Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (14 page)

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.

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 responsibility.” 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.