Re-run Around #2

CHINATOWN

The private eye thriller is a well worn path, trodden by films since time was time and secrets were secrets. Vivid images come naturally to mind at the mention of the genre: incriminating photographs taken from unsecured rooftops. Trilby's shadowing grim faced ex-cops. Smokey eye'd, smouldering, cupid-bow lipped molls. Dirty fingered exchanges of cash, loot and threats.

All these cliches are present and incorrect in Roman Polanski's 1974 noir Chinatown, captured so perfectly that within the first ten minutes you feel comfortable inhabiting the offices of Jake Gittes's private detective agency as if you yourself have a wayward husband and you need a PI to snoop out the misdeeds.

Jack Nicholson lives, breathes and reclines in the role of Jake, showing his now customary combination of slick seduction and manic danger. Set during the chronic water shortages that blighted 1930's LA, Gittes is an ex-cop escaping the pressure and danger of working in Chinatown to take up more slippery work, uncovering private indiscretions for the highest bidder.

Jake is hired by the wife of a prominent water engineer Hollis Mulwray who is apparently playing away from home. With precision, Jake photographs and discredits Mulwray's reputation and soon Mulwray's body is found washed up in the reservoir. Nicholson is pitch perfect in his portrayal of the hardened ex-cop taking a sly relish in his work, enjoying operating on the fringes of the law he once upheld in Chinatown.

However the conventionality of the film begins to twist as, in the ensuing scandal, Jake becomes aware that he was hired by an impostor. Jake's incredulity is matched by a newly invigorated passion to discover who is responsible for fooling him and why. Soon it becomes clear that he has been dragged into a battle for control of the water supply to the city and must challenge sinister corporate faces with dark fingers lining the pockets of city officials, if he is to find the truth.

By resisting the urge to use a conventional voice over, Polanski draws his audience into the world of Jake, uncovering the clues as he does, taking each step alongside him and becoming just as emotionally entangled in the plot. Jake's profession is a paradox of uncovering what is hidden by exposing what is seen through the lens of a camera and we as an audience take the same journey to discover each delicious nugget of truth served up in tantalising portions on the screen.

Chinatown becomes a paradox in it's own right, a juxtaposition of horror and joy. The joy in the film lies in uncovering each mystery, of piecing together how Mulwray's true wife, played with understated regality by Faye Dunaway, fits into the schemes of her wealthy father who has vested interest in the water supply. The horror in the film comes when we realise that uncovering that which is hidden, leads Jake to face dark secrets and subversive lives.

The legacy of Chinatown is clear in its familiarity. The cliches are a flattery, the copy cats a homage. Such is it's influence that a second look at LA Confidential, Blade Runner (at least in the directors cut) or Who Framed Roger Rabbit are a deja-vu. However, the real legacy of Chinatown is as a pillar of storytelling without patronising or over indulging your audience with distractions and grandstanding. Polanski treats us as grown ups, capable of discovering the nature of people and being horrified by the consequences.

This is never truer than as Jake makes his final and brutally dark discovery. A discovery which subverts both the genre and most people's fundamental understanding of what people are capable of. Jake is forced to realise that sometimes the horror is just too great, justice no longer worth the sacrifice. So, just like Jake, the audience cannot help but look away as the edifice of slick PI's, corporate money men and finding redemption in truth are torn apart by the gruesome nature of the world we live in.

"Forget it Jake... it's Chinatown"

xx

Derisory Inquiry

Blog Hawk Down

As is customary for a Wednesday morning, the tendrils of the dawn light rip open my sleep and I step dry mouthed and dizzy from bed (nearly tripping over the hooker's corpse) and into the bathroom for a shower and a fag, all the while consumed with hangover regrets. How did a 'quick ale' in the Lamb and Screwdriver turn into a 8 hour search for liver failure? Did I really declare all cheesy snacks crack lined agents of the devil and start a fight with a bag of Quavers? Could it be true that spray paint doesn't come off tombstones? Does a whole bottle of rum constitute 'reasonable doubt'? I'm sure you know the feeling.

After a refreshing Alka Seltzer enema and a few hours on the sofa weeping and shivering like a puppy in an RSPCA advert, I'm back on form with a determination to forget everything that went before. It's in these brief moments of sobriety that I'm prone to ponder why any sane person would then wish to assemble a panel of their friends together the next day and joyfully pick at the carrion of the previous night's debauchery like insects suckling on a cream horn.

