Dearly Departed

“The worst of the Eight Hells is called Continuous Hell. It has the meaning of Continuous Suffering. Thus the name.”
- Nirvana Sutra – Verse 19

I love Martin Scorcese - Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King Of Comedy, Goodfellas: wonderful films - but I was saddened when I first heard the news that he would be remaking the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs as The Departed. Why? Why does a great director like Scorcese have to jump on the contemporary Asian movie remake bandwagon? His remake of Cape Fear was good but no improvement over the original - an enjoyable but redundant experience.

Now, I have to admit that I have a possibly irrational bee in my bonnet about Hollywood plundering East Asia's recent back catalogue. I love the atmosphere and pace of the Asian versions of Ringu, The Grudge, Dark Water and The Eye and, being an intelligent human being who can walk and chew gum at the same time, I have no problem with subtitles. But no, lazy Western audiences don't go to the cinema to read. If they wanted to read they'd buy a book. So, in order to make these modern foreign classics accessible to Western cinema-goers, and to save themselves the effort of coming up with interesting ideas themselves, the Hollywood studios are only too happy to remake them.

So what? OK, the thing is that the Hollywood producers wax lyrical about the emerging talent in the East and about how Asian filmmakers are making the best films in the world right now and how they want to share these modern classics with Western audiences. And then they purchase not only the rights to remake the films but also distribution rights... but they don't distribute them. They sit on the Asian originals and fire out their own remakes to cinemas.

I will concede that, from what I've read, the US remakes have not been all bad (except Dark Water and, from what I gather, it was a pretty dismal experience for the very talented director Walter Salles) but, being the stubborn bastard that I am, I ain't gonna' see them. I've no need to. I've got the originals to enjoy.

It saddens me, therefore, that Scorcese is tossing his hat into the Asian remake ring (no pun intended). Infernal Affairs, in case you don't know, is the story of an undercover cop who has infiltrated a Triad gang in a game of cat-and-mouse with a mole who has risen through ranks of the police force. Directed by Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak, it is as much a rumination on identity and the idea of "Continuous Hell" as it is an action thriller. As well as the beautiful photography, direction and editing, it features some superb performances from Andy Lau as the mole in the police force, Tony Leung as the undercover cop, Eric Sang as the Triad boss and Anthony Wong as Leung's commanding officer.

This leads me onto another bone of contention: the casting of Scorcese's version. In place of Andy Lau and Tony Leung we will get Matt Damon and Leonardo di Caprio respectively. Matt and Leo are both good actors but when compared to the likes of Lau and Lueng (the latter being possibly my favourite living actor) then neither of them quite make the grade. One of the things that defines Lau's and Lueng's characters in the original is that they have been living the lie of their respective deceptions for so long that they no longer know what they are fighting for or whose side they are really on. They are getting older and world-weary. But Matt and Leo are, frankly, still too young and fresh-faced for the roles. Give them another ten years and they would probably be right for the roles, but not yet. And as for Mark Wahlberg taking on Anthony Wong's role as the police chief... ugh, please. The mighty Jack Nicholson is playing Eric Sang's gang boss part; the only bit of casting I feel could work well.

I don't doubt for a second that The Departed will look fantastic and that the cast and crew have given the project their all but, sorry Marty, I just can't muster much enthusiasm when I have the superb original already on my DVD shelf.

Oh, and the Hollywood machine is also going to remake the South Korean extreme cinema classic Oldboy. Yeah, right, that won't be neutered at birth. I can't picture any of today's popular Hollywood pretty-boys eating a live octopus on screen, can you?

Recent Bobbins

Last weekend I trundled down to Devon for a friend's wedding. It was great day and a chance to catch up with many old friends I don't see often enough. The reception was held at a big house near Brixham that commanded a wonderful view of the River Dart below or, to be more specific, this view of the River Dart below:

Isn't that lovely? I almost miss living in Devon... well, no I don't. I was bored out of my tiny mind most of the time. But it is good to go back every once in a while to unwind. Even better to go back to guzzle champagne with mates at a wedding.

---

Yeah, all very well trying to stay out of office politics but now psycho part-time permanent-member-of-staff is making accusations to the senior management that I am deliberately fiddling my timesheets and claiming more hours than I have actually worked.

Her evidence for this was one timesheet that I had left on the fax machine where I had forgotten to note that I left early one afternoon for an appointment. Genuine mistake - it simply slipped my mind when I filled the sheet in. Of course, psycho part-time permanent-member-of-staff tried to make out that it was more than it was and made a formal complaint against me. The senior management didn;t give the accusation much credence as I have been temping for them since last October and doing a bloody good job too; but they apologetically explained that they had to be seen to be doing the right thing and so I had to be formally questioned about the timesheet by my line manager and an HR person.

Now, slightly concerned that my good reputation with my recruitment agency is compromised by this whole stupid situation, I went to see them to explain what is going on. They didn't give psycho part-time-permanent-member-of-staff's accusations any credence at all and reassured me thay have had nothing but excellent feedback about my work from everyone and, don'y worry, if things don't improve then they'll happily take me out and find me another assignment.

