Al Goldstein

My friend and mentor professor Ernest van den Haag, now also gone, was a big fan of Goldstein’s. I hate to think what those two dirty old men got up to, but I was sad to read that Goldstein died penniless in a nursing home in Brooklyn, the millions he made by the foulness of his business all gone. He lived to shock and offend, but technology finally beat him. Why buy Screw when the Internet is full of what even Screw wouldn’t publish—and in full Technicolor to boot? The ten-billion-dollar-a-year industry he pioneered should have taken care of him once he went broke, but expecting a pornographer to have a heart is like counting upon Charles Saatchi to act like a gentleman. (Incidentally, I read that Trinny Woodall is now accompanying that particular cowardly slob. Trinny is a nice disturbed woman, but rather than counseling people about drug addiction, she should lecture them about dependence on filthy lucre.) The art world is full of rogues, cheats, thieves, and pirates, and in my book the heroic man who grabbed Nigella by the throat is all of these things, and he is most welcome to come and try to grab my little throat anytime.

Al Goldstein certainly made the world a worse place, and perhaps that’s why he died broke and alone and miserable. This means there is a higher power that judges us, which also means the Saudis and Qataris will one day be judged for the misery they are funding via the paid jihadists spreading death and destruction in the Middle East. Are four thousand dead Nepalese worth a single football match in that sandy hellhole? Ask Sepp Blatter and the rest who voted for the World Cup to take place down there. The Almighty takes his time, but trust me, one day, like the rest of us, they will be judged, and I wouldn’t want to be in their turned-up shoes.