Kingsman: Go and see this movie right now

Well, one caveat before we crack on. There is a scene set in your stereotypical hate-group church, and out of absolutely fucking nowhere a homophobic slur and a racist slur are used one after the other. Obviously that's to set up the fact that these are truly irredeemably hateful people, and they really deserve the righteous destruction laid down upon them by Galahad.

Yes, the Kingsmen's codenames are the names of Arthur's knights. Yes, the fact that Percival is the one who completes the quest gives me a tiny pang of history nerd joy. And yes, the fact that the code name is passed on to the next holder of the position is a very clever nod to a fan-theory about James Bond.

All of these clever winks and nudges are small fry, however, to the balls-out action-packed quick-camera witty-dialogue trope-filled taking-the-piss-out-of-itself remainder of the film. There are a few examples I'd like to bring to the fore, and one of those is sponsorship.

Films need a lot of money, and some of that money comes from sponsorship. This comes in three flavours: subtle, obvious but we're not talking about it, and Kingsman.

Subtle examples can be found in Mad Men; the whisky they drink, the cigarettes they smoke, the cars they drive. Obvious but we're not talking about it, well...




Transformers: absolutely not sponsored by Bud Light but shit, Bud Light is accidentally in this movie a lot.

Then you can do it the Kingsman way, which is getting motherfucking Colin Firth, holder of an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, two BAFTAs, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire to say "Happy Meal" on screen.

There are no fucks to be given with this film and product placement. Guinness want to sponsor it? Great, let's have Colin Firth beat the spit out of five guys after they refuse to let him - and this is a direct quote from the film - "finish my lovely pint of Guinness."

Amazing. 

This is James Bond for the 21st century, but also for people who are turned off by the newer, darker Bond. This takes the campiness of Moonraker, dials it up to the point where the dial falls off and then keeps going. This is not any cheese, my friends, this is M&S, matured in the mind of a man who grew up on Roger Moore's Bond and delivered fresh to your eyeballs. From the cheesy villain to the 100% 80s Bond ending, this is a film for 25 year old men and women who grew up on their dad's 007 collection.

Men and women, mind. There is a whole lot of man candy to be viewed, and we get not one but two "strong" female characters. One: double-amputee assassin (not actually played by a double-amputee, which is deeply disconcerting because can there really be so few disabled actors?); and two: the secondary protagonist who has a deeply unsatisfying story arc involving being afraid of heights and then having to something at a high altitude. 

There's also a scene in which a whole host of people's heads explode in stylised, colourised mushroom clouds to the tune of Beethoven's Fifth. So that's something to keep an eye out for.

This film is, in the end, a riotous, ridiculous romp. The camera work is incredible. The music is perfect. At one point Colin Firth sets a person's face on fire with a lighter/flamethrower.

It's absurd, amazing fun.

Just could have done without those two words.

The Joy of Work

Here's something: I am not happy, not content, unless I am just upon the cusp of too much to do. As example: I have at present three relatively major projects, a slew of applications to complete, and a lot - a lot - of reading to do.

And I am cheerful. I am elated. I am absolutely full of energy.

My lap, regretfully, is full of cat - and cats, as has been proven by Science, are furry drainers of energy. They store it up until 3am, when they need it to do laps of your domicile. As such, the emails I should be sending, the phone calls I should be making, and the documents I should be writing are being put temporarily aside while I watch Borgias, because I'm doing a course on the Renaissance and this production is clearly faithful to history.

There is a certain peace in not being entirely full of energy, entirely 'on' all the time. Cats are good. Partners are good. Big budget adaptations of particularly interesting bits of European history - they're good too. Tomorrow morning I start again, powering through more work, setting up and chasing down. And writing. And making a video for yet another application!

What glorious days and perfect evenings, when there's a cat on your lap and you can dream all the things you could do.

Murder, in his case. Furry silent murder.

New Year, Same Old Me

Today is a Thursday. It is a Thursday much like any other Thursday, aside from the entirely inconsequential fact that it marks the end of the 2014^th lap of the Earth around the Sun since the last time we reset to 0. It's a totally arbitrary point, and yet for some marks the beginning of a month without alcohol, a "new them", or any number of completely boring attempts to revitalise their crushingly empty lives.

