Intimacy

Some weeks before Christmas, well past the watershed, RAI2, one of the Italian state TV channels, showed Brokeback Mountain. Well, actually, it didn't. It showed a version of Brokeback Mountain shorn of its moments of intimacy. Brokeback Mountain without intimacy is another film entirely, and this was pointed out to the head of RAI2, who claimed it was all a terrible mistake - the bowdlerised copy had been prepared for another section of the RAI (presumably under total Vatican control) - and would be remedied forthwith. I've been told by a RAI director that it's damn nigh impossible that a film be broadcast without its having been seen by someone, but why should I doubt the word of a regime whore respected professional. If that's what he says, that must be the way it was.

We're still waiting to see the film as Ang Lee, and Annie Proulx, intended it, but who knows what the new year may bring. In the meantime, I discovered yesterday, from an article in the Observer, that Cuban state television has shown Brokeback Mountain without cuts. Cuba Libre.

A Chavez story that doesn't mention Naomi Campbell

There's a rather odd piece in today's New York Times about middle and upper class Venezuelans fleeing the country in fear of Chavez, to settle in South Florida. They're compared in the article to Cuban exiles, on the run from Castro. What's odd about it is that none of the people interviewed actually seems to have been personally affected in any way by Chavez. The first 'exile' apparently decided to stay in the US to avoid the repercussions of a labour strike organised by Chavez's opponents. Yes, not by Chavez - by his opponents. The rest of them seem to have been merrily exporting their wealth in suitcases over the past few years, not because of anything that has been done to them but because they're afraid their lifestyle might suffer. Well, yes. It's hard to have to do without domestic staff and chauffeurs. But, with the indomitable spirit of the formerly parasitic, they struggle on. After all, they don't want to be forced to live in a country in which a democratically elected leader does what he says he'd do - sorry, imposes his socialist vision. As opposed to having a capitalist vision imposed on the country by those notoriously undemocratic insitutions, the WTO and the World Bank.