Somehow, somewhere in the collective Celeb-unconscious a shift has ocurred, a polarity has been reversed, one has risen high on destiny's wheel and another has been cast low in shadow. Having a conversation about how "Vindaloo" is the only true football record ever made we fumbled for the name of that twat off the telly what done it and came up with "Lilly Allen's Dad".

Now we can’t be the only people who have started to refer to him that way, who can only really see him in relation to her. And it’s not like we’re teenagers who haven’t seen Lilly Allen’s dad around for a lot more years than we have Lilly Allen.

Ah well, sorry mate. You reap what you sow, innit.

Singer Lilly Allen's dad (Formerly: Actor Keith Allen)

Singer Lilly Allen (Formerly: Actor Keith Allen's daughter)

Some English Types

"The greatest poverty is not to live/ In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire/ Is too difficult to tell from despair." - Wallace Stevens

1.Marwood. "Yes you are, of course you are..."

“Withnail and I”, twenty years old this year, has finally been canonized as a Great British Film. It still has its detractors of course, but then, its detractors are fools.

The argument against “Withnail’s” greatness is that it hasn’t added anything to the grammar of film as such, there’s no formal radicalism nor is there any of the Po-Mo knowingness and elliptical plot structuring of late eighties/early nineties Indy (Jim Jarmush, Tarantino, Atom Egoyan etc and ad infinitum through every “smart” piece of cinema since). “Withnail and I” has a pretty static camera, a pretty schematic sense of montage, and a definite beginning, middle and end, precisely in that order.

But to assume there is nothing radical going on in “Withnail and I” is to radically underestimate it. Few filmmakers (Chabrol, Michael Haneke spring to mind) have attempted the subtle and pervasive diagetic sleight of hand that Bruce Robinson achieves with “Withnail.” Even the title of the piece reveals the strategy, foregrounding Withnail, the character whose excesses everyone remembers from the film, then sneakily subverting it with that “I”. “Withnail and Marwood” would seem to put the characters on an equal footing, “Withnail and I” is an altogether more elusive proposition. Both self-effacing and grandiose, seeming to elevate Withnail yet also encapsulate him, the argument as to who protoganizes the piece folds back on itself indefinitely. And its this act of both assertion and denial, this equivocation (with the “I” opening up a metafictional tension between Bruce Robinson, the presumed “I”, the self-asserting Author, and the fictional Marwood) that anticipates the unresolved core of Marwood’s being.

The film is certainly Marwood’s, indeed the film takes place within Marwood’s universe and from the start it’s evident that what we're shown, the world the characters inhabit, is entirely constructed by Marwood. It doesn’t take long for generalized disgust and fear, especially sexual disgust and fear of threatening male sexuality to turn up. Indeed sexuality per se is threatening and disgusting to Marwood. There’s a vicious image of an old hag, one of the only two women, (both hags) we see in the film, biting into a fried egg sandwich and squirting yolk all over the plate ( one of the few p.o.v shots in the film), as Marwood reads a headline about a transsexual’s recent operation, “I had to become a woman”. Bruce Robinson’s script has Marwood sitting in the café surrounded by “ketchup bottles, with their blackened foreskins”, collapsing all kinds of levels of threat and visceral horror into one. Castration, uncertain gender boundaries, old crones chewing hungrily on dripping eggs, sclerotic, menstrual pricks everywhere. This is indeed the “arena of the unwell”. Kitchen-sink Cronenburg. Suddenly Marwood's in panic and it doesn’t take long for the word “rape” to pop up in his mind. It’s a fear that never leaves him.

It’s long been pointed out of course that Withnail and I has a “subtext” but this is again to fail to fully understand that we are in a position where everything given to us is filtered through, constructed by Marwood. Long before Monty means to have him, sex and physicality cause terrible disruptions in Marwood’s psyche. The world is saturated in sexual dread. The boy who lands a plum role for an Italian director is on “two pound ten a tit and a fiver for his arse,” “ Imagine the size of his balls” Withnail muses over steroid abusing shot putter Jeff Woade. “Imagine getting in a fight with the fucker.” “ Please! I don’t feel good,” Marwood replies. We’re still within the first five minutes of the film. Soon they’re being menaced in the Pub by a huge Irish punter who might “ fuck arses”, then they’re off to see “ raving homosexual” Uncle Monty, head off to Penrith where they are menaced by the poacher Jake who threatens to break into the “horrible little shack” they inhabit in the middle of the night and put a suitably phallic Black Pod on them. Then there’s the randy bull that has hobbled the surly farmer by giving him one in the knee and which threatens to gore Marwood in its desire to get to the cows at the bottom of the field they’re crossing. Finally, of course Monty turns up at the cottage to seduce and, if necessary, burgle him.