Why gather braying, giggle trumpet pals to reminisce about your indiscretion with a hose? I try to ignore times when alcohol releases inhibitions by continuing to test my theory that drinking Toilet Duck can induce amnesia.

"Sure thing Alan, lets meet up down the pub, re-live some horrors I can't alter. While we're at it, why not invite all my ex-girlfriends over to discuss my individual failures armed with penknives and pepper spray? We could bring along an old school teacher and go over my lack of talent, perhaps uncover the reason I spend my days morosely tippy-tappying into a keyboard rather than building a business empire, dating international catwalk models, selling T-Shirts of my face and establishing a private army? Is that what you want? Is it Alan? What good would it do me now, Alan? WHAT GOOD WOULD IT DO ME NOW? YOU GUSHING TURDHOLE OF A PERSON, ALAN. ...what's that? Yeah, I'll see you Friday."

I really can't understand anyone wanting to haul their conscience over the hot coals of shame and make bold claims that "it could never happen again", whilst simultaneously turning hair of the dog into an Oliver Reed tribute concert and getting just as leathered all over again. It seems to me that gathering more tits in one place than Jordan's Guide To Ornithology and discussing my failure to keep my trousers on in a nightclub, has no effect whatsoever as a preventative measure for future idiocy.

I suppose it's fashionable to have a retrospective inquiry into mismanagement, misdemeanors and mistakes despite the fact that the horse has not only bolted but has run out of the paddock, spent all his sugar lumps down the dogs and been forced to live rough on the streets selling his arse for glue. Every time things are buggered, we like to celebrate the fuckupishness off it all with a big inquiry party and pick over the bones.

Leveson, Chilcot, The 9/11 Commissionandonandonandon. Nothing says 'Western Regret' quite like governments screwing up royally and, fearing the public are getting a bit miffed about all this murder and mismanagement, scrambling to avoid actually altering their ways by having a good old hand wringing session at an inquiry.

The standard model for an independent inquiry is to get some dusty bookend peer with time to spare between AA meetings and thrashing his children to sit at the end of a long table and fall asleep while bickering law schoolers spout non-sensical guff towards minor celebrities (like the Prime Minister) and look very pleased about how much they're getting paid.

Everyone called before an Independent Inquiry adopts the correct facial expression (an alarming combination of seriousness and attempting to break the world record for holding marbles up their bumhole) to give their version of events. Although, oddly enough, their 'version of events' always miraculously points the blame in every direction other than their own. The inquiry becomes little more than a desperate attempt to cover more arses than the trilby department of a Topman factory. On top of this, the process goes on so long that independent inquiries now appear to be a new kind of endurance sport where the winner is determined as the person who doesn't die of old age before the end.

These thrilling sessions are usually followed up by a handy 30,000 page report that no-one bothers to read and half arsed calls for an 'overhaul' of something or other, leaving all involved free to pat their bellies in a self congratulatory way and put in an order for enough Guylian chocolates to double the GDP of Belgium. By this point the press and public are so disinterested they can't remember the thing that was so wrong in the first place that we needed and inquiry to investigate it, and the calls for the overhaul in question are highlighted on That's Britain in a hilarious skit entitled 'political correctness gone mad!'

My favorite inquiry of the last week was investigating the high cost of the closing ceremony at last summer's under 20 Football World Cup, especially the payment of $12,000 to retain the services of a shaman employed to prevent rain. As organiser Martha Ana Pizarro rightly points out, "It didn't rain. We'd use him again", a particularly encouraging outcome for me as my meteorite preventing tea-cosy is currently available to the highest bidder on Ebay.

It seems that people are now asking awkward questions as to why sinister executives enticed a terrified, pig fearing government to fork out cash like Scrooge McDuck in Vegas on enough flu vaccine to allow us to cut off the heating in every nursing home in Britain and still keep the residents cough free until the rapture. Various agencies are united in 'calls' for an inquiry, presumably by hanging about in the woods with a special whistle, hoping an inquiry rears it's head up long enough to be pumped full of buckshot.