January 1 is not a magic wand or a sci-fi portal that will just fix the things you want fixed in your life. There are literally a million different factors that will lead to that: your own well-being, the people around you, the stress at your job - and of course, there are a thousand factors influencing that. You can't stop yourself getting suddenly ill because someone sneezed on you; you can't prevent your partner from leaving because they've got wunderlust to head to Borneo; and you can't sidestep your boss' ire because his daughter got a tattoo he didn't approve of.

All of these things are utterly out of your control, and they will colour and affect your projects in the year ahead. There are a few things to do when faced with your total powerlessness in the face of the universe, and they are as follows:

1. Laugh, embrace the absurdity of it all, and do your best to struggle through.
2. Become incredibly angry at the sheer unjust nonsense of it all, and do your best to struggle through.
3. Adopt a Stoic approach, become unemotional, and wall yourself off from humanity. Struggle through, though this time alone.

This year there will be failures by the truckload. If I have learnt anything this year - and the jury's still out on that one - it's this, and only this: embrace failure because it helps you learn. Helps, mind you. It doesn't make you learn. That's one of the few areas where only you can effect change; a tiny little micro-space where it's just you and your failure. Embrace it. Learn from it so you can fail a bit better next time. Be like Buzz Lightyear; eventually, you'll start failing with style, and when that happens you'll fool everyone into thinking you're flying.

This year I'm going to keep learning how to code; I'm going to keep learning how to manipulate images; I'm going to keep learning Russian and I'm going to get a job. Not because it's January 1, but because yesterday happened, and tomorrow will happen, and in a week it'll be Thursday again. In a year this planet will be back here, relative to the Sun, but the Sun will have moved and so will everything else.

Relative to all of the billions of moving planets and stars and clouds of gas out there, we're not in the same place we were last year. We're not even in the same place we were when you started reading this blog. Everything is always moving, and that includes us. So here's my suggestion: sling out arbitrary lines and make a plan that suits you. Draw, write, carve onto a mysterious monolith that appeared overnight and hums in D minor. Any way that you can, get a plan. Stick to it (but remember you'll probably fail.) Re-assess. Draw, write, paint in the blood of a pure-white lamb. Fail again, but with more success. Rinse, repeat, and before you know it you'll be flying.

You might also start wondering about other arbitrary dates like birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. Do not question them. They are for others to mark the passage of time. It is best not to ask why, because they might tell you.

The finish line approaches

What a long time it's been!

So, so many things have happened since I last put pen to paper here. I've written essays, I've given speeches, I've got a cat...

He's called Salem. He's about 1,000% more photogenic than me.

I say I've got a cat - it's really more of a "we". That is, my partner and I have a cat. We live together. We share bills. We're considering...a future. That means finding a graduate job, and sharpish - an ongoing and terrifying prospect. So far there are a couple of things lined up, but I'm always on the lookout for more so if you've any suggestions do please leave a comment. So far it's the Civil Service...and that's about it. Not a great start.

Other exciting things? Christmas is fast approaching, and we're well prepared. We've got gifts for almost everyone, we've got Christmas lights up, we put the cat in a Christmas hat (he got out of the Christmas hat pretty quickly). We're also going down south to see the family, which will amazing as ever - the food is plentiful and the people wonderful.

I mentioned that I've been writing essays, something I always enjoy and always leave until far too late. Something else I do, something I've not noticed I do until just recently, is leave really sarcastic comments in the footnotes. My partner pointed it out to me, and I'm at the point in my university career now where I feel like I'm just going to keep doing it. My 2:1 is - touch wood - almost guaranteed, so from here on sarcastic footnotes will continue to feature in my work. The work from here on in, by the way, is on Science and Literature and the French Renaissance, as well as the opportunity to take a class in French on a French subject. Quelle opportunité for a show-off like me!

I think that's about me for the moment; I'm going to try to get back into blogging semi-regularly back in the new year but in the meantime Happy Holidays, and thank you for sticking with this blog.

If you have. If you're new, I have no idea why you're here but thank you.

