by Steve Lowe
We don’t know why she swallowed a fly. But we strongly suspect part of the reason Dick Cheney didn’t alert the police until fourteen hours after he had pulled the trigger that fired the round was because he was an old man who had swallowed a beer. Followed by another beer. Possibly to catch the first beer. Who knows?
CHICK LIT
Competition: Three of the below chick-lit titles are real chick-lit titles and two are not real but made-up chick-lit titles. Can you spot the not real but made-up ones? (Answers below.)
1. Dot.Homme: Midthirties singleton Jess is sent by friends into the world of Internet dating—with unexpected results!
2. The Ex-Files: Take a soon-to-be-married young couple, four exes, mix with alcohol, and stand well back. Boom!
3. Virtual Strangers: Fed up, frustrated, and fast approaching forty, Charlie suddenly thinks she may have finally found her perfect soul mate—via e-mail!
4. The Mile High Guy: Twentysomething Katie is a flight attendant thrown head over heels by a handsome, wealthy first-class passenger. Emergency landing!
5. Old School Ties: Tracey is thirty-two, married, and bored. Then she spies an ad for a reality show on a perfect school reunion. Friends—and enemies—are soon reunited!
Answers: Sadly, there are no answers.
CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY, THE
Peasants, the blind tide who have floated down rerouted rivers, hanging off girders a hundred thousand stories high. Everything everywhere expanding like a great big expanding thing that moves very quickly. In 1998, sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities. We must build more. Build more and capture the last few places until the buildings eat the sky. Wonders accomplished far surpassing Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals, the Burj Al Arab. No one can breathe. It doesn’t matter.
Everyone must live in a pod hotel and eat out. All the restaurants in China full—all the Chinese restaurants full of Chinese people, which, as we know from our dads, is “always a good sign.” Now twenty-four million chickens eaten a day. It’s not enough. Soon they won’t be able to wait, and will just eat the eggs. Everything laced with agricultural chemicals and animal hormones: women buying tits; men growing them. “Western” technology bought or taken. A resplendent Olympics showcasing the all-new Reeducation Through Labor event. Beijing sites of English public schools churning out Chinese public schoolboys. Polo. Party princelings and the rich renew their organs from slaughtered-to-order cultists and Christians. Power brokers chasing “wild flavors” gorge on SARS-carrying civet cats from the wild animal markets of southern China. Businessmen’s prandial panda penises wreak disease and pestilence in foreign financial centers that are no longer houses of finance but merely houses of whores. Kids sent away to see how estate agents live. Kids who now can read but cannot read their history. Teen Vogue swearing allegiance to the party. No longer an iron smelter in every garden—steel plants for all that want them, dismantled and labeled piece-by-piece and shipped in from Germany. Motorways upon motorways—leading inevitably to motorway service stations; corrupt officials skimming off the top to leave potholes and cave-ins for unwary capitalist drivers. Families hitherto forced to work at opposite ends of the country now can work at opposite sides of the globe. A mature society, with proper vast inequality between the super-rich and the super-poor.
They will solve the problems of the countryside by abolishing the countryside. All will be a constantly renewing urban sprawl, an end of days of peasants starving while they feed the cities; now they can starve in the cities—cities leaping through stages of development and redevelopment. And again. A billion five-car families buying wide-screen refrigerators. A billion coal-fired arms dealers propping up revolving African despots. Socialism that you cannot eat becoming state capitalism that you cannot stop eating. Obesity: growth measured with a tape measure around the waist.
Production-producing product producers nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The cheap prices of Chinese commodities are the heavy artillery with which the new system batters down all Chinese walls, bringing home brands as souvenirs. Baby milk. Toys and tractors. Soft war by penicillin production. If only we could make the West wear its shirttails half an inch longer; the mills of China would be working around the clock. The world gorged on cheapness. Wal-Mart merrily marking up marks-ups that merely mark the end. The West desiccated and ruined—everyone reduced to surviving by selling one another their knickknacks on eBay and servicing one another. The rest of the time is spent falling down manholes, the iron caps melted as scrap by kids to send east. Kids once more display posters of Mao. The only good goods the Chinese goods.