But never mind: I have a job interview with an academic publisher on Monday so fuck psycho part-time permanent-member-of-staff and her bitter smear campaign against... well... just about everybody it would seem.

Someone really does need to ask her exactly why she is going to such lengths to discredit everyone because nobody can figure out what she is actually trying to achieve.

Not that I care. One way or another, I ain't gonna' be dealing with this shit for much longer.

How mainstream am I?

There's a meme thingie going around users at Last.fm at the moment whereby they calculate how 'mainstream' their music taste is by adding up the number of listeners for each of their top ten artists and then dividing the mean average by the number of Radiohead listeners (the most listened to artist on Last.fm).

As it is Sunday, the day of rest and procrastination, I decided to work out how mainstream I am. Here are my Top Ten Artists and the number of listeners for each on Last.fm:

• Orbital - 66,286
• Depeche Mode - 178,991
• The Orb - 33,841
• Xploding Plastix - 10,428
• LFO - 23,493
• Red Snapper - 18,749
• DJ Shadow - 98,026
• Four Tet - 55,873
• Aphex Twin - 122,145
• David Bowie - 229,893

The mean average of those figures comes out as 83,772.5 and the current number of listeners of Radiohead on Last.fm is 323,179, therefore my mainstream score works out as:

• 83,772.5 ÷ 323,179 = 25.92%

Quite low but not painfully obscure.

Then I wondered if Bowie and Depeche Mode, atypically popular artists compared to much of the stuff I normally listen to, were artificially lifting my mainstream score; so I decided to include the next ten most popular artists from my Last.fm chart in my calculation:

• Boards Of Canada - 101,766
• Pixies - 204,143
• RJD2 - 60,292
• Prefuse 73 - 59,250
• Mouse On Mars - 30,560
• Bola - 12,468
• Laurent Garnier - 18,876
• Plaid - 32,357
• Blockhead - 14,417
• Underworld - 72,753

This gives me a mean average of 72,230.35, so:

• 72,230.35 ÷ 323,179 = 22.35%

A slight drop but not much.

In conclusion, my music taste is not mainstream but neither do I embrace horribly pretentious, whacked out, totally unlistenable avant-garde noisescapes. Of course, this calculation is complete bollocks but working it out was an amusing diversion on a Sunday afternoon.

Oh... uh... Happy Birthday

Holy crap: this blog is a year old*.

But that doesn't include the journal I posted for two and a half years on the previous incarnation of this website. So it is really only the first anniversary of when I stopped laboriously creating my journal with HTML and started using blog software because it is so much easier and Suw Charman told me to.

To mark the occasion, here is that very first blog post:

Hello, blog reading type people. I'm just trying this puppy out to see if it works and then I am going to try and figure out how to incorporate it into my existing website.

Groovy.

Oh, bask in the warm glow of nostalgia! We'll never see the halcyon days of such quality prose again.

So, Happy First Blogday to me!

* Actually, this blog is a year and a day old. It is now the 12 June but I'm back-dating this post because I forgot to check the exact date until today.

Decongested: addendum

I made a shocking oversight when plugging the Tales Of The Decongested anthology the other day that I must rectify forthwith.

As well as featuring a tale by the charming and talented Disgruntled Commuter, the anthology also features something scrawled by the fat blonde bird* Kay Sexton.

Unlike the Disgruntled one, Kay is not offering to sign anybody's copy of the anthology once they have bought it but she will give a blowjob to anyone who buys her a dry white wine spritzer.

My most heartfelt apologies to Kay for omitting her involvement earlier.

* That's a lie: Kay is neither fat nor blonde. She does, however, really give blowjobs to anyone who buys her a dry white wine spritzer.

MySpace is pony

As it is the law these days for all aspiring musicians to have their own space on MySpace and that it is impossible to garner any attention for your music anywhere in the universe without one, I have finally put some crap up on my MySpace space.

I wouldn't bother going there if I were you because you won't see or hear anything there that isn't already here. In fact, I really don't like using MySpace at all. Badly designed, cluttered and unintuitive user interface, and, from what I've heard from people with more experience with the MySpace community, full of weirdos. So all I have put up on my MySpace space are two tracks that you can get from the noise section and links pointing back here.

But still, I suppose it's good to be a part of the MySpace revolution. Yeah, right there on the cutting edge, me. Right there.

Buy this book or the puppy gets it #4

Time to give another fellow writer a bit of a plug.

Please consider, if you will, adorning your bookshelf with Three Things About Me by Aliya Whiteley - a lovely woman who I once conned out of a free bookmark, conniving scoundrel that I am.

Aliya's novel is one of the second wave of books to be released by Macmillan New Writing - the publishing venture that has yet to utterly destroy the industry if not literature itself as many of the "tosserati" predicted. But what's it about? From the blurb (I'm so lazy...):

Seven potential customer service representatives start their training course under the professional guidance of Rob Church. From the start, he is disillusioned with the quality of his latest batch of trainees, but ever the professional and an inveterate optimist, he plunges into his routine. His worst fears are confirmed. Each of his charges, with one exception, is a loser.

