Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (13 page)

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 incorporates 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!”