Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?

by Steve Lowe

  IMPROVING THE VALUE OF YOUR PROPERTY

  Houses aren’t for living in, they’re for making cash out of. A good kitchen in a $250,000 property can add 10%. The introduction of a classic bathroom, which might cost just $8,000, can instantly add $1 million to the asking price.

  But it’s easy for beginners to make mistakes, so here we recommend our Twelve Quick Ways Not to Improve the Value of Your Home—which is possibly going to be shown on TV in the new year:

  1.Ruthlessly cut out all natural light with ripped-up trash bags over the windows.

  2.Scatter pigs’ entrails around the landing.

  3.Put a big sign on the door saying: JESUS LOVES THIS HOUSE.

  4.Shit in the sink.

  5.Open up the hallway as a stable.

  6.Pretend it’s built upon an ancient Native American burial ground.

  7.Disappear into the attic. And never come down.

  8.In the middle of the living room, build a little wooden town for a fifteen-strong mouse troupe to scurry about in. Call this Mouse Town.

  9.Redirect the sewers in any way whatsoever—they’re probably not connected in the right way anyway.

  10.Take in waifs and strays.

  11.Replace your stove with a tiny plastic one made for children that doesn’t even have any connections for the gas or electric.

  12.Burn the fucker to the ground.

  INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

  Al Gore’s heartwarming global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth is a rotting bag of recycled compost. Okay, it’s a film. We are told this talking-the-talk movie has been breaking U.S. box-office records (although it’s not clear which ones: possibly those for documentaries made by former vice presidents). Of course, Gore’s record on caring about the environment is second to none. It goes right back to the 1980s. (He actually invented it, right before coming up with the Internet and Roller Blading.)

  And since his failed presidential bid in 2000, Gore has been campaigning ceaselessly on behalf of the environment, urging everyone to reduce their carbon footprint before it’s too late. In fact, there has only been one itsy-bitsy, blink-and-you’d-miss-it, tiny interruption in Big Al’s near-lifelong campaign for the environment: the years 1992 to 2000. During this short eight-year period, he was far quieter about the environment. So quiet that even those in the front row of the cinema auditorium, excellently positioned with regard to the surround-sound speakers, would be reduced to lip-reading lips that were not actually moving.

  Oddly, this coincides almost exactly—no, completely exactly—with the time he was vice president of the God Bless the United States of A—in the Clinton administration that did slightly less than fuck-all about reducing America’s gargantuan carbon footprint.

  Shame he took this particular period off from the environmentalism. Because he might have proved quite useful then.

  Darn! These inconvenient truths get everywhere, don’t they?

  INDIE PORNO FILMS

  For pseudo-art-house auteurs, there is a new game in town: shooting a drearily pretentious film no one would ever want to see if it didn’t have someone’s real penis being inserted into someone else’s real vagina. Pretty soon, Quentin Tarantino will want to get in on the action, so watch out.

  The appeal for the directors is obvious: They get to watch people having sex. They even get to order them about in the process. What the actors get out of the experience is less apparent.

  Reviled actor-director Vincent Gallo’s 2004 flop Brown Bunny famously featured a scene in which the actor-director is explicitly fellated by a character played by his ex-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny.

  So how exactly did this happen? Maybe he phoned her up and said: “Hi, this is your ex-boyfriend. The one with the cast iron reputation for asshole-ism. Look, I’m not gonna mess you round, I’m gonna come straight out with it: Basically, it’s like this, baby . . . I want you to suck it on camera for this new thing I’m doing. Whaddya mean, is it justified? Woah, yeah! Of course . . . I can’t even believe you even asked me that. I’m outraged! I’m Vincent Gallo, important film director! What do you think? That I’d just ask you to suck it for cheap kicks or something? Man, that would be sick! So, anyway . . . that okay with you?”

  In which incredibly strange world of strange fucking strange would the answer be “yes”?

  INTEL INSIDE TUNE, THE

  The four Intel Inside chimes (da-da da-ding!) are played somewhere in the world on average every five minutes.

