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…

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