Cartel

Apologies to the handful of people who occasionally check this site for new stuff - I've been a bad blogger. That's partly due to a shed load of other work, and also because a number of the pieces that I've wanted to write about have been difficult to access except in print (notably a too-lengthy, but occasionally inspired piece by Janet Malcolm about a murder trial which ran a month ago in the NYer, and which is only available to subscribers online).

My work will soon suffer the same fate. The paywall is going up around the Sunday Times website in three weeks or so, after which time, people will have to pay a pound for a day's access to thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk, or two pounds for a week's.

Anyway, in the May 31 edition of the New Yorker, William Finnegan has a finely observed, and disturbing feature about organised crime, drugs, and the collapse of the state in Mexico. And, like much of the magazine's best stuff, you need to be a subscriber to read it online. On the strength of this piece, I would thoroughly recommend becoming one. A typically chilling piece of testimony about the drugs cartels comes from a Mexican ex-governor:

"There were these incredible scenes in small towns all over Michoacan," he said. "I would get a call afterward from the mayor. Ten pickup trucks full of armed men had arrived at the municipality. The local police could do nothing. They were outgunned. But the criminals were very respectful. They would tell the mayor, 'We want to work here. There will be no trouble, no crime, no drunkenness, nothing.' They they would take over the town, and enforce their rules. If a boy hit his mother, they would punish him and dump him in the plaza for people to see. If he did it again, they would kill him. It was a strategy to gain popular sympathy, and it worked." Mayors are typically paid for their hospitality. It is plata o plomo - silver or lead. You take the money or we shoot you and your family.

The New Yorker has a "web-only" talk with Finnegan about his reporting from Mexico here.

The Hunted

This is a remarkable piece about a pair of American conservationists fighting back against ivory poachers, and going too far. Probably the best part of a book here - 20,000 words, or 30,000 words - but like all good magazine pieces, you keep going because the story drags you deeper. Above all, this is a serious, well-resourced, sensitive example of investigative reporting.

The Man Who Sold The War

I've just come across this piece from Rolling Stone, about lies, PR, and warmongering in Bush's government. An exquisite skewering of the neoconservatives, and a quite shocking delineation of the road to shock and awe...

It won the National Magazine Award in 2006.

The Things That Carried Him

On the basis of his excellent Roger Ebert piece (see last post) I took a look at Chris Jones's National Magazine Award-winning 2008 beast, The Things That Carried Him. It concerns a US soldier's last trip home, and has a brilliant narrative structure that I'll let you enjoy without ruining it for you here. The Things That Carried Him is, above anything, an unbelievable piece of reporting. Writing not bad either.

Months away

I have been a bad blogger. That's partly laziness, and partly the depressing sensation of writing into the void. Anyway, I recently read something that made me want to blog again - a piece about the film critic Roger Ebert in American Esquire. Ebert had cancer, and had his jaw removed. He can no longer talk, except through a computer voice programme, and he writes a phenomenal number of words a day. The story, by Chris Jones, is wonderful.

Enjoy.

Titmuss, The Darkness, and the darkness of Sendak

In today's Sunday Times Culture, I write about the casting of Abi Titmuss in Lady MacBeth. She made me toast, with raspberry jam, which was nice of her. I interviewed her in Lowestoft, which is, incidentally, both the most easterly point of Britain, and the home of ersatz 70s rock outfit, The Darkness.

Which leads me to another piece in Culture, Bryan Appleyard's compelling discussion of darkness and orphans in children's literature and cinema. I like "airless" as a description of Maurice Sendak's cartoons. I had a recurring nightmare when I was little about the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Every night for about a year, he was on the hunt for me. It didn't matter what precautions I put in place, he was always too wily. I normally woke up just as he was about to pounce, but the lingering sensation of airlessness, or suffocation, remained.

Congo, Gleeson, Cameron, Predator Drones, Bushfires

I've been in the Congo, hence the silence. Did anyone notice? Possibly not. It's probable I'm talking in a void here, but I like that. My wife reads my infrequent posts, when she has the time.

Anyway, while I was gone, the Times almost failed to webtify this interview with Brendan Gleeson, which ran in the Sunday Times Magazine on 1 November. The New Yorker, meanwhile, provided me with considerable solace on my travels with the Congolese bandits, by producing their crackerjack Oct 26th edition. Three interesting pieces: one on the CIA's Predator Drone programme, one on the Australian bushfires (subscribers only), and one on the blowhard director James Cameron.

The crucial things I learnt from this trifecta are as follows:

1) Private ontractors fly predator drones remotely from offices in suburban America, thereby allowing them to obliterate Taliban leaders and any innocent civilians who happen to be standing nearby, and be home in time for dinner.

2) Seriously hot bushfires create their own weather. Very hot ones make their own lightning.

3) You should never, ever, call James Cameron "Jimmy". He also doesn't like to be touched by strangers.