Rampant Anomie

When it comes to judging how far we've come down the road from the class-bound, hierarchical Britain of yore to the golden New Labour meritocracy we've been promised, forget think-tanks and colum-inches; just take a long hard look at BBC2's Masterchef, having first turned the sound down - unless you want the last thing you ever hear without tinnitus to be, "cooking does not get tougha dan dis (you slaaaag)".
I frequently find my public sector hackles rising at what that strange show's victims, nay, contestants, nay, kitchen porters of tomorrow, are made to do. I'm not talking about getting to grips with cooking food - if that's not too vulgar a term - to a very high standard; serving bleeding and bleating meat to avoid the risk of its being a tad dry; and giving their meagre morsels of salivatory delight names that would make a beat-poet scratch his noggin - anyone for mezzanine of korfballed pike in a bitumen of drizzled sarin?
Instead, I'm talking about the constant, buttock-clenching, lip-biting degredation and kowtowing forced on these saps by the presenters' swaggering, inquisitorial style. Many programmes are padded out with pointless soundbites - take Dragons' Den and its pointless narrator's need to repeat the bleeding obvious for the hard of thinking (the blogger just said that Dragons' Den's expert analyst repeats the bleeding obvious to give cherished viewers extra insight) - but this is worse.
Knowing how to cook is just not enough for these sadists. Blue-chip interview questions, usually flung at the little chefs while they're busy chastising scallops, have to be fielded, and fielded out of the park, even if their flatulence of sulky yak liver and distressed onion jus is the closest thing to organic ambrosia these gourmands have ever supped. Unless the little chefs are prepared to say they are the best and destined to win, which is, given the level of competition, at best hubris and at worst a desperate, frightened lie, they're plainly lacking the ambition they'd need to hack it in a professional kitchen. If they can't persuade mein hosts that they'd skewer and lightly braise their own immediate family for Raymond Blanc's amusement and force-feed their flesh to an expectant Westminster lunch service, they are the professional equivalent of a sputum garnish on a coulis of frisky calf a la Max Boyce.
I'll concede that there's a bit more to it than that. Force-feeding the little chefs expectation and then stewing them in an emotional pressure cooker makes the tearful disappointment most of them will face all the sweeter for the audience; but that's another debate.
In short, it is not enough for them to be good at what they do unless they can regurgitate stylised chaff when asked questions whose only real purpose is to justify the interviewers' existence and put them in their place. On Masterchef and in many workplaces, this approach legitimises a thoroughly modern model of cap-in-hand, forelock-tugging begging and pleading for your job. It is degredation for entertainment, a test of conformity as well as competence. Where, I ask you, is Amnesty in all this?
Perhaps it struck a chord because I've had a few interviews in the public sector, all of which only tested my ability and willingness to say the right thing on the day and thereby conform to the interviewer's agenda. I don't claim that this is telltale of a conformist and intellectually craven culture which values saying the right thing more than doing it; I'll leave that for Flaming Cross. I'm just suggesting that being loudly and farcically 'on message' matters far too much in our supposedly restless, democratic culture.
After all, do I care about a Tanvic mechanic's willingness to embrace automotive corporacy and facilitate an enhanced customer expectation matrix, or is it enough that my new brake pads and discs work when I leave the M1 at 90mph in the expectation that I'll enter the Little Chef (the dining experience, not a failed contestant) on my feet rather than in the hurtling shell of my unresponsive car?
I almost included The Apprentice in this piece, but realised I didn't mind its contestants being degraded.