This is not a subtext within the film, it is the film. A study in Marwood's neurosis. It’s symbolism is so subtly integrated into the piece, that with Withnail, so central to what’s delightful and engaging about the film, so dazzling, the “I”ness is intentionally, almost fully, eclipsed. A brilliant diagetic misdirection strategy. “Withnail and I” is performatively neurotic in the way that say “Lost Highway” is performatively shizophrenic. Its not “about” neurosis, it is neurotic. The irresolvable question of Withnail and Marwoods relationship, are they in love or are/have they been lovers? is irresolvable precisely because we only know Marwood’s version of events and his point of view is structured around his denial. It may not be that Marwood can’t accept his own gayness so much as that in his chronic narcissism he compulsively utilises his own attractiveness to win regard, then denies his own intentions. He’s a flirt, and like all flirtation the end is not sex, physicality, but ego support. Why does Marwood scrub his boots with essence of petunia before he goes to the threatening pub? Why can’t he help but smile at Uncle Monty? Why does he emerge from the bathroom clad only in a towel to be appraised by Danny. “You’re looking very beautiful man,” (before offering him his saveloy!).

Both self-effacing and grandiose, Marwood oscillates between provocation and retreat, unable to follow thorough on his desire , unaware even of what his desire might be. Three significant sequences/shots in the film frame Marwood’s particular combination of desire and timidity, echoing the title (see image above). They are all confrontations, the first with the Irish homophobe, the second with Danny, the third with the Poacher. In all three Marwood stands behind Withnail, shielding himself, offering advice, pushing Withnail on. Withnail is Marwoods proxy in these sequences either acting out Marwood’s wishes or interceding in the consequences of Marwood’s provocations. It is perhaps only due to the two sequences in which Marwood is most catastrophically under threat without Withnail to intercede, in the scene where he must face down the bull in preparation for his later facing down Monty, (though this entire sequence twists around the paradox that in Marwood’s denying his “real” heterosexual relationship with Withnail he can convince Monty that he’s not in denial and is having a “real” relationship with him) that he can finally break his dependence on Withnail enough to accept the job in Manchester and leave him. The question of course of the extent to which Withnail uses Uncle Monty as proxy for his own unexpressed/inexpressible desire (having primed Monty with some elaborate fabrication about Marwood’s status as a “Toilet trader”) is significant. Why, that vital night of all nights, after everything Marwood has said, does Withnail get so abysmally drunk and leave Marwood to Monty’s tender ministrations?

2)Withnail: “ I deny all accusations…”

The film is so completely Marwood's that it’s only in the coda that we finally see Withnail alone, granted an existence (partially) independent of Marwood’s presence and can be sure that he concretely exists, though quite what he is, unmediated by Marwood, is largely unknowable, he simply channels Hamlet (finally “playing the Dane”) to a pack of glassy eyed wolves in an enclosure. The final line is, again, simultaneously an assertion and a disavowel. “Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither… no nor woman neither,” the rueful repetition stressing that it’s especially woman that doesn’t delight him. This is an entirely negative conception of pleasure in which, really, one can only opt for the least agonizing of situations. I love you because with you I feel so much less uncomfortable than I do with everybody else.

Withnail, like Marwood, has been in limbo, but will remain there. While we might be able to imagine Marwood, however tentatively, being physical we can’t imagine for a moment that Withnail would wander around clad just in a towel. Withnail is thoroughly buttoned down and asexual, his poverty is both material, he has a sole flapping off his shoe, he’s signing on, and more broadly, in Steven’s sense, he’s deeply physically impoverished. Estranged from his own desires, his own body, he owns almost nothing. What’s left to Withnail in the way of pleasures, what has been magnified for him in his diminished sensual and affective universe, is language. Words are all he has. Withnail is the man whose body is alien to him and who revels bitterly in grandiloquent language as an escape from his poverty. This is what has made him iconic for many. This is what many have identified with in him.

