Saturday, December 30, 2006

Holidaze Special Brew

Its a trusim that this special time of year is especially notable for novelty TV. Could not help noticing a reference in The Guide to this choice piece of BabyBel forom 1977. Lucas did it but disowned it, yet it reveals much of his artistic vision. He may be a cynical hack but this really does take the biscuit...

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Microwaved Rubber Nachos

Better than the real thing?
Hmmm. Well I can't help but notice posters saturating nearly every surface for Eragon - some kind of fantasy rubbish in the style of Lord of the Rings. Now genre has always gone in cycles - going all the way back to Shakespeare's day when a successful play with say a disguised ruler as a theme would lead to a spate of things of inspired imitation.

While I have less than no interest in the fantasy genre (I associate it with both spotty sados and Rick Wakeman) I noticed this campaign because it was yet another example of the mainstream appropriation of B. While most B markets were dead on their feet before video delivered the death blow, the copycat film market stayed with us. A trip to the video store would reveal 'Carnosaur' next to Jurassic Park etc as the knuckle dragging punters would have just seen the big budget B yet would be hungry for a knockoff. Eragon shows that just like with that run of modern day sword and sandalness that followed Gladiator no market is left to anyone other than the mainstream these days. But they do take their time.

The taglines on the posters make me think of a booming voice but the words are pure comedy: "When darkness falls. The. Last. Dragon...Will choose its rider who will be a fucking annoying kid hero of some kind."

Back when people with style, speed and a sense fun were riffing off the latest hot product from Hollywood you got things like the Star Wars on the cheap wonder referenced above. I'll take it over the likes of Eragon any day - rather than just reheat what it is copying it adds things (like female flesh and David Hasselhoff) that were missing the first time round. Lovely. And exposes just how silly Star Wars was in the first place in the process...

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Shanghaied at the Odeon



A rainy day and an unavoidable family outing turned into every cinemaphile’s nightmare: an enforced trip to a mainstream multiplex. Saw the best thing on there – The Departed. Marty Scorcsese’s rip off riff on the HK neo-noir classic Infernal Affairs. At least I did not have to watch The Devil Wears Prada, which would have made me eat my own hands before driving drunk with nothing but stumps in a stolen van towards LA on a mission to bugger Anne Hathaway.

It was awful, especially knowing that this is as good as it gets in the plastic zone. Hit with clichés like hail, I had to stop myself guffawing. Jack Nicholson has clearly been dead since 1989. DiCaprio and Damon could barely carry a 30 second biscuit advert. Marky Mark still has three nipples.

What was sad is it was like eating a meal from a once great chef who has been restricted to the same rather small fridge for thirty years. The results are competent but wearily familiar and emphasise persistent flaws more than they recall past glories. Broad-brush Catholic ethnic hood stereotypes. The wonderful word: “fuck”. Cruxifiction metaphors. A self consciously ok record collection.

Hey, at least I did not have to sit through the costume turdbomb he did last, but the man behind a few of my all time favourites should be doing better than this. Damn.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Red asphalt and champagne


Bavaesque moon
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.
Some crimes truly are beyond comprehension. Poverty can lead to moments of desperate depravity and tasteless violence, dysfunctional minds to worse (or at best the surreal – one of our neighbours was held up with a banana). However, there is one act that society should tolerate even less than drooling cretins yanking the wire through their pockets in the Curry’s TV section during Holby City or lubing up a bemused horse: Celebrity drunk driving.

There seems to have been a spate of this recently – Mel ‘Sugartits’ Gibson Nazi ranting, F-lister Caprice ‘Pissed on the road because I have VD please play net poker’ Bourret and most recently, the adjective-defying Paris ‘The only reason I could find Banksy cool again briefly’ Hilton all have been caught sauced at speed.