Future fear

Grad schemes are hard, and they're made harder by the fact that I was until quite recently a callow, stupid youth. I'll be honest: I have made innumerable fuck ups in my brief time on this planet, and one of those mistakes was my A-levels. I made a hash of them. I went from high-flying GCSEs to very poor A-levels, and while I've made a concerted effort since - improving my Maths knowledge so that I can teach it, improving my economic knowledge because - well - it's necessary to form opinions, and improving my French knowledge - although that's mostly just a by-product of, you know. Studying French.

Ah, la France. Avec les jardins. Et les petits, petits arbres.

But here's the thing. Since a lot of people have a degree - and that's a good thing; I think more people should be getting degrees, more people should be getting the chance to go to uni and not worry about paying debts or paying bills.

But the trade-off - a phrase I learnt only recently via +Aberdeen Debater - is that firms need some way to differentiate applicants. And also a way of ensuring they don't get too many people who aren't up to their "intellectual calibre."

As a consequence, I am struggling to find any firm who'll even look twice at my CV. We change so much in the three, four, five years we're at university that it's astonishing to me that even the Big Four - for all their claims of seeking excellence - are just as blinkered by their obsession with UCAS points. 

I hoped to join PwC way back when; even got to the interview stage before I put my great fat foot into my great fat mouth. Even through uni I considered it but now I'd done. I am just 100% with firms that think at 18 your future's done and dusted.

Welp. I can't go back and redo it; I haven't the time to resit A-levels; and I refuse to lie on my application, as has been suggested to me. 

I know right. I'm going to be kept warm at night by my principles.

Still, maybe things will happen between now and graduation. Maybe I'll get Living Wage implemented, maybe not. Maybe I'll get an interview with an MSP and avoid putting my foot in my mouth for the 1,493,576th time. Maybe.

Whatever happens, I've decided to stop worrying about the distant future and just on the proximate. To wit, how am I going to get businesses in Aberdeen to pay a decent wage?

Things. Things are happening

Five weeks to Living Wage Campaign launch. One and a half days until I meet members of my committee. Twelve weeks until I head home to see my family and friends for Christmas. And a whole ten hours until I have to get up - that's right. It's my evening off.

The gaps are where I do my uni work

So it's time for a super-brief update. I've not taken anything else on...sort of. I'm doing the STAR award this year, because it essentially makes my VP role epic, an upgrade on the awesome it already is. I talked about the STAR award a little bit last year; it's a few hours of workshops with someone I respect and look up to on campus plus genuine employers from the world of real jobs. An extra six hours is really all it's going to cost me between now and graduation, so I feel I can take that on.

Living Wage is kind of planned out, and I need to talk to some people about getting other groups on board - groups like trade unions and Aberdeen City Youth Council, but also groups that don't even know they're powerful. Groups of staff in shit-paid jobs who could band together and apply real pressure to the people above them.

Aside from that, things progress. If you knew me a few years ago, as some of my readers do, you'll know I was an insufferable ass. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure there are still time when I'm that, but I think I'm getting better. Case in point: Sartre vs. Beauvoir.

N.B if you're bored by existentialist philosophy and gender roles as performances look away now.

Simone de Beauvoir (r) and Jean-Paul Sartre (l)

So: Sartre and Beauvoir, like all of the most I of VIPs, go by only one name. Sartre's existentialist philosophy is fascinating: it says we are condemned to choose. There's no God; not a God who controls us nor a God who commands us, so there is both free will and no moral imperative. If you, like young Raskolnikov, see a young woman bothered by a lecherous drunk then be assured that there is no moral imperative to act. Similarly, if you are depressed by your boss, who works you to the bone for almost nothing, then (says Sartre) you choose to allow him that. You might also choose to punch the odious boss in his pallid face and make your way through the cheering crowds - but then, you have chosen that too. Almost any person in dire circumstances, according to this philosophy (one he argues is only for philosophers, which makes a lay person like me wonder what the damn purpose of it is then), is in those circumstances as a consequence of those choices.

In an egalitarian world where everyone starts from the same circumstances I could have time for this kind of philosophising, but since it ignores all pre-existing racist, classist, sexist, cissexist and homophobic structures that already existed in society and yet were apparently invisible even to a man as smart as Sartre, this philosophy for people who've already won the lottery of life and need a reason to sneer at people in other socio-economic conditions goes IN THE BIN.

THE BIN I SAY.