In that vein I look forward to a future Mirror Replacement Programme where Tamiflu executives are installed behind your bathroom reflection weeping for your future and humming a funeral durge each time you look inside the medicine cabinet for Lemsip or moan about a vague feeling of dreariness.

Any hope that future generations might learn from the past by ceaseless inquisitions probably rests on our own ability to press gang nervous officials to act responsibly and with accountability, but right now it seems that repenting at leisure is the only way forwards. Makes you want to turn to drink, doesn't it?

Come on. I'm buying...

Solongandthanksforallthefish xxx

Re-run Around #1

Note from the Reservation:

As of this week my ranting, non-sensical and semi-coherant views on retro movies are being inflicted on the population as a whole via Source Radio. If you have no regard for your sanity, you can catch my retro movie reviews live and in living sound-o-rama every other Wednesday. If you fancy, you can catch up (Retro-retro-reviews, anyone?) on this weeks review here

I'll be following each one up with a written version which replace banal mutterings with banal scribblings, but will still be a damn sight better than Radio 1's.

Thanks for listening, enjoy the film.

NETWORK.

The 1960's and 70's saw society lurch forwards into a new age of enlightenment, fighting the trends that had restricted and restrained society, popular culture and embittered people's lives. The sexual revolution, drug counter-culture, black rights, women's rights and the rise of populist television made for a molotov cocktail of conflicting and emboldening viewpoints, especially in the United States, where an increasingly enraged public fought a war on intellectual frontiers.

For the baby boomers, their war wasn't on the battlefield. They paid no homage to those who returned from World War II and opposed the anti-communist strategy in Vietnam. Their rage, fear and mistrust of the government was growing as was a sense of disenfranchisement. Hollywood was becoming a melting pot of political and social agendas and with a government isolated and mistrusted and television media outlets compromised, it was Hollywood who held a prism up to society, at once reflecting and refracting the concerns of the populace.

Set in the world of a fictional 4th television network within the American broadcasting system, Network was born out of these concerns and used both satire and realism to create a grand allegorical parable, warning this enraged generation that their rage and their desire for change could be manipulated and redirected by the one tool that was bringing them all together: television.

In the fictional network UBS, television news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) becomes increasingly morose as the measure of his success becomes reduced to ratings rather than factual content, until the time comes when his boss and great friend Max Schumacher (William Holden) is forced to fire Howard to appease the new owners of the Network, CCS. It's only when Howard returns to give one of his last shows as news anchor that he informs the public, live on air, that he intends to shoot himself on camera and quips that the ratings will soar.

At first, all hell breaks loose and Howard agrees to apologise, only to embark on a live, on air rant against the 'Bullshit' society that allows the hypocrisy of the world to continue unchecked. This public meltdown creates huge controversy, but at the same time, manipulative bosses played by Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall conspire to turn the news into an entertainment show, placing Howard's rants as the centrepiece and 'articulate the public rage' all for a larger share of the ratings.

As Howard's sanity gives way, his speeches become more and more alarming, culminating with his furious bellowing of "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" in a barnstorming performance from Peter Finch. The audience, finding in Howard, someone to represent their isolation and anger, lap it up and the machine of the corporation turns this disturbed man into the biggest thing on television. In doing so, the producers make rage mainstream, fury primetime and the exciting banal. The 'whorehouse' network which has solicited ratings from every possible source can now use the counterculture movement to distract and placate the population whilst at the same time insulating the public from the horrors of the age.

Part of the genius of Sidney Lumet's direction lies in how the details of the film were designed to reflect the central corruption by the networks, who streamline feelings into ratings. The film itself manipulates the audience into compliance through the lighting set up, which at the start of the film is whitewashed and grey, gradually improving throughout until the final scenes are as glossy and 'television' as possible.

The film is also strangely prophetic, as eventually Fox became the 4th US Network and their News programme is often little more than table thumping rhetoric designed to entertain and editorialise rather than impartially relay current events. The anchors on Fox News sometimes make Howard Beale's enraged rabble rousing seem positively tame in comparison, seeming more like a call to arms than a factual programme.

