Taki

New York The Big Bagel is facing one of the worst financial crises since the city teetered on going broke during the Seventies, when it actually defaulted on its bonds, and President Ford famously told the place to 'drop dead'. I remember being in Elaine's at the time, and when the headlines came in with the morning papers a cheer went up from the drunken customers. Elaine's, the favourite watering-hole for writers and showbusiness folk, was packed back then, at five in the morning. Not this time. I was there last week, hosting a party for friends, and the place was like a library on Saturday night in Belfast. Business at New York bars and restaurants has plummeted by as much as 50 per cent in the wake of the smoking ban, and many establishments are on the brink of shutting their doors.

New York This is a very good time to be in the Bagel. The sun's out, the girls are walking around in their briefest, Central Park's blooming all over, and Miss Monica Lewinsky is on national television performing oral acrobatics as a presenter of a show called Mr Personality. No, I have not seen the freak show, and do not plan to. I assume it is pop culture at its ghastliest, Lewinsky being a typical product of our times, a woman who became a celebrity for performing oral sex on the artful draft dodger in the Oval Office. Some celebrity. Some dodger. Needless to say, the show is on the Fox network, where Mr Rupert Murdoch and his fellow neo-cons have stormed the culture from within and have lowered standards to their moral level.

New York My doctor tells me that the reason I grew a tumour in my head was because of my obsession with Ashley Judd. For any of you living in outer space, Ashley is an actress whom I've never met but have rather ambitious plans for if I ever do. Needless to say, it was love at first sight. Then came the obsession, followed by the tumour. Don't laugh. My doctor is convinced of the cause, and, if Spinoza were around, he would agree. Mind you, Descartes would not. Let me explain. As all of you know, Descartes theorised that human beings were composed of physical bodies and immaterial minds. Not so, said the great Spinoza. In his Ethics, the Dutchman argued that the body and mind are one continuous substance. In other words, the mind exists for the body's sake and ensures its survival.

New York Flaying the Frogs has replaced baseball as the national pastime in this here great country, with Murdoch's minions doing most of the flaying, using elegant words such as weasels, yellow-bellies and slimeballs to describe our Gallic cousins. It is strange how Marianne's reluctance to join Hopalong Cassidy for target practice against a bunch of schmucks using Winchester 73s has spoiled a once beautiful relationship quicker than you can say Lafayette. Forget about Europe, shriek the all-conquering ones, only Britain and Israel matter. 'We saved the French twice in one century, but they still think they have the right to follow their own foreign policy.' Well, however true that may be, I used to think Americans had longer memories.

New York Just as well I never made it down south. For the last three weeks I've been feeling kinda funny, finding blood on my pillow in the morning and having headaches, things I attributed to my Karamazovian hangovers. While waiting to fly to Iran, I decided to go to see a doctor. He took one look inside my head (via an MRI) and told me I had to have an operation right away. The mother of my children flew over, held my hand, the doctor cut out a tumour of sorts, and I'm now home recuperating and happy as a lark. I shall know next week whether this was a bad or good tumour, but – before some Murdoch and Guardian hacks break open the champagne – the doc says it's a good one. This is the good news.

Gstaad Some days you pick up the newspaper and you don't know whether to laugh or cry,' writes Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Actually, I haven't been shedding too many crocodile tears lately, until, that is, a Sam Schulman column reached me via the miracle of the post. Talk about bursting out laughing. Schulman is an American friend of mine whom I once entrusted with running a section of the New York Press, Taki's Top Drawer, now mercifully extinct. Schulman's thesis in a jiffy: anyone who is anti-war is objectively if not intentionally helping to bring about genocide of the Jews. He writes of 'complicitous pacifists', and counts Jews among their number.

Gstaad These are quiet days and nights here, the noisy mobile telephone brigades having left immediately after the New Year. It is a sign of the times, the mobile telephone, that is. One used to be able to tell where a person came from by their manners, their dress, even their looks. Not to mention their accent. No longer. Everything is so dumbed down, everyone so common, one has trouble distinguishing the scion of an old noble family from a coke dealer. Both use the mobile pest non-stop, the former to gossip, the latter for business. Something must be done, but what? The thing is too far gone. I know a young woman in New York who walks around with two telephones, and talks into both of them simultaneously. They say she also uses them while screwing, but this I don't believe.

New York My friend Tom Fleming, editor-in-chief of Chronicles, and a polymath who doesn't tolerate fools or knaves, recently wrote that when he's described as a journalist, he takes it as an insult. 'Journalists are to writers what kept women are to wives ...' The American version of Paul Johnson went on to say that even the old standards of mercenary journalism have collapsed. 'Most journalists no longer even pretend to follow the news. All that matters to them is their celebrity status on TV.' Egotism, rudeness, ignorance and total dishonesty make for a depressing spectacle, and nothing depresses more than today's television, on both sides of the ocean. Then there's politics, as practiced by today's politicians.

Nice to be back in London, if only for a week. Not so nice to have to read about such low lifers as Angus Deayton and John Leslie, not to mention the feuding Spencer family. Mind you, I've lived in England for more than 30 years - no longer, thank God - and had never heard of Deayton and Leslie until now. (For our foreign readers, both men are TV presenters, and both have been fired by the BBC, the former for taking cocaine and sleeping with whores, the latter for allegedly raping various other presenters.) For me, however, the Spencers are far worse. So much for the family values Charles Spencer was going to instil in Princes William and Harry in his infamous Diana funeral oration.