But language is, of course, both his salvation and his curse, both the wound and the means by which the wound is momentarily sutured closed. Withnail strives to break language, to turn his own prodigious capacity for language back on itself, to defeat it, to evacuate it, to transcend it. His fits of high dudgeon, the closest he gets to transport, crest at the edge of ecstatic speech but he is too deeply repressed even for this, for the joy of babbling, for the relief of mouthing nonsense. While language might bend in his grasp he can never break (through) it. Nor will Withnail be offered the salve of baby-talk and cooing, the renaming of things, the beautiful exclusivity of the private language of lovers. All that’s left to him is irony and the thrill of the impossible demand, wounding reality. He demands, notoriously, to have some booze, he not only wants the finest wines known to humanity, he wants them here and he wants them now, he refuses to be an understudy, and defiantly roars at the empty sky that he will be a star. The tragic note that creeps in at the film's end is not just the parting of old friends and the grandeur of Withnail’s monologue. He has not just lost “all his mirth” but without Marwood there to perform to/for it seems that even his words, finally, have been lost to him and his poverty is complete. Without Marwood he simply doesn’t exist, though he is granted a last few, ghostly minutes of half-life, still, presumably, caught within the periphery of Marwood’s presence as he heads off alone for the station.

Then it ends.

UPDATE: Owen comes at it from a different angle and hits a high number of Withnails on the head! .....a Withnail symposium, anyone.....

I finally read a book by Ballard when I was on holiday. Unfortunately it was “Kingdom Come”, a book that even his staunchest advocates wouldn’t be up for defending. Interestingly though, while I was reading and mulling over its premise that consumerism and Retail Parks are the cause of all our ills* I was simultaneously experiencing what I can only call gratitude for their existence. When outside is deeply unfamiliar, when you’ve been wholeheartedly ignored trying to buy an arepa in the local joint just round the corner, when you know tourists are likely to be targets and you’re on your own in, by the standards of home, an abysmally dangerous place, suddenly shopping centres seem like a good idea. Here there will be well dressed people politely buying things, here there will be clean toilets, here there will be security guards, here there will be professional staff who will not only not stare straight past you because you’re a Gringo, but will do their best to make sure they understand you, here there will be the recognizable chains you pointedly despise at home but which now seem like old friends, Multiplex cinema set-ups showing comprehensible, time-filling films. In here, all the nasty cultural-political stuff, all that street level stuff about allegiances and enemies stops at the automatic doors. Here all that matters is your money. In an alien, bitterly specific environment these non-spaces, so derided at home, suddenly seem like an oasis. They’re soothing, not just in the state of a-temporal frictionless drift they’re designed to induce, but weirdly restorative. Thank god, here I am, everywhere and nowhere. This feels like home.

A few years ago I was talking to a woman I was staying with in Buenos Aires and having listened to her enumerate the wrangles at the heart of contemporary Argentine life I explained to her with a rather downcast expression and regretful tone that really in the UK we had reached a stage in which there were no ideologies struggling with each other anymore, that we were a management economy, effectively apolitical.

“ Mejor!” she exclaimed, hand in the air. Better!

One man’s hell…..


*Isn’t there a fairly, I would have presumed, UN-Ballardian romanticization of the past as an authentic, organic period of true liberal values and community that consumerism has destroyed going down quite heavily in this book? Begging the question of whether all dystopians aren’t inherently cultural conservatives.

And things have been getting been pretty Ballardian over at K-Punk too, with a truly formidable piece on John Foxx’s “Metamatic”, an album I have never heard but probably soon will. Mark’s piece actually sparked me off thinking about a band I ignored, or only leant half an ear to for years and who I’ve been listening to quite a lot lately. Chrome.

Specifically these two….

I guess what feels really interesting and exciting in Chrome (like thirty years later!) is the antagonism between Garage Orthodoxy and technology. If Post-punk bleeding into New Romantic was a particularly English moment, the possibility of the creation of a new aristocracy, a new kind of severe dandyism, Chrome’s futurism is resolutely American in the way it is in Suicide and Pere Ubu, the bands which bear the closet relation to them. The new American man here, hybrid of technology and machine will be abject before he is, if ever, Apollonian. A bowery bum with silicone chips leeched into his forehead, a sweating android desperately trying to shuck off its flesh.

