Pucker Up

Today, the company that I resigned from last year is carrying a story on their news site about the events that will lead to me being made redundant from the company that I left them for.

Oh, Sweet Irony, let me suckle on your barbed and bitter teats.

The Last Laugh

Could this week possibly suck more??

On top of my ongoing work travails comes something far more grave and depressing. Frank Gorshin, the one and ONLY Riddler, has died at the age of 72. But first, a little AKA history lesson.

By all accounts, I was a very placid and peaceful baby. Hardly ever cried, always smiling, never shouting. However, according to my Mum, once a week I would freak out. My younger self, despite having absolutely no concept of time, always, always, always instinctively knew when Batman was coming on TV. (And, I know it goes without saying, but I mean the Adam West / Burt Ward pop classic). Undoubtedly, they must have been reruns by this point. I was far too young to have seen them the first time round

Barely one year old, I would spend the entire morning bouncing around the house going, “Nana nana nana nana, nana nana nana nana, BATMAN!”, driving everyone nuts. And once the show came on, I would sit in complete and utter silence, in an almost trancelike state, gazing at the TV in wonder and awe. The show was a revelation to me. It was my first Favourite Show Ever.

And so, to me, Batman can never be Michael Keaton or Christian Bale. He’s always Adam West. And he’s not a Dark Knight or a vengeful borderline psychotic. He’s Gotham City’s Caped Crusader, living with his young ward Dick Grayson and his unflappable butler Alfred, with that cool red phone patching him directly through to Commissioner Gordon, and that kickass car!

And Jack Nicholson is not the Joker. The phenomenal Cesar Romero holds the undisputed title as the Clown Prince of Crime. And, of course, Jim Carrey is not the Riddler…

Frank Gorshin was amazing. That incredible cackling laugh. That wiry, manic physical presence and boundless energy. A frenzied emerald dervish whirling in a blur of question marks. A voice that could effortlessly slip from playful trickster to chilling menace. It was, and remains, perfection.

Frank’s final screen performance is in Tarantino’s feature-length season finale of CSI airing in the UK in a couple of months. I was looking forward to it anyway, but now it’s become unmissable.

And I’ve just ordered the 1966 feature-length Batman movie on DVD, so I can reclaim that part of me that remembers how to sit in wonder and awe, hypnotised by the blisterlingly bright primary colours of the heroes and villains of Gotham City.

And as for Frank? I can picture him right now: “Hey, St. Peter, riddle me this…”

Six of one, half-dozen of the other

OK. Now the shock of impending unemployment has subsided somewhat, let’s take a mean, sneering look at What Happens Next, and stare at the implications until they flinch:

Good News: I’ll be back in the heart of London again soon.
Bad News: I’ll be back in the heart of London again soon.

If you live and / or work in London, the dichotomy there will need no further explanation.

Good News: I’ll be out of this backwards-looking little parochial burg with its unevolved fuckheaded denizens, and I’ll return to the spiky embrace of the seething metropolis known as the 21st Century. At Last. I’m Coming Home.

Bad News: Less sleep. Longer and more expensive commutes. Less time watching my little girl growing up (which was always one of the main aims of my experiment in working here).

What else? It’s difficult to get into specifics, because at the moment there aren’t any. I don’t know when I’ll find another job. I don’t know what that job will entail. Will it be another I.T. role? Will it be an Editorial position? How much money will I be taking home every month? I’ve got variables seeping out of my ass, so there’s not too much point in playing a speculative “What If?” game. That’s just a bit too frustrating.

I can tell you this much, though. The next six weeks until the axe swings are going to be pretty damn uncomfortable. I’d much rather they take me round the back of the building right now and give me a double-tap to my brainpan, get this shit done quick. As long as there’s a juicy severance package thrown in, of course.

Up for the Down Stroke

This isn’t going to be an easy post to write, but I need to get all this stuff out of my head. This is also going to be a bit joke-light. Sorry about that.

The short version first: I am almost certain that I’m about to lose my job. Here’s the long version:

My company currently employs 54 people (I just checked). Around the middle of June, it is highly likely that there are going to be redundancies reducing the number of staff to only 30.

The company is about to sell off around a third of its assets. If the sale goes through, the staff cuts go-ahead. If the sale falls apart, the staff cuts will be scrapped. But let’s work with the worst-case scenario here.

