Twilight Zone

I’m pretty sure that it’s nowhere near as dull for you to read this as it is for me to live it, so I’m going to give yet another update on the as-yet barren search for work. So, you have to suffer through this shit one more time:

Number of jobs applied for: 121
Number of interviews so far: Still only 1

And I’m running out of ideas about what to do about it.

Tom Stoppard once said that: “Every exit is an entry to somewhere.” Well, I exited my last job on June 17. Since then, I don’t think I’ve entered anything at all, other than a bizarre existence that entails an endless round of begging, phoning, e-mailing, pleading, and losing little fragments of my sanity that slip away and rest on my pillow when I get up every morning. I’m just sitting in a Cosmic Waiting Room hoping someone calls my name soon.

This is how Sisyphus must have felt.

Scores on the Doors

As Week 7 of the interminable Job Hunt begins, and I hunt that elusive hulking great salary like an impoverished Captain Ahab desperate to sate my own personal financial demons, I thought it might be time for an action-packed round of “Fun with Stats” with me, your host. So, have at thee!

Number of jobs applied for: 97
Number of interviews so far: 1
Number of helpful recruitment consultants: None

There. Now you know. But in this case, knowledge isn’t power. Sucks, don’t it?

In another part of the virtual world, the terrifyingly prolific Bert has called me out, asking: “Dear Jim. Can you fix it for me to find out what you have been listening to whilst being holed up in your pit?”

Now then, now then, ‘ow’s about that? You ask, I answer:

United Future Organization – The Sixth Sense
Prince – Gotta Stop (Messin’ Around)
Ramsey Lewis – That’s the Way of the World
De La Soul – Pawn Star
Smokey Robinson – Cruisin’
Prince – Cream
Gil Scott-Heron – Fast Lane
The Blackbyrds – Rock Creek Park
Jabba – Superbad
Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Mellowship Slinky in B Major
Public Enemy – Mind Terrorist

Happy now? Now, getouttahere, kid, ya bother me!

Two Countries separated by a Common Language

To any American journalists lurking around here, please take note:

There is no such thing as the “London Subway”. It’s called the “London Underground” or, to the 8 million Londoners who live in this fair city, it’s “The Tube”. Don’t try and bend our language to fit your lazy journalistic standards.

Pop Goes the Weasel

And another day of wacky “transport ‘n’ terrorists” mayhem kicks off in London, with some dude getting five rounds pumped into him at point blank range by undercover cops on a train at Stockwell Station.

I wonder if anyone can help me reconcile these two conflicting statements that the police keep giving out when something kicks off in London: “stay where you are” and “carry on as normal”. Huh?

AKA’s Movie Round-Up

You know what they keep telling writers with tedious regularity?

“Write what you know.”

Well, right now I don’t know shit. Apart from a few things about movies, those celluloid confections that give me a two-hour window into a life that isn’t mine. So, it’s time for me to chew your eyeballs right out of their sockets with what is Good and Right at your local cinema emporium and all fine purveyors of cinematic wonders. So, let’s do this:

Kung Fu Hustle – Imagine Shaw Brothers meets Looney Tunes, or Kill Bill’s Crazy 88 doing dick ‘n’ fart gags, and you just about scratch the surface of Stephen Chow’s retina-scorching love-letter to the golden age of martial arts cinema. Neither as cute or laugh-out-loud funny as Chow’s Shaolin Soccer, but still a solid use of a couple of stray hours that you need to fill. Like a throwing star to my frontal lobe, this kept me pinned to my cinema seat. Or maybe that was something sticky under my chair…

The Consequences of Love (Le conseguenze dell’amore) – The words “existential Italian thriller” may fill you with balls-shrinking dread, but this little gem is one of my favourites of the year so far. Any film that can keep you rapt for over an hour without even getting the story started must have a little something special on the go. Or maybe someone smeared Crack on the screen. I don’t know. Either way, this is a beautifully shot, meticulously paced character study of one man’s seemingly aimless existence, held together by the mesmerising central performance of Toni Servillo.

War of the Worlds – Watching scenes of mindless destruction and helpless death a week after the London bombings made me look at this film in a different way, and it certainly wasn’t the mindless bubblegum diversion that I expected it to be. Surprisingly dark, brutal and increasingly bleak, Spielberg proves that he still has the chops when it comes to edge-of-the-seat set pieces, even though, despite the note-perfect closing of the criminally underrated The Terminal, he shows that he STILL hasn’t worked out how to end a film, adding this to his growing list of “Great Movies That Just Don’t Know When To Stop”, along with AI Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can.

