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According to an article in today's Independent, Maria Vittoria Brambilla, the Italian minister for tourism (seen here discussing policy with her employer), has announced that the Palio di Siena, the traditional horse races that occupy the city's main square for much of the summer, should be banned, along with all other public spectacles involving cruelty to animals. Not because of their intrinsic violence towards dumb beasts, with whom Brambilla ought to feel, at the very least, a nuance of sympathy, nor because they provide a substantial source of revenue for the Mafia, but because they damage Italy's image abroad.

In the same newspaper, Christina Patterson has this to say about David Cameron and his putative political encounter with Silvio Berlusconi this week:

How do you solve a problem like Berlusconi?

David Cameron has clearly been having a lovely time visiting his foreign counterparts, offering a little lecture here, a little pat on the back there and generally revelling in being one of the Most Important People in the World. If some of them can't quite match his background, well, one wouldn't want to make them feel awkward, and some of them – Obama, actually – have other qualities that make up for it.

But Berlusconi. Oh dear, Berlusconi. How the hell do you conduct a meeting with the biggest joke in international politics, a man so surgically enhanced that he now looks like a ventriloquist's dummy? How do you talk to a man who can't even have a snack without a bevy of luscious lovelies? How do you do that and retain a micro-molecule of dignity?

Cameron's solution to a challenge that might defy Debrett's lacked his usual lightness of touch. He turned up late. Almost an hour late. He skipped the planned talks and went straight to the dinner, and skipped a press conference, too. In the photos, Cameron weirdly managed to look like Berlusconi's taller, plastic twin. He also managed to look something he's rarely looked before: deeply, excruciatingly embarrassed.

Maybe someone should take Ms Brambilla to one side and explain that the odd dead horse - however lamentable - does far less damage to Italy's international 'image' than the raddled old nag to whom she owes her brilliant, and probably bareback, career.

Troublemaker

Isn't this wonderful! It's the winning portrait in this year's Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award. His name is Troublemaker and he's a young adult Sulawesi black-crested macaque. The photographer is Stefano Unterthiner of Italy.

(Thanks to Towleroad for this.)

Debord, de trop

ooI’m in England for a few days to see my mother. My visit's coincided with Naomi Campbell’s recent tantrum at Heathrow's disaster-struck T5 (luggage to Milan to be sorted...') and, less excitingly, the return to television of someone called Nigel Marven. Marven’s been popping up on all kinds of programmes, from Jonathan Ross, despite not having very much to say, to a daytime cooking show, despite not eating meat or drinking wine, which rendered him more or less useless, although no one seemed to care. He’s promoting his new series, so presumably all is forgiven.

One of the preview clips we were shown was of Marven, up to his knees in malodorous swamp, straddling a furiously threshing creature called, I think, a snapper turtle. He was forcing open its large, ungainly mouth to show us a small flickering scrap of flesh built into its tongue and used to attract fish. He touched it to see what the snapper turtle would do, the way you might squeeze an avocado before you buy to make sure it’s ripe enough for that evening.

He’s one of that new school of TV naturalists who’ve sussed that, just as the anthropologist contaminates and becomes integral to the culture under the microscope, so these various heirs of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough – and Marven began as one of Attenborough’s assistants – are no longer invisible observers from camouflaged hides in woods and fields, the kind of thing we used to try to build when I was a child and children were allowed to leave the house without armed guards. These days, they want to be seen. They’re part of the show. To all intents and purposes, they are the show.

Steve Irwin, the Australian whose self-aggrandising antics led to his death, must have been the first – though he certainly won’t be the last – to grasp that what we really want to watch isn’t the animal in its natural state at all. What we now appear to want is to watch the animal being drawn, dragged, biting, kicking, enraged, into our natural state: the state of the spectacle, our Everyman before the lens. We want to see the animal exposed in some way, transformed by its own anger or confusion or fear into the real performer’s stooge. The fact that the creature might damage the performer, even lethally, is part of the pleasure. It ought to be shameful, but it isn’t, or doesn’t seem to be. It seems to be what looking at the world – indeed, caring about the world – involves.

What does this have to do with Naomi Campbell? Well, it strikes me that what Marven and his colleagues most resemble, in their attitude towards their audience and their subjects, are paparazzi. Invasive, judgemental, acting in what they see – or pretend to see – as the public interest, they violate the world they’re supposed to be, in some way, recording. They’re so busily turned back towards us as they run to and then from their prey, teasing, coaxing, disturbing, rendering the otherwise unavailable available, that they don’t see the inauthenticity of it all; or, if they do, don’t care.

Now the last person in the world I’d normally defend is the maid-beating peace-crusading utterly dreadful Naomi Campbell. But when she turns on a photographer, or even a member of the public armed with camera phone, what she most resembles isn’t a celebrity so much as a snapper turtle, or dugong, or cayman, one of the harried beasts in Marven’s smugly relentless grip, held with its jaws forced open so that we can genuinely get the beauty of it hot.