Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?

by Steve Lowe

  The reason the string is so powerful, says the Rav, is that it has been wrapped seven times around Rachel’s tomb on the West Bank. The people who run the tomb claim to have no knowledge of the Kabbalah Center doing this, however, and the Israeli Ministry of Tourism and also for Religious Affairs have stated that no special permits have been given to the Kabbalah Center to enter the heavily militarized area at Rachel’s Tomb with large quantities of red string. In fact, the tomb dispenses its own type of red string—although presumably this contains much less enlightenment, what with it being completely free.

  The Kabbalah Center is even trying to get a patent on the red string. Presumably this will involve answering the question How long is a piece of string?—so at least it’ll finally clear up that old chestnut.

  Other money spinners include a set of the key Kabbalah texts, the Zohar, priced anywhere from $45 to nearly $400. To achieve enlightenment, you don’t even need to read the books—you can pick up their “energy” by just tracing your finger over them. Ah, now I see why it’s so attractive to pop stars.

  A 1.5-liter bottle of Kabbalah water—which the Kabbalah Center claims is “purest Artesian” water and can cure cancer—will set you back $3.95. A case is $45. In fact, the water comes from a bottling plant in Canada.

  Never mind all that, though; what about Madonna? According to a senior figure at the Kabbalah Center in London quoted in the Evening Standard, Madonna joined to learn how to control her moods and “how to be more tolerant with her husband.”

  But we could have sorted that out for her, no $5 million donation required: He’s an asshole. It’s not actually intolerant to shout at him. We want to shout at him, and we’ve never met the tool. You fucking live with him, you freak.

  KEANE

  Keane need to be stopped, immediately, for these reasons:

  •Singer Tom Chaplin’s face has no edges, like runny cheese.

  •Their sappy, mellow piano rock makes you long for the wild, dangerous sounds of . . . Billy Joel. We always promised we’d take a bath with a hair dryer before we’d say those words.

  •The title of their debut album Hopes and Fears derives from the lyrics of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” which is their favorite when they go carol singing around their hometown of Battle, UK. One hopes a future album is called Little Donkey (Carry Mary) (’Long the Dusty Road).

  •Look at them! Just look at them!

  •Speaking after a 2005 awards show, pianist Tim Rice-Oxley said: “We went to an aftershow party given by our record company. I had a really good conservation with Jake from the Scissor Sisters, who I’d not met before. We did all get pretty pissed, I have to say.”

  •Singer Tom Chaplin’s face has no edges, like runny cheese.

  •Understanding the importance of a “consistent anchor,” Keane got their own branding consultants—Moving Brands—before signing with their first label, together drawing up a list of buzzwords including fascinating,innocent, and expansive. When the band signed to Island, they absolutely insisted on retaining control over their branding.

  •Singer Tom Chaplin’s face has no edges, like runny cheese.

  •Chaplin once claimed: “There’s always a strong, potent message to a Keane song. Whereas sometimes with Coldplay, you’re not really sure what he’s on about.” Which is only slightly less deluded than if he’d said: “Hello, I’m Iggy Pop. Here’s my big willy.”

  •Just look at them! Again!

  KETAMINE

  Having a bit of a dance? Don’t trip over the a-hole in the k-hole.

  ALICIA KEYS

  Alicia Keys might well be the greatest soul singer of this or any other age. If the main premise of soul singing was to sound as conceited as possible.

  Realizing that what the world needed most was to share her innermost thoughts, this “unbelievably talented” “new Aretha” called her second album The Diary of Alicia Keys. After that, she actually looked into publishing reworked versions of her teenage diaries from the age of nine onward. At the time of writing, she was “just formulating which style I want to write it in: straight based off my life or a little more journal-style in nature.”

  In the meantime, she unleashed Tears for Water: Songbook of Poems and Lyrics, which featured reams of unused lyrics—because, according to her people, there are around a “dozen unreleased [lyrical] gems for every song that makes it onto one of her albums.” Her introduction read: “All my life, I’ve written these words with no thought or intention of sharing them . . .”

