Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

There he is looking out of an advertisement in the pages of the Guardian: James Bond, a public schoolboy with a machine gun in his hands advertising Barclaycard and Aston Martins. Was he once a member of the Bullingdon Club too? Probably. But where can we find an alternative James Bond, the heroic and stylish story of a hard-wearing sophisticated hero of the left? How about Dale, Dr Dale T McKinley? As a youth he moved to the US from his native Zimbabwe, where he trained at Ranger school, the US equivalent of the SAS. He went on to get a PhD in Politics and while he was studying for it he travelled to El Salvador where he was with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and used his military skills to defend village communities. Back in North Carolina Dale became incensed when he heard the CIA were recruiting at his university. He had seen the CIA's Felix Leiters at work in Central America and hated them. With colleagues he hunted them down and physically threw the rec...

On the day after the Nobel committee gives a Frenchman the prize, lets say what's true about the Emperor's new clothes. US TV series like Lost are hyped up entertainment products with little or no lasting cultural relevance - especially outside the USA. There is a place called planet USA where J.J. Abrams and his colleagues exist. I think it must be a little like secondlife . There, human reality is the product of a lot of fictionalisation. Artificial values are manufactured and sustained in the face of Imperial wars. Stories of the American dream belie the reality of lives lived under the thumb of the US corporates, banking mafias and olygarchies. In the 1930s and 40s there were a group of people who made intelligent and thoughtful films. This progressive group was later extirpated from US cultural life by McCarthyism. And since then there has been very little of real value produced in the mainstream. What is subversive or interesting about Lost then? We can conclude, howeve...