I recently had cause to visit the Home Office. I did so for reasons I'm not at liberty to discuss, my questionable understanding of some complex issues usefully masked by several layers of secrecy which may, for all I know, exist mainly to feed a smug sense of corporate exclusivity.
Having dragged myself in from the provinces using one of Mr Branson's 'Pendulino' trains - by far the most comfortable alternative to the motorcycle 'wall of death' - and enjoyed the welcoming embrace of London life that only the Underground can deliver - intimacy with reeking strangers, tooth-rattling inertia, the parched and ionised breath of Hades, the prospect of your sweating neighbour toting a bag crammed with semtex or sarin - I pitch up at the heart, or perhaps a less vital but still well-intentioned and noteworthy organ, of government.
A thickly chlorinated water feature, lustrous films of water wrapping themselves around obsidian blocks, guards the doorway to an airy structure of burnished steel and glass that is clean, frosted or infused with colour. This isn't the creaking, beleaguered facade of law and order I've seen in provincial magistrates' courts and market-town punch-ups. This high-concept vision of strength and openness wouldn't look out of place in an investment banker's loft-space being discussed over absinthe and quail nipples, assuming said banker has tasted those tasty, green shoots of recovery rather than drowning in his own mortgage and wishing he worked in the public sector.
Inside, sharp-suited automata, their mouths glued into adequately polite half-smiles, check my bona fides, scan me for knives and RPG's, issue me with temporary ID, which would probably explode if I left the building without handing it back, and wave me towards a set of man-size test-tubes. I show a machine the ID, enter the unique and secure code shouted my way by one of the automata, and the test tube whisks itself open to admit me. I step inside, to embrace what turns out to be a disappointing future. I'm not transported to the Soho basement HQ of UNCLE, to the transporter room of the USS Enterprise or to the Batcave. Instead, I stand on a target, am sniffed for explosives - or celery, for all I know - and ushered into a bright and open atrium, a basement floor of tropical plants, demi-lattes, panninis and Yogo classes opening on to five floors of hushed office space, water coolers and signage in soothing colours directing the visitor to a bewildering variety of acronyms and - protect and survive - the bomb shelter.
I have my meeting - the contents of which I cannot disclose, but rest assured a small corner of Guantanamo will be preserved for abuse'rs' of apostroph'es - and find my provincial wits somewhat taxed by a charming apparatchik of the new order, bright enough to go far enough, his path unimpeded by cynicism, his high-minded readiness to serve making my withering world-view feel more than a little juvenile, his ten years of bureaucratic insight trumping my two months of long lunches and skimpy research.
A chorus of whooping and laughter floods in from the street below, ignoring the tetchy clacking of keyboards and the hushing whisper of the air conditioning. Zimbabwean emigres are staging a demonstration on the street below in support of imprisoned pro-democracy activists. They grin at anyone who comes to a window, brandish their banners politely, wave and tease the security automata, before moving on without a glimpse of the old bill, perhaps having realised that the Home Office has little influence on Mugabe's penal policy, or having already discovered that the same can be said of the FCO, the UN or any other acronym you'd care to mention.
I return to Euston, join the expectant mass at the departure board, become part of a frenzied hive-mind when my platform is announced, have a one hour fever-dream of tilting crazily northward at huge speeds while chubby men with floppy fringes shout at their phones about slim margins and enhanced resilience, then find myself back in the provinces and compelled to type a meandering and pointless blog about my unusual day rather than concentrating on my civil service project management exams.
If you think this is dull, you should see the textbook I'm avoiding.

This is without a doubt the worst trigger-happy action film that I've ever seen. That isn't to say it doesn't have moments of purely technical inventiveness and spectacle. It's just that the whole sorry caper is infected with such a groundless sense of its own wit and sassiness that I couldn't let the gross insult to my intelligence pass unanswered.
It does have star draw in the persons of Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti, and God love 'em for delivering the terrible, scatalogical drivel that passes for a script without wincing, guffawing or sobbing at what they'd been reduced to.
It might seem that I'm taking a bit of popcorn cinema too seriously. Yet I'd take a sub-par Seagal or Van Damme movie over this because it would deliver its thrills without making the audience endure knuckle-bitingly awful gobbets of fortune-cookie wisdom in a desperate bid to be street-hip and deep. The script isn't so much your dad dancing at a wedding; more like your dad donning a hoodie and trying to bust a street-dance improv outside the offie with his own Level 42 megamix in the sound system.
Shoot 'Em Up desperately wants to keep company with the likes of Kill Bill and Sin City but the script alone puts it in a very lowly league of its own. If you want better gun-toting spectacle and edgy writing that doesn't get in the way, return to John Wu and his Pacific Rim confreres.

