Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?

by Steve Lowe

  In 2006, the “hedgehogs” came into the light with Hedge-stock, a festival in Britain that mixed bands and utterly incomprehensible business seminars (“Incubator Alligator?—sowing the seeds, but do they stay for a cigarette?”). It even had its own jingle, which sounded like the worst thing ever. To the tune of “Sex Bomb,” it went: “Hedgestock, Hedgestock, Groovy Hedgestock, a little bit of business and a whole lot of rock . . .” And you thought Lollapalooza had gone “a bit corporate.”

  HELPDESKS

  After being shunted among four different clueless cretins, after an epoch of holding on at 35 cents a minute, being subjected to what must be the world’s only extant Deep Forest CD, your psyche oscillating between impotence and rage, there is a voice, a connection, a lifeline . . .

  “Okay, I’ve found a Web site about it.”

  So, I’m paying you two kings’ ransoms plus a small fortune and a pretty penny to browse around software company Web sites, ambling toward some kind of nonresolution that I could just as easily have been stumbling across myself on the very same software company Web sites if I were not sitting here listening to your insensate minion ooze bewilderment down my fucking telephone.

  I DON’T THINK YOU EVEN WANT TO HELP.

  HIP HOTELS

  Hip hotels might have boxy rooms, bad beds, and shrill staff seemingly beamed in from another planet. But there’s a great selection of Latin chill CDs.

  •At Milan’s übertrendy Hive Hotel, beekeeping is the theme. Visitors can join in the beekeeping themselves or just relax, put their feet up, and let the staff take care of the bees.

  •At Notting Hill’s boutique hotel BOEulk, they’ve got an eight-year-old girl on a swing. Sometimes she sings “Son of a Preacherman.” Sometimes not.

  •Every room in West Hollywood’s Barker Ranch features a mural of a different member of the Manson family rendered in the blown-up-cartoon style of Roy Lichtenstein. Sheets are flecked with fake blood. To further resemble a cult of homicidal White Power hippies, all staff have tiny swastikas tattooed on to their foreheads (guests can get their own done, too).

  •Berlin’s superb Hotel Hostel has knocked away the interior walls, so guests effectively sleep in unisex dorms. Around the clock, the kitchen staff offer classic hostel fare like sausage ’n’ beans and macaroni ’n’ cheese.

  The word hip is actually believed to derive from the Wolof (the dominant language in Senegal) word hipi, meaning “to open one’s eyes” or “to be aware.” Of course, anyone who truly opens their eyes and becomes aware while staying at a hip hotel might well be moved to declare: “I have just become completely aware that I am being totally fleeced for a poky room, crap service, and decor that’s like the imaginings of a pretentious mental case.”

  HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTIONS

  So you’ve devoted two years of your life to a prestige documentary series about Auschwitz. You’ve got hitherto unseen photographs, interviews with survivors, shitloads of CGI, and a narrator with more authority than Charlton Heston. But there’s still something missing. What if viewers think you’re making it all up? It could happen. You’ve been reading all about this David Irving guy.

  So, obviously, you hire some actors to dress up in German uniforms and stand in a field (possibly in Poland) pointing meaningfully at a map. Ah, so that’s what Nazis looked like. Thank God for that. Because I thought they just wore pinafores and hoodies. That silly walk! It’s mad!

  The makers of the recent documentary Munich: Mossad’s Revenge had the cunning wheeze of juxtaposing contemporary footage of Palestinian terrorist suspects assassinated by the Israeli secret service with reconstructions featuring actors who looked nothing like them. Unless you were drunk, squinting at them through tracing paper. Which is not something you do often. Anymore.

  During one revenge job, future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was obliged to dress as a woman to get close to his target. To illustrate that this really happened, the docudrama makers re-created the event using the world’s shittiest transvestite, thus giving the impression that Mossad entrusted the biggest, riskiest operation in its obsessive mission to track down and eliminate its sworn enemies to Dr. Frank-N-Furter.*

  HITLER, PEOPLE CALLING EACH OTHER

  The Bush administration loves comparing people to Hitler. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is apparently considered a “new Hitler.” Much-missed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared everyone to Hitler. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in hiding was like “Hitler in his bunker.” Saddam Hussein has joined the pantheon of failed, brutal dictators, “alongside Hitler.”

