Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (6 page)

“Color is always out there,” pointed out Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, to
Time
magazine. “We just have to determine where it’s coming from at any given time.”

Beware of flying color. It’s “out there.”

COMEDY CLUBS

In every comedy club chain, the MC always kicks off with the lie: “We’ve got a great bill for you tonight.” His icebreaking banter involves asking the audience where they have come from. Perhaps inevitably, the answers rarely provoke high comedy, so the conversation very soon starts resembling distant relatives who haven’t met for many years exchanging pleasantries at a funeral: “So where did you come from?” “Mineola.” “Great.”

The first act begins by explaining that he’s “trying out new material.” Sadly, though, somewhere in his mind the phrase
new material
has become entirely disassociated with the concept of “jokes.” Fairly soon, it goes so quiet you can hear people pissing in the toilet.

After a few more minutes of no jokes, a bachelor party starts yelling: “Fuck off, you suck.” “No,” the comedian shouts back, “you fuck off.” When this has finished, the host returns to try simultaneously to convey the two sentiments “Don’t do that or I’ll have to get tough” and “Please, for the love of God, do not turn on me.”

This pattern is repeated three or four times until the arrival of the headliner—or, rather, the pseudo-headliner, the actual headliner having canceled (a fact advertised by a small handwritten note stuck on a wall behind a curtain). The bachelor party’s “fuck offs” will grow in intensity until you realize, as they trade unamusing insults with another bastard working through their “issues” by inflicting their paper-thin personality on people who have never done anything to hurt them, that you have paid good money to sit in a dark room listening to people bellow “fuck off” at one another.

COPPOLAS: THE NEXT GENERATION

The portrait of the babbling airhead Hollywood star in
Lost in Translation
was reportedly based upon writer-director Sofia Coppola’s firsthand experience of Cameron Diaz. We would personally be very interested to see Cameron Diaz make her directorial debut with a movie that featured a supercilious rich-kid indie
auteur
who does pseudo-profound confections that people initially splooge themselves over but which, on second viewing, are the cinematic equivalent of unflavored rice cake, with comedy scenes that are not especially funny, endless “arty” shots of the Tokyo skyline filmed out of hotel windows, and dialogue that is only naturalistic in the sense that it possibly took as long to write as to say, and which are considered original only by people who have never set eyes on any other footage showing characters suffering from exquisitely well-turned neon-lit urban ennui like Wim Wenders directing a crap U2 video in 1993.

And she was shit at acting.

Still, at least Sofia creates movies based on her own navel-gazing. Brother Roman Coppola and cousin Jason Schwartzman are content to simply gaze at Wes Anderson’s navel, who himself is twee enough to be named an honorary Coppola Jr. These guys are your go-to trio if you want a legitimately interesting subject (like, say, India’s native culture) seen through the patronizing eyes of bored, rich white guys. While listening to the Kinks. If they joined forces with Sofia, the resulting film would be so precious that even the most pretentious, clove-smoking art school student would be screaming out, “Cheer the fuck up, nerds!”

And come to think of it, Nicolas “Cage” Coppola hasn’t made a decent movie in years. And his hair fell out. So think on.

COSMETIC SURGERY GONE WRONG AS TELEVISION ENTERTAINMENT

Permanent scarring: Now,
that’s
television.

CREATIVE INDUSTRIES, THE PHRASE

Funny how you never hear novelists or painters say they work in the “creative industries,” but only squalid little advertising people. How could this be?

J. Walter Thompson, the world’s oldest ad agency—founded in 1864, it currently handles Ford and Unilever—tells us on its Web site: “We believe: in influencing the world to think more creatively.” Provided, presumably, that thought is
Must—buy—more—stuff.

If you listen to advertisers, you’d think they’re the fucking Oracle and that for a fee they’ll slip you The Answer. They are obsessed with being seen as “creative,” but what they do seems rather to be “parasitical”: pinching cultural innovations and using them to persuade people that they want stuff. So there’s a dilemma right there for us all to think “creatively” about.

JWT also believes in “raising the creative bar as far as it will go. Then jacking it up a notch after that.” However, having already raised the creative bar as far as it will go, further notching up the creative bar will cause the creative bar to break. The creative bar will be completely fucked. That’s just physics.

