I’m doing a very sloppy vomit first draft right now of the first novel in what is hoped to be a five novel project. I’m now at the beginning of the second act and it’s interesting how just by going through the events in the story, things are getting a lot better.
But the point is — I have to finish the first draft. I have to allow myself to get outside my comfort zone and finish something, anything as quickly as possible.
I’m also at the moment mapping out the events of the second novel in the series. It’s exciting because I know exactly how I’m going to do it. I’m going to draw inspiration from a very dark, dysfunctional era in my personal work history. I’m going to smash a number of different eras in my life into a cohesive whole.
Anyway, things are going well with the first novel. I continue to be surprised by how much the specifics of the story change as I make another run through of the outline.
The key thing is, I need to figure out how to use my time more wisely. I can’t just keep drifting in a general direction. I need to be more focused. I need to see this project more as a job than as simply a part of my personality that I work on when the mood strikes me.
I’m trying my best to see things that way, but sometimes it’s tough.
Now, let me be clear — I’m trying to pick my words very carefully so I give maximum empathy to the African American community as a middle aged CIS white male. And, honestly, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t even touch this subject, but The Slap has now officially transcended pop culture to enter the mainstream zeitgeist.
As such, it’s a subject that is both very touchy and something that we need to talk about.
Ok, here’s what I believe is happening with The Slap. From what I can tell, the African American community wants to handle this event themselves. They want to process what happened in their own way and at their own speed. And, yet, at the same time a lot of white people are using The Slap to make points, some of them racist. This aggravates and antagonizes the African American community that is still in shock and doesn’t need the help of white people to figure out what it all means.
So, in a sense, I know The Slap may now have legs because a similar dynamic to the OJ Trial has begun to swirl around The Slap. The white community’s take on what happened and the African American community’s take on what happened are now beginning to diverge greatly.
While not all of the white outrage as to what happened is racist, a lot of it is. What’s more, a lot of fucking racist MAGA New Right assholes believe they can get away with using their outrage over The Slap for a blanket indictment of not just the African American community, but the white liberals of Hollywood, too.
Another sign that we’ve entered a new phase in the discourse around The Slap is people like Zoe Kravitz have come out in support of Chris Rock and Black Twitter has attacked her, pointing out her perceived hypocrisy on assault. I think it has something to do with Alexander Wang.
Zoe Kravitz
The nuance of Black Twitter’s anger towards Kravitz is something I continue to struggle with. Or, put another way, there’s something going on that I as a white CIS male don’t really have the right to root around in.
But, unfortunately for everyone in envolved, now that we’re in a new phase of Slap discourse, things are going to get more and more corrosive and divisive because white America is beginning to see what happened in a totally different way than African American community and people like Ms. Kravitz are stuck in the middle.
Or something. What do I know.
Anyway, I think The Slap is now going to simmer on the pop culture front and the law of unintended consequences is going to kick in. It will be interesting to see what the ultimate endgame for The Slap will be.
Something that I could have predicted would happen, has happened –a growing number of people (at least on Tik-Tok) seem to think that The Slap was staged or pre-planned.
I find this totally bonkers for a number of reasons, even though I understand where these people are coming from. They think it was all staged because of how it helped the Oscars be relevant again. But that’s only part of the picture. Will Smith doing something so outrageous – especially for his career — is just not something anyone with as much to lose as he does would do willingly.
Or, put another way, sometimes a Slap is just a Slap.
All the quibbling and reconning of The Slap says more about the relationship a lot of people have with celebrity than it does any possibility the event was faked in some way. Rather than accept some shocking event, they process it through the lens of a conspiracy to blunt the blow on what they consider possible. It’s mental comfort food for people with a parasocial relationship to Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and their family.
We all saw what we saw and what happened, happened.
This story isn’t over yet and there’s a chance that things could get pretty dark for Will Smith. The future isn’t set and this incident hasn’t fully worked itself out yet.
I have to buckle down now with these five novels. I have to take this all far more seriously. I’m not going to live forever. I want to finish something, anything within a year.
