The Betrayal

by Stent ver Broek

I was there
I was in that number on that day
But you wouldn’t listen to me

I stood at a barrier in the middle of a gently sloping road and looked around. For a quarter of a mile in front of me, and half a mile behind, a road six lanes wide was filled with people. Bursting with people. With a gentle, rhythmic undulation from their marching, a million heads looked towards Hyde Park.

It was February 15, 2003 and I was at the mass march and rally in London organised by the Stop The War Coalition. The inspirational passion of the day still lives with me; so too the subsequent disappointment. Above all, I’m proud to say:

I was there

I had decided to attend because I believed the ensuing invasion of Iraq would be wrong. I did not oppose the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, or the subsequent overthrow of the Taliban, as there was overwhelming evidence that al-Qaeda was using that acquiescent country as its seat of power. Iraq was altogether different. I quickly became convinced that Bush was finishing the job his father had baulked at; greedy for another oil source; eager to rid himself of a constant thorn in America’s side; but cloaking his ambitions beneath the duplicitous shroud of pre-emptive self-defence.

As any Michael Moore fan or conspiracy theorist will attest, the thoughts of George W Bush and his Oval Office hawks turned to Iraq before the dust had even begun to settle on the ruins of the Twin Towers. Despite the fact that fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, and none Iraqi, greater and greater attention was given to Saddam Hussein’s nation as the months passed.

My opposition to the war was based on the belief that Saddam’s regime was stable. Democratic? No. Supportive of free speech and human rights? No. Something to be esteemed? Of course not. But stable? Absolutely. There had been shocking abuses in the past, for which he and his cronies were rightly tried once captured, but by 2003 that was already distant, so the issue of Saddam’s accountability for his crimes should be entirely divorced from the arguments for or against the war. Moreover, though there are many wicked rulers in the world today, they will not lose power at our instigation.

In truth, at the start of 2003 Saddam had neither weapons of mass destruction nor the genocidal tendencies of his past. His position was precarious, and he knew it. I believed then that he was not a genuine threat to his own people or the wider world, and I still believe it. Admittedly, the Iraqis cheered when he fell, but would they have cheered so loudly had they known what the future would hold for them? So when the Stop the War Coalition announced the rally I decided to attend and to my slight surprise, and immense pride, so did my father.

I was in that number on that day

We made T-shirts with suitably uncomplimentary slogans about Blair and Bush. Mine had a cartoon portrait of the president and the words “Bellum gero ergo sum”: I wage war, therefore I am. We rendezvoused in Gower Street, the official start for travellers from the north. Immediately the scale of the protest awed and invigorated me in equal measure. It was a teeming phalanx of humankind of every description: the hippies and socialists rubbing shoulders with politicians and businessmen; a second-year undergraduate alongside a middle-aged computer programmer from the fens.

Banners waved and whistles blew; there was anger, determination and defiance etched on every face; and there was noise – boy, there was noise. What we had failed to prepare for, Dad and I, was what to do with a full bladder. As the matter became critical, Dad whispered that he was heading into the backstreets to find ‘a place to go’. When he returned, he had an expression that, with its triumphant air, seemed incongruous.

“What are you looking so pleased with yourself for?” I asked.

“Got the side of a bank.” Yes, there was rebellion in the air all right.

We reached Hyde Park some time after the speeches had begun. The message was the same from everyone: an invasion of Iraq would be unnecessary and potentially devastating: not in my name. And then we left; returned to our essays, computers, shops, and banks. We could do no more.

But you wouldn’t listen to me

The exact sequence and co-ordination of events leading to the invasion of Iraq remains shrouded in secrecy and deeply contentious, but I now believe that the protest was doomed to fail. The war was a fait accompli and all that remained to be decided was the date on which ‘shock and awe’ would begin. At the time, however, we marchers were unaware of this, still blithely optimistic that our presence could slow or even stop the war machine.

