So my mate and I got down into town on Thursday night only to find that the Monster Magnet gig had been cancelled. I was a bit miffed but, to be honest, I was feeling pretty down and knackered anyway and the walk there and back did something to lift my mood.

Last night however, Sympathy For Mr Vengeance was not cancelled and I had the pleasure of two intense and thought provoking hours of cinema. One way in which I'm desperately trying to balance out the stagnation I feel from being back in full time work is to use some of my dull gotten gains to access various forms of art, mainly so that I can feel like there's at least some reason to being here.

For those who don't know, Sympathy For Mr Vengeance is an earlier work from 'Korean ultra-violence' director Park chan Wook, whose more recent and well known works include the amazing Oldboy. The set up for Sympathy is, at heart, pretty simple.

We're all familiar with tales of tragedy and retribution so it's easy to picture the man who's lost everything, good and honest until a string of undeserved horrors leave revenge as his sole reason to live. The righteous anger of the wronged and the returning of terrible sins to their senders.

Well in this vaguely defined genre the underserved horrors come thick and fast, piling up sickeningly with no punches pulled and no limits to the emotional and physical pain passed round. Apart from the more extreme incline of the downward spiral there are two other things that make this film stand apart from the vast crowd of traditional stories of vengeance.

Firstly, there are two men, both inadvertently robbed and wronged by each other. Their own personal descents into hell coil round one another until finally meeting. Instead of a single great wave of self righteous retribution we see two that finally crash over one another.

Both have lost everything, both have been driven to the edge, but who is the good guy and who's the bad? This leads us straight into the second, and perhaps slightly surprising unique aspect of the piece. My understanding of the 'ultra-violence' tag is not that the films are excessively violent but rather that the violence is gritty, low key and realistic.

Both hours are littered with acts of horrendous violence, cruelty and tragedy and yet, afterwards, it's hard to pick out just who the 'evil doers' are. At almost every turn those perpetrating the pain are clearly motivated by familiar and even noble feelings and guilt and even reluctance are common vibes among those dishing out the punishment.

In this way I found the emotional violence to be as 'ultra', ie. realistic, as the physical. Who's the Mr Vengeance of the title? It could be any one of the insanely violent characters, all of whom provoke and deserve the audience's Sympathy.

I left the cinema with that profound feeling of having engaged in an act of communication. A concept, ie. that people are people, that everyone hurts and is hurt and that, ultimately, retribution can only lead to an endless downward spiral that never finds satisfaction, had been communicated to me in a unique and amazing way.

Personally, I live to be challenged and inspired in this way and find such experiences to be life affirming. Walking out of the cinema however, I found myself behind a couple of couples of students:

"That was disgusting!"
"What was the point of that?"
"I can't believe we paid to see that shit!"
"I felt like asking for my money back!"
"Why would anybody want to make a film like that?"

Now I attach no claims to my opinion, it's only as valid as anyone else's, but I couldn't help feel a bit sorry for those guys who, it seemed so clearly to me, had missed the point by a long way. Now this taps into a recurrent theme regarding much of the culture that interests me, namely that unpleasant experiences can be rewarding too.

What concerned me more was these guys were clearly in the process of receiving a university education and yet none of them could engage with a film on more than the most shallow and immediate of levels. Stopping for cash on the way to the Monster Magnet gig that never was, I got stuck behind another student who couldn't work the cash machine.

I'm currently reading, 'Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?' by Frank Furedi which, as the title suggests, explores the nature of the intellectual but also the oft reported trend of 'dumbing down'. Personally I find the guy's tone a little irritating but the overall ideas he's pitching seem valid to me and I'm finding myself challenged and inspired so I can't bitch too much.

One issue mentioned is the decline, in the west, of manual work. There is a strange kind of implied assumption in our society that manual work is somehow inferior to its mental equivalent. Followed through, this assumption clearly suggests that the move from manual to non-manual, or intellectual work, must be a good thing overall, ie. a higher skilled, more intelligent workforce etc.