  Even Venezuelan “people’s hero” Hugo Chavez was like Hitler because “he’s a person who was elected legally—just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally.” (The presumed implication: Because George Bush was not elected legally in 2000, he is therefore unlike Hitler.)

  In retaliation, Chavez compared Bush to . . . can you guess? That’s right, to Harold Lloyd: “He’s always hanging off clocks, like a goddamn fool.” Not really; it was Hitler. And he added: “Mr. Tony Blair is the main ally of Hitler.” (So who does that make him: Eva Braun?)

  Chavez didn’t call hideous Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe “Hitler,” though. Instead, this ally of workers everywhere said: “He is my friend. Have you met him?” Of his various crimes against humanity? “We all make mistakes.” Yes, but ours generally involve losing our keys, and far less slaughtering of the innocents and starving and impoverishing entire populations.

  Perhaps feeling slightly left out, Mugabe compared himself to Hitler (no, really), only more so: “Hitler tenfold.” Because he, too, wanted “justice for his own people.” Yes, that was Hitler all right: justice, justice, justice.

  Changing tack slightly, Mugabe also compared Bush and Blair to Hitler and Mussolini. But can Blair really be like Mussolini when he has already been compared to Hitler by the countryside marchers? HITLER 1936. BLAIR 2002, claimed one banner. (Hitler famously hated the countryside, too: “Blood and soil? Basically, it smells of shit and I do not like it.”)

  North Korea called George W. Bush both an “imbecile” and a “tyrant that puts Hitler in the shade.” So, he is Hitler, but in a Jim Carrey sort of a way. But not—NOT—as good as Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

  Noam Chomsky is “the world’s leading intellectual.” Intellectuals are paid to see things differently, and Chomsky certainly succeeds on this score. His latest work, Failed States (yes, he means America), holds that the United States has been whipped into a state of “demonic” scariness to rival National Socialism. Don’t forget that “[Goebbels] boasted that ‘he would use American advertising methods’ to ‘sell National Socialism’ much as business seeks to sell ‘chocolate, toothpaste, and patent medicines.’ ” He forgets that it was rare for Hitler’s popularity ratings to fall to 32% (unlike Bush’s). In fact, they usually hovered nearer the 100% mark. Certainly we would have thought it would be intellectual not to play fast and loose with the definition of fascism, but maybe we just don’t have the requisite number of degrees in conspiracy theory studies.

  Bush and Blair, of course, never compare themselves to Hitler. They prefer comparisons to Winston Churchill, who was on the other side . . . and won. During the Iraq War, Blair apparently had to be restrained from turning his Downing Street office into a replica of Churchill’s war bunker in the Second World War (perhaps forcibly, who knows?). “We wouldn’t let him,” said close political adviser Sally Morgan. “It would have looked awful. He really would have liked a sandpit with tanks.” We would like to offer a corrective on this point. Yes, it would have been awful. But it would also have been very, very funny.

  And it could have enabled Blair to face down the critics attacking his “bunker mentality” with some of that trademark gall: “I would say to you this: I do have a bunker mentality. I’m sitting in a bunker right now. What do you expect? I’m sitting in a bunker.”

  HOMOPHOBIC CHRISTIANS

  Casting around for the on
e true path in life, Christians often ask themselves: WWJD?—“What would Jesus do?” Apparently, He wouldn’t “make some stuff out of wood” or “cure the sick,” but would walk up and down the high street with a big placard reading GOD HATES FAGS.

  The “Jesus as uptight, bigoted sociopath” reading of the Bible is proving incredibly popular with the world’s rising band of evangelicals. Even the born-again movement’s preeminent marketing arm Alpha USA—home of the meaning-of-life-answering “Alpha course”—has raised hackles after British founder Nicky Gumbel claimed the Bible “makes it clear” that gays and lesbians need to be “healed.” “Although I strongly advise you not to say the word ‘healed’ to them,” he once warned. “They hate that word!” Sound advice.