The basic premise is interesting and the director's track record promising, which together led me to ignore the negative criticism and waste a rental credit on this fat, diseased turkey. I may not be fully qualified to review this movie as I hated it so much I skipped the last half hour.
You'll be aware that the hero (Annakin Skywalker or whatever he calls himself these days), a lovestruck high school geek, finds himself able to teleport. As any teenage boy might, if he lives in an Oakley commercial, he uses this gift to get wealthy, get laid and get some surf. We are treated to images of Annakin picniccing on the Sphinx's head and clinging to Big Ben to try and persuade us that he is a charismatic, globe-skipping avatar of mind-bending power.
In a vain bid to turn this fantastic good fortune into a plot, Samuel L Jackson paints his hair white, produces an NSA ID card and chases Annakin around the world with an electric cane (really), interrupting Annakin's laying and surfing. Matters are further complicated by Annakin's pretty and pointless love interest and Jamie Bell's very confused accent, still in the air somewhere between Darlington and Burbank, but still leaving us in no doubt that dancing isn't just for poofs, divvent yer kna.
Each and every principal is bereft of charisma; perhaps Annakin, who mistakes pouting, sulking and glaring for acting, so lacks charisma that he drains everyone else's. Maybe they were all just mortified by the screenplay, which must have been written by a chimpanzee; not even a talented one, probably one of those 'scab' chimpanzees who worked through the screenwriter's strike. In short, give this a miss. If you want a taste of the sassy, well written, roaming action this director can deliver, revisit 'Go' or 'The Bourne Identify'.

The makers of this tosh seriously overrated themselves.
They must have thought their lazy and ludicrous plot made their movie as visonary and leftfield as The Matrix, despite lacking any zeitgeist or inner reality, or indeed any sign that it wasn't penned by an eight-year old who spends his waking hours drinking Red Bull and playing Grand Theft Auto.
Perhaps the makers thought parachuting in Angelina Jolie gave it the sexy sassiness of Mr & Mrs Smith; instead, the deathly professionalism needed by the distinguished cast to fulfill their contracts and issue their awful lines with straight faces leaves them no energy for anything more than constipated grumpiness.
Instead of lending this crock the earthy, urban lyricism of Pulp Fiction, the potty-mouthed, witless script sounds like it was penned by Vicky Pollard.
As for its much-vaunted special effects, if your idea of visual flair is endless shots of bullets tunnelling through cerebral matter, then this movie will excite you immensely. Even then, perverts of your ilk will get better value for money from the over-18 content on You Tube.
Worst of all, I rented this turkey and persuaded others to watch it, so there go my voting rights for the next few movie nights.
This crude, lazy effort at a high-kicking, comic-book actioner has only one distinguishing feature; it's somewhat less awful than Shoot 'Em Up and Jumper. Don't waste your time and money on this when you could just watch The Matrix, Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction again, or anything from Hong Kong.

Welcome to the First Secular Church of Our Lady of Anomie. Let us meditate on the un-sacred mystery of Christmas.

Remember, there's no need to be afraid as we let in light and we banish shade. Spread a smile of joy by spending money you don't have on things nobody actually needs. Throw your arms around the world by exchanging dozens of meaningless cards with people you either speak to every day or never speak to at all. Then say a prayer, pray for the other ones who have larger or more annoying families to pretend to get along with.

Perhaps your own bodyweight in meat and booze isn't taking the edge off and the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears? Is that the Thuggee sacrifice scene in Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom or just the clanging chimes of doom? When the sugar rush of material consumption has faded, who will draw us back to the spiritual life and save the world from the powers of darkness? Well tonight, thank God it's Bono instead of you.

Still, here's to Uncle Frank and Auntie Madge underneath that burning sun on that off-season special in Dubai. Do they know it's Christmas-time at all? Thanks to Brothers Bob and Midge.