If you are a ‘sleb, you can always, always, always afford a taxi. Or even a fucking chauffer with a background in Formula One if you need some speed to go with the booze/gak/etc and want to take it to the next level. There is the argument that if one has a serious motor driving it is a thrill in itself, but being chained in a concrete hole with seatless bogs is a bit of a let down. I am glad Paris was caged for longer than convenient but saddened that she was in a circumstance of relative privacy rather than handcuffed to a bench in a cell filled with scatologically obsessive and very creative sexual deviants armed with laxatives, duct tape and a camcorder. She could also learn about decadence from the gentleman whose adventures are to be found on the link above…

Friday, July 28, 2006

Londimium and the Isblington troll


Marker critics part 7673
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.
If you put your ear to the ground of the media you can hear the sound of the great stampede after the next novelty, coming along like a bag of dog mess floating along a canal.

A couple of months ago I looked at the Observer Music Monthly, which is for the unhipster looking for the latest titles to make him the ‘forty quid bloke’ at HMV. On the cover was a young woman best described as a 4/10 edging down towards a 3, pretending to laugh on Primrose Hill to trail a feature by the intensely annoying Miranda Sawyer (an aging, expensively educated hack specialising in taking money for celebrating trivia) on ‘Lily the Kid: The perfect pop star.’

I soon realised, to my horror, that the bald-headed salt tadpoles of professional waste of skin and Listerine fairy Keith FUCKING ALLEN had spread his ignorant seed and begot an artiste of similar weight to himself. Her mouthy mockney ignorance, despite a string of expulsions from pricey schools was celebrated both by herself and the charming Miranda, the tone of whose prose read like the uncritical sweaty gruntings one would associate with some impossibly submissive sex act. Lily knows nothing, and even less about music. This gives her the blank slate of credibility.

Of course, despite having a manager for the six years it took her to break out like wind from a tramp’s trousers, its all down to her profile on MySpace. Hmmmm. In American marcomms there is a great term for simulated grass roots growth – ‘astroturfing’. One would have thought that allegedly trained journalists, bombarded 24/7 by PR would see through the con. In fact, a brave post on the Observer’s blog rumbled the shit by mentioning that when taking a mobile call at the close of an ‘innit’-erview she switched to a rather more plummy tone.

A few weeks later, she has emerged like a moth of wet bogroll from her media cuckoon and is everywhere, like the smell of rotting Durian fruits down an alleyway. I cast my eyes on another odious profile by mistake and she was lauded for her giggly admission that she does not know the difference between a guitar and a bass- a distinction that could be heard easily by an educationally subnormal squirrel monkey. It’s cool to be rich, dumb and well connected. The saturation marketing for this methane is everywhere, her airbrushed face all over the tube walls like bricks. One can only hope the backlash comes quick and fast like pissfoam. Maybe we should all watch people be unsafe instead…

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Boggin boomboxen

A new social phenomena is exploding on our bus network like hot protein out of a one string guitar player’s pornopowered riffing. The latest generation of mobiles can store and play back low quality audio files with ease.

This is nothing new, but the wrong sort have figured it out. The type that regret that headphones make audio personal as you can’t share the latest bits of cynical, sugary ear excrement doing the rounds. Get on a rammed bendy bus and before you know it a clash of tinny, muffled beats, insipid sexual longings and phallocentric oaths will fill the air like the pong from rained on food waste.

It is my fantasy to don a suit of armour and strap a mid-80s bass heavy Hitachi model to my chest and board the bus banging out the reductivist sound of Detroit Booty Bass – the sound of a real street much harder than any local estate. People raised on dodgy 2-step and macho shouting would be blown away by the likes of DJ Assault chanting “ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS” over crude, jackhammer beats.

I did actually try this on a smaller scale – much to the chagrin of the lady of the house -loading the first verse of DJ Assault’s rather poor ‘Yo Relatives’ onto my handset and later when accosted by a lone chav larvae forcing out a muffled DIY CD:UK I took action. Slipping into a seat in the back opposite, I played the harsh sound of “YOUR MAMA YOUR DADDY YOUR SISTERS A HO. HO HO HO HO HO…” to see if a message was received. They turned up the crap, and I put it on repeat, bopping my head like an electroshock patient. This seemed to quiet things, though I am sorry to report that upon my exiting of the bus there was a window based exchange of masturbatory gestures. Maybe I am becoming feral too under the heat and pressure.