  Intel (da-da da-ding!) commissioned Austrian musician Walter Werzowa (the evil genius behind 1988 yodel-house hit “Bring Me Edelweiss”) in 1994 to compose a three-second jingle that “evoked innovation, troubleshooting skills, and the inside of a computer, while also sounding corporate and inviting.”

  More than a jingle, this is a “sonic logo” that coincides with every mention of Intel (da-da da-ding!). Wait till Intel gets outside. Then we’ll be really fucked.

  INTERACTIVE MEDIA

  Seeing as the TV channels bombard you with a never-ending kaleidoscope of mind-numbing commercials, and thus can by no means be considered broke, why aren’t they paying professionals to make their programs rather than asking you to fill in all the time? They are forever canvassing your opinion on this, or getting you to speak out about that. E-mail us, they say, press the red button now, text, call in.

  Why me? All I’m trying to do is watch the television, an activity I associate mostly with watching and listening and occasionally shouting and swearing and throwing crisps about, not sharing my opinions with an underwhelmed nation. This is the very acme of modern democracy, though: Don’t bother going on a demonstration or writing to your senator, just text what’s bothering you to The Situation Room. Same difference.

  The program, by lazily reflecting back to us what we already know, can fill up time without having to go to the terrible trouble of getting people in who might, say, know what they’re fucking talking about. Middle East road map irrevocably stalled? Just have a text poll; much easier than finding someone who could, say, identify Israel on a map. Don’t worry about informing the viewers, they only want to see Z-list celebs jacking each other off anyway.

  And it doesn’t matter how many times you and your buddies text during Best Films Ever, even if you run up a bill of $9,000: They will fix it and White Chicks will never win.

  INTERNET CAFÉS

  Particularly those with threadbare psychedelic carpets, run by a money-grabbing misbegotten who probably owns half of Barbados purely from the profits he makes on printing charges, full of preppy college students doing pretend higher-education courses sending long, banal e-mails home before realizing that there are other preppy college students in the room and sharing their inane platitudes loudly and at length while you are innocently trying to send abusive e-mails to senators using fake Yahoo! accounts and you only went in there because your shitty broadband has screwed up yet again and you have no alternative but to come back here even though the last time you went in they charged you twenty bucks to send a fax and you told the guy behind the counter that you’d never patronize their stinking digital shit-farm ever again.

  Some of them are nicer than that, though.

  iPOD FASHION

  The iPod has been venerated in many extraordinary ways. iPods have inspired songs, athletics, even books, from how-to guides (um, try touching the iPod’s only button?) to a treatise titled The Cult of iPod, in which author Leander Kahney proclaims, “Fire, the wheel, and the iPod. In the history of invention, gadgets don’t come more iconic than Apple’s digital music player.”

  Maybe slightly less extraordinary, but potentially more disturbing in that it’s actually real, is iPod fashion. That phrase exists. It is a phrase that exists. The mere phrase iPod fashion—which exists—should make you shudder.

  There’s Karl Lagerfeld’s rectangular gilded purse—roughly the size of “a bread bin,” oddly enough—which is lined with multicolored cloth and incorporat
es a pocket for holding up to a dozen iPods. Or some crusty rolls, we suppose. (Incidentally, Karl Lagerfeld now owns seventy iPods . . . the newly thin German freak.)

  Gucci recently introduced an iPod Sling, a $200 carrying case with leather trim and silver clasps. Colors include Namba (“shines golden color in direct sunlight”), Chocolate (“rich and dark, almost good enough to eat”), and Deadly Nightshade Returns (“subtle and elegant”).

  There are even iPod pants—pants with a pocket for your iPod (“Party On with iPod Pants”).

  There’s also a swath of new sleeves and hoods, with one Internet reviewer deciding of the foofpod that “Overall, it’s a recommended sleeve for the iPod if you want to get away from the ‘skins’ scene.”

  Jesus Christ, there’s a “skins” scene? We need to lie down.

  iPOD POPES

  The pope has got an iPod, hip hip hip hooray, the pope has got an iPod and he’s coming out to play.

  Yes, the pope has got an iPod. Of course he has.

