Sunday 24 October 2010

L'intouchable

A lazy kind of day digesting the previous week . It was the bright, not cold autumn day for a walk along the cost or into the countryside. I hated myself for not feeling up to it or wanting to. It is no good working hard at cutting out dairy products, increasing vegetables and oily fish, paying the higher cost for brown seed bread and the like and then overdoing the quantities and eating more meals a day because of working mentally 18 hour days with inadequate physical exercise.

For a brunch I enjoyed a chicken stir fry with a lemon sauce accompanied with a bottle Peroni beer and for the afternoon evening some sardines in tomato sauce on crackers, some soup and apple pie with custard, finishing off with a bowl of cornflakes and cold milk.

There was I fact only a matter of an hour between rising and deciding on the brunch while watching the first evening floodlit grand prix on a road circuit to rival that of Monaco. The event was declared by the media to be a great success although it was very very boring in that the cars were unable to overtake except for a couple of moments on each lap thus eliminating competition other than concentrating on avoiding hitting the sides of the track and the car malfunctioning. I learnt that the organisers are keen to arrange other similar events on traditional circuits. Louis Hamilton came third behind former team mate and rival the Spanish driver Alonzo, and in so doing increased his lead in the driver's championship as his nearest rival failed to register any points. With the forecasts that he could win two of the remaining three events the title could be his in only the second year of competing at this level.

In football Portsmouth recovered from their thrashing at Man City to beat Spurs 2.0 keeping them at the bottom below Newcastle and creating further problems for the future of their manager. The behaviour of the owner is almost as puzzling as Ashley at Newcastle. You sell your two best players, Berbatov and Keene for some £45 million and leave yourself insufficient time to find suitable replacements. The situation puts paid to their assistant coach Poyet coming to Newcastle as had been strongly rumoured. However Man City failed to repeat their magical performance of last week and lost 2.1 to Wigan in a frenetic match with considerable skill shown. The league has an odd look at the moment with Aston Villa third above Arsenal and Manchester United in Mid table and Spurs last. West Ham are fifth and Hull sixth. Alan Shearer denies that there has been any approach or suggestion that he will return to Newcastle in a Managerial capacity and other papers explain that although Kinnear is supposed to be in charged for only six matches he is banned from the touch line for three games because of an offence four years ago which makes his appointment even more ludicrous and someone is taking the proverbials with the customers. If there is no significant change confirmed by the end of October I forecast revolution in people staying away in their thousands having paid for their season tickets or not. The Newcastle folk are not as masochistic as that.

I quickly turned my attention to what the media had to say about the Durham winning the County Championship and was pleased that those writing about the development understood the significance, and gave appropriate recognition to all those who contributed to this development over the past sixteen years. This will help raise the finance to develop the ground into being able to hold major international events, weather permitting, Hopefully the development will also result in increasing support although the way the finances of the sport are presently structured the club can only balance the books through the revenue from international and the 20 20 format.

The main activity of the day was to search the My Space database for traditional jazz bands and artists, for historical literary and classical figure and classical composers. This was a slow process for two reasons. The music was all worth listening to, mostly familiar but of the kind that one can hear time and time again. I also experienced software problems.

There much playing of games the computer with having reached 90% wins at Spider Solitaire from the initial 75% and progressed Hearts to 42% from the low of 11% while good progress is being made at third level chess with overall 98 percents wins, five draws and one loss, achieved by consistently having winning runs of forty to fifty games.

Part of the ability to relax came from the news that agreement had been reached between the White House and Capital Hill over the terms of government intervention to prevent an economic meltdown along with total financial collapse. While one inclusion replicates what is happening in Britain to prevent the loss of homes another does not, at least at the moment, this is to limit the pay of some senior executives in the firms being rescued. This is a good development and I presume restricts the cap to those in post and responsible for what has happened but not to those who may be brought in to rebuild firms to function effectively and make appropriate profits thus limiting the longer term impact upon tax payers. Congress has rightly insisted on strict oversight. It is understood that both Presidential candidates are now in agreement with the proposed legislation. There is also to be a phased release of the money. It will be interesting to se how the markets react on Monday and if one negative side effect is an increase in the price of oil per barrel.

The day ended with a French film which had great significance to me. A Caucasian looking young French woman learns that her father was an Indian living in India (not the genuine American as opposed to the land grabbing ethnic cleansing murdering ancestors who stole the country and when they elect an a genuine Redskin President they really will have something to cheer about) and worse still from the viewpoint of sorting out her psyche he was regarded as an Untouchable, hence the title of the film, The untouchable. L'intouchable.

I had anticipated there would be no information on the internet except for the Elliot Ness films and TV series the Untouchables, but found two reviews as the film had been screened as part of the 2006 Venice film festival. I which had drawn a blank because one reviewer made the very point I had made at the time of viewing that it seems essential for any French film about a young woman to shed her clothes at very opportunity although in this instance it was immediately evident body doubles were being used. There was no justification or relevance for this or for much of the way the film was made, but I believe, because of my own experience, I understood what the film was trying to show. This was someone who discovered that their origins, their identity was very different from what they had been led to believe. In her case an Untouchable from the Indian Sub Continent and in my mine a dodgy member of the Catholic Hierarchy from Malta based in Gibraltar . She had somehow managed to overcome the basic insecurity, feeling of being an outsider, an illegitimate child, by becoming an actress and being will to engage in anything and everything to further her career, from having sex to flaunting her body on the screen. She goes to India in search of her father among 400 million as soon as she can get the money together and this second part of the film attempts to show something of contemporary Indian society although I was not sure what. She dresses up as an India girl, accompanies a gay stranger met at a hotel pool where she is not staying to visit his former friend who is has become a nun which is introduced to make the point about life choices and that solutions to the answered questions and issues of meaning and purpose and who has found her place in the universe by shutting herself away in a convent praying. For who she is asked, for everyone, she answers. Having satisfied something of her curiosity she return to France and her former way of life. It is possible she has seen her father according to one sources but given this opportunity she makes no attempt to establish one way or the other. It is a slight film of wasted opportunity and will only be of interest and significance for others the likes of me, unless seeing young French actress take off their clothes is your thing. For me I am left pondering what I should and should not do next.

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