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Zanskari women during transhumance (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve decided that Arte is possibly the best TV channel in the world. Last night I happened to stumble across an amazing documentary by Marianne Chaud called Himalaya, la Terre des Femmes.

Marianne Chaud has previously made films about India and wrote her doctorate on popular theatre in the Himalayan Ladakh region. La Terre des Femmes is essentially a work of ethnography, made in 2007 during her long stay in the remote village of Sking in Zanskar valley at 4000m, a region of Kashmir where the culture is predominantly Tibetan.

Barley fields in Zanskar (Image: Paul A. Fagan, Creative Commons)

The film follows a summer in the lives of the villagers. The men have left for the season to find work in distant towns like Leh and Manali, and the women and children remain to herd the yaks, harvest barley and collect grass for animal feed in the coming winter.

Chaud is not just a bystander but an active participant in the film, and grows particularly fond of a 13 year-old sheperdess, who lives on her own with a herd of yaks. In the absence of men, the women speak openly of their life histories, their hopes and fears.

Farmhouse in Zanskar, with winter feed piled on the roof
(Image: bobwitlox, Creative Commons)

What develops is a compelling portrait of a people who live largely isolated from the modern world, and rely on centuries-old transhumance practices to live in such a harsh environment. The nearest town is 4 days walk away. Everyone, from 5 years old to 80 years old, works in the fields every day.

The only intrusion from beyond the valley is the occasional sound of an aircraft high overhead. The sheperdess asks Marianne, “Inside an aeroplane, how many carpets are there?” “Why carpets?“, responds Marianne. “So you can sit down of course!” laughs the sheperdess. In Zanskar, there are no chairs, because there are no trees, and no timber. The shepherdess has never seen furniture, let alone been in an aeroplane.

The Himalayas as filmed by Marianne Chaud are a long way from the “Lonely Planet” images of picturesque monasteries and prayer-wheels we’ve grown accustomed to. La Terre des Femmes is a gentle, human and intelligent film that ranks among the most beautiful things I’ve seen on television for a very long time.

At the end of the late screening of Inglourious Basterds on Wednesday night, the cinema erupted into applause. Now, maybe it’s a strange French custom that I hadn’t come across before, or perhaps the room happened to be full of rabid mordus de Tarantino that evening. But quite simply, the film didn’t deserve it.

Diane Kruger contemplates the flammable possibilities of nitrate filmstock

First of all, I’m not going to criticise Inglourious Basterds for being ahistorical.  The film is set in a fairy tale world that happens to bear a very passing resemblence to occupied France. It’s a little like watching Hogans Heroes and ‘Allo ‘Allo simultaneously, but with gruesome screen violence added in. I can accept this -because  if you’re incapable of suspending disbelief during a Tarantino flick, then don’t bother watching.

But Inglourious Basterds simply makes very little sense as a story. Tarantino is a master of slick and innovative narrative. But this film shambles along in overly long and occasionally irrelevant episodes, linked by massive leaps of logic that are neither explained nor plausible (yes, you can place your story inside an ultraviolent comic-book, but the story still needs to fit together).

Brad Pitt should be scalped for his performance, although the script gives him very little to work with. In fact, the script is mostly lumpen, although there is some post-modern fun to be had with  dialogue that transitions glibly between German, English and French (and occasionally Italian – providing Pitt’s only golden moment).

There some bright spots – a couple of scenes remind us of the tension and black humour of which Tarantino is capable. And the show is stolen by the European actors – Christoph Waltz struts around as a zealous and slightly camp jew-hunting Nazi, and Mélanie “Standing In for Uma” Laurent plays a convincing French-Jewish maiden bent on revenge.

War Films 101: A British officer in a German uniform is just asking for trouble…

Mr Tarantino is lumbered with a reputation based on his classic early films,  setting a high standard that is hard to live up to.  He is a genius – growing up in the 90s, I had to sneak in underage to see Pulp Fiction, the one totemic film of my teenagehood. And I had a Reservoir Dogs poster on my bedroom wall for many years (thanks Cameron!).

With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino may have been trying to make a grand statement about cinema, fiction and history (the climactic scene certainly suggests so, as does Philip French). Tarantino doesn’t completely fail, but most of the time it seems like he’s just made an occasionally diverting film full of silly accents.

Yeah, you see, I told you so…

The part of parenthood that Dr Spock never told you about

In between pretending to finish my dissertation, I’ve discovered a low-cost summer activity that doesn’t involve going outside and sweating: catching up on half a decade of television. After 4 years of not having a TV at home, I’ve realised there are actually a few good things I’ve missed.