Perhaps we were naïve. In his evidence to the Chilcott Inquiry last year, a former US ambassador recollected a change in Blair’s attitude after his infamous visit to Bush’s Texas ranch: Sir Christopher Meyer noted Blair’s first use of the phrase “regime change” the very next day. That was as early as April 2002. From that point on, Blair’s language became ever more belligerent, his tone implacable. We know now that, come the march, the Treasury and armed forces had long been working from a blueprint of war against Iraq and the attorney general had endured months of pressure to issue the crucial legal authorisation. The Commons were to vote on the issue twice more, but the momentum towards invasion had already become inexorable.

Statistics concerning Iraq are widely disputed and should therefore be treated carefully. However, when deaths as a result of lawlessness and lack of healthcare are added to the direct casualties of war, estimates of civilian deaths since 2003 rise to as high as 600,000 or even a million – a truly monstrous figure. Would so many have died under Saddam? I think not.

I recently read an article about gang violence in Ciudad Juarez, dubbed “Mexico’s most dangerous city”. A local newspaper carried the headline “More people are murdered here than in Iraq”. It truly shocked me that Iraq is now known the world over as the epitome of violence, discord and death. Even in Mexico, where there can be dozens of murders each day, the yardstick for such atrocities is to be found in Baghdad. And the blame for that must be placed firmly at the feet of the President and Prime Minister who made it their personal battle.

On February 15, 2003, ten million people worldwide said, “Not In My Name.”

Two powerful men refused to listen.

Tomorrow

by suzishimwell

Tomorrow I will be good
I will not smoke or drink
But instead floss regularly
In between yoga sessions
I will work harder
Write that article
Paint that wall
I will concentrate on succeeding
Eschewing all cakes
And trash TV
I will sleep at 10
And rise at 6
I will walk 3 miles before having fruit for breakfast
I won’t need breakfast
I’ll be a machine
Tomorrow I will be better
The rest of today
Therefore
Does not count.

Spanakopita and Fedoras: Navarino Cafe in Montreal

by Christopher DeWolf

Eight years ago, I was an undergraduate student in Montreal, living in a two-room apartment that had nice wood floors but no natural light. One morning in early December, I awoke with my girlfriend, who had an end-of-semester exam, and as we left my building we discovered a thick blanket of fresh show that had been deposited on the city overnight. I remember a few things from that day. The first was my fatigue — getting up before eleven o’clock has never been one of my strengths. The second was the sunshine, which was brilliant in a way that it can only be on a cold day immediately after a snowstorm. The third was where we went after we left my apartment and trudged north up Park Avenue: Navarino.

Wedged between a former Banque Nationale and Lipa Klein’s kosher supermarket, Navarino is a Greek bakery-café that has been run by the Tsatoumas family since the early 1960s. Originally, it was just a bakery, but in the economic doldrums of the mid-1990s, when Montreal was still reeling from Quebec’s second referendum on national sovereignty, the younger generation of the Tsatoumas clan installed some tables and started selling coffee. That appealed to the layabout bohemians drawn into the neighbourhood by the cheap rent and good food left behind by departing Jewish, Greek, Portuguese and Italian immigrants.

By the time I moved to the neighbourhood, Navarino had taken on the appearance of a well-worn dive, with a rusted 60s-style sign in French and Greek, on which stood a comely waitress holding up a cake. For years, the staff behind the counter consisted only of young women who were called Les déesses de Navarino, according to a sign taped to the tip jar.

Navarino was my regular haunt for most of the time that I lived in Montreal. It was venerable but unpretentious, known throughout the neighbourhood but not unduly popular. But I didn’t find any of that out until later. In the beginning, I was won over by the cheap coffee, sweets and sandwiches. A couple of quarters and a quick flash of Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s ponderous five-dollar face was all it took to feed my caffeine addiction, rumbling student stomach and insatiable sweet tooth. The day-old pastries — sometimes brownies, sometimes danishes — were my favourite. When I felt fancy, and if I had an extra dollar, I would upgrade my sandwich from brown bread to cheese-stuffed tyropita.

I appreciated Navarino’s low-key charm. No matter what the time of day, there were always people sipping coffee and nibbling on spanakopita. In the winter, it was a cozy respite from the cold, and it would sometimes get so crowded that people would stand between tables with their coffee. Staff had to constantly sweep up melted snow and pebbles tracked in from outside. When the ground was clear, people sat at sidewalk tables out front, even if the temperature was just a few degrees above zero. My favourite place to sit was at the bar along the front window, where I could peek out over my newspaper at the people passing by on the street.