Also: check out the sheer length of that sentence. This is what happens when you read French at university: you lose all sense of scaling sentences and end up writing Ulysses. 

In any case: enter Beauvoir, who expanded on the philosophy and produced a phrase that defines feminism, the problem with so-called "femininity", and is also epic in French. In English it gets fuzzy. It goes:

On n'est pas née femme; on le devient. - We are not born women; we become women.

Womanhood - and, indeed, manhood - are performances or constructs that you grow into and in doing so you completely give up your freedom. You trade freedom for security. You fit into the mould crafted for you and you don't need to choose any more; you are no longer "condemned to choice," as Sartre said above. You can go through the motions, like a character on a cuckoo clock.

So then we get all kinds of complex questions like (a) are you betraying womanhood if you take part in this construct (b) what do you mean, womanhood? Aren't we all individuals? and (c) hey, I'm a guy, I have an opinion on this and you should listen to it.

I'm super-sarcastic this evening, and I do not even slightly apologise.

If you skipped past existentialism and gender roles, please start reading again here.

Other news: big scoops with the Tab this week, but not mine. We have done a pretty good job exposing the frankly obscene amounts the university paid a company to make a super-shitty video that they finally took down. As a sort of unofficial response to that piece of crap, there's a "Reclaim the Night" march happening in Aberdeen for self-identifying women and genderqueer people. If you don't know about it yet I know you'll be made welcome if you go, and if you are in either of those groups, do please join the march. If you are instead a man, don't go. Don't be that guy.

It's that simple.

PIR - our next event is shaping up to be bloody enormous, with over 170 folk turning up. It's going to be huge, and I will be working as per. I hope people get photos.

Right. That's a massive update. I'm well, I'm doing many things, and I shall shortly be kicking some buttock or at least poking it with intent to harm. I hope you're all well and if you've got this far have a prize of my friend John using the phrase "penis monsters" in a chat about his sexuality. 

References to Crime and Punishment are all well and good, but for humour there's nothing better than an Englishman using the word penis.

It's done, it's finally done

21 days and 8,000 researched and referenced words. Quite frankly I'm not sure even I believe it, and I wrote every one of those words. It is without doubt the biggest task I've ever undertaken, and if I could go back in time there's no doubt I'd do the whole thing again exactly the same way.

What can I say? The month I should have spent writing I spent working in an organisation I'd love to go back to, so it wasn't wasted. I wouldn't have given it up for all the sleep I haven't had these past three weeks - though perhaps I'd have asked for just a little more time, so that I could have got home to see my mother, whose birthday I missed due to this enormous project.

With that particular enormous project out of the way, though, it's back to other enormous projects.

• My VP project - to try to encourage Aberdeen's big businesses to move up their minimum wage. It's looking likely anyway - both the Conservatives and Labour have been making noises about it - so my argument's going to be simply that if they do it before they're forced to, they look like positive, pro-active members of society rather than the vile, tax-evading corporate monsters they are.
• My PIR project - generate coverage for our trips. I'm going to involve the Loch Ness monster.
• My Tab project(s) - cover something big. Really big. Like a pyramid. Wait no, not like a pyramid. Wrong kind of big.
• Degree classification - this...probably shouldn't be at the bottom of the list. Still: it's got to be a 2:1. 2:1 or nothing baby.
• Life project - don't take on anything else between now and graduating. Kick me if I even think about it.
• Post graduation projects - apply for every job going. I've already got one well in hand, another in progress, and others are lining up as I speak. There are a few I can't start until next year, post-graduation, but until then I can keep plugging away at the ones that accept predicted grades.

See? When I make a list it doesn't look at all like a Sisyphean boulder I have to push up a mountain. Besides, even if that is what is resembles, I'm getting into Camus again (via Sartre's more-than-a-bit-privileged-existentialism and these bloody gorgeous comics) and that means I can he happy about my Sisyphean task, because it gives me purpose, and without purpose (even if that purpose is meaningless) we are nothing.

A cheerful blog today then.

And just to round it off, here's my front page: a work of art and a challenge to the laws of language; a 30-page, mildly acerbic, poorly written assault on laïcité that stretched the word "no" into 8,437 words.

In terms of words per minute, formatting this page
was the hardest thing in the entire paper.