Money Actually

All you need is love. That's what John Lennon reckoned, but he was wrong. Sometimes you need a bulletproof vest too. And sometimes you need a cynical, jaded eye. Often, in fact. Having said that, although love is most certainly not all you need, it is the prime mover of the human spirit and life without it is stale, flat, tiring and - on the whole - depressingly pointless. So when on Saturday 17th January I received an email from Nikki Leigh, contacting me on behalf of Dr Ava Cadell, founder of Loveology University, I automatically assumed that this was merely yet another unscrupulous, self-serving charlatan exploiting humanity's instinctive desire for love for personal financial gain. But I thought I’d better do a bit of research, just to be sure. So I looked up Loveology University online and to my gargantuan surprise, it turns out that it’s actually a beautiful thing! Turns out that Dr Ava Cadell is a genuine, warm, caring human being who wants nothing more than to help people help themselves to become more ready to give and receive love. Nah, just kidding. She’s a charlatan. And Nikki Leigh is her Satanic little PR twot. This by the way, is only my opinion. I know how litigious these American charlatans can be, so let me reiterate that all of this is mere opinion - bitter, malicious, loveless conjecture based on what to my disenchanted eyes are glaringly obvious facts. Anyhow, Ms Leigh wanted to know if I’d like to help promote Loveology University and their repugnant, soulless Valentine’s Day-themed competition to find the World's Best Lover. (Yawn.) You probably heard from her too. I’m sure she contacted every blog on the internet which somewhere features the word ‘love’ or ‘sex’. I wrote back to say I’d be very interested in interviewing Dr Ava and a week or two later, I sent her a bunch of genuine, heartfelt, inquisitive questions, including the following...

If you would like to read the rest of this article, Stan recommends you go here and purchase a copy of The Little Book of Shame. Not only does it contain the article you're currently reading, it also contains around 50 others, and all for the incredible price of whatever price it happens to be at the moment. You lucky thing you.

Telly Which Isn’t All Evil :: That’s Not My Name

I’ve just fallen head over heels in love with a song and I want nothing more than to share it with you like an insidious if garishly ostranenic viral marketeer. Eat my sentence.

So I was watching last week’s Jonathan Ross on television, diligently utilising the frankly futuristic ‘watch last week’s television’ function, and I was ecstatically drawn in. I kind of want to be Robert Downey Jr, which is maybe a bit odd, and Michael Aspel was nothing less than adorable, playing a kind of Green Room sleeping bag, all fusty and sweetly grateful to be unpacked for one last roll in the heyday of prime time. Gwyneth Paltrow was wholesome and charming and a good foil for Ross’s outrageousness. He really is a one, and I do admire his inappropriateness. Telling Paltrow that with his wife’s permission, he would fuck her, takes a special kind of confidence. But I don’t want to be Jonathan Ross. He can be quite annoying. I want to be Robert Downey Jr.

So anyway, there I was all caught up in the well-crafted PR drama of it all, when Gwynnie was packed off with her Guinness (kerching!) and it was time for Music For Young People to play out the show. So naturally I turned down the TV and carried on reading about Wing Chun Kung Fu (which Robert does). (And is brilliant at.) Then I realised I was being slowly hypnotised by the music. I watched for a while, and then I turned up the volume. Then I rewound it and watched it three times from the beginning. What it was, was, I fell in love with it. That’s what it was.

A couple of times, it actually made me cry. It was glorious. It also made me wonder if maybe there was something somehow somewhere wrong, or a little peculiar in that. I decided that no, there wasn’t, and that I was merely massively moved by the music, by the mesmerising passion of the performance, and maybe also by the clump of hash that Keith left behind last night.

Whatever. Here it is on the life-changingly brilliant YouTube (kerching!):



Actually, I can see how some might find it rather annoying and that over time – maybe not even that much time – it could become every bit as annoying as Oh Shitting Mickey. But for the moment I – as they say – am all over it.

It does however, pale into insignificance, next to this.

The Things You Find On the Internet When You Should Really Be Asleep #13 :: Cock Refused Entry

I know I’m bordering on the obsessive now, but I… I can’t help myself… I found out about Horsley’s latest bit of expert myth-making in the comments here and here, which have been attracting some search traffic over the past few days.

In a nutshell, Horsley has been turned back from the US border for being a fuckwit, and his PR machine has flown into rather flamboyant meltdown. Last night at the book’s launch party, Horsley’s publisher Carrie Kania wound up her speech by saying:

‘Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, American Psycho: all of these books have been deemed dangerous by the authorities and unfit for the general public to read. The Sex Pistols, banned in 1978. Sebastian banned, 30 years later.’

What gall. What audacity. What offensive codswallop. Comparing Horsley to Miller, Nabokov and Salinger reminds me of Richard Littlejohn declaring that he was more complex than Tolstoy.

There is no denying however, that Horsley and his people are very good indeed at PR, and sly Horsley himself is just offensive enough to get himself turned away and talked about, but not offensive enough to get himself holed up in Guantanamo Bay with a matching fatwa.

Funny that.

Now let us never speak of him again.