So I borrowed the first four seasons of Weeds off a friend, and have been working my way through it. I’ve been pleasantly surprised. If Weeds is a sitcom, the “situations” are twisted, and the “comedy” even more so. In Seinfeld, we laughed at Soup Nazis and George’s lack of luck with the ladies. In Weeds, people get shot dead and dissolved in baths of acid – and we still laugh.

Growing shedloads of pot in suburbia – what could possibly go wrong…?

In case you haven’t seen it, basically, Weeds is a show about suburban mom Nancy Botwin – after her husband dies suddenly, she turns to dealing marijuana to her friends and neighbours in order to make ends meet. But her efforts to support her family via a modest weed-pushing operation rapidly fall apart as alcoholic friends (Celia), idiot accoutants (Doug), DEA agents and couch-surfing brothers-in-law (Andy) foul her every move.

There’s something refreshing about a TV comedy that tracks the slow disintegration of a suburban family and their hangers-on. Weeds is very much a show for our time: at the end of season 3, (screened in 2007, just as the credit crunch was beginning to hit), the Botwins’ identikit suburb of easy-credit homes burns to the ground (something to do with Mexican mafia revenge, biker gangs and Nancy with a petrol can… oh never mind).

The last thing you want to deal with when you’re on the run from the Mexican mafia..

Illegal immigration, Mexican drug wars, euthanasia, police corruption, narcotics (lots), and sex (even more): life is complicated in Schwarznegger’s California. We’re a long way, geographically and spiritually from Saturday evenings with Bob Saget or the amiable but inane antics of Friends.

If occasionally the storylines lacks energy, the series is kept alive by a dynamite script. Andy spouts unlikely slacker wisdom at crucial moments, Nancy’s best enemy Celia goes postal every few episodes, and Shane (borderline sociopath and Nancy’s 13 year-old son) makes the most of being on cable with a dirtier mouth than the rest of the cast combined. And could you imagine Clifford Huxtable having this conversation (NSFW) with Theo?

Celia is actually stabbing Nancy in the back in this photo

But the show belongs to Mary-Louise Parker, who plays Nancy. Her character, who has the best of intentions but no business plan, seems only capable of digging her family into deeper trouble. Although her problems are of her own making, you feel truly sorry for Nancy, and somehow responsible for her predicament as her world teeters on the edge of the abyss.

So, Weeds has been well worth staying inside for. Maybe TV isn’t completely useless. I’ve heard The Wire’s worth seeing too – anyone have some DVDs I can borrow?

Yesterday, today and tomorrow mark the 40th anniversary of the New York recording sessions that produced Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. The album was released in April 1970.

I really shouldn’t say much more about the record. But I still think it’s a miraculous piece of work. I found a copy in a friend’s dad’s LP collection as a teenager (the vinyl had hardly been played) and made a tape of it which I thrashed to death.

I took the tape on a school trip to the USA, and have distinct memories of playing it on a long bus trip across the high desert of Arizona. Kerouac’s Visions of Cody was in my bag, and the redness of the desert stretched out like the surface of that other planet Miles and his crew were trying to reach with this music.

As I’ve written before, it was heady times for a teenager. I’d like to think I haven’t completely lost that particularly notion of existence that formed in the apex of those three forces meeting: Wayne Shorter’s solo on Spanish Key, the vastness of the American continent with signs pointing to Albuquerque and Kerouac’s love poem to the vanished idea of a friend.

If Montpellier has an internet celebrity, it’s Rémi Gaillard. He’s been making prank videos on the internet for ten years, and his clips have received over 350 million views on Youtube.

Many of his gags are filmed right here in Montpellier. One would have thought the locals would have got used to his antics by now, but Monsieur Gaillard always finds new ways to amuse and annoy: last year he turned the streets of the city into a Nintendo Mario Kart racetrack:

His classic clips include a re-creation of Saving Private Ryan on the beach at Palavas and the arrival of an astronaut on a golf course, but my favourite is when Rémi and friends turn a supermarket into a Pacman maze. (According to the “making of” article, all damage was repaid in full):

There is obviously an anarchist and possibly dadaist streak in Gaillard’s humour,  and his motto “C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui” (roughly – “By doing whatever you can become whoever”) suggests that there may be a philosophy behind what he does. There is also money – he was hired last year by Orangina and Nike to make viral videos.