The music itself dramatizes this battle between studio technology, voice, synth and three chord rock, enacts the clash between the bedrock authenticity of American culture, the man of flesh and blood sweating over his guitar and the new sets of frictionless, push-button sonic supplements he can strap on. In both “Half machine lip moves” and “Alien soundtracks” jerky cut-ups, echo-effects, slabs of music-concrete and wild stereo pans predominate, loose garage jams or Stooges derived rockathons suddenly assailed by spasms of synth, effects throttled guitar and vocals run backwards, distorted down into a streams of indigent mumbling or inchoate howls. Here the impossible war is being fought out inside the skin of the players. In "Suicide" there is of course Vega’s ghostly Greaser-in-the-machine, the rockabilly rhythms, the iconography, “Ghost Rider,” “Rocket USA”, but Vega is contained by the sound, it’s all around him, Elvis sunk in amber. Chrome are the sound of wires threading veins, silica silting the blood. Technology as a kind of trash, an excrescence, flesh as trash, an encumbrance, in mutual combat. The closets visual analogue to the sound would probably be “Tetsuo: the Iron man,” and its agonistic vision of becoming-machine.

There’s something very odd here. It may simply be that they descend from two different lines of Futurism, the more austere and intellectual European line feeding into Foxx et al while American Futurism is a decidedly more lowbrow affair, ad hoc, folksy, more Gnostic, a cobbling together of Jack Arnold B-Movies, late night Twilight Zones and pulp Sci-Fi (certainly Ubu’s "Avant Garage" idea largely defines that heritage). But still, how is it that within the UK, the country of static class systems, sunk in history and tradition, the dream, or at least the enactment of the dream of a total transformation can occur while in classless America, land of becoming, Authenticity prevails, degrades and mutates all attempts at escape?

Dexys Midnight Runners - Listen To This (I Love You) - Video

The greatest video ever made?

I was thinking of a compromise when
I saw the beauty in your eyes
It heightened something in me so I'll say so,
You were always near to me
And thoughts of you will stay with me
Until the day I die

You were standing next to me
In '82 and '83
In all that time
I barely proved I loved you
Well there's nothing wrong but the wrong in me
You were everything you were meant to be

Now I just want to say this to you
Listen to this, Iisten to this,
I love you, I love you

Did you know that I loved you
From the start
You didn't care about my words
And why should you?
You didn't know that all the time I loved you so

I love you, I love you

Generally I like to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast and there is no shortage of attractively priced and packaged cereals here in Caracas, Venezuela. Indeed, just last week I bought three different types from the scores available. A box of Granola, a box of Muesli with No Added Sugar and Forty Percent Fruit, plus a box of Bran Flakes with Apricot Bits. All as it should be.

The problem was finding milk.

We scanned the refrigerated shelves. Juice of all kinds, drinking yoghurt in a abundance, an embarrassment of soft drinks. Not a single carton of semi-skimmed.

“Any milk?” Andrea, who's gamely shepherding me around Caracas, asks.

“You´ll have to get it somewhere else,” they tell us.

Easier said then done. Especially for someone in my position who doesn't know precisely where to go and can't zoom between supermarkets tracking it down. But it seems it's not only my ignorance of the highways and byways of Caracas that's at stake. The next day I go for a coffee with my teacher Mallington ( a gentlemen of a certain age, originally from Trinidad and about whom much more later) in Sambil, one of east Caracas' larger shopping centres, slap bang in the middle of the determinedly anti-Chavez Chacoa. It's Chacao's shopping centres that invariably feature in any documentary on Venezuela that wants to highlight the contrasts in wealth. First a shot of a Barrio, then a shot of Sambil. Mallington orders a thimbleful of the heavily caffinated tar the locals thrive on, I go for the more gringo–friendly café con leche.

“There is no milk,” they tell us.

“See?” Mallington asks me, eyebrows raised.

And if they can’t get milk in a café in Sambil, what chance do I have?

As it happens I find one the next day in the supermarket directly below the building I'm staying in, the imposing, twenty-five floor ( Í am on floor twenty four) Torre Este. It's one o'clock or so and there are two left. Foolishly I buy just one. That's long gone and despite having returned several times I haven't seen any since.

As Andrea whizzes me around town I always have milk on my mind and every time we stop I try to hunt some down, All-night Chemists, Twenty Four Hour Garages, Mini Supermarkets. There isn’t any. I’ve ended up eating my cereal either dry or with water.