  Even this was not enough to sate Keys’s desire for Keys-related book product. Just try imagining the scene in the publisher’s offices when she unleashed her finest idea: a young adult detective series starring the sixteen-year-old Alicia as a wannabe soul star who betrays a “sometimes dangerous penchant for investigating—and solving—heart-pounding whodunits.” For fuck’s sake. What does she do? Go into bookshops and note down all the sections that don’t have any books about Alicia Keys in?

  Of course, it would be quite tragic if, at some point in the near future, the public unanimously decided that Miss Keys was not, after all, “unbelievably talented” but really quite up herself and could, if she really wanted, go and spend the rest of her days in a cupboard. At that point, we would actually pay good money to read her innermost thoughts.

  KEYSTONE TERROR INTERROGATORS

  The very word terror is enough to strike terror into the heart of most people. Personally, we’re very much against “terror.” We hate it. You could even describe us as being “anti-terror.”

  But, without wishing to seem needlessly controversial, I do wish the government would stick to doing the “anti-terror” in a way that didn’t jettison human rights. Or diminish global standards on what constitutes torture. Or ignore likely big leads. Or ask questions so stupid that they would make a stupid person ask: “What exactly the fuck do you think you are doing?”

  Holed up in Guantanamo, Moazzam Begg was questioned about the U.S. sniper John Mohammed (sentenced for shooting eleven people in Washington in 2002), because he was called Mohammed, which is Muslim. He was also shown pictures of the pope taken from his computer’s hard drive and questioned about his apparent assassination plans. Begg was initially confused by these pictures, until he remembered that all computers’ “Temporary Internet Files” folders store all of the images from any visited Web site. So a visit to the Fox News Web site, say, might lead to your computer storing all sorts of pictures from the home page that you hadn’t even paid any attention to at the time. (The interrogators also presented him with a picture of a camel spider and asked him for an explanation, although they did not accuse him of planning to kill it.) The Catholic major told him: “If anything happens to the pope, I swear I’ll break every finger in your hands.”

  On other occasions, Begg was asked to identify someone from a picture of the back of their head, or an arm, or a leg, and asked: “Do you recognize this?” To which he might reasonably have responded: “Hmm . . . tricky one, this . . . [decisively] Singh! Yup, it’s Vijay Singh, the golfer . . .” before realizing he wasn’t after all on ESPN’s Two-Minute Drill.

  KFC

  Why do you never see hippies with scarves covering their mouths catapulting each other through the window of KFC? It’s always McDonald’s. But Colonel Sanders was a right bastard—just look at what he did to Elvis.

  BEN KINGSLEY, SIR

  Sir Ben Kingsley has been woefully misunderstood. When he was billed on the posters for Lucky Number Slevin as “Sir Ben Kingsley,” he was accused of being “barmy” by Lord Puttnam and of talking “pretentious bollocks” by Roger Moore. (Lucky Number Slevin wasn’t lucky, by the way, it was shit.)

  Sir Ben Kingsley shot back, telling the Sunday Telegraph that he was “shocked” by the producers’ “faux pas.” His case was sadly weakened because he was quoted as accepting the knighthood by saying: “There is no Mr. Ben Kingsley anymore. Being a Sir brings with it responsib
ility.” And an old document sent to all crew on his previous movie Mrs. Harris read: “We received a call from Ben Kingsley’s agent . . . Please address him as ‘Sir Ben’ if you find yourself in his presence.”

  It puts one in mind of his most celebrated role, that of Mahatma Gandhi. Except for all the humility, the grace, and the kick-starting of campaigns of civil disobedience. As Gandhi famously said: “I want an M&M-filled trailer the size of Jupiter. Right here. Right. Fucking. Now!”

  KITSCH KNICKKNACK SHOPS

  Called things like Missy Kitty Mau Mau or Puss Puss or Funky Monkey Pants. Sometimes innocent shoppers accidentally enter an emporium because they need to buy a present for someone and it claims to specialize in presents.