  Normal people flicking through the Good Book will find anti-gay sentiments quite tricky to unearth. The New Testament’s supposed “No to Homos” message basically boils down to Paul the Apostle’s comments in Romans 1:26–27 on the sins of the Gentiles—“God gave them up unto shameful affections”—and depends on the translation of the mysterious ancient Greek word arsenokoites (and we promise that’s actually true), which might mean “special gay friend” or possibly “male temple prostitute” or even “gigolo for rich women.” Now there’s a solid bedrock for bigotry if ever we saw one.

  For others, though, the Bible is just one big old book about hating queers; they’re constantly finding startling new chapters like when Jesus, after healing the sick and helping the poor, draws together His disciples and tells them how God’s vision embraces everyone—prostitutes, paupers, lepers, even tree-climbing tax inspectors . . . “On hearing this, His disciples pauseth for a moment and said unto Him, What about the gays, Lord? Jesus flincheth and spat, Oh no, not the gays. I don’t like them, He ranteth. I don’t like their white vests or their love of gaudy music. And I have it on the highest authority of a man down the tavern that there’s a gay mafia running the Roman Empire. A man with another man? No way! Anyway, the lepers . . .”

  In fact, the Big Bad Son of God never mentions bum sex or any other gay-related issue even once, not even mutual masturbation. It’s possible He planned on making His Big Speech Against the Gays right after Easter. We’ll never know.

  HORSERACING TIPS

  When it boils down, what you’re being asked to do here is take financial advice off a gambler. Is that wise? These are people prone to investing large sums of their own money on chance events, and then jumping up and down exhorting horses to “run quicker, you fucking horse, you,” so they are not necessarily the model of an independent financial adviser.

  Tipsters are obsessed with “value.” The first aspect of this is looking for an event priced higher than its actual likelihood. So if you can find a horse priced at 12–1 when really it should be 8–1, bet on it, quick. Never mind if it has much chance of winning—just remember that, if it does, you’ll have four times as much money as you should have! Barman—drinks for all my friends. It probably won’t win, though.

  Of course, the theory is that some value bets come off, so over time a few big winners will cancel out your losses: The odds are greater than the probability, so in theory it has to even itself out in your favor. This may or may not happen, but for it to apply you’d have to bet on every overpriced event, which would certainly keep you busy. And that’s what value is all about.

  Except it’s also about avoiding bad value. What this means is, in a race most likely to be won by one clear favorite—which thus is trading at very low odds—you look for a horse with better odds to bet on: the weight of money being slapped on the big, strong, fast horse that is probably going to win is making the price “too short” to be worthwhile. And the low price of the favorite makes the price of all the other, not-so-fast horses greater. It’s an attractive proposition: Your new selection might be trading at, say, 14–1, so you’ll win fourteen times as much back. Barman—drinks for all my friends. Except they’re advising you to bet on it “just in case” it wins. Which, in all likelihood, it won’t. Probably the strong favorite will. Or it might get beaten by a “live one,” only not the “live” one you bet on, which turned out to be more asleep than alive for most of the race.

  Tipsters will often refer to making a selection for a particular race as “solving the puzzle.” But while a puzzle has a fixed end—the picture on the box of a jigsaw puzzle, for instance—the only fixed point in a horse race is the finishing post. Which horse will run past it first, however, is open to quite a few variables. The horse only has to clip a fence, have an off day, or get a bit tired out and your jigsaw puzzle’s flying up in the air in as many pieces as your torn-to-shreds and discarded betting slip.

  So if it’s a puzzle, it’s a 4-D puzzle that constantly shape-shifts, the selection of roses becoming a painting of the White House; then one of the pieces falls over and gets shot through the back of the neck inside a little tent.

  Of course, the real problem facing tipsters is that they have to make a call for each and every race. In closely fought races, or if they just haven’t got much idea who will win, tipsters will use words such as might and could, as in could go close. This is code for: “Well, you never fucking know. The jockey’s wearing blue, and that’s my lucky color. How many days to the solstice? Fuck.”

  It would perhaps be better to suggest you stick a pin in the race card, or say: “Don’t bet on this race, it’s a bitch, bet on another one. If I were you, I’d get some contacts in the trade who are going to run a mustard first-timer at Saratoga Springs. That’s what I do, although obviously I’m not sharing that information with you. Not even if you ring my seven-dollars-a-minute premium-rate tips line for the requisite half an hour of waffle before I finally deign to tell you that the hot favorite in the 3:20 at Belmont is probably going to romp it, which you already knew anyway.”