Locals will no doubt be stunned at my ineptitude (and the implication that Caracas' gridlocked traffic allows you to whizz anywhere), but it seems that there is a scarcity. The argument goes that the government is over-dependant on imports and has failed to support or increase local production. With China and India shifting toward a more western style diet with lots of meat and dairy (and consequently more exciting Western lifestyle choices like bowel cancer) the world milk supply is getting pretty substantially mopped up. Not enough milk in circulation and few domestic reserves to fall back on. The shortages aren't just in milk. Rice, chicken, eggs, flour, beans. The staple foodstuffs are also, seemingly, in short supply, as are citrus fruits, which, for a tropical country, is really something.

The shortages in the supermarkets can be put down to market pressures, a global phenomena, increased demand and the effects of climate change creating scarcity. Even the bread and milk in my local Tescos back in rainswept First World Greenwich have shot up recently. Tough luck for the pampered rich, who’ll just have to suffer a little privation for once. Except that those most likely to be directly affected are the poor. Certainly they have the government's subsidized shops but supply here, it seems, can be as erratic as anywhere, if not more so. Some 70 per cent of the poorest inhabitants, it’s claimed, had difficulty buying milk and eggs last year. It’s not just market pressures, but the inevitable quick-buck corruption. Heavily subsidised food gets ripped off and shipped across the border to Colombia to be sold at a profit.

Subsidised food and subsidised petrol. Filling the tank of your Hummer round here will cost a staggering three dollars, about one pound fifty. Despite Chavez's article in the Guardian a few years ago condemning the hegemony of the car, the insanely cheap price of petrol is meant as a gift to the nation, meaning that everyone can participate in the country's oil wealth. Everyone can afford to run a car, if they can afford to own one. Andrea's dad, as he’s driving us out to stay in his six-berth Yacht in Puerto La Cruz practically cackles as he gets back in the car after filling the tank. "Petrol's never been cheaper than it is under this government," he says as we power past the shacks that line the road and the groups of kids walking or cycling from one roadside barrio to another.

Later we polish off a bottle of Buchanans', the oligarchs tipple of choice and much favoured by Chavez and his associates too (along with those sexy Hummers). It used to be the traditional, indigenous Rum that got drunk at parties but these days, in our globalized, free-market world, the prestigious drink is expensive imported whisky. Something which seems to have really increased in popularity under the present government, they tell me. For some reason which my Spanish is too inadequate to grasp, the government is thinking of levying duties in order to make it even more expensive, adding, one can only assume, to it's prestige and making sure that only the super-rich can get their hands on it, meanwhile a significant black market in Colombia is already gearing itself up to ship it across the border. Government subsidized food and petrol goes one way, from Socialist Venezuela, free market whiskey, guns and other "recreational items" from Yankee lapdog Colombia come the other way. Two ostensibly opposed political and social systems, united only by those two timeless, seemingly ineradicable aspects of life, corruption and crime.

Not entirely surprising. Venezuela was recently garlanded with the accolade of "second most corrupt country in South America" (Haiti was first), no mean feat given the stiffness of the competition, I would think. Today the free newspaper they give out on the subway informed me that Caracas was assessed by some Imperialist Lackey Business Organization as being the worst city to live in in South America. External investment is negligible, as is inward, gun crime is soaring, the infrastructure crumbling. Inflation is the highest in South America and with the proposed cut to the working day from eight to six hours, it looks to get worse, although given the somewhat confused premise of the proposal, that the working week remain thirty six hours and that therefore people would in fact be obliged to work Saturdays too, the Government is now trying to spin the proposal, the sweetener in the up-and-coming constitutional reforms, some other way. Plenty of economists are predicting a devaluation, though the government is, for some reason no-one seems very clear about, changing the currency from the Bolivar to the Strong Bolivar, something achieved simply by knocking a few zeros off the end of the price, though how this might strengthen it, no-one seems to know. The populace doesn’t seem convinced and, restricted in the quantity of dollars that they can own, are busy either buying into the thriving currency black market ahead of a devaluation (like Andrea’s mum) or trying to sink their money into consumer goods, hence cars and high-tech goods importers (like Andrea's dad) are thriving. The Strong Bolivar, like the up-and-coming change to the time, the proposed setting back of the clock by half an hour so that Venezuelans will receive and extra half hour of sun a day and enjoy all the attendant feelings of well-being and enthusiasm for work that they might otherwise lack, is perhaps more a question of influencing public morale than any really significant measure ( though after reading a three page encomium on the difference this would make to the national life in a pro-Chavez paper, MY morale was considerably dampened). Any directly practical measures they are taking seem to be cutting taxes, thereby increasing the individual's spending power. A strange measure for a socialist government, you might think.