Following Max's sacking when he opposes the exploitation of Howard, he embarks on an affair with one of the bosses responsible for keeping Howard on the air. Faye Dunaway's depiction of a woman in a man's world, sees her strip her character of emotion, feeling and sexuality. She explains to Max that she loves like a man, "Arousing quickly, consummating prematurely", while Max retains his humanity as he is in the twilight of his years, seeing death as real with 'definable features' and wrestling with the guilt of leaving his family for a person who reduces human life to "the rubble of banality". The story itself becomes melodrama, moving between emotive afternoon play sentimentality to the stark reality of modern living. The film Network takes on a new life, aping the affectations of TV and reflecting how it reduces the human experience into soundbites, seconds and ratings.

As Howard becomes increasingly unhinged, he eventually directs a tirade against the network bosses for a proposed deal with Saudi Arabia, to the great displeasure of the head of the corporate machine Mr. Jenson (Ned Beatty). He is summonsed into the grand boardroom of CCS and stands before Jenson who, in the most memorable section of the film, sells his philosphy. In explaining to Howard that there are no peoples, there are no freedoms, there are no democracies, there is only a system of businesses and money that unite the world, he foretells the future of both television and delivers a pointed warning to politics that it is corporations not elected officials that control our lives and, far from informing us, television is there to insulate and alienate us from the machinations of a world we don't understand.

The philosophy of Jenson is where the film is at it's most terrifyingly prophetic. The financial crisis gave us an insight into how faceless banks and corporations affect us, right down to our jobs, our food and shelter and our health, yet we were totally unaware. As television news struggled to explain the intricacies of how this all worked, to a public starved of transparency for so long, we can see how ill-equiped the instrument of television is to inform us. Its forgotten how to.

Where Network fails is that there are so many targets, so many sub-plots, so many issues to uncover. The danger with this is, although all are valid, the arrows of satire can sometimes miss the mark, simply because there are too many to hit such a small bullseye, perhaps a reason Sidney Lumet missed out on the Best Director Academy Award that year, as he struggled to reign in the strands of the film.

However, this is a minor issue that should not distract from the importance of this film as a prophetic and satirical miracle that is so relevant today, it actually makes you wonder just how many of the problems we have could have been avoided if Hollywood, TV and our media could only continue to be so brave.

And it's bloody entertaining. The greatest show on Earth.

Sametimenextweeksamebattimesamebatchannel.

Past Perfect (and) Tense

The blogtown rat...

Never let it be said that I don't move with the times (for if thou shalt besmirch me so, I shall offer you out on the cobbles for a darn good thrashing with a rolled up newspaper and mine butler's heel) as here at Reservation Towers we are constantly striving for new and modern living. Our sound system, RoBono, pipes bland, self important muzak into my brainspace 28 hours a day. I get world information through News Internanal, a continual news feed that keeps me up to date on current events through the medium of my own colonic irrigation detritus being spread onto the bathroom window whilst my personal psychic steals the spirit of Rupert Murdoch from his own weakling frame long enough for a ghostly forefinger to smear cryptic messages into the grizzly mess outlining the current status of the Levinson enquiry. Our big screen entertainment is obtained entirely out of my newly installed 4D Tellysaurus which allows you to wallow in the self satisfied smell of Jamie Oliver's farts as he squirts the recipe for plastic olives out of his pudgy jowls.

Not every mansion (everyone has one of those, right?) can be as rad as that though. Apart from looters with a local Curry's and a handy homemade cosh, most people have to pay for such sublime entertainment and surprisingly choose to prioritise food, shelter and paying off leg breaking debt collectors over obtaining tedious gaudy techno arsewipe. Not that this has led to a revival in sitting around playing Mousetrap, Connect 4 or actually conversing with real people, as we remain distracted and bored in equal measures by the technological what-nots we retain or failed to trade in for porridge.

As we reject those outmoded forms of pleasure, I've noticed strange ghosts from the past cropping up on TV. Just recently I've been feeling like I'm watching a continual re-run, seemingly descending into a personal "I love 1984". Last weekend I finally caught up with Sherlock, the latest in the BBC dramas trying to tap into the mystique of icons who have fallen out of fashion (Robin Hood, Dr. Who, Merlin, Charlie Brooker's hair) and been rebooted, saucified, cult-ificated and thrust, genitals forward, into the prime time.

