Ensamples

Among the worst things about The Slap is how it has fed self-righteousness in all but the two participants, and they already had it or it wldn’t have happened.

But there is Solzhenitsyn, again, with the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart, and there is Dostoevsky, always, reminding us via his creations how we are each and all responsible for everyone, and there are Chesterton and Eliot, because they can’t all be Russian Orthodox for Pete’s sake, with respectively, ‘You ask what is wrong with the world. I am’ and ‘Hell is me.’

I didn’t hear the joke and still don’t know it, and don’t want to. Didn’t see the altercation live, have limited exposure to what’s been said or in some few cases thought. This has been enough to form basic understanding, emphasis on basic, that Chris Rock attempted humor at the expense of Will Smith’s wife, with allusions or at least implications to the infidelities among the Smiths, and the latter dropped one on the face of the former.

Some thoughts.

It wasn’t staged. Chris Rock is a conventionally successful — rich, top-drawing — comedian. Fills halls, calls his own shots on comedy specials. This doesn’t mean he’s always funny, tho it helps.

The way one tops any profession is by absolute, utter, total commitment, to the exclusion of virtually all else, to the work. I don’t think many understand this. You ultimately must literally make it first and nearly only in your life and — again, literally — not, in the end, let anything else trump it on any given decision.

The focus is incredible — again literally, as in ‘not to be believed’ … I don’t have it, and I don’t fully grasp it. The gold medal Olympian, titan of titans of industry, U.S. Presidents, commanders of armies, founders of religions … one must be absolutely single-minded.

One tweet I saw in the aftermath of The Slap [TS] was someone noting that Chris Rock right now is most likely trying to write a second joke that’ll get him hit again. That’s the level we’re talking about here. Everything, including physical and emotional pain, for the perfect joke. I think this is where such comedians as Rock [CR] and Dave Chapelle operate.

Dave Chapelle doesn’t hate trans people. But he’s willing to sacrifice ‘em at the altar of his humor. Conventional response following comedy specials that cause ripples are ‘Aw, now, c’mon — it was just a joke.’ This is just exactly the wrong — in fact completely opposite — view of the joke-teller.

They set aside everything — family, friends, fellowship — for the joke and for even the pursuit of the joke, which is how the fame and fortune figure in as well, at least in CR’s case. He has made his own infidelities a part of his stand-up — in the recent special somewhat baffling his audience who did not know their role for a few minutes there.

Not incidentally, the allusion to his own cheating has to be part of ‘what was he thinking?!’ in pursuing the joke.

It wasn’t staged. There are other explanations for the images that clearly show CR bracing himself for Will Smith [WS] and the assault. Well, and the battery as well, since he actually did hit him. The explanation is that he expected, or at least anticipated the possibility, confirmed as Smith came stalking down the stage, as jetliner on the runway, that he’d get walloped for it.

Ever violence? Well, in honor culture, in this case two black males, it wd seem so. And who are we to judge, right? Entire riots can be justified but one man striking another can’t? Please.

Much has been made of how it was ‘on camera’ and ‘in full view’ of people, both there and electronically observing. This is irrelevant. It wldve went down the same way if it had just been the two men. I doubt either were, in that very moment, even aware of anyone else being there. Certainly for WS, no.

His non-apology after was simply the rote and ritual recitation required in all such cases. It hasn’t happened for some time it seems but at some point not long ago there was a spate of sports events of these sort, esp in basketball as it happens, with many black players — honor culture and ghetto practice, in the heat of competition and unrestrained.

Violence of course is not a ‘black thing’ — few can touch Western whites for savagery through the ages and all the guys I quoted at the start are dead white ones. But it’s asinine and absurd to be blind about how adult black males interact; it’s not infrequently capable of what happened. In fact, I wonder if a white guy wdve had the cojones to march up on stage.

Another image that cropped up in the last day or so was of WS and CR being buddies, palling it up — appearing at the same events when both are active in Hollywood! Imagine. This wdn’t keep one man from punching another and I guess one might have to be a man to understand that but women certainly do kill friendships with violence appropriate to their sex. And anyone, male, female, whatever, who’s endured a break-up or divorce, certainly knows the level of violence, of all kinds, that’s possible.

Of course we believe violence is sometimes acceptable. World War II is a good example. Dissing one’s wife might be another. In between we place a riot or twelve, the Ukraine, someone stealing our car or breaking into a home — even the law itself allows for a commensurately violent response.

