Do you think it is good Gwyneth Paltrow has largely stopped acting? Wait – let me finish the question. Do you think it is good she has stopped acting and now devotes her energy to flogging sex dust and vaginal eggs? If so, get to New York, which this week hosts the second Goop summit, provisionally titled Goop 2: Expensive and Expensiver.

Anyone #blessed enough to be unfamiliar with Paltrow’s lifestyle company and the range of wallet-colonic products it sells and promotes should check it out. Past highlights in a “ridiculous (and awesome) gift guide” include $956 luxury toilet paper and a banana guard that costs $395. In fairness, the site changed tack a while ago. It is now full of articles about whether underwired bras give you cancer and crystals cure infertility. You can buy lavish wellness unguents, plus spiritual aids such as reiki-charged aromatherapy mist ($28) and psychic vampire repellent made with sonically tuned water ($28). A steal.

But how do you turn the funniest website in the world into a live experience? The In Goop Health summit promises “a hall of experiential activations, ranging from binaural beats meditations to acupressure”, which sounds like absolute Mordor. You also get lunch with GP – which is Goop’s understated way of referring to Paltrow. I assumed they meant lunch with my GP, which might be good for my health.

GP lunch is only available to top-flight ginger ticket holders, who fork out $2,000. The turmeric class, with their $650 stubs, only get wellness shots and feel-good food. “We’re calling [the ticket tiers] ginger and turmeric, just because we couldn’t think of anything,” GP told Vanity Fair, or VF for those in the loop. It is not a tremendous advert for the IQ-boosting effects of experiential activations. But at least the plebs get a gift bag filled with “Goop gear and wellness swag”. If the phrase “wellness swag” doesn’t make you want to rub cider vinegar in your eyes, there is something wrong with you.

We have all had enough of experts, but Goop has always been a platform for GP’s celebrity pals. The summit is an incredible opportunity to experience this tedium in real time. Laura Linney was superb in The Savages, but I do not want to hear her talk about sprouted millet. Imagine Drew Barrymore explaining why cassava root is the new It flour. A woman who was pouring Baileys over ice-cream at the age of seven. (I know you came back from the abyss, but these are our Baileys years, Barrymore. Let us have them. Besides, there is a vegan version of the Irish liqueur these days.)

I am quite sad I will not be there. I have always been fascinated by how the wealthy spend their money. Is there a correlation between assets and stupidity? Is there a tax bracket that flips a mental switch marked “dog tipi”? I know, I know, #notallrichpeople. But this specific type, the rich and useless, who act out a repressed guilt compulsion to throw it all away on utter rubbish, which the summit will be ... What even makes it a summit? Davos welcomes more than 30 heads of state and government and only calls itself a forum. The answer, of course, is that Goop is the pinnacle of BS.

Goodbye, Dolores O’Riordan, the artist who almost got away

I was moved by tributes from my friends after the death of Dolores O’Riordan, singer of the Cranberries, last week. Their nature, not their number. There were not that many. Perhaps they were more significant because of it. For me, she is emblematic of all art that nearly passed me by.

Zombie had been a monster hit when I was young. It was everywhere and I did not like it. It was too popular and I was too confused by O’Riordan’s voice, which sounded like a stampede of supernatural geese. It was embarrassing to learn later that the song was written to protest an IRA bombing that killed two people. But my ignorance of sectarian politics was not the only reason I could not appreciate her art.

At the time, I put music in the same category as the clothes I wore (combat trousers and a blouse: just blew your mind, yeah?) and my hair (dyed what was meant to be pillarbox red, but turned out butternut squash). It was an identity statement. I defined myself against pop music, which was inherently conservative, lacked rebelliousness.

The songs did not change; I changed. I listen to Linger now and it makes me swoon with recognition. I am lifted off the ground by the ecstasy of Dreams, more rhapsodic for the darkness shading the edge of the picture. I can appreciate the true anger in Zombie. O’Riordan’s solo work shows she never lost her extraordinary voice, the Celtic squall and electric current of it.

Strange the ways in which art can change, gather meaning, as your life takes shape. The way music disdained decades ago can now make you weak with feeling. Recently, I have been going back to songs, books and films I did not get first time around, marvelling at those messages that were waiting for me. It is an unnerving, humbling experience.

Goodbye, Dolores. I was such a fool for you.

Sequel opportunities: George Clooney’s Catch-22

George Clooney is to star in a new adaptation of Catch-22. We must entertain the possibility that he signed up thinking it was yet another sequel to Oceans’s Eleven. A free-associated, cyclically cumulative satire of heist movies, in which the protagonists learn their enemy is not Andy García, but greed itself? That sounds great. Or maybe he just really likes that naming format. If he tries remaking Apollo 13, Buffalo 66 or Fantastic Four, we will know for sure. Set your browsers to IMDb.