Fish, wood, logs legal and illegal. Oil. Wood for wood; wood to make way for soybeans. 20% of the population; 7% of the arable land. Raw materials sucked in from the globe like a giant fishing factory-ship draining all the oceans at once, commodity prices trebling even in the instant that they are sold. Norwegian men fight in the street like dogs, over tree saplings. The West morally outraged by the combination of low wages and environmental degradation. The very idea! Taiwan purchased. A yo-yo of African despots, misery revolving; cash loans and ivory palaces bestowed upon the new dictators. China Radio International broadcasting as Radio Not Free Nairobi. But starvation-waged copper miners listen instead for accidents. More Chinese in Nigeria than the Brits ever had. Hard power. Oil wars. Chinese fiefdoms in the Middle East—Mad Max beyond the Terrordome. Mel Gibson strung up on an oil derrick like Christ.
Jailed journalists fail to report the unveiling of the statue of the Google founders—1,989 feet high at the gates of the Forbidden City, next to the mural of Mao. Under it, the Google motto—now the organizing principle of the Communist Party of China—DO NO EVIL. Kids jailed for Internet searching “Tiananmen.” Twenty years for throwing an egg. Shi Tao—jailed for ten years for e-mailing abroad how the paper he worked for covered the fifteenth anniversary of the slaughter in the square. Yahoo! helped identify him. Yahoo!/Google/Microsoft: Will you let me search “police informants” or “accomplices to repression”? Murdoch: He knows a ruthless money-hungry elite when he sees one. Seek truth from facts—even if you have to make them up.
Party and nation fused; run by arse-lickers, nepotistic yes-men, and old-fashioned bastards. Lawless local government mafias getting fat on the wages of migrants, siphoning enviro-cash to build coal-fired coal burners, just for kicks, state loans disappearing in a puff of sulfurous smoke. Close to two hundred thousand party members found guilty of corruption in 2004—just the careless ones. Grasping at the organs of the living—imprisoned for the fear of funny-exercising Falun Gong. Churches putting party before God in their screeds. The organs of Christians (body organs, not big music ones with pipes—that would be stupid). The organs of the trade unionists. The organs of those jailed for having a picture of the Dalai Lama: Look, he’s “Tibetan.”
Tiananmen? An “incident.” The Cultural Revolution? A couple of mistakes may have been made. Thirty million dead of famine? We couldn’t possibly comment. We prefer to be called the ruling party, as if someone else might get a go.
Acid rain already falling in Canada reaches all the way around the world and comes back. But it cannot be enough. Overproduced stockpiles of baby clothes tower. Workers handed the shitty stick—and are then struck with it if they strike. The iron rice bowls are empty. A communist state that is not as socialist as Germany—spending less than half the share of GDP on its people. One hundred twenty million migrant workers with no welfare. Housing sold off. Mass state layoffs. Releasing private firms from the commitment to fund health care and workers’ kids’ education. But it cannot be enough. Beating back social movements like bashing moles with a mallet. No one can stop this? There are 1.3 billion Chinese who need to consume like Americans. There is no alternative? The Three Gorges Dam—the world’s most costly construction project, its opponents disappeared? “It is not enough! I want a bigger dam! Get me more gorges!”
Onward. Driving u
p commodity prices until you have to pay to stand in the breeze. Everyone is eating everything, and everyone is being eaten. Everyone waiting for the Chinese Elvis. But she is in the army. A billion boys and girls, no longer aborted, playing video games continuously for days on end. Once, kids denounced their parents. Now parents bottle pressure up in kids. The kids lose themselves in online games; generations jump from buildings, believing they can live and die and live again, as in a game. But you cannot repair nature. The air is like sewage. But what do you want? Scenery or production? All relationships are burst asunder except relations to money and relationships to the party. Ancient traditions prove futile to resist and are swept away. New traditions are ratified unanimously by the National People’s Congress. All that is holey is propaned. A man stands stripped bare in a dry riverbed, clutching a pirate Harry Potter with an alternative ending. Everyone is melting.
Well, that’s one school of thought, anyway. Who knows? Maybe sense will prevail. Or they might just run out of oil or get tired or something.