In about six weeks, it looks very, very likely that I will lose my job. Yes, it is possible that they will want to keep me, and it is possible that the sale might collapse. Possible, but not very probable.

The third of the assets up for sale is the shit-end of the company assets. The remaining assets are the good stuff. Which makes the company portfolio attractive to prospective buyers. Which leads me to believe that the rest of the company will be up for sale within the next couple of months anyway. Everyone’s a loser, baby! (Unless you are one of the company directors, in which case you’ve got a hell of a payday coming up.)

I could go into more detail, but at the moment I just can’t be fucking bothered. To say that I am hugely demotivated right now is a massive understatement. Time to polish up the ol’ C.V., get on the phone to bother recruitment agencies, and all that fun shit.

When this has all shaken out and everybody knows where they stand, I’m sure that the future will hold bigger and better things. Right now, though, this is a messy and unpleasant transition stage.

I will return with my regular bouts of nonsense and vitriol shortly, once I have figured out a way to reignite my sense of humour.

Labour Pains

So…Election Day. What can I tell you?

I went to vote this morning and, despite being convinced that I was going to vote Labour, at the last minute I spontaneously decided to go for LibDem. And here’s why…

Labour, in all probability, is going to win. And I think that’s OK. We can live with that. I decided not to vote for them as a Conscientious Objector to what has become known as “The Complete Fucking Mess in Iraq”. Too many people dying for too little reason. So, consider my floating vote a petulant bitchslap for Blair. The other reason that I decided note to vote Labour is Alastair Campbell. What an utter cunt. He’s spent years bullying the media and kicking them around, leading to forced resignations at the BBC and the Mirror over minor factual mistakes, even though the general thrust of what they were saying was, by and large, absolutely true. I vividly remember Alastair Campbell storming onto the set of Channel 4 News unplanned in the summer of 2003 to rant and scream about the media in the face of a powerless Jon Snow. Funny stuff, but you could see the foam-flecked bile flicking onto the camera from his raging, angular face. He really, really does need to go fuck himself.

And the hypocrisy of Campbell is mind-boggling. Blair deliberately mislead the British Public. Fact. So he really is in no position to question the veracity of any news that goes against his party line.

So, I reckon the ideal scenario would be something like this: both Labour and Conservative parties shrink in this election, and LibDem grow slightly. Ultimately, if the LibDems became the party of Opposition, and the Conservatives got shunted to the side as the lame duck third party, the next General Election should be a doozy, with those two parties upping their game somewhat, whilst Howard and the Conservatives can go and crawl into a corner somewhere, rename themselves the Neo-Conservative Party in a rare moment of insightful honesty, and then they can be ripped to shreds by wild dogs in the middle of a fox hunt. Sound good?

I’m also concerned about Voter Apathy, but that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of shit. All I’ll say is this: You know the end of the world is coming when people make more of an effort to vote for contestants in reality TV shows than they do for the Leader of their Nation. And you have to pay to vote for the dipshits on Big Brother too!

One, final politics-related note before I wrap up. Just finished reading Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris. Imagine The West Wing with the trappings of science-fiction and superhero fiction. Absolutely stunning stuff, and the finest first issue of a series I’ve read in years. And you lot, you lucky people, can read the first issue absolutely free if you follow this link.

Day of the Dense

“Stupidity is replicating itself at an astonishing rate. It breeds easily and is self-financing.” Frank Zappa

I’m too goddamn tired to deal with these fucking morons today. I was up late last night fiddling around with my new iPod, and my eyes are as red and raw as my temper today.

Today’s inane question that I really have absolutely no idea how to answer:

”How come you’re so good at spelling?”

And If I hear one more person say “May the 4th be with you”, I’m going to slap the shit out of them.

Any suggestions on how to deal with the overabundance of fuckwittery I have to battle on a daily basis are greatly appreciated.

This blog entry was brought to you by the letters ASS and HOLE, and the number .357.

Twist and Shout

Be unafraid. Everything I write here will remain Spoiler Free to avoid ruining your enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the shit discussed below.

One of the most hackneyed plot devices in modern cinema appears to be The Twist. You know, where everything you’ve just seen is A Lie! Or an Elaborate Hoax! Or Deliberately Misleading! Where everything exists solely for a punchline, invalidating the complex shenanigans of the previous ninety minutes or, alternatively, validating a huge slab of tedious build-up. Far too many films exist today purely for The Twist. And I don’t want to sit in a cinema for two hours just to watch someone do a variation on screaming “Not really! It was all a dream!” at my head.