You can find dozens more videos on his site, nimportequi.com. Although his gags are largely harmless, it really is a wonder that Rémi hasn’t ended up in jail yet…

In talking about American healthcare reform, I’m tilting at a rather irrelevant windmill – I’m not American and I don’t live in the United States. But I have friends there, and I’m disgusted by the way certain opposition groups have been representing Obama’s proposed reform package, however ill-conceived it might be.

I’ve also spent seven and a half years working as a supplier to the healthcare industry in countries around the world – including the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Canada. This doesn’t make me an expert, but I’d like to think I know some of the basics about healthcare delivery models. So…  I’m going to dive in anyway.

First of all – Campaigns currently running in the US describing the failings of the British NHS are misleading and not helpful to informed debate. Obama is not currently proposing an NHS-style single-payer plan, even though Obama has voiced personal preference for it in the past.

The overly complex bill before Congress is introducing the concept of a publicly-funded option available to all, alongside existing provision. While some are saying that this is a slippery slope to universal single-payer, I can’t see this happening given the immense vested interests who’ll ensure any such future law would be defeated.

Secondly – no health care plan is perfect. Yes, there are waiting lists in Beveridge-style health systems (eg. in the NHS and New Zealand). And yes there is “rationing” too – in the UK, decisions on treatment guidelines occur through NICE, generally considered one of the most rigorous branches of government, which makes decisions based on clinical evidence.

But in the current American system rationing occurs through a different, crueler mechanism – by denying care to those who can’t pay, while over-treating those who can. In the richest country on Earth, 18% of the adult population are uninsured. Scenes of people queuing overnight for charity-provided healthcare should’ve brought policy makers to their senses a lot earlier.

Thirdly – complaints that government-provided care is bureaucratic and inefficient are ill-founded. On average, Medicare (which is, by the way, a socialised healthcare system), costs substantially less (2-16%) to administer than private insurance (up to 25% according to some studies). With healthcare consuming upwards of 15% of US GDP, this means that around 4% of US GDP is accounted for simply in administering private insurance programmes.

Fourthly – socialised medicine doesn’t necessarily restrict patient choice.  The people most concerned about choice are those who are rich enough to go outside the public system anyway. In NZ and the UK, people can choose to pay for private insurance and “go private” for elective surgery if they wish.

In France, often cited as the best healthcare system in the world, healthcare is largely paid for by your national insurance contributions, with a small co-payment by the patient at the point of care. Most French people buy additional insurance to cover this co-payment. For me, this additional cover costs 24EUR (34USD) a month – not an excessive burden for peace of mind.

So some kind of reform in America is necessary. I wish it would be either single-payer (like in the UK or Spain) or a non-profit multi-payer system (like in Germany).  But it’s most likely to come in the form of a public insurance option available to all (take a deep breath guys, it’s not creeping socialism. Insurers, HMOs and pharmaceutical companies will still make enormous profits).

I hope Obama’s bill, with all its weaknesses, passes in a workable format. But mostly I wish that the healthcare debate in America was centred around rational facts rather than cynical scare-mongering.

Hey, we’re just actors. Don’t ask us about healthcare reform.

Ignoring that Indian proverb about mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun, and needing a break from writing my dissertation, I set out on a mission yesterday to explore Montpellier’s slightly neglected river – the Lez.

On the map, it seemed like a simple exercise – following the river from Antigone northwards to Castelnau and then catching the tram back from from Place Charles de Gaulle. However, Montpellier has not quite reconciled itself with its river, making the journey more of a trek through suburban streets than a waterside ramble.

I started out at the eastern end of the Antigone quarter – a complex of monumental buildings aligned along an axis running a kilometre from the Hôtel de la Région all the way back to the Polygone shopping centre in the centre of town.

Antigone was designed by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, and although some praise its sweeping vision, I’m sweepingly unconvinced. The whole thing is vaguely totalitarian, as if it were dreamt up in fever dream by Ceaucescu. The scariest thing is people actually choose to live there.

I’ve been told by a couple of people that that fountain in the river was designed to be taller that the jet d’eau in Geneva – but when they switched it on, it soaked the diners on the terraces of the chain restaurants on the opposite bank. So today fountain plays at 33% strength. True or not, it’s a nice anecdote.

Continuing north from the Esplanade de l’Europe, the footpath soon deviated away from the riverbank – and I realised that despite the other magnificent infrastructure investments made by Montpellier, there was no public right of way along the banks of the Lez. Instead, you have to thread your way through side streets, very rarely glimpsing the river.