  A Vatican spokesperson said: “He is very pleased with the iPod. The Holy Father likes to unwind listening to it and is of the opinion that this sort of technology is the future.” He’s up all night, you know, illegally downloading Gregorian chanting.

  iPOD WAGES

  The iPod city of Longhua has ten factories making iPod components for Apple. Workers can sleep a hundred to a room and earn $27 a month. It would cost them half a year’s salary to buy an iPod Nano. Their wages are low even by Chinese standards. At another iPod city outside Shanghai, fifty thousand workers are enclosed in a barbed-wire compound the size of eight football fields.

  Yue, a worker in Longhua, said: “We have to work overtime and can only go back to the dorm when our boss gives us permission. After working fifteen hours, we are so tired. It’s like being in the army. They make us stand still for hours—if we move we are made to stand still for longer. The boys have to do push-ups.”

  “And if we make the black ones, we have to listen to the preloaded U2 tunes. It is terrible.”

  (She didn’t say the last bit.)

  IRAQ WAR EUPHEMISMS

  Having a great big war going on day after day requires a whole raft of new coinages to stop people from getting too hopelessly worked up about bodies falling apart and other things that really shouldn’t concern them. The Iraq War has spawned a whole new range of such euphemisms to go alongside old favorites like friendly fire and collateral damage.

  The whole affair was a “preventive” or “preemptive” war—a safety measure closer to fitting a smoke alarm to protect your home from the danger of fire than to, say, protecting your home from the danger of fire by launching missiles at it. It was also a “war of choice”—as in car of choice or cereal of choice—which makes the coalition sound like a happy consumer rather than, say, the kind of consumer who bombs shops. Pacifying Fallujah became an almost comfortably familiar phrase (like Educating Rita or Chasing Amy)—with its connotations of a dummy helping soothe a crying baby’s distress. During the attack on Fallujah, the Foreign Office claimed displaced residents were “visiting relatives” and the Pentagon labeled the 10,000–15,000 universal soldiers helping interrogate/torture prisoners as “private contractors.” Presumably the word mercenary sounded a bit, well, mercenary.

  U.S. news feeds would talk of another “busy day in Baghdad” before going over to a correspondent who said, “Yes, there’s been some developments.” On one particular “busy” day, September 22, 2004, the “developments” included two U.S. soldiers being accused of the cold-blooded murder of three Iraqi civilians, the discovery of the beheaded body of British hostage Jack Hensley, multiple car bombings causing eleven civilian deaths, plus a further twenty-two people killed in helicopter raids on Sadr City. So yes, definitely a “busy” day. If you were living in Baghdad, you’d certainly come home saying: “Busy out there today. Busy busy busy! There’s what looks very much like a big fucking war going on.”

  Perhaps next time we could do away with the word war altogether and replace it with the words birthday party. This will reinforce how coalition troops are calling in by invitation. On entering this “party,” we will start dropping “cakes” on the hosts. Unfortunately, this might lead to some “crumbs” falling on to the floor. But don’t worry, because we’ll wipe up any subsequent mess with “tissues.” Lucrative oil and rebuilding contracts will be the “sweets” we take home in our “goody bags.”

  Despite the invitations stating that the party ends at 4 AM, we might stretch out the fun a little longer, possibly for some years.

  J

  MICHAEL JACKSON FANS

  There was the lady who released doves into the air in response to the liberating verdict, while the man beside her shouted “Praise be!” to the skies.

  And the lady who cooked raccoons over a log fire to pass around to her hungry comrades.

  The fan who, as every “not guilty” verdict was announced, sawed off one of his own toes to express his gratitude—sadly, but also joyously, running out of toes before the verdicts had ended.

  The family from Arkansas who reenacted crucial moments from Jackson’s life—the Motown 25 show, the baby-dangling incident, the Martin Bashir interview, the morphy video for “Black and White.”

  The SCID-suffering boy in the bubble whose mother was convinced that some tooth enamel from his hero would cure him of his strange, sad condition.

  The South Dakotan death cult who all sported white gloves and reinterpreted “Man in the Mirror” in the style of Nine Inch Nails.

  The Catholic priest who added a fifth gospel to the New Testament—“The Gospel According to Michael”—featuring Jesus continually explaining to his disciples that he is “bad, but bad meaning good.”