Back by Dope Demand

Hi, I’m blogger AKA. You might remember me from such blog entries as “Hate Crimes” and “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?” .

Yes, I know I haven’t been blogging much recently. But, dammit, I’ve been out of work for a month now and I don’t have a hell of a lot to say for myself. I have no “a funny thing happened on the way to work” anecdotes. No “moronic bullshit spouted by my hateful colleagues” stories. No “I saw this weird thing, and here are my irrelevant observations on it” type of meanderings.

Nevertheless, nature abhors a vacuum, so I’ll just keep ploughing on with this shit regardless. Here’s the short version of my last month of job-hunting: Applied for about fifty jobs so far. Managed to get one interview, but I didn’t get that job either. So despite my best efforts, I’m no closer to finding a new job at the moment.

I still have a few plates that are spinning away merrily, so I’ll just stay positive and keep on hammering at it. I don’t have any other choice. It’s either that, or go suck on an exhaust pipe. I’ll go with the former for the time being.

Other than the very occasional foray beyond the front doors of my humble abode to sneak a movie or two, I haven’t seen anyone or done anything of note. I am now officially the Crazed Hermit Man who mumbles into his stubble and glares at strangers in public. Oh yes I am.

When I’m not looking for work, I’m keeping my eyes on young Buttercup. She has now mastered the art of crawling, and I can’t look away for a second, because she can scoot across a room like a horizontal Peter Parker, getting herself entangled in all manner of seemingly innocuous household objects.

Another pitfall of Summer Unemployment is my weakness for Big Brother. Yes, I know I’ve written extensively about my hatred of Reality TV, but I’ve always had a debilitating weakness for this particular Freakshow. And with 24-hour live streaming, I’m always in danger of losing hours to this televisual time-thief.

Fuck me, my mobile keeps ringing while I’m trying to concentrate on writing this. But not one call is job-related.

Right, I feel like my writing muscles are now suitably limber. Thanks for the warm up. I’ve now got to go off and write some old boring shit that may or may not get me a well-paid permanent writing post with some fancy London-based company. Wish me luck. I fucking need it.

A Brief History of London Under Fire

Well, we certainly do live in interesting times.

With London such a fundamental part of my DNA, it would be inappropriate to ignore the events of last Thursday by refusing to mention them at all. It goes without saying that it was a horrible and unpleasant sequence of events that will leave a mark on my city. But it’s important to put things in perspective. So, here goes:

New York & the Pentagon - September 11 2001
Death toll: 2,986

Bali – October 12 2002
Death toll: 202
Wounded: 209

Madrid – March 11 2004
Death toll: 191
Wounded: 1,460

London – July 7 2005
Death toll: At the moment, over 50 confirmed
Wounded: Over 700

I’m not trying to diminish the events of last week. Without a doubt, it was a terrible day for London. But other cities have faced carnage far in excess of the London bombings last week. Let’s bear that in mind.

Putting things in historical perspective, London has faced far, far worse itself over the years. Look:

The Blitz – September 7 1940 – May 16 1941 (although bombing continued until the end of the Second World War in March 1945)
The Nazis carried out sustained and intensive bombing of UK targets, resulting in 43,000 deaths and the destruction of a million houses. And we are still standing strong.

And let’s not forget the frequent bomb attacks on London by the IRA from the Seventies right through to 2001. I can’t seem to get my hands on exact data for this at the moment, but London has a history of being bombed and attacked by the IRA. And we are still standing strong.

David Copeland, the London Nailbomber, targeted London’s gay, black and Asian communities in 1999. On April 17 1999, his first bomb went off on Electric Avenue in Brixton. His second bomb targeted Brick Lane, the heart of London’s Bangladeshi community. Copeland’s third and final nailbomb went off in the Admiral Duncan pub in Old Compton Street, a popular watering hole for London’s gay community. Three people died and over a hundred other people were wounded and maimed by the nails in the bomb. I was in a pub a street away when the Soho bomb went off. The pub shook ever so slightly. And then Soho was full of noise: the thwacking rotors of police helicopters in the sky; the streets blanketed in sirens and the desperate, insistent chirpings of mobile phones.

But back to last week. The bombers aren’t the only villains of this piece. There are others. Here are a few objects of my ire:

George W. Bush on July 4 2005, three days before the London bombings: "We're taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home."