I never made it to Castelnau – my route involved traversing the main railway line, and the only crossing point was a road tunnel without any visible pedestrian footpath. So I backtracked through Les Aubes and Les Beaux-Arts (a rather interesting, slightly bohemian central suburb) to the centre-ville and caught the tram home.

Re-reading my map, it seems the northern stretches of the Lez are more promising for a riverside walk. So my next plan is to start from Place Charles de Gaulle and head north from there towards the zoo. I’ll just wait for a day when the temperature isn’t quite 34 degrees…

Here’s the next chapter in the story of the hip-hop boys from Oxford, GTA, who we’ve mentioned a few times on the blog. MC Chima Anya has now moved to London, where he’s working in a children’s hospital (remember Dr Anya is a trained medical professional by day, and rapper by night), and breaking into the London scene as a solo artist.

His new single is New Day, featuring Soweto Kinch, and produced by some bloke called Astronare, about whom I can find nothing on the web. The video looks a lot more slick and professional than the previous “home-grown” clips filmed around Oxford… you could say it’s a big step up.

Soweto Kinch (born in London but growing up near Birmingham) has a bit of an Oxford connection too. A pretty handy jazz saxophonist and rapper, he also has a degree in Modern History from Hertford College, Oxford. Now, whatever you think of jazz, hip hop or Oxbridge education, you’ve got to admit that that’s a pretty cool CV.

Anyway, if you’re in London in August, you can catch Chima Anya’s album preview gig at The Gramaphone, 60-62 Commercial Street E1, on Thursday 27th August.

After the storm, the trams
rumble and flash.
Sluiced of oil by rain, they
hiss and sing through curves:
like slow fingers on wet glass.

Between the tracks, a boy
orbits a chiding father.
Thrusting his willow wand, he
dares demons to join his marvelous project:
to snare and slow down the sun.

Tomorrow, the trams
will void themselves of voice,
Tamed by rest and lubrication.
Unscathed, the sun will spy
a wooden sabre rusting in a gutter.

But for now, the grey-arched day belongs
to roaring dragons on Sunday timetables,
to white arrows pointing to hospitals, and
to the mercury dancing in sandals
one footstep ahead of his shadow.

Montpellier, August 2009.

My antediluvian and well-thumbed copy of The Rough Guide to France once told me that Strasbourg was “the one city in eastern France worth a detour”. This week I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself a little with the place, joining the tourist hordes munching on ice-creams in the summer heat.

There’s a lot to like about the city – there are trams and numerous bicycle paths (bicycles rule Strasbourg far more than they do Oxford). And the architecture betrays a history far richer than most cities can claim: the whole of the mediaeval centre-ville is a registered UNESCO world heritage site.

Across the Ill towards the north, the city opens up from twisted old-town alleys into the broad vistas of the “German quarter”. Unlike other French cities, the monumental buildings here are not the result of Napoleonic or Republican fervour. Rather they are the Prussian puffery of the Kaiser in the period (1871-1918) when Strassburg was part of his German Reich. The resemblance to Berlin is deliberate and striking.

Of course today Strasbourg is generally happy to be a French city, but the Germanic influence is always present: bilingual streetsigns, a proliferation of Winstubs selling Meteor, flammekeuche and glasses of Gewürtztraminer and Edelzwicker.

If you arrive early in the morning at the market on Place Broglie, the old people and the stallholders still chatter in the local dialect of Elsaessisch. It’s like hearing whispers from another century.

I didn’t have time to run up to the European parliament district to visit Richard Roger’s European Court of Human Rights building. But Strasbourg is not resting on its architectural laurels: the city recently celebrated the arrival of the TGV line from Paris by encasing the old train station in a giant glass slug. It’s quite a striking renovation.

A brief Google search reveals much history of Strasbourg that remains to be explored: including an institutionalised anti-semitism that lasted in the city until the 1700s, a short-lived soviet government of 1918 (it lasted 11 days), and the the military legacy of Vauban (he was kind of like Halliburton or Lockheed-Martin for Louis XIV).

So much left to see and do here. I’ll have to come back sometime.

*”A short business trip to Strasbourg“, rendered in Elsaessisch. The Hochdeutsch transliteration would be “Eine kleine Geschäftsreise auf Strassburg” or in French “Un petit voyage d’affaires à Strasbourg“.