And so we find ourselves, flukes of evolution, confined to a sliver of light in an infinite abscess of nothing, our short lives defined by mercurial joy, dependable pain and unending strife, flailing for hope and meaning, usually finding only disappointment and trinkets to occupy our simian hands while those of us who read too much and are free to do so thank fortune daily that our already benighted lives aren't about to be ended by the megalomaniacs, wars, disasters and tortures that are humanity's birthright. The universe drowns us in an immensity of time, space and indifference. Still, never mind: only one more sleep 'til Christmas!

We all know what happens then. Benign supernatural entities bless the Christian and pseudo-Christian world with joy, peace and cool presents. A trinity of fictional characters, Father Christmas, God and Bob The Builder, is believed in briefly before they go back into the attic for another year. Rogue angels or Victorian ghosts should be busy drawing me towards a tearful epiphany which will unacceptably inflate my hospitality budget. 'Neath the cosy lights of town-centre hostelries, glassings and sexual offences will proceed to the festive tones of Slade and The Pogues, perhaps ceasing for a blessed moment of peace outside the kebab shop while Jona Lewie incisively reminds us of the total irrelevance of Christmas to industrialised warfare.

Exceptions tend to prove rules. If Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace and goodwill to all men, does that mean the rest of the year is fair game for misanthropic strife? By force-feeding the nation emotional syrup, is it intended to make the poor feel poorer or the lonelier feel more alone? Isn't the whole thing just a fabulous barometer for our civilisation, dependent on ersatz spirituality and greed?

I hope I've spread some cheer. Your Majesty, if you're reading, feel free to use this.

Chronic pain is turning my head into a pressure cooker, the gristly contents stewing away while the odd jet of steam escapes in a random splutter. The nerve endings at the site of my spinal surgery have formed an unresting choir, their efforts never less than a bass grumble and frequently rising through shuffling discord to shrill squeal.

Pain is making me a bit peculiar. I can grit my teeth and will the beast into submission for days or weeks, but periodically it wins and I have to take a tranquiliser or two and spend a day or three in a state of narcoleptic surrender. My brain fills with tar and starts functioning like British Leyland, circa 1979. Neurons don't seem to fire, nor can they be fired even if they sit around reading the Sun and picking their noses all day.

This isn't much of a lifestyle choice. I'm bloody-minded enough to fight off the beast, most of the time. I work nearly full-time hours, have a social life, swim, lift weights and don't drink heavily every night of the week. In the gym, I cause myself a little more pain just so I can look in the mirror and show the beast that it won't turn me into a pasty, drug-addled pudding.

Perhaps I can only win a pyrrhic victory this way, but I've got so much pain to share. It's unfair to share it with people I care about, and too messy and complicated to share with the rest. So, do I fall on my own sword? Do I slap myself silly to daze and distract myself, as I've done once or twice as a non-prescription alternative to opiates? Perhaps I need a new focus.

Mice have found their enterprising way into the loft of our detached, ten-year old house. They convened an orgy of gnawing at the plasterboard, insulation and timbers above my head on a night when my pain had me fizzing with adrenaline. The next day, my Guardian-reading, fair-trade tendencies smouldering on the fires of insomnia, I acquired a sleek, black rat trap from a reputable ironmonger, baited it with organic peanut butter and within hours heard the gratifying crack of justice.

Marigolds and miniature bodybag in hand, I ventured into the cold space above my centrally-heated life and acquainted myself with my victim. The mouse's back was broken, its carcass sagging from a steel jaw, flecked with blood and seeming too tiny to accommodate nerve, bone, sinew and feeling. This scurrying agent of my pain wouldn't be troubling me again.

I had for a picosecond considered buying a humane trap, detaining the verminous critter in an approved manner and driving into the countryside (taking care to limit our carbon footprint) to restore it to liberty and watch it scurry into the golden sunset. But that wouldn't have allowed me to kill something that caused me pain.

Am I going a bit peculiar?

My solicitor suggested I keep a diary in support of my personal injury claim. I'm sure this isn't what he had in mind.

Normal service may be resumed when I've had a good week's sleep.