Where this falls down of course is the basic premise that work not requiring physical labour is automatically intellectual. I've received a couple of minor reprimands at work recently for using my initiative. It's not my place to think, I've been told in no uncertain terms, it's my job to do, end of, simple as.

Those who know me will appreciate how much that grinds but, swallowing back the bile and smiling, I realised that my boss was absolutely right. That is my job. There's a system in place wherein certain people make certain decisions, if one person starts overriding those decisions the whole system breaks down.

This is a pretty common system structure which certainly has some strengths. One downside, however, was illustrated unpleasantly well to me a few days later. One of the reasons I was employed by this particular Leeds Housing ALMO was to develop new spreadsheets to increase the efficiency of the team.

One spreadsheet in particular that I've designed and developed has grown into a bit of a monster as more and more is required of it. Another part of my brief however, was to ensure that the rest of the team understood and could use the systems I devise. To this end I've created extensive help files with simple short paragraphs and plenty of illustrations and examples.

Now I was off sick again one day last week, officially food poisoning this time but, to be honest, my depression's been getting on top of me a bit recently, hence the lack of postage. Anyway, upon my return my boss mentioned how glad she was to have me back as she had needed to use the spreadsheet but had no idea how to go about it.

I mentioned the help files I'd created but was told that, 'no-one's going to bother reading that'. It was at this point that I realised that I am actually a working part of the spreadsheet I have created. I am the interface between the spreadsheet and the rest of the team, just another part of the machine.

Reading Furedi's book I realised that, according to his definitions anyway, not only is the kind of non-manual work that I and many of my peers do day to day not intellectual, it is in fact the complete opposite. In the book one common trait of intellectualism is a 'universalism' in thought.

Basically this refers to the more abstract nature of intellectual thought, that it is not contained within strict boundaries or contexts, but stretches out into any and every direction it wishes, or rather, feels it needs to. Clearly the utterly specific nature of thought required to be a simple interface is the antithesis of this.

Just as labourers carrying raw materials into some mechanical beast are merely parts of the machinery, so are the millions of people sat behind desks. Our hands may be clean but that doesn't mean we're getting our brains dirty.

A good friend of mine refers to call centres as 'modern day mills', which I would say hits the nail right on the head, though of course what really I mean is, it fills in the paperwork to book a workman to come and hit the nail for me.

Now it's tempting I guess, to tell me to quit my bitching. At the end of the day stuff needs to get done and if this system gets it done then surely it's good enough. What's the big deal about intellectualism anyway? What gives it any more validity than other ways of living and working?

Well what sent a minor shiver down my spine when reading about the whole 'universalism' bit was this: the kind of conceptual communication I experienced at the cinema is an example of a universal language. Transcending written and spoken language, culture and geography, ideas and so called 'higher thinking' are on a par with hunger and sexual desire in that they are common and potentially uniting facets of humanity.

Most organised religions and political or economic systems are designed to work best when adopted by everyone. Converting the world to the 'right way' is usually the utopian drive behind all three, but intellectualism is quite different.

Arising spontaneously throughout time and across continents, thinking is something we don't need to be converted to, it's already in all of us. Now social constraints have always tried to limit the opportunity to think to small elites. It's worth noting that this reflects more on the systems we've developed to live together than the nature of human thought and, in particular, that none of these systems ever manage to fully take possession of intellectualism.

The defining factor of our evolution has surely, so far, been the development of this ability and it is my belief that, far from being just another way of being like any other, some kind of lifestyle choice, intellectualism is in fact the next step up the evolutionary ladder.

Somehow we've got ourselves into a society that doesn't just encourage apathy but that actually punishes initiative and independent thought. We're going nowhere like this folks, we need to get thinking, all of us.

Unfortunately the only way to make that happen is to totally transform our current social systems which is no mean feat. Some may even say it's impossible, but, yet again, they'd be making the fatal mistake of underestimating the potential of the human thinking machine.