But in fact a visit to the mythical centre of Caracas (everybody warns you against going there) might well persuade you that Bolivarian Socialism doesn't look much different to anywhere else's free marketeering. There's nothing in the frantic rat-run of market stalls and makeshift shops that line the sidewalks and colonize the squares in the administrative heart of the country that Thomas Friedman wouldn't take pride in. Those of you who have had the misfortune to read "The Lexus and the Olive tree" will recall Freidman's sugary epiphany when, on the day after Thailand's financial crash, he encountered a grandmother selling matches on the street. This was like Hegel seeing Napoleon pass through Jena. Here was the incarnation of the world spirit, the spirit of entrepreneurship, the old woman also tirelessly hunting down her piece of the American dream. The Universal Dream.


The centre is the home of all that is Chavista, and there's certainly plenty of local colour. Up out of the Subway we immediately cross the road to avoid what looks like a pretty heavy confrontation developing between street vendors, go down a side street and find another, a young guy being pinned to the floor with a gun to his head while representatives of one of the bafflingly large variety of local police chase his friend. Street after street is lined with buhoneros, street vendors, the recently legalized mainstay of Caracas' informal economy, which accounts for approximately forty five percent of the population and whose recent legalization has, arguably, helped to bring the country's unemployment statistics down. On a corner next to an official building and amid the melee, the most recent of the Misiones, Mision Che Guevera is in effect, handing out water to people and offering super-cheap, possibly second hand, possibly Cuban clothes while on the other corner a debate on the proposed constitutional reform is taking place, the small audience peopled largely by a group of disconsolate looking schoolkids. We pass on through more and more market stalls. It’s all rather exciting and colourful for me, as a tourist, carnivalesque. Rather like going to Downing Street and finding they've moved Deptford market there.


Where does all this stuff that's being sold come from, I want to know. Much of it's smuggled in or stolen of course, most of it comes from local enterprises who give the goods to the street vendors at a concessionary rate and then cream off the profits. There are plenty of local police and military types lounging on motorbikes. So what jobs has the government directly created, I ask Mallington. The military, he tells me and the Misiones.


The Misiones. I'm supposed to be going up to one of them to have a look round under the auspices of Patricia, one of the people I've been staying with here and who works with single mothers living in more-or-less absolute poverty. It’s not unusual to have four generations of women pregnant simultaneously apparently, and no fathers around anywhere. Unfortunately it doesn't come off, but I have had time to talk to Patricia about her work.


Does she feel it's having a real effect on people’s lives?

It’s difficult to get people to change their way of thinking and living, she tells me, but yes, she believes it is having an effect and we agree that creating any substantial change would inevitably be a long process.

And what do people think about the government, I ask, as we look out of the twenty fourth floor at the almost inconceivable quantity of slums clustered onto the slopes of the bottle-green mountains that ring Caracas. The euphoria, she says, is starting to wear off.

The euphoria wore off on Mallington quite some time ago. He could tell you some stories, and should you come here he almost certainly will. He could tell you for instance that when his brother passed away in a public hospital recently, the nurse attending to him had neither gloves nor a face mask (Andrea backs this up. The doctors provide the expertise, the patients family provides everything else). And he could point you to an advertisement in one of the national newspapers in which the Directors of the public hospital system are publicly appealing for more Government support. Or, for instance, he could tell you about the newly recruited Private in the Venezuelan army who rents a flat in his building at a cost of three million Bolivares a month ( a small fortune here) hardly ever uses it, and runs three cars.

I tend to trust much of what Mallington tells me. He isn't simply Anti-Chavez, indeed he voted for him in the first election and believes that the platform he stood on then was what the country needed. And still needs. Equally, while he protested against the government in 2002 he was opposed to the cabal of businessmen who took power in the coup and proceeded to rip up the fabric of the country's legal and political system. Just another bunch of dictators. Neither Petroleum Populism nor Neo-Liberalism. Neither Washington nor Caracas...


I ask him how he would sum up his feelings toward the Chavez government now and he teaches me a nice new phrase in Spanish.

“No se le ve el queso a la tostada.”

The cheese is not seen on the bread. The government hasn't delivered


I wonder if there's any expression using milk?