Just to be absolutely clear, twist endings don’t constitute a last minute re-write because the filmmakers have no idea how to wrap things up, or because a test screening of two hundred morons in a mall in the asshole of nowhere didn’t like the original ending. Twist Ending, using my definition, is deliberate. The whole film deliberately builds towards it. Most films should still be able to stand tall without the twist. Sadly, more and more, it has become the movie’s raison d’être, and everything else is just subterfuge and window-dressing.

Man, I am so damn bored of the Twist. Granted, there are fine examples of The Twist. Off the top of my head, I can think of The Usual Suspects, Se7en, Fight Club, and Memento. All fine films enhanced by their closing moments. Significantly, they would still all be fine movies without the twist.

But here is where the problems start. I guessed the twist of The Others about half an hour into the movie, and I was disappointed to find my guess was spot-on at the end of the movie. Tim Burton was never going to be able to top the twist of the original Planet of the Apes, so he sidestepped the problem with an illogical swerve that, whilst entertainingly maddening, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. One of the worst twists in recent years, for me, was at the end of Basic, the much-touted reuniting of Pulp Hitmen John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Manipulative bullshit fakery that screams contempt for every single person in the audience.

Nowadays, it seems that M. Night Shyamalan has rummaged through Chubby Checker’s wardrobe to steal the crown and make himself King of the Twist. But with each subsequent movie, the twist becomes more and more important, and the actual meat of the film, the damn story, is merely a tool to get you there.

The Sixth Sense – Pretty good twist if you don’t spot it in advance. Unbreakable – My personal favourite of his films, because it’s the only film that doesn’t live-or-die by the twist at the end. Without the twist, the film would still hold up. Signs – Ugh. The rot is starting to set in now. Crop circles and glasses of water. Just silly.

But what really prompted this tirade was The Village, a film I had the deep misfortune to suffer through over the weekend. Easily snags a high place in the Worst Films I’ve Ever Seen List (and I think you all know how many films I see. And I also have a pretty good tolerance level for crap. So, this film must stink pretty badly, right?)

The Twist here renders everything that comes before it utterly meaningless. To keep myself entertained during the movie, I tried to think of the worst possible twist ending. Shyamalan duly delivered, and gave me my Worst Case Scenario Twist.

NOTHING in this movie makes sense. I lost count of the number of plot holes and inconsistencies. None of the build-up justifies the ending and the absurd contrivances needed to get you there. The ridiculous “Those We Don’t Speak Of” are spoken of in Every Bloody Scene! At one point, Sigourney Weaver proclaims: “What nonsense are you saying?”, a charge she would have been better off levelling at the writer-director of this cinematic atrocity.

Community Disservice

Every now and then, something New! And Exciting! is touted as the Latest Bestest Thing to come out of the Internet. It Will Change Your Life!

What a load of horseshit. There are genuine innovations and breakthroughs on the Internet all the time (like, say, weblogs). But for every real, useful service that appears, the Internet graveyard is clogged up with a hundred more useless electronic carcasses, gorged on bandwidth and strangled by their own worthless html.

A couple of years back, a whole bunch of “online communites” sprouted up, to put you closer to people with similar tastes, or similar desires, or similar postcodes. As far as I can tell, none of these virtual clubhouses worked at all.

At the moment, I’m mentally backtracking trying to remember where I’ve left a trace of myself in these Internet ghost towns, so that I can remove my details. I don’t need my information stored all over the place for no reason whatsoever.

First up on my Shit List is Friendster. The idea was this: you register, and your friends register, so that you are linked to your friends, and the friends of your friends, and their friends, and…

…and who gives a shit? I can easily get in touch with people I already know. I have their phone numbers, mobile numbers, e-mail addresses, postal addresses…I don’t need a website to provide a third party service in that regard. Cut out the middleman. Save me the fucking trouble.

And people I don’t know? Well, I don’t particularly care about them. If they are friends of friends, and they are sufficiently interesting, I’ll meet them in due course anyway.

And I certainly don’t need to contact people on the basis of similar tastes. I don’t see the value in contacting complete strangers on the basis that they also list Battle Royale amongst their favourite films. That is not the basis for a friendship, much less a casual conversation.