J. Walter Thompson further believes: “90% of the world’s surface is made up of ideas. The rest is water.” A brief look at an atlas or infants’ school geography textbook could have disabused them of this errant fallacy. Creative? Maybe—after all, they have completely made it up. But certainly not “industrious.”

Leo Burnett (which does Heinz and McDonald’s) is also into “belief”: “We believe Disney, McDonald’s, Nintendo, Heinz and Kellogg’s are some of the world’s most valuable brands because people have gone well beyond merely buying them. These are brands people believe in. When people believe, they buy more, pay more, stick with a brand more and advocate the brand to others. And so belief is the ultimate brand currency.”

Instead of all this gibberish about creative bars and making wine from water, really to convey the essence of their activities they’d all be better off with just one page of flashy swirly graphics, fading in these five words:

We

are

emperors

of

shit

CRITICAL REASSESSMENT

Yes, for fuck’s sake. By which we don’t mean yes, as in “the affirmative.” We mean no—to Yes.

In their lifetime, the prog rockers were critically reviled and were held in particular derision by the punk movement. There was a reason for this: They were so bad they made your ears want to die. However, having tried to wreck completely all music by making really bad music is no barrier to critical reassessment, the process in which rock critics look for a date on a CD, see 1973, and think: “Hmmmmmmm, interesting . . .”

The criteria for critical reassessment reflect the high critical standards traditionally exercised by the music press. The criteria are:

• You must once have put a record out.

• Erm, that’s it.

You might imagine that revisiting 1980s-era Genesis in a lavish five-CD, five-DVD box set (including remastered albums, rarities, outtakes, and a photo gallery of “rare tour memorabilia”) has scraped through the bottom of the barrel into the dark, dirty ground. But even now a few neglected cases are still, in our humble opinion, ripe for rediscovery:

• Solo albums by members of Guns N’ Roses.

• Salt-N-Pepa—
The Later Years.

• The George Martin stuff on side two of the original 1969 release of the
Yellow Submarine
album (which nobody has actually ever listened to).

• Ashlee Simpson—
The Kindergarten Demos.

• Gary Cherone–era Van Halen.

• U2.

TOM CRUISE

Writing a piece for
Time
magazine on “The People Who Shape Our World,” Tom Cruise waxed miracle about
Mission: Impossible 3
director J. J. Abrams: “It’s hard to convey with brevity the extraordinary experience of knowing and working with J. J. Abrams. First of all, is there anything in a name—J. J.? Look at the Jays we have now—Jay Leno, J.Lo, Jay-Z—but he’s got two J’s. He was born to impinge and invade pop culture.”

There are many reasons to fear Tom Cruise. There’s his fully functioning World War II fighter plane. The way he thinks all psychological problems can be cured by “vitamins and exercise” (he might himself consider a brisk walk down to Whole Foods). There’s all that stuff about the silent birth thing. Those films. But given that he believes we are descended from super-intelligent aliens (see
Xenu
), it is perhaps not wholly surprising that when he turns his hand to journalism, the results are utterly off their head and, well, look like they have been written by an alien.

Anyway, Cruise finished his lavish eulogy by revealing that J. J. is a “loving husband to his beautiful wife Katie (can you believe this coincidence?) and father of three glorious children. Gotta give it up for that J2.”

Can we believe that Abrams, like Cruise, also has a wife called Katie? Well, yes. Super-aliens: no. Two women being called Katie: We’re not feeling that to be too much of a stretch. It’s quite a common name: Katie Couric, Katey Sagal, KT Tunstall, Katie, the California Angels Rally Monkey. That’s four more, right there.

CULTURE OF PRAISE, THE
^*

As in, when describing an unremarkable work of artistic creation, the application of words like
magnificent, unbelievable, an awesome achievement,
and
If you don’t think this is unfathomably great, I’m coming back with my rifle and the two of us are going to teach you some sense.
Are these bringers of hyperbole being paid in sacks of gold? Or are they the subjects’ moms in disguise? According to these throwers of garlands, we live in an unparalleled age where a new masterpiece is being created by another genius roughly every twenty seconds as opposed to, say, every other year.