  Ooh, they think. A present shop, maybe I can get a present in this shop for presents and thus satisfy my present-buying needs. Then they go inside and remember that it’s actually a festival of shit with price tags on. You can find:

  •George Bush fridge magnets—you can dress him up as either Shirley Temple or Wonder Woman.

  •A Monkey tape measure.

  •Numerous cards featuring the picture of a 1950s housewife and a rude slogan—something like, ON SUNDAYS, DOREEN ENJOYED NOTHING MORE THAN A GOOD SPIT-ROAST.

  •A Wonder Woman cocktail shaker.

  •A tiny little book about eating chocolate.

  •Plastic action figures of a black Jesus arm-wrestling Che Guevara. (See Che Guevara Merchandise.)

  •A monkey. With the head of Monkey.

  •Something featuring a Mexican wrestler.

  •A baby’s first Ramones T-shirt.

  •Monkeys.

  Of course, no one really wants this crap. But they get it anyway . . .

  EMMA: Here you go, Gran—happy birthday. I got you a T-shirt with PORN STAR printed on it.

  GRAN: Oh, cheers. By the way, I never liked you, and your dad’s not your real dad.

  L

  LEFT/LIBERAL APOLOGISTS FOR ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISTS

  There are some ground rules that need establishing here: blowing oneself up in a shopping center to forward a medieval theocracy involving the suppression of women and the stoning of gays is a bad thing, isn’t it? We think we can all agree on that one.

  Ah, apparently not. By some crazy twist of logic, reactionary bigots who seek to plunge the world into religious darkness can become freedom fighters—a “deformed” liberation movement; the ACLU by other means. If you don’t like U.S. imperialism (and hey, even the Pentagon seems to be wavering on that one these days), you must be okay—even if what you do like is slaughtering people standing at bus stops because of their religion. So we end up with anti-war demonstrations where purportedly socialist paper sellers mingle with thoroughly fundamentalist Hizb ut-Tahrir, chatting, standing next to each other.

  There’s Rosie O’Donnell, who—when not feuding with other celebrities or acting mentally retarded in the hope of winning an Emmy—fancies herself Long Island’s own Noam Chomsky. Why, during only her second week as co-host of the misogyny-fueling morning show The View, Rosie smacked down conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s comment that militant Islam is a “grave threat” by stating that “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” Now, let’s be clear: We really don’t want to defend Hasselbeck. She’s like Ann Coulter as played by Florence Henderson. But Rosie, radical Christianity is many things—hateful, homophobic, predominantly white—but it’s not shouting “Death to America” or strapping explosives onto its followers’ chests. Not yet. Maybe if Hillary wins in ’08 things will take a sharp left turn.

  At a later date, Rosie also told View viewers, “Don’t fear the terrorists. They’re mothers and fathers.” Um, actually, that makes us fear them more. Terrorist mothers and terrorist fathers mean there are little terrorists running around, playing with “Kill the Infidels” Elmo and whatnot.

  Of course, Rosie is but one woman. There’s also the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who warmly welcomed reactionary bigot SheikhYusuf al-Qaradawi to his fair city. (Al-Qaradawi supports the execution of all males who engage in homosexual acts and “personally supports” female circumcision. Of suicide bombers, he says, “For us, Muslim martyrdom is not the end of things but the beginning of the most wonderful of things.”)

  Historian and novelist Tariq Ali has set himself up as one of the world’s premier cheerleaders for the bigots dominating the insurgency in Iraq, casting them as anti-imperialist warriors and saying: “The resistance in Iraq is not, as Israeli and Western propagandists like to argue, a case of Islam gone mad. It is . . . a direct consequence of the occupation.”

  Critics of this abject moral and intellectual collapse are often accused of “Islamophobia.” But this isn’t about Islam per se. What we are talking about is Islamic fundamentalism—a fanatical politico-religious ideology that would outlaw homosexuality, kill trade unionists, institute medieval, religious feudalism . . . sort of like fascism, only less modern.

  So, all things considered, if ever the worldwide caliphate is established, it seems like a few people will be in for a nasty shock:

  THE MEDIEVALISTS: Ah, honored gentlemen. If you’d be so kind as to file into this football stadium . . .

