by the review on the IMDb, which is unusually articulate for a commentary on that site. The poster also boasts projection in 'Franscope', evidently a product of les Trentes glorieuses, and the tagline is 'la plus belle conquête du cinéma'. Even after years here, and many hours of boredom, the essential pleasures are delivered just when you least expect. And I'm not even talking about watching the film. The poster itself is good enough for me.

Make Room For the Jocks, Paddies (and Latvians)

The fools and knaves at the Scottish Football Association are attempting to persuade UEFA to expand the European Champhionship finals to 24 teams, no doubt because of their historical ineptitude at getting anywhere near the damn thing. When we have seen how so many of the teams that grace the World Cup every four years are scarcely worthy of the epithet 'world-class', why would anyone want to see the also-rans of Europe trudge about in a tournament that is unarguably more competitive? It is bad enough that the cloggers of Austria and Switzerland will be present in 18 months due to their hosting of the next tournament. Scotland are supported by fellow mediocrities Latvia and Ireland, with whom they fielded an embarrassingly bad attempt to host those same 2008 finals. You'd think the FAI, given their handling of the Steve Staunton affair and the subsequent mauling by a team of Cypriot hairdressers, would see it best to lay low for a while and stop making pathetic excuses for themselves. Next they'll be asking to be made play only against schoolboy selections in competitive games.

A Wordie In Your Ear

Seanachie, in a particularly slothful mood, will catch a ride on the back of Eamonn Fitzgerald's always-entertaining, if politically-outré Rainy Day blog for his next post, which concerns a wonderful invention that is but two weeks old, namely Wordie, a web resource conceived and launched over Thanksgiving weekend. The concept is for users to post their favourite words, 'like flickr but without photos' and there are links to other lexicons on the web, including a wonderful visual thesaurus. This is great fun and is yet another of those brilliant web inventions to which one can lose half one's life. The hell with it, sometimes the www is more fun than real life. Limerick neocon Eamonn has an interview with Wordie creator John McGrath on his blog. Meanwhile among Seanachie's postings so far are 'afflatus', 'phalanx', 'comestible', 'gobshite', 'muppet', 'overhead' and Geoffrey Chaucer's beloved obscenity, 'cunt'. If you are offended, you should be.

Full Irish Buckfast

A brief post due to a busy day; news has reached us that a number of Irish councillors have called for Buckfast, the famed tonic wine made by the monks of Buckfast Abbey in Devon, to be heavily taxed due to its contribution to alcoholism and anti-social behaviour. I have never been fond of the stuff and neither do I underestimate the nature of the alcohol problems in Ireland (and Scotland, where our celtic cousins are also fans of the tincture) but perhaps our lawmakers (a pleasure to use that word so beloved of the New York Times in an Irish context) might be better tackling the overall consumption of alcohol rather than scapegoating one drink, sales of which surely constitute but a wee drop in the ocean that is Irish drinking.

More News

A post a week back about the death of an acquaintance of ours, Mark Blanco, has since been supplemented by news updates in more influential media sources than Underachievement. Mark died after a 30-foot fall from a balcony at the East London home of Paul Roundhill, the soi disant literary agent of Pete Doherty (though those in the know describe Roundhill more accurately as a crack dealer). Doherty was also present and his departing the scene of the accident to go party in a hotel and trash the hotel room is, to put it mildly, distasteful. It may well be that the death was a genuine accident, but a London friend of mine currently living in Paris, and who frequented Doherty's circle for a year or two describes them as a vicious, self-serving, mendacious lot, who, for one reason or another have been allowed to offend with impunity for years now. I don't expect much to come out of any investigation into this.

Rot In Pieces

We all know by now of the passing of former South American hard man Augusto Pinochet; I have nothing to add to an assessment of the old bastard other than to say that I hope the worms give his corpse a good thorough going-through. It is sad, though inevitable, that he died in his bed, and was never made to suffer for his crimes but Chile can be proud of itself for the way it has fought back against the bullying and thuggery of the General and his supporters, without ever stooping to the same level as them. Due process was observed every step of the way in the state prosecutor's efforts to bring Pinochet to trial, and though this exercising of a democratic mandate was obviously enough to outrage those on the Chilean right, it did not rend the country in two, as conservative elements predicted. Current President Michèle Bachelet's government is to be congratulated for refusing a state funeral for the man, though she might find it hard to stomach that he will be buried with military honours, considering that she lost her father, a military man himself, in the same torture chambers that she and her mother were also brought to. I recall a quote of a supporter of Pinochet from back when he was under house arrest in London in 1999: they said that 'he saved the country; before he came to power, you couldn't even get blue jeans in Chile.' Sometimes if consumerism isn't working, it needs fascism to underwrite it. My greatest fear is that there would be many in European countries that would think the same way.