The trend of updating a previously bankable gimmick by furnishing it with some heavyweight writing talent (Steven Moffat, Russell T Davies, Dominic Minghella) and a budget that would make Fred Goodwin cough up his swan fritter, has enabled these writers to grasp the mandate to enliven TV schedules and breathe life into dead corpses. A hard hitting Paul Abbot re-imagining of He-Man as a urban terrorist battling a disenfranchised, youth culture Skeletor (he's a hoodie, after all) can only be days away.

This has extended into light entertainment, with the One Show starting the trend for providing retro style 'naf' TV, gaining a following based partly on it's own whimsy. The success of the televised village fete The Great British Bake Off, provided a sunny hearted alternative to sneering, hard nosed, Cowell based cluster fucks that continually barked at feeble willed contestants while press ganging the audience into dialling premium rate phone numbers to whittle the saps down to the least offensive. The embracing of more traditional, revivalist programming harks back to a time when TV laughed with, rather than at, the general public.

This all feels rather nice, especially as all the above mentioned shows are generally exciting or compelling. But, although each is individually good, they only exist on a platform of nostalgic understanding and complicity. Take the names Sherlock or Dr. Who out of the title and the knowing, nodding references to well known baddies such as Moriarty or the Daleks, but keep the exact same scripts and acting and I wonder if they would have been made at all? Would the BBC have had the guts to chuck a disturbed detective or a psychopathic face changing alien onto the screen at all? They did once, of course, but does the same sympathy for something totally new exist? It seems that the new can only be experimented with on the outskirts of BBC 8 at 9pm every other Wednesday to see if it catches on.

The fear seemingly filters down into all areas, where people trying to create original concepts are frustrated by a cultural aversion to anything which steps outside of the comfort zone of instant cool provided by the past. Amy Winehouse's soulful singing sounded like something half remembered, which was then followed by Adele's post Springfield warbling. Folk and 80's revivalist bands add to the mix of Hollywood's love for remakes and biographies until, suddenly, popular culture feels like it's riding on the back of a one legged duck in ever decreasing circles. It's also increasingly difficult to take financial risks on totally original work thanks to the world apparently being in so much debt we owe Mars a fiver for red soil and eggs.

The purse strings are pulled tighter than Victoria Beckham's butt cheeks and the effect is to cut the UK Film Council and restrict access to grants and support from public money. I feel that we are stuck inside a continual mash up, DJ'd by a retro mafia of angular haircutted Tweeters not concerned with creation but a preoccupation with a new kind of Anxiety of Influence; not an anxiety born out of doing justice to the old masters, but the anxiety of being seen to be influenced; to be better read, better watched, better than you.

I long for a backlash of neo-punks, ready to take control of the cultural landscape, armed not with a showy offy desire to inform me how much they can quote, but an iconoclast spirit which says; 'I've read nothing, but look what I made'.

In the meantime, I'm going to stick the telly on. It's pretty good, but not as good as the first one...

EverythingIdoIdoitforyouandyouandbahbabahbabahba

Year in Refutile

Oh come, all ye fanciful...

It's one of the strange Christmas paradoxes (along with being 30 years old and watching 6 straight hours of Pixaardman cartoons or gut bubblingly awful episodes of some shit cake, money felch, cocktease game show because the word 'Christmas' has been dumped in front of the title and a bit of tinsel is draped across the studio. Come to think of it, there's something paradoxically dreary about good old shiny tinsel. It reminds me of a sort of enforced, Daily Mail Campaign underdoggery that forces us to clap along with the 'superdooperousness' of Christmas while costing 18 pounds a yard and looking a bit shit as a background to annual misery and passive aggressive family bickering) that at this time of year, my perception of the world both opens up and contracts at the same time, like a sea anemone with a personality crisis.

As I am reminded of the increasing size of my family due to apparently unceasing embryo production and also put in mind of the dismal size of the problems in the world (normally by cynically heartbreaking TV ads encouraging us to give 2 pounds a month instead of pushing obscene quantities of spun sugar into our cavernous head holes) in the same instance, I also feel the world closing in and my range of understanding contract. What's going on outside the realm of oven times, nibble quantities and the best time to put out the ruddy cheese cake because I hate it when it ends up going all mushy, seems a distant nightmare of sight and sound that I can barely make out in the middle distance, allowing me to bob my head back under the water and become soothed by the muffled screams of the lifeguards.