Yesterday, I experienced paraspinal lumbar injections with the benefit of full consciousness and a fair view of the near-live xrays guiding the surgeon's enormous needles. I realised, again, that the horrible but brilliant 'Green Wing' is in fact a documentary. Erudite observations on right L1 vertebral facets are interspersed with bickering about whose turn it is to buy the bourbons, who Crispin from Radiology is boffing, what else Joachim Phoenix has been in (and he did sing those Johnny Cash songs himself you know), and exclamations like, "no, just keep pushing it in 'til you hit bone." I suppose we've all been on first dates like that.

I was a big, brave boy and focussed my attention on the pretty, wavy lines on the ECG. Oddly, my pulse stayed around 60bpm. I get more excited than that when Simon Cowell is threatened by some geordie pit-bull whose 30 stone, walrus-voiced daughter has failed to appreciate the Wildean wit on which her deranged dreams have been impaled.

The local anaesthetic and steroids injected into my spine didn't achieve a great deal beyond making me walk like Douglas Bader for the rest of the day. What, some kind soul said to me, as I was tottering and teetering around the ward in a backless gown, enjoying the cool draught on my nethers, contemplating my numb legs and the news that my lumbar spine was more compressed and curved than it was a year ago, would Action Man do?

This is, you'll understand, an arbitrary segue into something that has been troubling me for no good reason. The fact is, I'm not sure what Action Man would do, and this makes someone of my age feel adrift.

He seems to have lost his way since the end of the Cold War. Once he had his dignity, his NATO jumper, his DMS boots and his FAL rifle. Look left and right, find the Germans / Russians, lock and load, rappel from the Christmas tree to an enfilade position, butt of the FAL hard into the shoulder, commando grip on trigger and barrel, drop the filthy Hun / Red with a double-tap, pull the cord in your back for a valedictory flourish, then back to Sindy's / Barbie's tea-rooms for sexless banter.

This behaviour belonged to an age when East and West were organised in their hatred and followed the rules. We knew where to point our guns, tanks and ICBM's. Anything more complicated than that could be sorted out by a few cryptic words from George Smiley at a dead-letter drop on Hampstead Heath.

Now what have we got? Spooks are so demonstrative and urgent all the time, never finding time to play chess with double-agents in Soho attic rooms. As for Spooks Code 9, they're like S Club Juniors to Smiley's Bob Dylan. Such are the thoughts that mill around in the forebrain while the hospital porter gamely pushes you the ten miles or so to theatre while reciting his 10,000 word thesis on why static caravans are the future of holidays.

These days, Action Man, stripped of his military certainties and still denied genitalia, is flouncing around in baggy pants and Oakleys, rescuing dolphins from tuna nets, smuggling tofu into school canteens, trying to stay on a skateboard and looking like someone's dad dancing at a wedding reception. The peace dividend really isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Random ramble ends. I think the opiates are wearing off.

The Jeremy Kyle show has taken some flak and for good reason. It may have a gloss of morality about it, but Kyle's manner wouldn't have been out of place at a medieval assizes, where the wretched received their comeuppance from strutting demagogues before a baying pack of their peers. Yet this is commercial television; not a public service, just a consumer product. Drawing in the punters and the advertisers is inevitably more important than the mental health of random members of the urban underclass.

So if the show presents itself as a moral forum, it deserves all the right wing derision and left wing sanctimony that can be heaped on it. But aren't we all guilty by association? In bygone centuries, how many of us would have cheerfully taken the wife and kids to the local asylum to stare at the loonies, or, better yet, to the local gaol to witness a good hanging? Even in our supposedly enlightened times, aren't we all guilty of schadenfreude, whether we're enjoying slapstick sitcom suffering or simply relishing the news stories telling of people other than ourselves dying horribly in plane crashes and other acts of malign fortune. It's a pretty rational human response to see suffering and be grateful or glad that it's not happening to you.

