£$ Resurrection? Capitalism never died £$

Between Hallmark Cards (JC Hall, founder of Hallmark, pictured at left in his kitchen), and the proliferation of viral discount e-vouchers for [already-very-cheap] booze in the UK, it seems that we are forgetting about the true meaning of Easter. I've been emailed more Thresher's Easter 40% discount vouchers, with tag lines like "long weekend coming up, better stock up lol" than there are stations of the cross, for Christ's Sake!

So, let's get it straight. On Easter Bank Holiday, 2008 years ago, right after God created the Solar System, the Garden of Eden, and Threshers, Jesus was fasting inside a chocolate egg for like 40 days, until we had all sinned so much, that a bunny had to wake him up and told him it was time to hop along and get crucified for our sins. Full stop.

Capitalists of the world, stop f*cking with our holidays. Oh, and readers, feel free to click on the voucher to download, (or get it off Thresher's here) but only if you intend to shop with ironic appreciation of how big business plays religion for loot.

Trying to reduce my car bomb footprint

I see now how easy it is to be swept up in a wave of fundamentalism. I have joined the ranks of an extremist army headed by the likes Anja Hindmarch, Prince Charles and Al Gore. The other day, I was walking along the mean streets of Hackney and I walked past a grotesque 4X4 Jeep. Immediately I felt my blood boil and I shouted ‘Cunt!’ at the gas-guzzling monstrosity.

I admit that I am an environmental fundamentalist. Where once my interest in environmentalism was satisfied by an episode of Captain Planet, I’ve now become more aggressive-about-being-green than the Incredible Hulk. I’m not faultless. I sometimes leave lights on at home, I have thrown some paper in the bin instead of recycling and I’ve taken much more than my fair share of flights. But despite these flaws, I feel rising anger at people who wantonly flaunt the green code.

If ever there was a new successful mass religion or belief system, Environmentalism is it. And its extremists, like Green Peace and Sea Shepherd (who recently accused a Japanese captain of shooting at them) are just the tip of the iceberg. I read this morning that Pope Benedict has just added seven new sins to the original seven and that ‘Not recycling’ happens to be one of them.

If this wave continues to gather momentum, we’ll have a tsumani on our hands. This time next year, even more extreme groups will appear preaching for true believers to reduce their carbon footprints by increasing their car-bomb footprint (in a Toyota Prius naturally).

They say that admitting that you have a problem is half the battle. Hopefully I’ll have the self-control to stop myself from keying the 4x4. Now, if only someone would give me a lid for my recycling bin so that my neighbours can’t witness the weekly clearing out of the embarrassingly large number of wine and spirit bottles from my flat.

In Da House

As an animal driven by a fluctuating maelstrom of wants and desires, pushed and pulled by wave upon wave of mixed media stimuli, it can sometimes take a while to distill the things that you really want from the things you just want right now.

This ongoing process of filtering has recently revealed one indisputable, irrefutable, and hard to swallow home truth; I really want to be a member of Shoreditch house.

Of course, this desire will have flitted across the mental landscapes of many people. Others won't know what I'm talking about. They are entirely possibly the lucky ones, for proximity to the seductive flame of this particular institution probably means that you are some kind of participant in the merry go round of being young, urban, possibly well off, plausibly good looking, occasionally encumbered by tangential links to glamour and celebrity, and menaced day and night by attempting to further some or all of the above facets of your existence.

And that's the thing; I don't want to be a member of Shoreditch house. I know that there are lots of nice places to drink in london, the food's in there's ok at best, the service is slow, and it's full of cunts.

However, I do want to be a member of Shoreditch house. The reasons are simple; despite being well thought of amongst my friends, popular, friendly, funny, and all that stuff, I know that the posession of this one little card will really reinforce how succesful, wealthy, and downright cool I really am. Even though some of this (wealthy in particular) is very far from the truth.

And that's how simple it really is, no matter that your friends have smelt your farts, seen you puke, possibly holding your hair back as you do it, knew you when you were broke, and are still happy to be seen with you despite all of this, you must for some reason continue to tirelessly further inflate yourself in their already reasonably adoring eyes. Or worse still, to inflate yourself in the eyes of those who you haven't met yet, may casually encounter, and need another card to play to reassure them that you really are 'the shit', or, as they will most likely conclude either a; 'a dick' or b; 'just like them', which entirely possibly mean that in fact you are also a; a 'dick'.

Oscar Wilde once said that he wouldn't want to join any club that would have him as a member. Perhaps rejection will be my only saviour from this particular monster.

It's either that or opt out by getting work to pay, and pretending that I didn't gently and discreetly and in the darkest moments of the night, campaign for it for months. Justify, young man justify...

Harry gets sent to the front page

From one Prince to another. This week, I decided to pen a letter to Prince Harry. Here’s a copy of it:

Dear Harry,

I was wrong about you. It was the media’s fault, you see. They made us think it with their headlines like ‘Harry Snorts Vodka’ , ‘Harry’s 14 hour binge’ and those photos for you punching photographers, wearing a Nazi uniform and shagging Chelsea on the beach. Before you went to war, I thought you were just the joker of the Royal pack. Loaded, entertaining and a bit dim if I’m honest.

But now we know about your courage on the front line, I’ve a new found respect for you. In fact, my friends and I even raised a glass to you last weekend. And that’s the kind of respect that’s difficult to earn.

And the media! Weren’t they well behaved, Harry? Well, they were up to a point. Do you know what I heard on the grapevine?