  Whenever Michael Jackson fans gather in one place to give thanks and praise, you can guarantee some serious End of Days shit will be going down. Some appeared almost ecstatic that their idol was up for child molestation again. It’s nice to have a reason to get dressed up, isn’t it? “Hi, sweetie, they’re trying to kill Michael again by saying he’s into kiddie-fiddling, showing them porn, and getting them drunk and all that kind of crap! Tell work I’m not coming in—it’s the End of Days!”

  JOURNALISTS WHO NEVER GOT OVER SEX AND THE CITY

  We were so close. It had been dead for over four years. The images of Kim Cattrall’s withered boobs finally ceased haunting our dreams.

  Then Sex and the City returned—supersized and in movie form!—and with it came an all-new barrage of articles from that certain type of entertainment journalist who never got over the end of the show in the first place. Mostly female, constantly on the search for her own “Big”-type suit guy, these are the only people in the world who still go on “dates.”

  You’re looking for that ideal guy who knows grooming but is also slightly roughed up; whom all the waiters know, who deals stocks and also deals art and respects a woman’s independence but will also throw away thousands on an expensive outfit that will make you look and feel fabulous. You do this by filling professionally concerned papers and magazines with articles about how rich people are great and how expensive stuff is the best stuff.

  Now, it’s hard to say how much the series’ portrayal of the New York singles scene is fact or fantasy without doing more research—and that, frankly, is not what this book’s about—but if you transplant this vision to the thronging metropolitan centers of, well, anywhere else, you’re screwed.

  Look: All the money-raking bachelors around most parts are a loudmouthed bunch of dildos who simply want to (a) snort blow, and (b) cum on your face. Sorry about that.

  So, while it seems churlish not to wish you luck, please don’t get your hopes up. Oh, and if you do ever find your own personal “Big,” do you then think you might possibly be able to shut up? That would be just so fabulous!

  JUICE DRINK

  Juice: It is, almost by definition, a drink. Add the word drink to the word juice and you
might imagine it becomes even more drinky, which is potentially delicious. But no. If anything, it becomes less drinky. And it certainly becomes less juicy. In fact, your average “juice drink” often contains a mere 10% juice; that’s compared with the fulsome 100% juice that’s always contained in “juice.” Which should make people say things like: “What happened there then? What did you do with all the juice?”

  What if you needed to unwind after a hard day and dreamed of downing a bottle of tasty wine but the local liquor store only carried something called “wine drink”; then, on returning home, you find the bottle contains just 10% of the wine of a normal bottle of wine (which is 100% wine) while the rest was just spit and rain?

  You wouldn’t be happy. You might not even get that drunk. And then, when you start shouting about the whole matter outside your local liquor store, banging on the shuttered windows with your bloodied fists screaming “Where is my fucking booze?” you’d definitely have justice on your side.

  K

  KABBALAH

  Back when people imagined The Future at the World’s Fair, the twenty-first century was full of jet packs and robots doing your ironing. None of the so-called experts predicted that everyone would be getting into a weird sect vaguely related to an ancient Jewish tradition that sells bits of red string to its followers at $30 a pop. George Jetson? You’re a fucking charlatan.

  Apparently, the reason that Madonna, Posh, Ashton Kutcher, et al., wear the red string is to protect them against “the evil eye.” Seems a strange length to go to stop people from giving you dirty looks, but hey ho. Oh, and it gives you “total fulfillment.”

  Spreading “total fulfillment” has been the aim of Philip Berg since he gave up his job as an insurance salesman in 1970 to become a bit of a seer. Called the Rav by followers, the American rabbi set up his first Kabbalah Center in Israel in 1971. Clever marketing—and the “donated” labor of followers—has seen that mushroom into forty centers worldwide and a turnover of millions. By setting up both not-for-profit and private Kabbalah enterprises—plus wheezes like the Rav “blessing” businesses in return for a cut of the profits—Berg and his wife, Karen, have managed to build up an enormous property portfolio and although they take no salaries have lavish no-expense-spared lifestyles for themselves and their two sons. The Rav sold a ten-year copyright to his books to the KC for over $2.5 million. That’s a lot of red string.