I’m certainly not alone. At my last visit to the Nordic temple of genteel shame (pIKEA) I noticed that one area in the kitchens section had been converted into an impromptu and very fragrant baby changing area, another had the evidence of shoplifted 15p tins of Swedish Perry consumed en masse in a moment of private pleasure. It made sense. You could start a commune in there if you had weapons to fend off the staff.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Sun sex sand and snotty screens


Words to live by
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.
As soon as I heard David Lynch’s Inland Empire would not be premiering in Cannes, any urine-sodden embers of interest I had in this self-congratulatory blingfest were extinguished. However, from afar matters remain amusing. The poor reception given to a risible film from a pointless potboiler mentioned before in these pages was encouraging, but will mean little to knuckle-draggers at the Odeon.

What was better was the judicious use of “Boo” at a criminally overrated dynastic daughter of a Holywood waster. I remember eating stale popcorn while confined in the dark, watching the celluloid spack that it is Godfather Part III and noticing a particularly wooden performance from a dark haired, nose based actrice. Nepotism was in the house, as emerging dazed from a blizzard of Bolivian and dubious winemaking, Francis was ensuring the family business had an auteristic future. Later on, she celebrated Scarlett Johansson’s rear and Bill Murray’s deadpan skills in a piece based on the idea that, hey, Japan is really rather different and being there can seem lonely. It slid across the critical radar inoffensively like a tiny rubber cockroach on some imaginary Gozilla set.

Now she has combined period drama with post-punk, casting underfed, aging prom queen Dunst as Marie Antoinette, the misunderstood fun loving inbred who partied to the end, not smelling the fecal writing on the wall for a Regime that had outlived any kind of relevance in a world of reason. All concerned must have been assured of the brilliance of the project. The dichotomy of modern music and sensibilities in a period setting, edgy director, teen friendly cast and punky marketing would have had the focus group creatives as erect as an ill advised ‘astroturf’ web marketing campaign. Who would have expected an instant chorus of mockery to spoil the party? Like a bunch of monkey turds inserted amongst the Maltesers at an office function. Hopefully in the end a few fewer gimps will burn cash to see it when it emerges like a gilded, uncool cloud of flatus in the Autumn.

In the end, the judges continued the tradition of mistaking cack-handed propaganda for art and awarded old Stalinist Ken Loach the prize for his rant on the Irish Civil War. Of course, for Ken a Civil War can be confusing as it usually involves two sides with competing political claims (as well as atrocities to their name). This doesn’t work well with a tabloid binary worldview coupled to a comic book reading of Marxism. For Ken, a much better idea is to tell the story of plucky Celts fighting off genocidal Brits. Never mind the complex tragedies of Home Rule or the fact that De Valera’s legacy is that of a blood-soaked clown unable to accept the Treaty on offer as the best solution on the table, the whole thing is extremely good v. very bad much like Iraq in the eyes of the rump hard left. Put your plastic shamrock away please, Ken, as to sensible eyes this guff has less complexity than the average paramilitary mural.

A dramatist would see a tragic and bloody divorce, much like the partition of India. A polemicist sees only victims and villains, alongside a chance at export markets. One just hopes that the yoof will see it is a melodramatic romp and not even the smallest glimmer of history. Or drama.

If it is neither arthouse nor grindhouse it is nothing of value.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Revenge of the Weird:


Wandsworth gets interesting
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.

When there was a kind of semi-functional taste arbitation other than Wal-Mart functioning in the culture industry genre works, conspiratorial nonsense, UFOs etc would be widely distributed paperbacks with promotion and hardback credibility given to things of more serious ‘intent’. The obliteration of the high/low cultural distinction imposed by the Romantics in a kind of opiate snobbery is liberating, but not without cost.

