Gawker - Thots and prayers

The dirty snow pile maintains a shred of dignity

Julia Fox scooped her own profile in New York Magazine by a few hours yesterday, confirming on her Instagram page that her whirlwind romance with Kanye West was over and she WASN’T crying about it. A few hours later, New York published a whirlwind account of Fox’s last few weeks, with a devastating disclaimer pinned to the top:

Note: A week after our interview, Julia Fox posted a statement to her Instagram: She and Ye had parted ways. The announcement fell on Valentine’s Day, amid Ye’s public pleas to get back together with Kim Kardashian West. Fox waved away the suggestion that she was heartbroken. “Why not see me for what I am which is a #1 hustler,” she wrote. Here, she tells us all about her so-called hustle.

Embarrassing for the magazine, to be sure, but writer Hunter Harris lets Fox and her people do most of the talking, and they do most of the heavy lifting embarrassing themselves and everyone around them.

Here’s a round up of everyone who this profile humiliates.

Dan Charnas’s exhaustively detailed biography shows how J Dilla changed music forever

How do we explain — how do we account for — the reverence and awe lavished on the late hip-hop producer James Dewett Yancey, alternately known to his fans as Jay Dee and J Dilla? He is celebrated annually with “Dilla Days” in cities across the country. In 2017 the composer Miguel Atwood-Ferguson performed a tribute to him at New York’s Lincoln Center. His MPC3000 drum machine is on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. My brother and I have framed posters of him in our respective homes and t-shirts that read “J Dilla Changed My Life.” Why?

To answer that question, any self-respecting Dillaphile would exhort you to simply listen. Listen to The Pharcyde’s 1995 single “Runnin’,” and pay careful attention to the kick drum: notice how it never quite falls in the same place, how it refuses alignment with the time grid, creating a lazy, lumbering sound. Listen to “Don’t Cry” from J Dilla’s celebrated instrumental album Donuts, which, at first, consists of just a few loops of The Escorts’s 1974 song “I Can’t Stand (To See You Cry),” before being suddenly resequenced at the 40-second mark, as Dilla plays the original sample’s kick and snare drum in a faster tempo. Or, again from Donuts, listen to “Lightworks” and hear what J Dilla could do with a Raymond Scott cosmetics jingle from the 1960s: the way, for instance, that he manipulates the vocal sample to say “light up the spliffs” instead of “his heart does flips.”

If that doesn’t persuade you of the uniqueness of J Dilla’s musical achievement, then Dan Charnas’s engrossing new book, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, should do the trick. In a narrative that is part biography and part music history lesson, Charnas offers a straightforward and simple answer to the question of J Dilla’s musical reputation: he is revered because he “transformed the sound of popular music in a way that his more famous peers have not.” Charnas means this literally. Before Dilla, he says, popular music had two “time-feels”: straight time and swing time. By juxtaposing these, by playing them at the same time, J Dilla created an entirely new rhythm, one that allowed for blemish and imperfection. Put differently: the music he made on a machine sounded human.

She deserves it and so do we

After three years of host-less ceremonies, the Oscars will have not one but three hosts this year. According to Variety, Wanda Sykes, Regina Hall, and Amy Schumer will be emceeing the ceremony in March, a trio that makes sense if you squint a little bit. All three of them are funny, Schumer has an upcoming TV show to promote, Hall worked with Oscars producer Will Packer several times, and Sykes… well in a perfect world she’d be hosting the ceremony every year until it goes off the air due to lack of interest (at the rate things are going, that will be in 2027).

Packer allegedly cast a wide net when looking for his hosts in an attempt to bring in as many viewers as possible. There’s a little something for everyone here except misogynists, and I’m sure that Schumer and Hall will do a perfectly fine-to-good job ushering us through the ceremony. I can’t wait for Schumer’s inevitable Worst Person in the World joke (“That’s what Twitter trolls called me after I Feel Pretty came out.”). But if we’re being honest, this should be Sykes's show.

A personal opinion that I believe to be 100 percent correct is that Wanda Sykes is the funniest person in the world. I say this as someone who has watched a lot of her stand-up and as someone who watched almost all of The New Adventures of Old Christine as it aired. Sykes is so talented that you can watch several of her Ellen appearances in a row and not feel like your brain is about to melt. Not many people have that kind of power.

I’m glad the Biebers got some time off

Yesterday, to celebrate Valentine’s Day, several celebrity couples eschewed the typical dinner date for a leisurely lunch (as Gawker wrote in September, lunch is the hottest meal). This move served to establish many important truths about these couples: By going out to lunch in the middle of a Monday, our A-listers proved that 1) they don’t need to work, 2) they still look good in blinding afternoon sunlight, and 3) they have love in their lives.

According to TMZ, Justin and Hailey Bieber had lunch at Nobu Malibu, easily shaking off the drama of their Super Bowl weekend. (Four people were shot outside Justin’s party at The Nice Guy on Saturday.) The soon-to-be-married Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz also went to lunch at Nobu Malibu, giving Beckham the day off from making his dreary little heart-shaped pizzas. And after cursing the Bengals on Sunday, Chrissy Teigen and her husband of nine years John Legend “grabbed lunch” at an unnamed restaurant in Beverly Hills.

If your Walgreens is anything like mine, it is pinker than usual. For the past few weeks, the franchise near my apartment has announced the approach of Valentine’s Day in several festive forms — sparse ceiling streamers, trampled Hallmark envelopes, and a full two aisles dedicated to heart-shaped boxes of Ferrero-Rochers. After the long, post-New Years drought of seasonal decorations, this strikes me as quite nice. But there’s an element to the annual display that I’ve always found somewhat mystifying: the teddy bears.

One could reasonably assume that teddy bears belong to the same genus as dolls, action figures, and little baggies of goldfish scored at state fairs — which is to say, items generally beloved by children and their caretakers. If the occasional childless adult enjoys them, I’d imagine it involves a nostalgic distance, a collector’s intensity, or something that prevents said adult from living within 500 feet of a school. There’s plenty of evidence for the latter; old Gawker covered those pioneers pretty regularly. But the bears’ seasonal popularity suggests an adult interest in them on a mass scale. The drug stores aren’t alone in that assumption. Earlier this week, Activision announced a “Valentine’s Day-themed experience” for Call of Duty Vanguard players: an operator skin of a “pink teddy bear dress for war.” Just before that, Build-A-Bear debuted an “After Dark'' collection of teddies, which includes, as CNET put it, “a chad teddy bear with a lion's mane and a silk robe, lying on a shag carpet with a single rose and two glasses of wine.” Bring that to a kid’s birthday, and you’ll probably get asked to leave.

Somewhere down the line, a toy seemingly aimed at kids became not only an acceptable gift for adults, but a legible symbol of romantic love. This has been the case for as long as I’ve been sentient, but where it all started is somewhat unclear. Attorney Paula Paster-Michtom, the granddaughter-in-law of the couple who claimed to have invented the toy (more on that later), found its modern-day synonymy with Valentine’s Day surprising: “I have never been contacted about [teddy bears and] Valentine’s Day,” she said. “It used to be about Christmas, so I would guess this started sometime in the 1990s.” The toy itself goes back well before that to a national fad with distinctly unsexy, by which I mean political and propagandistic, roots.