Soho

For the first time in about nine months I'm back in full time employment. Monday morning is no longer reserved for Jeremy Kyle and staring mournfully at Sky Sports News in a pair of pyjamas. All those late mornings on Columbia's Caribbean coast only three months ago seem distant and vague, like a time when Manchester City resided in the third tier of English Football. Oh how the tables have turned!  The term 'employment' is also used loosely here as I'm working for free in that heady, intangible industry where people make films/TV programmes, hoping (well praying) that it will lead to something permanent and paid. Only two weeks ago United lost a competitive fixture to a club from a town smaller than Blackburn whose population could comfortably fit inside Old Trafford...so anything is possible.

                                Monday Morning style.

Anyway without naming specific names or companies (mine is actually very good!) I'm situated on the fringes of Soho; that thin sliver of central London synonymous with tacky sex shops, rainbow flags, excellent restaurants and members clubs full of whisky soaked/drug addicted writers/producers/actors complaining about the state of the business over lugubrious lunches and lines of coke on expenses. Well that's the myth anyway. These days everything is a bit more Pret a Manger than Quo Vadis and most people hanging around my locale have the suspicious aura of the desperate intern; all tight jeans and rubbish haircuts wishing they had got that boring job in finance so they didn't have to still live at home with their parents. Like me.

Soho Plugs

Talking about 'sad desperation' Saturday saw me take a trip up to White Heart Lane for Tottenham-United. I was prepared to exchange eighty hard earned pounds in return for an away end ticket from one of those truly despicable turds commonly referred to as a 'tout.' From my (sadly) extensive experience these 'men' are always uniformly hateful: scouse or wide boy cockney, dressed in a shit anorak and Velcro trainers, leering from the recesses of a gloomy ally with sets of teeth blacker than licorice and more disjointed than Portsmouth FC's starting eleven. They rarely acknowledge the anomalies of life that fund their seedy enterprise; the 'emotion' and 'passion' of 'proper' fans fuel their greed and they would gladly sell their grandmother for a mark up of 50%. Only 'touts' can claim to have more disdain for the paying customer than MUFC. They operate like ugly bands of trolls, a mobile phone constantly pressed to their ear, whispering sweet nothings to exec members of clubs like United; coaxing out precious away tickets and souls in return for 10% of the profit. Goes without saying that the snide cunts were demanding a ton for United's end and so ultimately it was a wasted journey, still it reaffirmed my absolute conviction that 'touts' lurk at the very bottom of the human gene pool; on the same level as petty thieves and wife beaters. 

'Two fackin' tickets to the premiere of Green Street 2 for a pony geez.'

Finally and most importantly of course, I saw two films this week (pilfered from the office) one shockingly bad, the other rather brilliant. How the Cohen brothers could go from directing No Country for Old Men to Burn After Reading is beyond me, but it really was a terrible load of shit (salvaged in part by Brad Pitt.) On the other hand Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married was a brilliantly claustrophobic study of guilt, familial relationships and addiction stunningly carried by a mesmerizing performance from Anne Hathaway. Review will follow, along with a long awaited Inglorious Basterds appraisal.