  ROSIE: Sure! I love riding buses! Can I see photos of your sons and daughters?

  THE MEDIEVALISTS: Yes, later. Now please, hurry it up. We’ve got a load of stonings still to do—and we’d just like to slaughter you all.

  ROSIE: Lovely. I like buses, you know.

  TARIQ ALI: What? You’re going to what?

  HARRY BELAFONTE: They’re going to slaughter us. It’s nothing to worry about. It’s customary among such peoples. Cigar?

  TARIQ ALI: Don’t they know who I am? You really should have mentioned this before.

  THE MEDIEVALISTS: We did.

  TARIQ ALI: Oh.

  ROSIE: Yes. Now I come to think about it, they did give some signals in this direction. I like buses, you know.

  TARIQ ALI: Well, I think it’s rude. I’m going to write a big piece in the Guardian about it.

  THE MEDIEVALISTS: We’ve burned it down.

  TARIQ ALI: The New York Times?

  THE MEDIEVALISTS: Yeah, that, too. We didn’t like the Sunday Magazine. Only joking—it was for being infidel.

  “LIFESTYLE” MUSIC COMPILATIONS

  Like all products with the word lifestyle attached to them, these compilations are designed for people who have neither a life nor any style. What they say is: “I do not know anything about music. Please, Clever Marketing People, target my demographic and tell me what you want me to like.”

  Who thinks these things up, let alone buys them? Take the Elite Modeling Agency Compilation. As the name suggests, Elite would be useful if you needed a model: Perhaps you are a fashion photographer, or have dropped something down the side of the fridge and can’t reach it. It knows shit-all about music. Neither do Elle magazine or Cosmopolitan. Cosmo is known mainly for doing questionnaires about blow jobs, which are sometimes related to, but are essentially different from, music.

  ESPN’s Jock Rock and Jock Jams series of albums are based on a false premise: Jocks do not love music; if they did . . . they wouldn’t be jocks! Instead of playing football, they would’ve joined the jazz choir and been beaten up by the football team.

  The music label Quango has nonsensically titled compilations available for any ABC drama in need of a musical montage. Dr. Meredith Grey is crying over McHotpants? Cue up the Mystic Groove CD!

  Describing their extensive compilation series, Starbucks says you should “Think of them as mixed tapes from a friend.” We prefer to think of them as mixed tapes from Beelzebub.

  LISTS

  1.OK Computer.

  2.The Bends.

  3.Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl Ad.

  4.Johnny Carson.

  5.Shepherd’s pie.

  6.Who Shot J. R.?

  7.
Bobby Ewing in the shower.

  8.The sax solo in Baker Street.

  9.The Shawshank Redemption.

  10.The Bends.

  11.Thriller.

  12.The Bends.

  13.The video for “Thriller.”

  14.The Da Vinci Code.

  15.Star Wars.

  16.The last episode of M*A*S*H.

  17.Hank Aaron.

  18.The Heidi Game.

  19.The Beatles.

  20.The otter.

  21.Jesus Christ.

  22.This certainly is an

  23.easy way to

  24.fill up the pages

  25.and schedules

  26.and that.

  27.Abraham Lincoln.

  28.Lake Titicaca.

  29.The Bends.

  30.OK Computer.

  31.The Bends.

  32.The Bends.

  33.The Bends!

  34.OK Computer.

  35.Martin Luther King.

  36.The Shining Path.

  37.Homer Simpson.

  38.Pet Sounds.

  39.Maya Angelou.

  40.The Bends.

  41.Godfather 3

  42.was crap.

  43.But the first two

  44.were not crap.

  45.Did you know that?

  46.I didn’t.

  47.Jesus.

  48.Jesus Christ.

  49.Jesus H.Christ.

  50.Might it just be possible

  51.to start producing more culture

  52.instead of lazily cataloging

  53.stuff that everyone already knows about?

  54.Richard Nixon.

  55.Lance Armstrong in Dodgeball.