There were many regulars at Navarino. I gave some of them private nicknames: Newspaper Couple, Gay Dentist, Fedora Man, YMCA Guy. Often, I would see them around the city, and there would be a weird moment of dépaysement, like seeing a lion outside its zoo enclosure. One exception was Steve, who ran the café with his brother Peter. He lived with his girlfriend in the flat above Navarino and he was always around, chatting with customers. I don’t think I ever saw him outside of the café.

I visited Navarino at least once a day for several years. Whenever I left town, I missed its reliable familiarity. It was the quintessential “third place,” an informal gathering spot that lacks the social isolation of home and the strictures of the workplace. Ever since the concept of the third place was popularized by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the late 1980s, it has been absorbed into the marketing language of chain cafés like Starbucks, which neuter its true meaning by reducing it to comfy seats and soft lighting. Navarino, by contrast, embodied the true meaning of the term: a place that drew from the surrounding community and forged a community of its own.

In the summer of 2004, Greece unexpectedly made it to the finals of the Euro Cup football tournament and Steve and Peter installed a big screen TV on the sidewalk outside Navarino, under the shade of a green awning. It was a very hot day. All of the regulars were there to watch. When Greece scored the winning goal, Steve lept up from his seat, cheered wildly and waved a Greek flag. Park Avenue filled with revelers, immersing the neighbourhood in a frenzy of horn-blowing. Cries of joy and toilet paper were tossed like confetti.

Steve died the the following summer. I was visiting family in Calgary when my girlfriend called to tell me that he had hit a pedestrian while cycling and had injured his head by falling onto the pavement, even though he was wearing a helmet. She was distraught; I could hear her voice break on the phone. Not long after, I received an email about the news from my friend Zvi, who I had gotten to know on Navarino’s sidewalk terrasse. When I returned to Montreal, I went for my usual coffee and found that something in the air had changed.

Eventually, I started visiting Navarino less often. I still went for a sandwich now and then, but my horizons had expanded. I had new cafés to frequent. In 2008, I left Montreal for Hong Kong, where I have struggled to find a coffee shop that has the same sense of camaraderie as those in Montreal. Lately, Navarino has returned to my thoughts. It was renovated last year, and when its old sign was removed for restoration, city by-laws prevented it from being re-installed. The window bar where I used to sit has been removed, too, along with the windows themselves — the front now slides open entirely, according to a friend.

People change; so do places. My attachment to Navarino has crossed the threshold from everyday affection to hazy nostalgia. Still, part of me hopes that the next time I visit Navarino, I will be greeted the same way as when I visited in 2009, after a year of living in Hong Kong. “Hey,” said the girl behind the counter after seeing me. She had worked at Navarino for as long as I had been going there. “I haven’t seen you for awhile. How’s it going?”

Time

by benj24

Simple elements
A glass of water and a whirring fan
White spaces and long pauses
That stretch slowly
Along a line or distant horizon
That which is tasted
Time that is savoured
Presented
As a restaurant meal
With no one around
Gaps and spaces
In which even a clock does not
Tick or tock
Stock still, frozen
The table, window sill
Mantel piece
Outside it is raining
Glistening figures
Rushing home to children
And plates of food
Steaming

Nothing Extra: The Problem With Ricky Gervais

by stephenjbouchard

I first came across Ricky Gervais one night while watching Channel 4′s long-since cancelled Eleven O’clock Show. He appeared as himself, although clearly playing a character, that of a small-minded bigot. I found the character a little tedious – he put me in mind of a teenage boy who feels compelled to make provocative remarks in class continually in order to get any kind of reaction, good or bad. He became a recurring guest on the show, and each time I saw him the schtick remained pretty much the same.

I was rather surprised, therefore, to learn that he was to star in a verite-style sit-com on the BBC in the lead role. Creative casting, I assumed at first. I was doubly surprised to discover that he had co-written and even co-directed the whole show. But he was such a good fit for the part of try-hard boss David Brent that after a couple of episodes it was difficult to imagine him in any other role than as Brent.