I remember a time when books about UFOs, religious conspiracies and other paranoiac nonsense were a guilty pleasure of shut-ins, curtain-twitchers, street corner mumblers and their unwashed friends. They were sold in American supermarkets, the back of Smiths, or shifty places with a curtained section at the rear for Japanese fart video distro. Pre-Jaws/Star Wars era New World Pictures and Warners were by in large in different markets. There is no way 1977 Hollywood would have made Death Race 2000, just as there is no way circa 77 drive-in land would have made Barry Lyndon. Now Hollywood would make neither, choosing instead to steal the easy formulas of B without the old transgression. Spielberg and Lucas showed the moneymen that formula and youth markets were worth stealing poor Roger Corman’s lunch to get at. It probably will owe a few lunches soon to Dan Brown, but he would be able to pick up the bill for X-Men 4, unless he is pick-pocketed by the Revenge of the Weird. ‘B’ has now taken over the bookshelves but has lost its trashy energy and sense of experiment in the process.

For now awaiting a verdict are two hairy bits of oddball who noticed that Brown had reached into the storm drain to retrieve an old bit of conspiratorial smegma – Holy Blood: Holy Grail to Xerox into his $200m+ potboiler. Jesus’ descendants are alive and well and having drinks in a Parisian Masonic Lodge or something and the Pope has bugged the world so anyone talking about it will be killed. Never mind that the lack of Biblical DNA sample availability renders this an unprovable assumption – as Richard Nixon found out some secrets are just too fucking big to keep. The latter point is a deadly fact for any conspiracy theory.

One wished that there was some way both sides could lose in a court case, though Brown repulsing the challenge would be better on balance for delaying the encroaching fungus of abused copyright. In any event, it is great to see the Weird reaching up from the bog to bite the gilded bum that cynically got the credibility long denied it, despite its paranoid passion.

I must say that if I had somehow hallucinated a interesting conspiracy – say that James Mason was in fact a malign shape-shifting alien over 2,000 years old that had actually kidnapped the real spirit of Easter, a blue Armadillo, replacing him in children’s minds with the image of a rabbit in preparation for a world takeover, written a bestselling but forgotten book about it only to have a failed singer-songwriter make more money than would be needed to buy Belize twenty years later by scribbling crap about it, I would go to violence before I went to Law.




Sunday, February 26, 2006

Britney’s mates stole your TV


Estate Exterior SE5
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.
Noticed a post by a cat called Mike Evangelist – an ex-Appleteer who was involved in the development in lickworthy products such as Final Cut Pro and is urging a boycott of HD. Apart from playing back gorgeous 1080p trailers for shite video game like mainstream films on my trusty Mac I do not have HD. The people who control the bandwidth in the UK seem to have decided that UK Gold +1 (the channel for when you forgot when the repeat of ‘Birds of a Feather’ was on but were only off by one hour) and endless streams of soontobeanescort showbiz rejects desperately attempting to get livestock to text in to win or whatever are a better application for all those bytes. Actually, the only thing separating the girl with the desperate eyes and bad skin on UK Quiz thing whatever from, say, Kate Garraway is access to PR, luck and better grooming – but I digress.

Soon the content creeps are going to attempt to fill their troughs with another ‘buy what you have in a snazzy new format’ type deal with the emergence of high def DVD formats. I’m not too bothered as I reckon one will see ‘Ally McBeal Remastered’ long before anything I would want emerges but Mike’s point is a better one.

The day when all of our senses will be subject to 'rights management', with a Direct Debit to the content goons to compensate them direct any time we say, see or hear anything vaguely copyrighted is now closer. If this stops gimps from using catchphrases from the latest unthreatening sitcom practictioners as every utterance of ‘Am I bovvered, I’m a lady etc’ incurs a terrible cost mankind will have moved forward. However…

When the hidefwhatever discs come, they will have more strings attached than a piece of well knit winter clothing. You will only be able to play them back if they phone home over the net and say both the disc and device are suitably locked down. Not to mention that the ‘rights’ of the discs owner (who is seen by the content clowns as a criminal conspirator) can be changed at any point. It can be assumes that the real dream is a kind of personal pay per view, where you buy a nice silver disc that charges you every time you use it and extra when there are friends round.