As I spent most of 2011 working in another country, returning to England in early December thrust me immediately into the clunking 'review of the year' hand wringing of newspapers, 4 hour talking head list shows (containing the absurd insights of mysterious comedians) and online photo gallery 2011 obituaries, which, rather than bring me pleasingly up to date, actually added to my sense of disconnection. As Noel Gallagher Version 101 once said; "The more I see the less I know, the more I know the less I understand" which sounds like a grim epitaph for society in general (or it would if we weren't too busy giggling at Royal arses or watching omnipresent perfume adverts that make you want to fall on your knees and pray for the apocalypse).

List shows are pretty anonymous and exist merely to fill your time with soundbite guff, but it's now essential for every channel or digital output medium to scratch around like they're CSI investigators, looking for that last crumb of insight or reduction to capture the feeling of the nation as though it would lead to some sort of glorious event horizon where all meaning is condensed into the single, one sentence opinion from Alan Whothefuckisthatguy from off the tellybox and all races, languages, opinions and facts deemed superfluous so at last we can all go home and I'm left free to establish my Empire (I think that's what they're doing...).

But it's not true. I feel absolutely fine not being able to reduce the London riots into 3 sentences. I actually feel quite satisfied that I have no ability to reconcile the cigar blowing, backslapping pandemonium surrounding the killing of Bin Laden and Gaddafi, whilst simultaneously condemning their own murderous lives. I'm glad I can't put my finger on the pulse of why we both stare through our electrical eye boxes, snickering into our elbows like five year olds, at the death of Kim Jong Il whilst looking the other way as North Korea starve their own people. I feel fine not weeping over the bubbling stew of a year, pleading for it to reduce into the kind of flavoursome jus that would delight the podgy faced, talking egg, greengrocer man from Masterchef.

Perhaps it's a symbol of a struggle to cope with the everyday problems and failures I encounter (failing to retain the receipt for overly snug trousers, suspicious breath tests, tasering strangers and murder charges) that there's a cold but intoxicating comfort in 'rounding up' the year into a drop down menu of 5 minute nostalgia fixes recounted by awkwardly haircutted giggle merchants collecting cash in return for reducing existence to less than 140 characters. Having seen uprisings, fighting, natural disasters of inconceivable power, hacking, humping, injunctions and Royal functions, a never ending picture postcard slideshow of the 'best and worst' of the year seems vastly superior to the horrors of actually having to live through it.

So here's my best of and worst of list of 2011:

Best thing: All of it

Worst thing: All of it.... and Piers Morgan. Obviously.

Cheerio my lovelies, see you for tea and sandwiches on the next episode of Life:The Movie. I've seen the trailer and it looks crap and brilliant all at the same time. Must be a paradox.

IcantstanditIknowyouplanneditI'mgonnasetitstraightthiswatergate xxxx

National Fail

Deck the halls with boughs of folly....

Here's a jolly festive quiz for you: What does this blog, the career trajectory of Tinie Tempah, the continuing TV presence of Tess Daley and Nation Rail Travel all have in common? Time's ticking... tick, tick, tick. (Adopts patronising, student baiting Paxman voice) "Come on, let's have your answer now..."

The answer is that they are far more incomprehensible than they have any right to be. (Oh yes. that really is the best I could come up with to start off the blog, but they can't all be winners can they?) Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Nation Rail Enquiries Help Line is some sort of sideways glancing, Shakespearean aside to the continuing farce of my life. The name 'help line' is itself a textbook example of knockabout comedy, consisting as it does of a useless voice recognition system which has no ability to understand a single word you're saying unless you bellow like a mental lost in a wood or speak so slowly and clearly that passers by think you're trying to instruct an elderly relative how to manoeuvre themselves to the toilet by mobile phone.

For example, the simple act of finding a train from York to Birmingham went as follows:

Help line: Welcome to National Rail Enquiries. So, which station are you travelling from?

Me: York.

HL: (continuing, oblivious) For example, if you want to travel from Leicester, say Leicester.

Me: York.

HL: I'm sorry, was that "Dunstable"?

Me: No.

HL: If you want to travel from Dunstable, say "Yes"

Me: NO.

HL: OK, where are you travelling from?

Me: York.

HL: OK, I'll look for trains from Liverpool Lime Street.

