la ley de fuga

I don't often watch TV TV. Broadcast TV. I get my fix from DVD. Not enough mind you, especially when writing for TV persists to be an ambition of mine. Signals don't come into my room, so I normally have to book time with my flatmate's digibox. I have not found my way to either Spooks or Life on Mars, despite them being my cup of tea. I am making light work of Unit Season 2 and polished Dexter Season 1 off over Christmas. There's an unwrapped Shield s1, a Star Trek (OS) S1, Twin Peaks 2 and Friday Night Lights to keep me going for the forseeable (though I get the feeling, much like my attitude towards paperbacks, I'll start buying like I'm expecting a narrative fiction holocaust, and I fully expect to plump for Battlestar Galacticas and much more soon enough.) I fell out of sequence with Lost, The Sopranos, ER and 24, and don't know when I'll pick up those threads. I'm routinely lent The Wire and Deadwood. (I don't actually own a Wire myself, as much as I yell it's awesomeness. But I was maybe only the second person I know to see it. So fuck off.)



Anyway, tonight I asked if I could watch Panorama. Which has nothing to do with that list above. It isn't HBO. JJ Abrams or Joss Whedon (never saw the final Season of Buffy either) didn't have a hand in making it. It didn't start with "Previously on Panorama..."



It was about Blur Bassist and cheese-maker Alex James going to Colombia to say something poignant about cocaine as a gear in international crime and the commodity that makes Colombia one of the most hellish places on Earth.



After reading Mark Bowden's 'Killing Pablo' last year, Colombia is not a place I'd want to make a high or low profile vist too. I'll admit I'm quite pussy about countries. I don't think of Thailand as lush beaches and an amazing culture like so many who'll braid their hair and wear beads and go sit in a hammock. I think about slave-traders and pirates and murderers. Latin America is Man on Fire. If I go there I will be kidnapped. My kidneys will be sold on the black market, and when finally I make my bloody way to the Federales They'll throw me into the worst prison on earth and I'll eat shit and sicario cock for the rest of my life. I don't need to read a Lonely Planet guide to holiday destinations. I've seen Belly.



I don't think Alex James has read Killing Pablo, because I don't think he would have agreed to go if he'd read so much as the back. I do think the case he made about cocaine wasn't so much expressed in words as it was by being so scared he could hardly talk. I think the idea initially was to make an hour long special, but poor Alex must have shit himself after each segment that there really was very little footage of him not loosing his bowels. I commend his efforts, I really do. He was a likeable presence in a show with good intentions and he had put himself in harms way to show you something. He joined aircrews crop-spraying (not shot at). Tagged along as worker's uprooted illegal plantations (didn't tread on a landmine. Wasn't shot at.) Met dealers (wasn't shot at.) Met a contract killer (wasn't kidnapped. Wasn't executed. Wasn't caught in crossfire from a rival. Car didn't blow up.) Met farmers (wasn't kidnapped by the FARC. Wasn't chopped up by the FARC. Plane wasn't shot down.) Met the President of Colombia (nobody tried to kill him either for the length of that meeting.) Someone from the aircrew did die while he was out there and the contract killer got rubbed out when he got back. He did give the President a box of goat's cheese.



The intention of the show was to make the casual user, probably the educated apparently world-sensitive middle class market, think twice about what the product's true social cost is. The idea being that there is some moral equivalent to your carbon foorprint, and if you can do something about your emissions, maybe you should do something about what you suck in too.




Problem was they didn't make that point very well. They've certainly made people never want to go to Colombia. But the cost in terms of lives wasn't illustrated at all. Probably the pre-watershed nature of the show. We did see one victim of sorts - a mule in prison - who was such a gargantuan fuck up anyway. Half his face moved in the opposite direction to the other and he had no sense of self-preservation a tall. Alex had some which is why when he laughed at the guy a beat too long, you could audibly hear him gulp and quickly make up a question that wasn't 'should I or should I not stab this floppy-hair-man on TV?' for the slack-jawed nihilist to ponder.