  “HOT” COLLECTIVE COVER SHOOTS

  Whenever magazines or color supplements suffer crises of faith over whether they are still “hot” or, in fact, “not,” they usually gather together a stellar array of undeniably hot, sometimes even hotter-than-hot, really actually quite burny-hot young things for a big old cover shoot that will jump off newsstands with an eye-grabbing headline like “New York’s Hippest Designers of Hip Stuff,” “37 Hottest Writers of Hot Books Under 37,” “The Hottest Human Rights Lawyers in Hotsville,” or “This Week’s Hot Hollywood Hotties—In Their Hotpants!”

  Inside, the editor’s letter will say: “Can you feel the heat? Hot off the presses, here’s the latest hot young things—they’re hot like hot cats on a hot tin roof, like inappropriately hot soup on a hot summer’s day, like hotcakes, hot tubs, hot potatoes, and those hot towels you get in Chinese restaurants. Hot! If things were any hotter around here . . . oh, hang on . . . I appear to be melting . . . look at that, I’m actually melting! Aaaaargh!”

  What everyone in these pictures should realize is that, as soon as the shutter clicks, they will start to cool. By the time they leave the studio, they will already only be “warm.” In a year’s time, nobody will remember even the slightest thing about them.

  HOTDESKS

  We can understand why you might want fewer desks than employees—to keep them “motivated,” that is, to create some kind of Hobbesian war of all against all, everyone doomed to insecurity and battling for scarce resources, never allowed to settle in one place and get the idea that they may have a job to come to tomorrow rather than being expelled at speed down a garbage chute into a vacuum.

  But do you have to make them hot as well? Is insecurity not enough that you have to fucking scald people? Jesus—actually burning your workers; it’s positively barbaric.

  “HOW I GOT MY BODY BACK”

  “I didn’t eat anything.”

  I

  IKEA

  When IKEA opened its new store in Orlando, security guards were soon swamped by six thousand shoppers grabbing at sofas and shouting “Mine! Mine!” Many collapsed with heat exhaustion, and twenty needed hospital
treatment.

  Of course, we’re not suggesting the company was in any way responsible for the carnage. After all, a visit to IKEA is usually connected in our minds with inner calm, low blood pressure, and a total absence of any thoughts of violence. No, hang on—we were thinking of the park.

  IKEA fucks with your head. All you want is some furniture: Why do they want your sanity in return? The layout alone makes you feel like a lab rat. The stores are like psychoactive jigsaw puzzles with moving pieces, designed by a sick Swedish physicist with access to extra dimensions.

  They have what look like shortcuts between adjoining sections, allowing you to pop through a little walkway from one part of the store to another. But where you end up won’t be where you were trying to get to, even if the store map said it would be. Worse, if you decide you were better off where you were, and pop back through the hole, you won’t end up where you started, but in a different section again. Sometimes on a different floor altogether. In a different branch of IKEA.

  There are some amazing statistics concerning IKEA. Apparently, 95% of all couples who move in together visit an IKEA within one month of moving in together. Of these, only 3% manage to buy the things they went there for, and 100% of them are related to the staff. Young couples troop into IKEA with high hopes. They emerge as husks. And without having bought any furniture. IKEA still makes huge profits, however—all of which come from those funny Scandinavian hot dogs, meatballs, and cakes they sell at the exit. And from lightbulbs.

  100% of people who visit IKEA buy lightbulbs. IKEA does sell very cheap lightbulbs. Everyone buys the lightbulbs because (a) they are so cheap, and (b) they can’t come away empty-handed having spent three hours of pain and panic in IKEA.

  Everything in IKEA has funny names: You will find cupboards and beds called things like Dave and Philip, or Clare. Or Jurgen-Bergen-Heldenveldenstetser. If you try to buy any of them, you will be directed to a warehouse section where your item—a chair, say—is placed carefully on top of some eighty-foot-high shelves. They will tell you that a man will come and get it down for you. The man will never come.