As such, I’m going to have to do something to speed the method by which I develop and write these five novels. For once, I have both the motivation and vision to get this done.
And, people always, always, underestimate me.
They have every reason to, given that I’ve done jackshit in a long time, but I have these five novels mapped out in my mind and I just have to do the hard part of making them a reality, something you can hold in your hand and read.
If I don’t do something, I’m going to wake up in a year and be essentially in the exact same place I am at the moment with these novels.
I don’t think we talk about how powerful Lorne Michaels is in the world of comedy. He has built SNL up from the ground up to the point that he can make or break careers simply by hiring or not hiring you.
Michaels knows everyone worth knowing in showbiz and Chris Rock is firmly a part of the SNL extended family, so I’m sure he’s spoken to Rock extensively since The Slap took place.
Now, logically, since SNL would go all-in on The Slap this coming Saturday since they have a new show this weekend. But I’m sure there are a lot of showbiz politics reasons why this might not happen. This weekend is an eternity in media terms.
And I will note that The Tonight Show — which Michaels produces — barely mentioned the incident. If that’s not a sign that Rock might want to just put this all behind him — and Smith — then I don’t know what is.
So, it’s possible that while there might be some reference to The Slap on this weekend’s SNL — probably during Weekend Update — overall it will be considered distant enough in the past that nothing is really said about it directly in terms of sketches.
In an age lacking both accountability, nuance and subtlety, it’s difficult to process the shocking events of the most recent Oscar telecast. We’re so accustomed to Trump being above the law and the absolute Singularity of crassness that is Trumplandia, that it’s almost impossible to figure out the long-term significance of Will Smith smacking the shit out of Chris Rock on live TV.
First, I guess I need to tell you what my personal view on this clusterfuck is. I think Rock’s joke was tone deaf, but nothing that merited getting smacked over. In fact, the worst part of the entire event wasn’t even the smack itself. It was how the Academy kept going with the night as if nothing had happened. I get that it was a live event and for basic logistical reasons they couldn’t do anything, but at least they could have done SOMETHING to tell the audience that they were aware of how surreal everything was that was going on.
Because that didn’t happen, it gave a lot of grist to the hysterical MAGA New Right. From what I can tell from YouTube, there are a fair number of far-Right podcasts spending a lot of time talking about the “hypocrisy” of liberal Hollywood because Smith was able to hit someone and nothing happened to him.
Let’s get something basic out of the way. A lot of the attack on Smith from the Right comes from a thinly desguied form of racist paternalism. They’re on an hair trigger to attack the African American community and because Joe Rogan loves Dave Chappelle, they, by extension, feel they have to take Chris Rock’s side for maximum racist effect.
But this is an example of how we need some sort of nuance about this situation. The key thing is — there were so many other ways Smith could have articulated his anger at the joke without destroying the evening with violence. And, that, I think is the most troubling thing about what happened — why did Smith do it in the first place?
He’s been in the public eye for 30 years and he freaks out just as he’s about to get an Academy Award. What the what? If there’s any kind of mop up of this clusterfuck, that’s the specific question an interviewer — Oprah? — needs to get answered.
That’s what makes the event so shocking. In real terms, nothing Rock did was out of the ordinary. It was Smith’s reaction that was fucking bonkers. And, to date, there still hasn’t been any real accountability.
Nothing has happened to Smith, nothing that might bite, and all he’s done is released a written apology. Being held accountable, at least in my opinion, means you suffer for your actions in a way that reminds you not to do them again.
I’ve been surprised by how quickly all of this has begun to fade. I thought there was a chance that The Slap would hit the zeitgeist in such a way that it might linger longer than one news cycle, but I guess I was wrong.
The center, at last, has not held. There is no middle ground. Either you’re with Them or Us. Either you’re MAGA or you’re not. I say this because I find myself growing annoyed with some of the center-Left orthodoxy and not really finding any options.