When El Doctor was in power, hundreds of people died on his order. He really was 'in power' too. He was in Parliament at one point, and Forbes listed him as the 10th Richest Man in the whole fucking world. There's a strong following for this Osama Bin Laden man, even though he's endorsed death on an epic scale and I'm sure his followers are a-ok with that because Bin Laden's pointing his bomb-happy morons at (arguably) his enemy. Pablo blew up Colombians, and Colombians loved him. In order to kill one presidential candidtae he blew up an airliner midflight, killing 110 people. When he turned himself in the the authorities, he did so on the condition that he design his own prison - La Cathedral; essentially a presidential palace where he would serve out his sentence. He escaped later (knowing how to, of course) when it was suggested he be moved to an actual proper prison. For crooks, like.



When Bogota wasn't getting blown up by the Narcos - gunning for judges and police chiefs - a vigilante group called Los Pepes (who may have been trained, even established by Spec Ops/Black Ops) went gunning for the narcos and carved up some 300 cartel members and their families. It's touched upon by someone in the book, a line I can't find at a glance so I'll have to paraphrase it - That God made the most beautiful landscape on the planet, and then felt he had to populate it with the most brutal people ever.





What's my point? None really. I just saw something and felt like writing. I was inspired partly because Stand Up Geek gets updated nearly everyday, often just with anecdotes about being on a bus or a tube (in fact, it primarily is that. Here's my joke: Please Offer This Seat To Those Less Able To Stand-Up Geek. I know I've got talent I can fall back on should my looks ever fail me) and is entertaining. I figured I keep trying to write epic posts, and maybe I could use a ramble.



If you missed the show, that's a shame. It wasn't ground-breaking. It was just a bit strange and a bit interesting. I heartily recommend the book. Two Escobar films are in the works - Joe Carnahan is adapting Mark Bowden's book with Javier Bardim and Christian Bale, and Anton Fuqua is doing just a Pablo-bio with Edgar Ramirez. The book tells an amazingly fucked up tale. Fictional Escobars like Franz Sanchez in Licence to Kill or the chap in Clear and Present Danger don't compare at all to the batshit insane El Patron and his billion dolar empire.

I've never done the stuff, I might add. It gets offered about at some of the things I've been to, but discreetly and I've not been party to anything beyond hearing who has gone to the lavatory and why. I've got a smallish double-standard in that I've happily smoked weed at various points in my life. Sporadically and in quantities that pale compared to anyone else I know who has indulged (I know complete utter nevers), much in the same way I think I drink, but nobody else thinks I drink, not properly. I haven't smoked for quite some time now (in fact I think the last time was during Blur's set at Reading five years or so back. Fancy that? I'd drunk in the sun and then smoked my little hash pipe back at the tent. I passed out for all of Blur and didn't notice that people had come into my tent to get their bags and leave the festival. I slept 14 hours or so on the ground in a humid nylon lung.) Perhaps I'm deceiving myself a bit when I say I also, by way of a friend of a friend, knew it came from a guy's secret greenhouse and not from anywhere ten year olds carry MAC-10s (so not Peckham, then. A ho hum.) Likewise I've never done pills. I think over a decade's worth of watching everyone from Roger Moore to Mel Gibson rumble with the dealership convinced me which side I should be on. When I hear the small fry chemical desires of some of my peers, I feel all Skull T-Shirt and Shotgun. It cost Frank Castle his kids. Felix Leiter his wife. Got Murtaugh's daughter kidnapped.




Just so you can talk shit to shitheads.








I did work experience at the BBC Music Library at Television Centre once. It was quite dull. I guess it must have been the days before 'Song 2'. I imagine some departments just have that on permanent loan. Well done. The royalties from that alone are probably how Alex James got to spend a million on cocaine and champagne in the first place. Your paint-by-numbers soundtrack selection has ruined the lives of thousands of Latin Americans. I hope you're happy.



The show also used Bloc Party's 'Helicopter' for...wait for it....footage of helicopters. Christ.







I haven't proof-read this thing. I'm going to bed.

So winners don't do, ok? Good. Just so we're clear.