Is that right, motherfucker? Tell that to the families of those injured and killed in Bali, London and Madrid. Time to find another angle for your spin to justify your continued atrocities all over the world in the name of “freedom”.

Here’s a doozy. This from Fox News’ top anchorman Brit Hume: “My first thought when I heard - just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, 'Hmmm, time to buy.'"

What a colossal, venal, shit-sucking scumbag. Want to respond to Mr. Hume? His e-mail address is brit.hume@foxnews.com and his office number is 202-824-6300.

All of London is back to work today. London’s the John Wayne, the Lee Marvin, and the Clint Eastwood of world capitals. We take a licking and keep on ticking. Don’t fuck with London.

I'll leave you with the words of London Mayor Ken Livingstone, which I think says it all best: "In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail."

(Special thanks to The Huffington Post and Wikipedia for helping me with the research for this piece.)

London's Burning

And so my fifth day of unwanted self-unemployment begins, and the sky is no longer on fire. And I’ve got yet another day of fruitless job-hunting ahead of me.

I haven’t had the chance to do any writing of any kind for the last week, and I fear this may turn into a permanent state of play until I start carving my day into immutable chunks: family time, job-hunting time, writing time, etc. At the moment, it’s just a huge lump of shapeless hours that disappear quickly and before I know it, the sun is setting again and I haven’t got anything done.

I’ve been battling a particularly virulent bout of hayfever for the last week, trying to get stuff done with my head swollen, a neverending supply of mucus clogging up my nostrils, strangling my brain, coagulating on mountains of tissues strewn all over the house. Lovely.

On top of that, London has been melting for the last week, a wall of heat pushing down from above, not a breeze in the air to take the edge off the fire. Yesterday, on the hottest day of the year, with temperatures topping out at around 31 degrees C, I bravely / stupidly (delete as applicable) ventured into the heart of London for a press screening. Which meant tackling the horrors of the unventilated subterranean inferno that is the London Underground, drowning in the sweat of a thousand commuters, my skin permanently slick with a sheen of bubbling perspiration, rapidly darkening with the grime of the Big Smoke clinging to me like a black membrane of ash.

And to make it worse, the air-conditioning at the cinema was broken…so there was a room full of film critics pumping out acrid heat, listlessly fanning themselves with press notes, swilling warm water that was supplied to try and keep us from passing out.

After the movie, there was a bit of a party thing going on, so I grabbed a couple of ice-cold beers and propped up the bar, with the beer turning into steam the second it touched my lips. I didn’t stay for long: I didn’t recognise anybody I knew there, so I headed for the exit soon after.

What else? The last week has included my leaving drinks from my last job; Father’s Day; Batman Begins…but I haven’t got time to get into all that now. There are jobs to find, writing deadlines to meet, facial hair to shave. Otherwise, before I know it, the demands of family life will interrupt my already fractured flow, and it will be the weekend again.

I’m busier now than when I had a full-time job! Where the hell has that 40 hours a week gone?

Liquor in the front, Poker in the rear

What can I tell you to stop the blood pouring from my eyes and the brains oozing out of my ears? The last hours of my current employment are dying away minute by interminable minute, and I’ve become so bored and disconnected from it all that I’m tempted to get up and head for the exit now, rather than wait for the hollow good wishes and back-slapping sure to be spewed onto me tomorrow morning.

Can’t wait to see the back of the lot of them, to be honest. Having these fucknuts pollute my life for the last ten months was quite a steep price to pay to watch my little girl grow up. A little girl that I am on the verge of renaming “Mad Monkey Kung Fu” by deed poll. My body seems to be the most exciting climbing frame she has ever seen, and her little legs flail around like fleshy nunchakus.

That is all. The next time you hear from me, I will have rejoined the ranks of the unemployed. Again.

Oh yes. One last thing. Stop reading this now. Find the nearest cinema and go and see Sin City. Go. Run. Now. Film of the Year so far (if you got the stones for it). A world where a film like this exists seems to me to be a world worth tolerating just a little bit longer.

Dumb Shit I've Heard

More in the occasional series of stupidity my ears are assaulted with. And, yes, I really did overhear someone saying this:

“I was watching that Pulp Fiction the other night. I didn’t understand it. Halfway through that John Travolta gets killed, right? And then later on, he’s alive again! What’s that all about?”