CLASSICAL RELAXATION ALBUMS
No one’s interested in listening to classical music for the exciting bits anymore. Dark, doomy symphonies evoking a Europe awash with revolution and romantic spirits tussling with their demons, eventually climaxing with some big fuck-off cannons going off all over the place? No thanks, we’ve only just finished our Boston Market dinner. And we’ve lit some candles.
Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, with its tormented lows and ravishing highs, was all right back in the day. But never in a million years could it fit into a classical relaxation compilation, advertised with an announcer cooing in weirdly oversensual tones, like he’s spent all his voice-over money on exotic candles and jelly: “Relaxing . . . classical . . . music . . . mmmm . . . mmmmm.”
Silly old Ludwig. If only he’d stuck to that balming rinkydink stuff that’s like sipping a cool glass of yoga, he might have saved himself a whole lot of bother. Shame, because he really must have put himself out. What with being stone deaf and all.
BILL CLINTON
Whenever the Democrats need to add some glamour, they wheel out Bill Clinton. These days, Clinton is seen as the last great “progressive” U.S. president, the 1990s Good Guy who stands up for fine, admirable things like books. But Clinton’s primary loyalties were always to the people dishing out the campaign dosh, like the auto and gun industries. And how progressive was his flagship pledge to “end welfare as we know it”—which he did not by overhauling the meager benefits system to favor the neediest, but instead by quite literally ending welfare, canceling the benefits of pregnant women who didn’t take low-paying jobs? About as progressive as someone cleaning the wax out of your ears with a soldering iron.
Clinton’s New Democrats even invented a new political word, “triangulation,” to denote using progressive rhetoric to pacify voters while continuing to do the bidding of big business. But really, two old words would have sufficed: “telling” and “lies.”
CNN, NBC, ETC.
Who would have thought, when the concept of the global media first appeared, that what they meant was the whole globe getting American media? Really, who could have predicted that?
And why are they always called Bob? The bloke doing the piece to camera in Washington? Bob. Who hands back to the studio—to Bob. Sometimes it’s women. But mostly it’s Bob.
We once saw this on CNN:
BOB: A flood in Indo-Indo-. . . how do you say that, Bob?
BOB: Inda Indakinesia.
BOB: a flood in Indostania has left four hundred people dead with another thousand so far unaccounted for. But first, let’s go back to Minneapolis to get an update on that dog up a tree. She’s a real cutey, too. Bow wow, Bob.
BOB: Bob. Bow wow.
When we say we saw this, we had been drinking so it might not have happened. In case you were going to use it in an essay or something. Or work as a lawyer for CNN.
They definitely did call forces fighting the United States in Fallujah “anti-Iraqi forces,” though. And you can check that. You can’t fucking touch us for that one—so don’t even try. We were on vacation. It was August 2004. Not sure which day it was. They had CNN where we were staying. You might wonder what we were doing inside watching CNN when we should have been outside in the sunshine enjoying our time off. But it was the evening.
COLORS OF THE SEASON
Who actually decides the new colors of the season? Is it God? No, it’s not. It’s actually a global network of analysts and trend forecasters in organizations like the Color Association of the United States (CAUS) and Pantone, Inc., who together form a kind of new black Bilderberg Group. They meet in secret, possibly in Davos, possibly in a high-tech base built into a volcano, and usually let the weakest links in the group—possibly those with a distasteful penchant for lime green—take their chances down the shark chute. Their forecasts influence designers of shirts, paper products, candles, cars, tiles, paints, silk flowers, and lipstick. When they say “Aqua,” the rest of the world says, “How high?” These people know about color. The CAUS Web site boasts: “Pinks and fuchsia were everywhere in spring 2003; CAUS members knew this in spring of 2001.” That’s some serious knowledge.
But predicting colors is a strange pursuit—a bit like predicting cows. Basically, they’re just kind of there; not really getting any better or worse with the passage of time. This partly explains why, describing their recent aqua-blue ranges, designers Narciso Rodriguez and Michael Kors could only really claim inspiration from seeing—surprise!—some blue water.
“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.