My main criticism of Friendster was that it was painfully slow when I first registered. Pages took aeons to load. I can’t be bothered.

The bottom line is this: I never contacted anyone using Friendster, and no one ever contacted me. So, with a couple of devastating keystrokes, my profile has been deleted.

Next on my list of Worthless Web Communities is Ryze. Clearly based on the premise of early Internet darling First Tuesday (which flamed out in an inferno of wasted millions, non-existent profits and raging egos. And I was in a position to know.) , Ryze is a networking community designed to get you in touch with relevant business contacts. Not a bad idea. But the worthless fucker never did shit for me. All I got was my “guest book” signed by people whoring services that had absolutely no relevance to my life. As soon as I get round to it, I’m going to vaporise my profile on there too.

Interestingly, my most fruitful online endeavour is right here. You’re looking at it. Sucker Punch has resulted in interesting dialogues and arguments and conversations with both friends and people I’ve never met. It’s helped me stay in touch with people I don’t often have the opportunity to see. It’s forced me to focus my mind on writing on a regular basis. Ironically, I’ve got no agenda here. I’m not trying to make friends or business contacts or cash out of this site, but it’s ended up giving me something tangible and satisfying without me asking for a single thing in return.

Thanks for that.

Jamming on the One

There are many things I could write about today.

I could write about my day out of the office yesterday, and the I.T. seminar I attended in Fulham Broadway. I could tell you that a room full of well-groomed suits-and-ties turned to glare at me when I walked in with my five o’ clock shadow, jeans and leather jacket. Fuck ‘em.

I could tell you that the seminar itself was Snoresville. I felt like Jeremy Northam in Cypher, struggling to stay awake during speech after speech. I could tell you how I flinched every time a bit of Business BallsSpeak was uttered. My favourite: business should plan “for the valley not the peak”. They should be shot for crimes against the English Language.

I could tell you how I decided not to return to work in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day enjoying a sunny afternoon in W1. I lay in the sun in Green Park, thinking that, a year ago, I would have been lying in the same spot with Beckett and Coupland, trying to avoid being hit in the head by a stray frisbee.

I could mention that I went to see and enjoy the much-maligned Be Cool in Leicester Square, with John Travolta reprising one of his signature roles as the effortlessly cool Chilli Palmer. High fives also to Vince Vaughan, Cedric the Entertainer, the late Robert Pastorelli, and especially The Rock in a superb turn as a gay wannabe actor slumming it as a bodyguard. A funny, cute and entertaining film, which nevertheless is never quite as funny, cute and entertaining as it thinks it is.

I could mention that I cruised the cheap bookstores and comic shops looking to snag myself some bargains, eventually walking away with £30-worth of books for £10. In Forbidden Planet, the overpoweringly sweaty stench of “Eau de Geek” assaulted my nostrils. Damn, can’t these nerds take a shower every once in a while? They are totally to blame for the continual perpetration of the stereotype of freakish basement dwellers, oozing all over their weekly stack of four-colour power fantasies. You know, all the comic lovers that I know are amongst the coolest, smartest and cleanest people I have ever met. Why can’t we be the template for the comic-reader stereotype instead?

I could also tell you that I wandered past my old office, now an empty husk of a building on the verge of being razed to the ground to make way for a “plaza”, which is just fatuous fancy talk for “mall”.

I could tell you all these things. But I won’t. Because there is something Bigger than all that on my mind:

Today marks the First Birthday of Sucker Punch. I’ve blown out the candles and toasted this momentous occasion, so let’s grab ourselves a slice of cake and look forward to the second year of the Punch. Shit, I’m just getting warmed up.

The Force is Strong in this one

Reasons why London is the Greatest City in Existence Part 594

We get to see Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith THREE WHOLE DAYS before the rest of the world.

At the Empire Leicester Square on May 16, there will be a back-to-back one off screening of all six Star Wars movies.

George Lucas will be there. So will Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew.

At other Leicester Square cinemas, the other five movies will be screened throughout the day.

There will be FREE performances of Star Wars music by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

There will be a selection of one-off activities presented by Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century Fox – open to absolutely everyone.

The 501st UK Garrison of Stormtroopers will be on duty all day in the Square.

“Galactic Passports” to the entire event cost a mere £50 per person.

I fucking love this city.