Read Online I can make you hate by Charlie Brooker - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Charlie Brooker
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mansion so they won’t feel cold to the touch. Not that she’ll have touched a doorknob in fifteen years. She must think every door in the world opens by magic at the first sign of her approach.
Under those circumstances, you’d rapidly lose all respect for ‘regular people’ and start issuing lunatic demands for them to follow, partly to keep yourself amused, and partly out of sheer disgust. After all, if you’re going to bow each time I enter the room, I might as well make you kiss my feet a few times while you’re down there.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it’s hard to detect much in the way of palpable feeling in Carey’s music. Her singing voice wavers up and down through the octaves, like someone slowly tuning a shortwave radio in search of an authentic emotion. It’s technically amazing, but almost impossible to relate to on a human level – possibly because she no longer experiences anything akin to regular human life. She might not even experience proper emotions these days. She might have people who do that for her. Aides who rush in and hitch up the corners of her mouth each time she starts to smile, and mop down her cheeks with tiny hand-knitted towels when she cries.
But is it Mariah’s fault if she’s over-indulged? No. It’s yours. You specifically are to blame.
Oh OK: it’s society’s fault. If society insists on treating celebrities like royalty, there’s little point lambasting them for behaving like princesses. It’s nurture, not nature. And besides, the press is probably making it up anyway.
Tales of the cosseted few whistling through an unreliablesphincter into the eyes and ears of the many: that’s entertainment news, that is.
Dubai dooby doo
30/11/2009
I am phenomenally stupid. Stupid in every conceivable way except one: I’m dimly aware that I’m stupid. This means I spend much of my time assuming the rest of the world knows better, that everyone else effortlessly comprehends things I struggle to understand. Things like long division, or which mobile phone tariff to go for. In many ways, this is a comforting thought, as it means there’s a limitless pool of people more intelligent than myself I can call on for advice.
But sometimes I find out my gut assumption was right all along, and it’s a deeply unsettling experience. Take Dubai. I’m no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai’s skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense offshore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from
Super Mario Sunshine
. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn’t enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.
When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I’d been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.
But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai.
Under those circumstances, you’d rapidly lose all respect for ‘regular people’ and start issuing lunatic demands for them to follow, partly to keep yourself amused, and partly out of sheer disgust. After all, if you’re going to bow each time I enter the room, I might as well make you kiss my feet a few times while you’re down there.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it’s hard to detect much in the way of palpable feeling in Carey’s music. Her singing voice wavers up and down through the octaves, like someone slowly tuning a shortwave radio in search of an authentic emotion. It’s technically amazing, but almost impossible to relate to on a human level – possibly because she no longer experiences anything akin to regular human life. She might not even experience proper emotions these days. She might have people who do that for her. Aides who rush in and hitch up the corners of her mouth each time she starts to smile, and mop down her cheeks with tiny hand-knitted towels when she cries.
But is it Mariah’s fault if she’s over-indulged? No. It’s yours. You specifically are to blame.
Oh OK: it’s society’s fault. If society insists on treating celebrities like royalty, there’s little point lambasting them for behaving like princesses. It’s nurture, not nature. And besides, the press is probably making it up anyway.
Tales of the cosseted few whistling through an unreliablesphincter into the eyes and ears of the many: that’s entertainment news, that is.
Dubai dooby doo
30/11/2009
I am phenomenally stupid. Stupid in every conceivable way except one: I’m dimly aware that I’m stupid. This means I spend much of my time assuming the rest of the world knows better, that everyone else effortlessly comprehends things I struggle to understand. Things like long division, or which mobile phone tariff to go for. In many ways, this is a comforting thought, as it means there’s a limitless pool of people more intelligent than myself I can call on for advice.
But sometimes I find out my gut assumption was right all along, and it’s a deeply unsettling experience. Take Dubai. I’m no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai’s skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense offshore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from
Super Mario Sunshine
. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn’t enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.
When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I’d been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.
But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai.
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