Me: NOOOOOOO

(How is that even possible? York is a monosyllabic city in the North East of England. There's 3 different words in Liverpool Lime Street!!!)

HL: (2 second pause) Can you repeat that?

Me: Listen to me my robot friend, I do not wish to travel from Liverpool or anywhere even near Liverpool and, in addition, I'd like to find the actor who supplied the voice for this pitiful system, go to his house, murder everyone in his family, then use the sharpened edge of a SPAM tin to cut his stomach open and spill his dinner into the bath like a student after a heavy night out puking up her guts into a handbag.

HL: OK, that's great. I'll look for services from York....

Me: (No words, just the sound of me opening up my jugular with my own coat zipper)

My attempts to use this service and potentially discover the exact time a train will miraculously and arbitrarily appear became so ball crushingly infuriating that I decided to throw caution to the wind and rock up at the station, sans ticket, sans hope, sans everything. I became a soldier of fortune, bravely facing up to potential random ticket inspection and irritating little barriers that, although cutting you off at the waist (and thus being as effective a barrier against ticket dodging as whistling is to a prolonged nuclear assault) appear to be a forcefield of terrifying strength and mystical power.

I'm no bean counter or right wing social crusader but I'm pretty sure that infinite half bearded, Adidas promoting, slack faced cornholes before me have been absolutely fine with not buying a ticket and probably travelled uninhibited to their chosen destination (casino / dog track / crown court) mainlining Carling and uttering unintelligible profane slurs. I felt it was about my time for a slice of the action, as only a middle class champagne socialist could think that not paying for a train ticket is in any way 'action'.

I hopped on a waiting train with a lump of adrenaline in my veins like gristle and a slice of non-conformist pie in my belly, only to be immediately confronted by a planet arsed, humourless ticket inspector with the look of a Bulgarian shot-putter about her and murder in her eyes. As it became clear from my embarrassed shuffling and sorrowful mutterings to the tune of "can I buy a ticket from you..." she didn't exactly have a hardened criminal on her hands and as such spoke to me like I was a five year old who'd waited too long at the Tesco's checkout to tell mummy I had to 'do a toilet' and had dumped a wad of filth into my dungarees.

I managed to purchase the ticket from her and immediately became self conscious of looking like some scumbag who'd tried to cheat the same system everyone else was obediently conforming to. In my head, they had me pegged as the reason travel prices were on the rise; I was the type of junkyard punk who rioted in the streets and caused some corporate office literally 0.2% of diminished returns; I was to be hated, feared and cast out of the window immediately. Needless to say, I didn't consider that I was in any way responsible for my own ridiculousness. That would have been the easy way out, of course. That ticket inspector was now my enemy. Nemesis.

Of course, my feelings subsided and I remembered that I was in fact a massive idiot-o-bot who equated the failure of a simple enquiry system to my own decision not to buy a ticket and subsequently look like a bit of a tit. By immediately creating a 'bad guy' I gave myself an easy excuse which allowed me to differ my own guilt long enough to scoff down the rest of my chicken pasty and look at my reflection in the window without wanting to hurl it all back up and write 'cock eyes' in the chickeny spew with my forefinger, like any sane person would have done.

It worries me that there was something comforting in creating an enemy to pin my failures on, as we seem to do it readily when dealing with larger scale events. Rioters on the streets of London? - it's common looking thugs not cultural inequalities and youth disenfranchisement. Can't find anyone to shoot for attacking us? - it's evil Saddam, not spoilt brattish oil gathering and distraction mongering. Economy falling in around our ears like the conclusion of an Indiana Jones film? - it's (booooo) Fred Goodwin, not a house of cards monetary system that makes pyramid selling look like Wall Street's wet dream. Someone's always to blame, but that someone is conveniently never us.

It suits our desire to feel secure to deflect guilt onto a nemesis, but dooms us to remain insulated from uncomfortable or difficult truths. Luckily, creating a comedy 'Satan' onto which our fears can be projected is something the media jumps all over the chance to do for us, which is handy. All the while, it becomes harder and harder to render an informed debate, regardless of your opinions, because lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) are around every corner and behind every tree. Eventually every issue and newsworthy event will be reduced to 'goodies' and 'baddies' and we're forced to sit impotently booing and cheering on command, like red necks at a wrestling match.