‘It’s surely not the job of the Army or MoD to sort out Harry’s relationship with the media any more than it is the media’s to act as cheerleaders for the Royals or an unpopular war’, Mail on Sunday columnist Suzanne Moore

In reading about you in Afghanistan, I’d forgotten that I’m against the British presence there, Harry. But you’re still a brave lad, even if I think that you’re fighting the wrong cause. And surely the media must have some respect for this too, if they all agreed not to write about your dispatch to the front line?

‘News blackouts happen all the time with kidnaps and the PM’s travel plans. It would be naive of anyone to think it was a first. It just happens to be a sexier story', Head of Sky News John Ryley

Harry, forget about John. But at least you showed that you were ‘one of the boys’, just like the rest of us. Even though you do lead a privileged and excessive lifestyle.

‘It’s a PR stunt, the whole thing has been put together… He was getting increasingly bad publicity from hanging around in clubs and coming out drunk. It happened immediately after that’, Publicist Max Clifford

I don’t care what they say. My new-found respect remains unabated. But Max, he’s got it wrong, hasn’t he Harry? Surely he has. We ALL know that it can’t have been a PR stunt. We know this because you’re just not smart enough to orchestrate this kind of thing.

This would be less funny if I actually spoke Arabic

Sent this to a fellow blogger last week, from the ol' blackberry, in the back of a Porsche Cayenne Turbo in the Arabian Desert, being driven by a Prince - no joke. [Names changed for reasons relating to the fact that I like my job and want to keep it]

From: Marty McSingleflex-Boogaloo [onlyifyouhadonemore@crackdealer.biz]
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:27:13 +03:00

Arabic is funnier when interspersed with english words, like these one from Prince Al-Momonidanyu:

- stagflation
- private equity
- Johns Hopkins
- Alan Greenspan
- M.I.T
- Sub-prime

And he's just told a joke that was all in Arabic except for the punch line which was in English, which was "and he whistles!" which had the entire car in stitches... except my colleague Boney M and I 'cause we're totally lost Anglos in the backseat.

Sent from my Dingleberry Wireless Addictophone

To which I got the following response, enlightening me to the likely story which was being told, in Arabic, unbeknownst to me:

From: Sparky Brightlinks-Frangiponce [causeIwanttobe@thetopofmygame.tv]
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:50:13 +0000

This guy gets out his hopkins on the bus to MIT and everyone starts laughing, because it's like totally sub prime! He starts to blush and says, "hey, this is private!" Equity breaks down and things start to get even worse, as stagflation sets in! Everyone's staring at Alan and his green span reduces before their eyes. But he looks up and they can see in his eyes that he's really a she, and she laughs and says, "yes, it's sewn on, and the joke's on all of you because this is John's Hopkins!"

Pedants deserve to be toyed with.

The landlord of my new office is obsessed with putting signs up everywhere, and has so many security/admin idiosyncracies that I have even been made a number, not a name now. The inane sign in the loo tempted me into a little foldy origami pedant-terrorism.

From Edgy(US)/Nouveau-ditch(UK) to Poncy(UK)/Snobby(US)

Yesterday, as my taxi driver was foiled by a road closure in Shoreditch, due to the construction of the new East London Line(1), I got to thinking about the regeneration of neighbourhoods. In particular, the fact that this process brings on an inevitable blood transfusion for a hood - out with the sickly mullet-haired blood cells, and in with the suited-and-booted nouveaux riches cells - presto chango! (1:East London Line: the sneaky orange line that you never take unless you live in pretend parts of London that don't exist, with strange names like Canada Water, or Wapping - who do they think they're fooling?)

In the gentrification process, someone is always going to feel like they've been pushed out of "their" hood - be it by rising prices, or the fact that they spontaneously turn inside out when within a range of 3m from a Louis Vuitton bag or a blackberry, and there are suddenly significantly more of these around (don't even ask what happens if the blackberry is in a Louis Vuitton bag). So gentrification seems to involve bad blood...but for why like this?

I should know why, I've been there (though that reasoning will soon prove spurious). And in fact I was there again yesterday, in the taxi I mentioned, but that is geographically there, that's different. I mean there, like on the crest of the wave, philosophically in the now, a face full of real politik, on the cutting edge!! Or, that is where I thought I was, when I lived in an edgy, up-and-coming hood, at a time I thought not that many others were doing the same. But as you will see, it's all subjective, this concept of "others".

At any one time, there is a neighbourhood in a city somewhere on our little planet, somewhere on the spectrum between nouveau-ditch/dodgy (edgy for you americans) and poncy (snobby; the things I do for you yankee doodlers, eh?). Which implies that at any given time, there are people somewhere in cabs, driving by, going "this place used to be real *sigh* and people who live here are such wanker-bankers now". BUT the wanker-bankers think they themselves are cool, and so do their friends. And the artiste-hipsters that are being squeezed out by rising prices and coordinated attacks led by sentient blackberries riding Louis Vuitton handbags around think that they are cool too - in fact these populations walk around with self-reflecting halos of coolness. But they feel mutual uncoolness vibes towards each other.... It's basically a chicken and egg question of coolness.

However, it is clear that if neighbourhoods were only full of people who wandered around patting each other on the back, mutually appreciating each others' mullets, or taking their blackberries for walks down to the cappuccino bank to mingle with other brokers, they would slip into a self-congratulating mire of compliments, ego and superlatives, to the point where everyone there would be so annoying that traffic would have to be diverted around said hood because of passers-by wretching in their cars, and eventually resources would no longer get to the shops and houses of said hood (except email, but that can't feed you) and everyone would eventually die (while checking their last email). Also not cool.

So the moral of the story somehow seems to be that we need this mix of people - we need to have square people in round holes, and so on. And I think we can basically close the case on the age-old question of "why can't we all just get along?" - it is in fact a red herring, exposed in all its irrelevant glory, by the much more important "for why like this"?