Mary Carey, Not Quite So Contrary

Struggling R&B artist Mariah Carey has decided to stall the slide in her career by suing her more-tasteful near-namesake pornstar Mary Carey for an intentional confusion of personalities. As Mary Carey's lawyers say, does Mariah seriously think people will be confused? Mariah might take solace from the news that uber-hip Brazilians CSS are fans of hers (lead singer LoveFoxx wore a Mariah T-shirt at their recent gig in Paris). But she should know that her first name is actually pronounced 'Mar-ee-a'.

Big House on the Prairie

The recently-deceased Robert Altman signed off with his adaptation of Garrison Keillor's long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which is a fitting tribute to the great (though sometimes mediocre) old cinéaste. In a pleasant reversal of Hollywood reality, the film tells the distressing end of a real-life radio show that continues to run unimpeded, where the antiquated formula of recording in front of a life-studio audience every Saturday night is threatened by the buy-out of the station by a Christian-fundamentalist-run Texan conglomerate. The film details the last night, overseen by a hamming security guard played by a patently superfluous Kevin Kline, where the regular performers, Keillor, playing his eminently admirable self, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and others, combine to bring the house down in classic Hollywood fashion.

Things neither ever get too clichéd nor get too serious thanks to Altman's touch, which is particularly noticeable in the early backstage scenes, which remind one of his high points of the early seventies such as McCabe & Mrs Miller and The Long Goodbye. From thereon the film entertains in fits and spurts; occasionally the action wanes but by and large the film is likeable enough to recommend viewing. Keillor is better known in Europe for his incredibly funny novels and it is a delightful novelty to see him playing himself onscreen (as do many of the show's technicians). There are also wonderful turns from Streep, as one of Keillor's fictional spurned loves (Streep has made an effortless transition to comedy in recent years that only confirms how much her acting genius was for so long hidden beneath leading roles in middle-brow studio features), and John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson as the ribald cowboy duo, who have a show-stopping number entitled "Bad Jokes, I Love 'em All". There is nothing remarkable about the film, and it is minor Altman at best, but given the way his career went in his last ten years that is good enough. Keillor, for his part has fun dispatching the God-fearing Texan by way of the angel Asphodel; he has, since before the election of Dubya in 2000, been a standard-bearer for progressive Americans (many of them, as the film shows, Country & Western devotees). The US is not as easily dismissable as many simple-minded Europeans think. May Bob Altman rest in peace and may God preserve Garrison Keillor.

What I Learned This Week

Watching the evening news on TF1 last night, something I rarely do, I saw a piece on the internationally unrecognised state to Transnitria (officially known as the Pridnistrovie Moldovan Republic), a sliver of landlocked province between Moldova and Ukraine, and which was in Soviet times a part of the Moldovan SSR until the war between its ethnically Romanian neighbour in the early 1990s. Much of the former Soviet Union is obscure to Westerners, even those very un-Russian parts of the Russian Federation, something which has allowed the fuelling of some hysterical stories about Russia in the Western media recently (I loathe Vladimir Putin as much as anyone else but it is unlikely that he ordered the killing of either Anna Politskovkaya or Aleksandr Litvinenko - he is, sadly, hugely popular at home and neither of those dissidents had any influence that could have threatened him at all, organised criminals are more likely the culprits). And so a nation like Transnistria can escape the radar of even a person like myself who would consider himself geographically aware.

It does not look like a terribly nice place to live, being an effective Russian-funded kleptocracy, with a Russian president named Igor Smirnov, and, according to the TF1 report it is a safe haven for organised crime, particularly for trafficking of women. An undercover segment in the bulletin bore this out. And the sickle and hammer is ever-present, just as it was in Soviet days, just like in Belarus, that other nostalgic state. I can't say that I am going to shout from the rooftops demanding Transnistria's independence, and I am more likely to agree with the Moldovan MP interviewed on the bulletin in calling the state a front for illegal activities. Though independence would hardly make this any worse.

Hail, Hail, Rain or Sno

It didn't take long for Celtic to take the sheen off their Champion's League last-16 qualification. In a match that was academic, and which they might have thus taken as one they might throw caution to the wind and attack to win in, they were humiliated 3-1 by the ever-so-modest FC Copenhagen. It is a significant reversal because once again Celtic have failed to overturn their abysmal away record in the Champions League and they advance with a negative goal difference, their home record paling in comparison with the maulings they have suffered away from home. We approach the second round with a fresh reacquaintance with reality. For every three goals we score at home, we can be guaranteed we will concede as many elsewhere.

This War's About Gas Reserves, Not Oil

My people that look out for this sort of thing have alerted me to this story in which a scare was reported aboard an American Airlines flight and caused it to be diverted to Nashville with nary a bearded Arab wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with cursive script in sight. As An tUasail de Gallaí put it, this means the terrorists have won. Life's a gas. No, really it is.