Then one evening I happened to catch his stand-up show on Dave or Gold, or one such repeats channel. He delivered most of his routine from behind a lectern, and the whole act was nearer to a lecture than a comedy show. And yet I found myself convulsing with laughter for the next hour. I saw his other live DVD, Politics, which turned out to be equally amusing. At that moment, I would have championed Gervais as the greatest comedy talent of our time.

And yet, his subsequent output convinces me that my first impressions of him were far from being entirely mistaken. I first began to suspect that Gervais was something of a chancer in the right place at the right time during the first series of Extras. This time, Gervais made the mistake of playing the straight man role. From the opening episode, there seemed to be something off about the character Andy Millman, and it wasn’t just the unconvincingly insipid name.

The part required Gervais to act the part of the everyman figure, in the vein of Tim from the Office. Martin Freeman was effortlessly convincing as the downtrodden under-achiever, but he was able to appear so naturalistic precisely because he is a very talented and indeed highly-trained actor. When Gervais tried to play the Tim role, he was very transparently acting.

 

There are very few big-name comedians who don’t make the leap into films and/or sitcoms at some stage in their career, but most are smart enough to stick with character acting, for which the eccentricities which make them funny in the first place are likely to serve them well. David Brent was such a memorable comic creation because of his neediness and desperation for people to like him, qualities which I don’t imagine Gervais had to dig ever so deeply to dredge up.

The concept for Extras was promising, and parts of it were as funny as anything from the Office. Kate Winslet as the cynical Oscar-chaser and Les Dennis as the blissfully-ignorant cuckold were funny because there was a significant element of truth behind those characterisations. However, Ross Kemp as a hardman who is revealed to be a massive pansy and Orlando Bloom as a vain poser were angles far too obvious to be entertaining. Worst of all was the episode with Samuel L. Jackson. Here was an opportunity for an episode with real fireworks. No other actor does righteous anger like Sam Jackson.

Throughout the whole episode, I was waiting for the killer scene with Jackson. He appeared in the last scene, and he was given barely a couple of lines, while Gervais’s character makes a tit of himself by inadvertently saying something with racist implications. The whole episode’s premise was that white people find it hard to relax around black people because of a paralysing fear of saying or doing something that might be conceived as racist. A very similar theme underscores any interaction between David Brent and a black or Asian character in the Office. I realised then that Gervais is unable to create a black character who is anything other than a foil for inadvertent racists. I appreciate that this is an area of comedy worth exploring a little, but to restrict black characters to being merely objects of offensiveness shows a disappointing lack of imagination.

And then out of nowhere, Andy Milman decides to write a sit-com about his previously-unmentioned old boss, which he manages to sell to the BBC. As series 2 begins, it becomes clear what’s happening – Ricky has been getting into Curb Your Enthusiasm, a brilliant show starring Larry David, creator of Seinfeld, as himself . So now Andy Milman, instead of being an extra going from one set to the next, is the star and writer of an office-based sit-com. Perhaps the main reason why Curb works so well and Extras series 2 doesn’t is that Larry gets more and pissed off with each setback he encounters, whereas Andy Milman comes across as merely forlorn and pitiful.

Gervais is not the first comedian to ape Curb Your Enthusiasm and fall a long way short – Jack Dee, although a very funny stand-up, couldn’t quite rise to the challenge in Lead Balloon. The thing about Extras that most grates is its creator’s barely concealed sense of superiority over his peers. The BBC mystifyingly force Andy to re-write his verite-style sitcom into what is perhaps best described as an extended Two Ronnies sketch, with silly wigs, comedy glasses and, worst of all, a laughter track. Of course, everyone knows that the real Office pioneered the laughter track-free approach to comedy. Not counting the Royle Family, of course. Or the League of Gentlemen post series 2. Or the Larry Sanders show… I could go on.