I know what I’m experiencing — negative polarization.
So, I guess it happens to people who anti-MAGA, too. As such, I don’t have much recourse when I grow alarmed at how some elements of the anti-MAGA movement take the most absolute extreme position and then I have to defend it because, well, there’s simply no room for nuance or subtly in American political discourse.
But I’ve picked my side and I’m holding to it. And the chief reason I fucking hate MAGA with a white hot rage is that to be MAGA is to deny reality. When you’re entire political world view is so fucked up that you ascribe superhuman qualities to a ding-dong like Trump, well, you got yourself a fucking problem.
Or, put another way, when “owning the libs” is, unto itself, the core of what you believe politically, that’s not something I can really get behind. In fact, it makes my skin crawl. That’s not a political philosophy, that’s a grunt.
And yet, here we are.
I know people like to say I peddle “hysterical doom shit,” but as we careening closer and closer to the existential choice of autocracy or civil war starting as early as January 2023, I don’t know what else to peddle. The United States is tearing itself apart and an alarming rate and for me, the only question at this point is when the crisis finally comes, do we just shrug and slip peacefully into autocracy or do we have a civil war.
At the moment, it definitely seems like we’re just going to slip peacefully into autocracy. Initially, nothing will change, but gradually, over the course of a few years, America will turn into a political clone of Russia and for a lot of conservative Traditionalists, the only line they have about it will be personal. They will only care about the change in American life when somehow, someway someone in their life crosses the autocrat and they have to deal with it.
Otherwise, lulz. The libs will finally be owned and there will, at last, be no risk of someone being “canceled” simply for being conservative.
It takes a lot to shock me, but I was honestly shocked by Will Smith smacking Chris Rock. I was “watching” the Oscars via Twitter and when I first heard about it, I assumed that the two men were standing next to each other on stage when it happened.
When I realized that Smith had walked up, approached Rock and smacked him full on the face…oh my God.
After losing a lot of sleep staying up all night looking at Twitter, I assumed when I woke up this morning that things would be a lot worse than they actually turned out to be.
Twitter was not full of bad What Does It All Mean hot takes that saw everything through whatever political point someone was trying to make. So, I guess we can all be thankful for minor miracles.
But, in general here’s my hot take on this situation. The joke that Chris Rock said was tone deaf, but it wasn’t bad enough to deserve to be smacked in front of tens of millions of people. The risk of escalation was too great, if noting else. Now THAT would have been a disaster.
So, in a sense, I guess we can be thankful for once that we live in an era of post-accountability. It seems we’re just going to move on as if none of this happened, just like we do whenever we learn something shocking about Trump.
It’s interesting how all the dire predictions last night of 36 hours worth of takes dominating the public conversation have not come to be. We all wake up today and it’s a big meh. What that says about modern America, I don’t know.
This little blog gets about 100 views a day, many of them from people apparently stalking me for some reason. But one thing seems to be true — the traffic for all my political ranting pales in comparison to my occasional showbiz observations.
As such, I have a hunch that there’s an unfilled niche — an aggressively snarky celebrity blog. Now, there are some caveats to this observation. The blog market is mature and the blog media sector is already awash in celebrity gossip and news. What’s more, you would have to compete against Instagram and Tik-Tok for people’s attention when it came to such things.
And, yet, if you were really unique in your hot celebrity gossip hot takes and kept a close on on Tik-Tok, I think you *might* be able to grow such a site organically. But, again, given how mature the blog industry is, it’s possible this is all a moot point.
Despite being an Old, I still long to get into fashion photography in some way before I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. I have an eye for beauty and it seems to me that the one place I could combine my love of beauty with photography would be the sweet spot of fashion photography.
But, for the time being, I’m going to have to focus on the five novel project I’m working on.
And, yet tonight, Kristen Stewart’s outfit at the Oscars caught my eye. She looked amazing! She looked very modern and classy. The black and white ensemble was stunning and she still managed to feature her “pins” as the Brits would say. Her stylist did a great job.
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