Karl Lagerfeld exists on a planet—no, in a universe—entirely of his own. In case that wasn't obvious enough already, here's what he has to say about his little Siamese cat, Choupette:
"She is a famous beauty. She is nine months old. [Model] Baptiste [Giabiconi] gave her to me for Christmas to watch for two weeks when he was away but then I refused to give her back. I thought she was too cute. She is like a kept woman. She has a strong personality. She has lunch and dinner with me on the table, with her own food. She doesn’t touch my food. She doesn’t want to eat on the floor. She sleeps under a pillow and she even knows how to use an iPad. She has two personal maids, for both night and day. She is beyond spoiled ... When I am not there, the maids take down, in little books, everything she did, from what she ate, to how she behaved, if she was tired, and if she wasn’t sleeping. In the nine months, we already have almost 600 pages. Colette had written a lot about cats. I am not Colette, but I think it could be funny to make a little book of Choupette’s diary."
Ah, that Karl...his outrageous, almost alien-like tendencies nourish us so.
Increasingly, we're becoming a culture that feeds on, rewards, and therefore perpetuates the absurd. Of course there are many different forms of absurdity: there's the train-wreck variety (Charlie Sheen, #winning), the idiotic and in-bad-taste variety (a restaurant's "half-eaten face" dish), and the no-fucking-way variety (Bloomberg's campaign to ban soda), to name a few.
The kind of ridiculousness that I'm specifically referring to can be qualified as a) highly unlikely; b) grossly outlandish; c) usually, most often, very expensive; and above all else for the benefit of our entertainment d) not anything that directly affects us or our way of living.
A kitten that can play Angry Birds on an iPad while one of its TWO maids documents every move? LOVE IT!
A soda ban that would force most New Yorkers to change their diets against their wills? LOATHE!
Victoria Beckham's $500 sheep placenta facials? Gross, but pretty amusing.
A $3,333.33 banana split at Three Twins Ice Cream in San Francisco? Who do they think we are?
So, the more absurd—and the less it has anything to do with the rest of the human race—the more entertaining. It's the new theatre.