A horror story, then - although perhaps not the kind that involves a fiendish, lank-haired, dead Japanese girl crawling out of a television set. But I haven't read the book so I could yet be proved wrong. Either way, I've been in those corporate training environments before and that is an horrific enough experience even without ghostly Asian kids in desperate need of a comb scrambling out of household appliances.

Anyway, it all sounds like a good laugh so go and buy a copy or the puppy... so on and so forth.

Increase you website traffic

Fuck an iPod.

No. 1 result on Google!

Or, at least, do a search for the phrase "fucking drama" on Google.co.uk and my blog is the No. 1 result.

Um... yay. Go me, I guess.

Decongested

Tales Of The Decongested is a short story showcase that happens at Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, on the last Friday of every month. To quote the organisers:

[...] our primary objective is to raise the profile of the short story and to discover exciting new talent in London.

The basic idea is that you submit your story and, if selected, you will be asked to go along to the monthly event, stand up in front of a room full of people and read it aloud.

I've never actually attended one of these readings either as a performer or a member of the audience. So why am I mentioning at all?

Well, they have just published Tales Of The Decongested, an anthology that collects together the best stories from the first two years of the venture, one of which was written by none other than the Disgruntled Commuter.

As an added bonus, if, once you have purchased a copy, you can guess which author in the anthology is the otherwise anonymous Disgruntled Commuter, he/she/it will sign your copy for you, assuming that you can be arsed to send it to him/her/it. I of course have an unfair advantage, having met Ms/Mr./Mrs./Messer/Monsieur/Fräulein Commuter, so I guess I'll have to forge his/her/its signature myself.

Shock! Horror!

So, nil-nil after ninety minutes, nil-nil after extra time; is anyone seriously surprised that England are out of the World Cup after a penalty shootout? Was there really any liklihood that England's World Cup campaign would end any differently? It happens every time, every time, and ever it shall be thus.

Still, far be it for me to point and laugh at my fellow football-obssessed countrymen who must be at this moment wailing like banshees, their England shirts drenched with a cascade of tears, as their pitiful dream of World Cup glory is once again utterly (and predictably) demolished.

I'm bigger than that. Really I am.

Office politics

Work anywhere for any length of time and you will eventually get sucked in to office politics to a greater or lesser degree no matter how hard you fight against it.

This week has been something of a nightmare because two people in my office team have got the hump with each other big time. Lots of bitching when the other is not around, running off to speak to senior management, formal complaints... and why? Er, well, the part-time permanent member of staff thinks that her supervisors are giving me, a lowly temp, responsibilities that should be given to her. Or something. She's paranoid that I am being groomed to take over from her. Or something. I am, of course, doing nothing of the sort. She is part-time and some new policies were dumped on us on a day when she wasn't there and I was so I had to try to work out how to implement said new policies. I didn't want to but I just happened to be the one who was there.

Part-time permanent staff member returns next week to discover that the lowly temp is trying to tell her how to do her job. At least, that is how she took it. I wasn't trying to tell her how to do her job - I was merely trying to explain these new policies that had been dumped on us and what we were expected to do. As far as she was concerned, this meant that lowly temp had been given preferential treatment because he knew all about the new policies before she did.

Ergo, rather than sit down with her immediate supervisor and say, "Look, I'm the permanent staff member here, he's just a temp, I should have been the first to know about these changes," and have a rational conversation about it, she's been bitching to all and sundry about the shoddy treatment she has suffered and bending the ears of senior managers and Human Resource personnel. Her supervisor, not surprisingly, is hugely incensed that she has complained to everybody about the situation but him. This has all led to an unbearably tense atmosphere in the office where we all work, she has lodged a formal complaint against her supervisor and is being generally shitty with me - lowly temp scum suffering delusions of grandeur who needs to be put firmly in his place before he ousts her and steals her job - and now nobody is talking to each other.

The thing is that I couldn't care less. All I want is to turn up, do whatever work is required of me, get paid and go home. I have no ambitions to oust anybody, consolidate my position, rise through the ranks by any means necessary. I just want to make a living so I can pay my rent and eat food. I don't give a flying fuck about the job beyond the fact that I need it to survive.

So this week has been horrible. I am renewing my efforts to find permanent work with a gusto. I need to get out of there and away from all the egos, the paranoia, the mind games, the petty machinations, the hidden agendas. Run, run, run away.

Oh, and the funniest part? They are creating a new post within the team that will be partially supervisory that will exist between part-time permanent member of staff and her current supervisor. As I have been there so long, they are very keen for me to apply for it. If I were to get it the remuneration would be considerably more than anybody else on the planet would currently give me to work for them. But I am becoming less and less keen on the idea of applying because A) the job itself will be a nightmare (and I know this because I am doing a lot of it already) and B) if the tensions within the team are not resolved then my jumping from being the lowly temp to part-time paranoid permanent member of staff's new supervisor will cause no end of hassle.

No, I must run, run, run away. Pass the job pages...