One can only hope that angry consumers, crackers, hackers and dodgy Far Eastern manufacturers will render this backdoor parasitism as impotent as the DVD Region nonsense. Only buy what you can own, kids!

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Blessed exempt and the nameless


Bin full of gialli
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.

Society’s attitude towards substances has declined in many respects since the Victorian age. What once were considered private vices at worst or medical problems at best are now shunted into the world of criminality. As the days of Capone demonstrated, people want to self-medicate for pleasure, foolishness, anaesthesia, hastened death whatever and it is the role of State to minimise harm rather than pretend it can be prevented, creating criminal supernormal profits in the hypocrisy. These arguments are too well rehearsed to breathe again and change may come in some places over generations but at present the law is worse than an ass – The idea that identakit city centres infested by ethanol fuelled barbarism is more pleasant than people giggling quietly in Amsterdam style caffs is self evidently obscene.

People with connections, luck, bodies of note or all three are exempt from normal life and law. When the videos of ‘La Moss’ hoovering and passing round large amounts of fun chalk on a grainy mobile cam appeared in the pig press, I realised that the chances of her facing the same fate as an unlucky youth not beloved of industry caught out with half a wrap of heavily cut crap half dead after a party was as slim as the genitals of a dried cuttlefish. The Bill are making noises due to the aging mannequin’s arrogance about the whole thing but the amusing image of the Croydonwaif unironocially cuffed to a bench in a piss reeking cell for a long time will never come real. “The jury found him famous…” etc.

On another puff page did noticed the not quite 21 Keira Knightley ripped out of her tiny brain at some Beverly Hills party being propped up by her grimacing madeforlife ‘playwright’ mum Sharman Macdonald like a piece of supple shoe leather stretched over some matchsticks. Of course, Stateside while you can get an assault rifle five years before you can touch grog absurdity is taken to Hummer proportions. However, the idea that pixies from Pirates of the Caribbean 3 are held to a happier standard than poor high school kids who just want a good time smells of injustice. I’ve seen them ‘card’ people with grey hair over there. Maybe if the blessed paid the same price as the nameless the world could change.



Saturday, January 14, 2006

Sticky critics and the hoodie chasers


Marrakech Modernity
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.
For a simple salaryman, the holidays come and go as fast as an openhanded slap from a youth on a speeding minibike fitted with a cameraphone and a rubber arm on one of the handlebars.

Struggling along the Northern Line back to the ranch feeling like Travis Bickle on absinthe and paint fumes, I found myself reading the Evening Standard again. It feels dirty – at least the thing is cheaper than a tin of warm pop but one of the presumably news rich Great Cities surely could find it in itself to support a newspaper with more weighty content. Sure it is tabloid crude but I can live with that. Sam Fuller was tabloid crude but the Standard is devolving into some kind of combination of Heat!, a gossip website populated with bubbly sycophants and a haphazard crime column.

Page 2 is often occupied by stories such as the odious hippychic fleshwisp personpuppet that is Sienna Miller, whose IMDB credits are a slur on cinema, deciding to have a new haircut inspired by mid-80s Bowie. Then on to a bevy of columns usually more shallow than a pub urinal (City Lives? Single Life? Minty hair cake?!). It is as if the rag got mixed up with Now! at the presses.

As Social Control compelled me from creating any kind of compelling news myself on public transport, I wondered if the Government’s latest attempt to corral the feral through parenting classes mild repression et al would have an unintended consequence: The silencing of the amateur, chewing gum and pen armed critics who are the only defence against the sugarculture machine that pimps its wares all over the Tube system. How else will the dead eyes of Reese Witherspoon be enlivened? Who would else would counter the march of the Woman in White with the incontestable statement “Haile Selasssie I the world is a whore”? How will the anatomy on display in the latest tired bumpf for “Chicago” be taken into three dimensions with discarded oral sculpture? Food for thought, etc…

Check the link: Vintage horror and soulfulness were never so much fun...