If book reviewers like a book they’ve been given, they often claim it is “hard to put down.” Has anyone else except book reviewers ever noticed this phenomenon? Some books are even “dare-to-put-me-down” books. Soon we will be faced with “if-you-put-me-down-I’ll-rip-your-fucking-feet-off” books. And then where will we be?

Hanging from awnings outside theaters, a succession of boards cherrypick key phrases like
awe-inspiring, unspeakably moving, pure brilliance,
and
a courageous step into the void.
It’s surprising audiences aren’t struck deaf, dumb, or blind by their experiences. At the very least they should have pissed themselves.

Speaking of pissing yourself, actresses like Kate Winslet often find themselves referred to as “brave.” When recently asked by veteran CBS reporter Tom Fenton about being “an uncompromising, very brave actress,” Winslet replied: “Being brave is

very important because sometimes, you know, you can find yourself in scary situations at work, you know, when there are scenes that are difficult to do. And you can’t run away from it, so you just have to go headlong into it.”

We must all applaud Kate Winslet’s ability to cope with scary situations at work. But, we must also wonder, how brave is she really? It would be intriguing to see how she’d hold up faced with the challenge of, say, a burning orphanage.

Watching her go headlong into that would indeed be “awesome.”

D

DANCE MUSIC AS THE FUTURE

In the 1990s, many people thought dance music was The Future of Music and the Future of Everything; that catching a few DJ sets by Paul Oakenfold would eventually forge young people together as The Oneness—a single bubbling, bouncing organism strong enough to move any mountain. Although why you would want to move mountains is beyond us. Moving a mountain is the sort of project you would only embark upon if you were completely off your meds.

These days, dance music’s main function is to provide excuses to wear robot costumes (Daft Punk), mash up hits of the 1970s and ’80s (Girl Talk), and help Damon Albarn find reasons not to record a new Blur album (Gorillaz).

And that is the story of dance music.

DEAD PROSTITUTES

Why are all TV crime thrillers centered on dead prostitutes? Jesus, prostitution must be fairly tough already, without some hack bumping you off every ten minutes. We’re surprised there are any left. And it’s not even enough for them to be “dead.” Most of them also have to be “mutilated.”

Cold Case, Without a Trace, Dexter, CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, CSI: Cleveland . . .
plus all the
Law & Orders,
especially
Special Victims Unit.
Whenever the
SVU
writers run out of “ripped from the headlines” rape cases, you can bet Belzer and Ice T are gonna discover another dead hooker.

And it’s not just on the boob tube, or in this case the blue-nippled, rigor-mortised boob tube. In movies, there are only two types of prostitutes: dead ones, and ones with a heart of gold. And if you glance at any crime/thriller book reviews—especially for the latest by James Patterson, who’s a literary Jack the Ripper—and you’ll likely find: “Dr. Tony Hill is a clinical psychologist whose assistance is often sought by Detective Carol Jordan, with whom he conducts a hesitant waltz of the ‘will they/won’t they?’ variety. The mutilated body of a prostitute has been found.” Has it? No shit.

DELICATESSEN COUNTERS AT SUPERMARKETS

The pasta salads piled up in those quaint earthenware bowls are, of course, produced by the Italian matriarch up to her elbows in prosciutto out back, merrily crushing her own spices while joshing with the French peasant crafting his authentic cheese.

Either that, or they’ve been mass-produced, loaded into plastic containers, transported across the country in a big lorry, removed from the plastic containers, and placed into said earthenware bowl to seem just ever so slightly more appealing than the absolutely identical ones in vacuum-sealed plastic multipacks on the shelves.

That pasta salad? They’ve just cooked some pasta and then let it go cold. I will not take a number. I am a free man.

DESIGNER BABY CLOTHES

NEW DAD:
H
EY, HERE’S AN IDEA—LET’S GET THE BABY A MONOGRAMMED
R
ALPH LAUREN POLO FOR
$50
THAT IT’LL PROBABLY GROW OUT OF TOMORROW AFTERNOON
.