As a result, I have decided to give up on hatred and become the hated by spending my mornings pushing razor blades into birds nests, placing soft toys slightly out of the reach of babies and eating panda hearts. I prefer things on this side of the nemesis equation. As Calvin once said, "virtue definitely needs some cheaper thrills".

We'llmeetagaindontknowwheredontknowwhen xxx

Euro Trash

Don't look blog in anger...

Did those feet in ancient times walk across England's mountains green? I seriously doubt it, as the owner of the feet in question is a potentially fictional 30 year old male born in Palestine 2000 years ago, a time noted for being notoriously difficult to obtain cheap air fares or quality budget coach travel due to substandard Holy Land broadband. Mr Of Nazareth had no desire to spend hours on Expedia, for it was written, he had little tolerance for pop up adds and was easily distracted by CountenanceBook.

Despite containing enough historical inaccuracy to make Braveheart look like a Simon Schama 98 part documentary on the history of lambing in Wales, the stirring words of Jerusalem inspire nationalistic chest pumping and eye reddening, Union Jack humping fervour until you feel ready to munch down a Yorkshire pudding sandwich and invade France, brandishing a cutlass from the back of a milk float.

It makes me wonder if David Whatamaroon had accidentally flicked his iPod on shuffle this week and spent 2 hours listening to Margaret Thatcher's Hymntime Karaoke Songbook with Jerusalem on repeat, before landing in Brussels and making a bit of a spectacle out of himself in the best traditions of a man so consumed by self promotion and wax faced posturing that, like a 14 year old farting during school assembly, felt the need to turn all the attention on 'me, me, me' in the hope of appearing vaguely relevant, a notion which flies in the face of public and political perception.

The effect of DC comic exercising his veto at the Euro Summit has been seen by some as a mere gesture of independence from a Eurozone crisis that is outside our remit due to the UK's none participation in the single currency. This shields us from two key points that have short and longer term significance for us and Europe. The first is that by turning the meeting into a crisis of the European Union, the political debate surrounding how the Euro can be saved was pushed to the sidelines and turned into a row between 'us and them'. The Euro remains precarious, as Germany and France are now essentially guard dogs and CCTV bullies checking the homework of profligate nations who failed to balance their books. However, as stated in the Guardian's Editorial;

"that founding economic analysis is of only limited relevance to Greece – and no help at all in dealing with Spain and Ireland, both of whose slumps stem from housing and lending bubbles"

It appears that the cracks in the currency are being papered over by the big guns of Europe rather than providing a solution to the long term issues facing a single currency tripping balls, throwing a whitey and sitting on the floor of the cubical trying to regain it's equilibrium before the bouncers wade in and chuck it out. There is still no central bank for the Euro and no treaty in place to form one, leaving the big economies free to rule the roost, dish out sanctions to over-spenders, but doomed to scratch their heads should the fault lie elsewhere.

The second problem with viewing this as 'not our fight' is that it's easy to overlook the significance of our old chum Dave bringing the Euro sceptic dinosaurs a prezzie back from his holiday to stop them grumbling over having to share the Government canteen with the Lib Dems. The country suddenly becomes even more insular, isolated and bitter, essentially locking ourselves in our bedroom and listening to Marilyn Manson records dreaming of a time when we can trade with ourselves and ignore those Europeans who 'just don't understand'.

It all makes me wonder how long the Liberal Democrats will sit quietly like castrated puppies or if they've actually morphed into some sort of post-modern art installation, commenting on modern life by expressing everything and nothing simultaneously in a bewildering volley of comment without content. In fact, the coalition appears to be experimenting in a breed of anti-politics where the opposing concepts of power and dissent are gradually removed from the political process, leaving a silent and turgid hegemony which lacks the brazen wrongness of totalitarianism in favour of an impotent perma-government.

None of this is particularly relevant at street level, where the dark satanic mills of civil unrest, riot hangovers, pension cuts and an inequalities gap the size of Bournemouth are of more immediate concern. But it makes me wonder how long we're going to be stuck with a non-government, more concerned with sellotaping itself together than actually identifying a strategy to haul us out of this economic bum pit.

At least we can count on big Dave to fight for Britain at home, as well as on the European stage. Unless of course, the whole meeting turned out to be a bit of a 'damp squib'. Oh well...

Imissyourface xx