Who was right? Well neither, of course. And both. That is, we can’t say. And why do we want to? So that all will again be right with the world? I am sorry-not-sorry to inform you all is not right with the world, and it will not be, and that’s an end on’t.

Which doesn’t mean we shdnt try, a’course.

Neither was right maybe bec you shldnt tell jokes like that and you shldnt in the main respond like that. Of course we will never be tops in our jobs like that, but this is OK and, more to the daily point rather than reality or ontology, we’re good with that.

Both were right inasmuch as CR is a comedian — which we pay him handsomely for so he cd be excused perhaps for thinking we were good with that. We do so not in spite of his offensiveness but because of it. Likewise WS, if he has any idea of staying married even after all of his and hers dalliances, has to pop the guy who said such a thing.

In the end, there is a sense in which the ‘who are we to judge’ crowd is a correct bunch, despite their lack of awareness and introspection, and that most of them are just parroting — as WS’s non-apology — in their role as a public morality.

If it leads to true, foot scrubbing humility, that’d be a good thing.

Maybe means we won’t be as much in the same place as our celebrities.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Can We Tawk?

Comedienne Joan Rivers’ catchphrase was, ‘Can we talk?’ with all that that entails — its rhetorical nature, the Jewish thing, an implication that at least one of the parties will be better off for having done so … Like God. T’other day a priest spoke of ontological remembrance, the immediate and ongoing memory of past-present-future

Read More »

Hide and See

Something lost, Dallas Willard said once, might yet be very valuable. One’s car keys for instance. He was speaking somewhat in the context of salvation, if I recall … the general point was calling something lost doesn’t mean it’s not wanted — quite the opposite. Yet it remains … until finding its way out or being found

Read More »

Greater Love Blah Blah Blah

Do we doubt locals thanked them for their service? I’m not equating the two. They were wrong; glad we crushed them. Only noting it’s likely they thought as much about such things as we do, which is to say not much. German citizens who believed their leaders, loved their country, watched their sons get on

Read More »

Dark Eyed Life

According to @CitizenScreen, doing yeoman’s* work daily on Twitter* relative to the Golden Age of film, today is the birth date of Mabel Normand, Hedy Lamarr, and Dorothy Dandridge — Normand: New York, 1892 Lamarr: Vienna, 1914 Dandridge: Cleveland, 1922 — which makes for coupla at least interesting, if not compelling or fascinating at the

Read More »

Random

Fast Food Nations

Sometimes the blogs write themselves. “There’s a really strong pull … to come to different countries. There is a growing familiarity outside the United States with Mexican food.” (Fast food exec in Bloomberg, Dec. 2015) “They don’t always understand what the food is, or how to order the food, or what the ingredients are. Taco Bell takes the mystery

Read More »

The Simple Art of Murder (Excerpt)

Raymond Chandler In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not

Read More »

Saving Grace

Don’t ask me for grace. Not because I don’t want you to have it, for I certainly do. But I can’t give it to you. Only God can give you grace, of this I’m becoming certain. Grace is God’s action in our lives to accomplish what we could never do on our own. Dallas Willard which

Read More »

Business Card

  Live lean. Altar ends. Mercy burns. Pleasantly surprising. Love to the point of folly. Afflictions eclipsed by glory. Write until your fingers break. Everything worth doing hurts like hell. The individual will be thoroughly misunderstood. Write as if you were dying … — that is, after all, the case. Completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in

Read More »

Related

Finding Level

Relationship finds its own level. Generally it looks like we [and others] choose — a boy’s entreatment rejected, an attorney makes partner, 158 million of us vote — but there is a finality to much that we ostensibly do. This is how such absurdities as determinism gain purchase, how authors can talk and be misunderstood

Read More »

One Day One

The birds start by 0315 here, which is when I awoke this morning. They didn’t do it, make me wake-up, they’re not roosters after all, but it was odd, since in summer-coming season — the annual-but-always-unexpected late Spring overcast SoCal days with weather-people broadcasting [good weather word!] ‘plenty of heat on its way’, or the

Read More »

Events Full

Five weeks ago I gave six-weeks notice at the business journal. It came about five weeks in on the largest weekly increases in initial unemployment claims since the real estate recession. To date we’re just shy of 39 million in nine weeks, with, for me, one week to go. As at least one other person

Read More »