What’s that smell? Why, it’s Ezra Miller

And Jada is here for it!

Will Smith slapped Chris Rock’s cheek during the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday night, elevating the broadcast into television event that will leave fresh prints on our hearts and minds for months to come. What has transpired in the past 36 hours since the slap? Great question. Please read our previous installment of Slap Updates for context, as I’ll be picking up where my colleague Olivia left off. Here’s a rundown:

SLAP UPDATE 1: PUCK (LIKE THE MISCHIEVOUS SPRITE)

Matthew Belloni of Puck News dedicated his morning newsletter to the slap. He was sitting in “Row F, seat 58, on the left side of the Mezzanine, in the Dolby Theater” that night and got a nosebleed view. Among other things, he spied Serena Williams laughing at the slap and Venus Williams not laughing at the slap, while Jake Gyllenaal and Kevin Costner “just appeared shocked.” The crux of Belloni’s blog was about why Smith was not removed from his seat post-slap. Three sources told him that there was a “serious debate” over whether to do so: Continue reading →

11 new singers went head-to-head this week, and I have forgotten most of them already

Welcome back for week two, songstresses. American Song Contest proved once again that it is the most confusing show you are probably not watching. Last night’s episode had everything: a horrible attempt to explain the show’s mechanics, some cross-network synergy with a winner from NBC’s other singing show, Michael Bolton looking confused, and fellow actual famous person Macy Gray.

This week we got to see the judging process in action, as we learned which contestant from last week was moving on to the semi-finals. ASC’s approximately eight other viewers (not including me) may remember that Rhode Island’s Hueston earned the jury’s pick last week and was locked in to move on. On this show they denote who is locked in by showing a padlock next to their name, just in case you’re stupid.

Hosts Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson stumbled their way through an explanation that, while the jury had picked a top four, America’s votes would also somehow factor into the final decision. The jury, made up of music professionals from all 50 states, five territories, and Washington, D.C., selected Oklahoma’s AleXa, Arkansas’s Kelsey Lamb, and Puerto Rico’s Christian Pagán as their top picks. With the fan votes included, AleXa and Pagán made it to the semi-finals, along with Michael Bolton. Sorry, Kelsey. Let’s see how excited Bolton was to hear the news: Continue reading →

The Flash should enter the deodorant zone

The beleaguered set of cheekbones with violent tendencies that is The Flash actor Ezra Miller has been arrested in Hilo, Hawaii for disorderly conduct at a bar. According to Variety, Miller became unruly around 11:30 p.m. on Sunday evening while patrons sang karaoke and began yelling obscenities. Miller, who uses they/them pronouns, then “grabbed the microphone from a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke and later lunged at a 32-year-old man playing darts.”

Miller paid their bail, set at $500 and was free to leave police custody, though this is far from their first instance of public aggression at a public watering hole. In 2020, a video surfaced online of Miller choking a woman at a bar in Reykjavik, Iceland. Some sources say the choke began as a hilarious dance floor joke, but they were booted out of the spot, nonetheless.

But perhaps Miller’s greatest crime lies beyond the purview of the law: their smell.

Gawker’s very own Allie Jones profiled Miller for GQ in 2018 at their farm in Vermont, where “the air is thick with the promise of new life, and the hay floor is dotted with goat shit.”. Jones reported Miller smelled like “cigarettes and not deodorant.” Continue reading →

A new HBO Max show about the cooking legend promises more of the same

I wasn’t born a food writer, but I became one through Julia Child. Watching episodes of her cooking shows on repeat on PBS with my grandmother, I found comfort in Child’s expressive, high-pitched voice and clumsy foibles in the kitchen. I don’t know who I would be as a person or a writer if, at a very young age, I hadn’t watched this woman on television eating voraciously, without a shred of self-consciousness — and if I hadn’t, by extension, consumed my grandmother’s love through her own cooking. Those two experiences are inextricably linked for me, a tale as true as it is cliché.

Child left a deep mark on food culture in the United States, on scales both personal and much grander. The structure of cooking shows that she helped invent through her seminal The French Chef still persists today. She was 51 years old when the show debuted in 1963, and she continued to be a presence on television and beyond until late into her eighties — through more than a dozen shows and 16 cookbooks — proving that a woman didn’t have to become invisible as she aged.

Her role as a pivotal cultural figure has been documented, examined, and celebrated at length, over and over and over again. In recent years, especially, there has been a renewed interest in reviving Child for the screen. Meryl Streep defined the role in the 2009 film Julie & Julia. A documentary chronicling Child’s life came out last year. A competition show called The Julia Child Challenge, in which home cooks are tasked with completing culinary challenges inspired by Child, is currently airing on Food Network. On March 31, a new series titled, simply, Julia — starring Sarah Lancashire in the titular role, and recounting Child’s unlikely rise to public television stardom — premieres on HBO Max. The more that American gastronomy has changed in the nearly 60 years since The French Chef was first broadcast on WGBH in Boston, it seems, the more we are still treated to Child’s memory. Don’t forget to be grateful to Julia! the seemingly never-ending retellings of her story suggest. Continue reading →

The joys of having stuff

There’s a store out here in the Southwest called Zia Records. They have locations in Vegas, Tucson, and Phoenix. I played a “show” there once with my drum teacher in high school, though I really can’t begin to recall let alone describe what that show consisted of. Playing along to tracks on a drum kit in the back of the room while people tried to browse, if I had to guess. What I do remember, very clearly, is the feeling I had when I walked into that store for the first time: I thought it was the dumbest place in the world.

Racks and racks of CDs and vinyl, shelves stuffed with DVDs and used books, that humid smell of old paper and human breath. I missed the physical media indoctrination by a long shot. The closest you’d ever find me coming to fetishistic object worship was my iPod Classic, which I still stand by. Fast forward a decade: Vinyl sales are booming, available from the biggest artists in the world at your local Target. People are buying physical books again. CD sales are up for the first time in almost twenty years. Somehow, cassette tapes are still being made.

The gloss and promise of a digital utopia has clearly worn off a bit. Rather than bridge the gap between clunky, space-gobbling stuff and invisible, frictionless content, companies have dug in, bet big on streaming, shuffling titles and rights about like divorced parents trading children, while also trying to capitalize on the aesthetic nostalgia for earlier eras (’80s neon and synths, ’90s hip hop and grunge, etc), when things were more analog. Continue reading →