From there, it's only a small step to enjoying the suffering of the wretched as light entertainment. The Kyles and Springers of this world have been unfairly isolated. How dull would The X Factor be if the desperate and damaged were less willing to humiliate themselves for our viewing pleasure? Even compos mentis performers are persuaded to play their bereavement cards to guarantee that emotional money shot. For my filthy, guilty money, lonely eccentrics murdering soul standards is far better value than Timberlake-clones covering them competently.

How would 'You've Been Framed' and 'World's Scariest Videos' fare if footage of nasty accidents happening to people other than us wasn't such good, wholesome fun for the whole family? As for Big Brother, this is nothing more than petri dish television with bacterial life on either end of the microscope. No offence.

So, I may watch Jeremy Kyle in a knowing, ironic, post-modern way, but I'm still complicit. In fact, I'm probably more complicit, because I should know better. Human suffering has always been entertaining, but at least our ancestors were less hypocritical about it. Rant ends.

(Excessive reply to a polite, friendly email about football and Star Wars)

I'm afraid I'm no more football-literate now than I was back in the day. In fact, what was latent hostility to the so-called beautiful game has solidified into something altogether more bitter. Whereas I might once have tried to make faltering small talk about soccerball, I'm now just as likely to start excoriating it loudly and at length, even past the point where the entire pub has fallen silent so that the local firm's AGM can hear me.

I can rationalise this in all sorts of ways. Like any sport played well, it can be a majestic and thrilling spectacle. That's the only plus point that occurs to me. Which negative should I begin with? The pursuit of money above all else? The cynical gamesmanship that defines the sport at every level from kids in the park to millionaires on the pitch? The lack of meaningful sanctions against, or indeed interest in, violence and cheating (does anyone in the game know about video recording yet)? The lack of social responsibility on the part of so-called role models? The legitimisation of tribal violence?

I've already blathered on about this at length here: http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/02/11/the_ugly_game~3713305

Perhaps I'm just not a team player and my hostility to the game is based on unresolved issues from childhood rather than some lofty social consciousness. Still, I'm glad I got off the fence about it. I spent a lot of time last year working with a fanatical Liverpool fan who still nursed a few (real not imagined) injuries from Hillsborough. To him, you can no more be a fair-weather, occasionall football fan than you can be half-pregnant. In his strange, judgemental view of the world, I scored more highly for ladling scorn on soccerball and his endless prattle about underside rulings, Range Rovers, Manhattan transfers, Pele Docherty and penalty spot dunks, than I would have done with a pretended and polite interest in an aribitrarily adopted team.

I don't want to seem entirely negative though. I'm all for genetic experimentation if it would liven things up. I've also submitted to Pannini (they are in charge of every player in the world aren't they?) a list of useful reforms:
1. The goalmouth should be the entire width of the field. Single figure scorelines are extremely boring.
2. Scrap the underside rule. My wife understands it and I don't and this is no good for my masculine pride. Also see point 1 re scorelines
3. Have more than one ball. Also see point 1 re scorelines
4. Introduce video referees with the power to suspend play for as long as it takes everybody to settle down and discover that we are all one and love is the answer.
5. Revise the the fines system so that a top-flight player can expect to forfeit more than 0.0001% of his weekly take-home in the unlikely event that he is caught cheating in a major sporting event.
6. Further revise the fines system so that players who a) cheat and b) enjoy it should face an escalating tariff of sanctions beginnning with humiliation, progressing to mutilation and ending with execution or, worse, being compelled to work on a minimum wage and drive a car worth less than an entire street in south Manchester.
7. Change the law of the land so that having an opinion on soccerball is no longer viewed as the only social skill worth having in the workplace canteen.

That's better. I needed a good rant.

I heartily agree about the latest utterly pointless instalment in the Snore Wars saga. I fear that because it is animated and relatively cheap compared with its forebears, it might turn a profit. I'm not sure that boycotting the film is a good enough way to teach Lucas that the world isn't interested in his ersatz rehash of a yarn that has already bored and enraged his patient fans. Isn't it time a Cinematic Crimes Tribunal was set up at The Hague? Let's see Lucas try his old Jedi mind tricks when he's sharing a bunk with Karadzic. That's something I would pay to see.