The laughing goons in the audience are seen wearing slogans such as ‘Am I bovvered?’ and ‘I want that one’, a rather crude way of lampooning Catherine Tate, David Williams and Matt Lucas. I would agree with Gervais that neither of these shows are especially funny, and where they are funny the jokes are soon blunted from continual repetition. But if you’re going to mercilessly rip other comedians’ efforts, you’d better make sure your show delivers the goods (it doesn’t). Moreover, the Fast Show, which also lends a number of its catchphrases to the hysterical studio audience members’ t-shirts, is probably the best sketch show of the last twenty years and is far funnier than anything from Extras’ second series.

Andy inevitably becomes famous for his comedy, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s a sell-out for allowing his vision to be compromised by the BBC. He is duly ridiculed by sophisticates everywhere, including David Bowie and the entire attendance of the BAFTA awards. However, since Andy is really the anti-Gervais, having created a sitcom with catchphrases, wigs and laughs, the joke falls a little flat, since any criticism of Millman is equally, by implication, praise for Gervais.

Comic relief, if you will, comes in the gangly form of Stephen Merchant, who plays Darren Lamb, agent to Andy and also to Barry from Eastenders. Here, at last, we have a character who is neither a bully nor a victim, and who is something other than a conduit to a raft of awkward situations. Darren Lamb is simply a man of limited resources and competence who finds himself more and more out of his depth as Andy’s career takes off, with hilarious consequences (no, really).

The suspicion begins to grow that perhaps it’s Stephen Merchant, being after all the co-writer and co-director of Gervais’s TV work, who is the greaterl talent out of the pair. His contribution to the Ricky Gervais Show podcast (which should really be called the Karl Pilkington Show) lends weight to this suspicion. The show is essentially an exploration of the aforementioned Pilkington’s mind, a man who seems to be an idiot savant with a child-like conception of the world.

Merchant makes perfectly-timed wry remarks and asks him finely-judged leading questions. Gervais, on the other hand, laughs like a hyena (he literally makes the exact sound), calls him an idiot and tediously spells out his mistakes to him (as if he doesn’t really know he’s talking bollocks). In other words, Ricky Gervais is the least funny participant on his own show.

These days, Gervais spends more of his time making films than TV show. His two latest offerings as writer/director make for an interesting contrast. First, there’s The Invention of Lying. Chris Hewitt of Empire magazine puts it best:

‘We’re not going to lie to you: The Invention Of Lying is bad. The Love Guru bad. Sgt. Bilko bad. David Brent’s stand-up bad. It’s so bad that it makes you think  that Stephen Merchant — notable by his near-absence here, with first-timer Matthew Robinson sharing the writing/directing duties with Ricky Gervais — was the real brains of his partnership with Gervais all along.’

Contrast that with Cemetery Junction, a film with no celebrity cameos and only a supporting role for Gervais as the lead character’s dad. Cemetery Junction garnered a an almost universally favourable critical reaction, and, unlike the Invention of Lying, was co-written, by, you guessed it, Stephen Merchant.

So what should we conclude from all this? There’s no doubt that Ricky Gervais is a considerable talent, just not of the astronomic proportions which he seems to imagine. Although he’s had considerable success since he shaved off David Brent’s goatee for the final time, it’s hard to imagine he’ll go down in posterity for anything other than creating and starring in The Office. It does seem a shame, then, that he chose to call time on that show after only two series and a couple of slightly disappointing Christmas specials, but then such is the fate of more great sitcoms than I care to remember.

The classic Fawlty Towers is often cited as a great show that didn’t outstay its welcome, but I reject that line of thinking. Peep Show, possibly the greatest television show of all time in any genre, broadcast its sixth series last year, which was possibly the best yet. Seinfeld, the best of the American sitcoms, produced a total of 180 episodes in its nine year run. And the American Office, starring the wonderful Steve Carrell, has produced over a hundred and looks set to continue, albeit minus Carrell. And to tell the truth, the American version has more laughs in it. Which, lest we forget, is the ultimate aim of comedy.

I can’t help but wondering, incidentally, if Stephen Merchant might have become an even bigger star, were he not such a ‘goggly-eyed freak’, as David Brent charmingly refers to him in the Office. We’ll never know…