Althouse

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• "Did you notice Bill Maher did a 'new rules' that was all about toxic masculinity and then two days later Will Smith did that thing? I feel like maybe he was influenced by Bill Maher a little."
• The revenge of Uncle Fluffy.
• "When Gramsci was four, a boil on his back began hemorrhaging, and he nearly bled to death. His mother bought a shroud and a small coffin.."
• Must I cover the Will Smith resigns! story?

"Did you notice Bill Maher did a 'new rules' that was all about toxic masculinity and then two days later Will Smith did that thing? I feel like maybe he was influenced by Bill Maher a little." Posted: 02 Apr 2022 09:26 AM PDT Said my son Chris, sending me this clip from Maher's March 25th show:    My response on watching that was: "Wow. That was very pro violence and for the wrong reason/I see your point re smith/And many people, especially women, supported smith." One can't know if Will and Jada caught that episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher." I'm just saying that, watching the clip, I easily imagined them watching the show and then arriving at the idea that Will ought to stomp up on the stage and whack Chris Rock in the face. Now, here's how Bill Maher talked about the incident on the new episode of his show, which aired last night:   "I just want to say to Will Smith: I got your back. April Fool's. You're a dick."

The revenge of Uncle Fluffy. Posted: 02 Apr 2022 08:11 AM PDT This is another piece in the NYT about Will Smith — it's by Melena Ryzik, Nicole Sperling and Matt Stevens — and I think it's worth reading, because it raises the more general problem of what happens to a person who chooses the strategy of niceness: From his start as a goofy, G-rated rapper and sitcom star through his carefully managed rise as a blockbuster action hero, Will Smith has spent decades radiating boundless likability. But his amiable image was something of a facade, he wrote in his memoir, noting that a therapist had nicknamed his nice guy persona "Uncle Fluffy."... Mr. Smith wrote that he had another, less public, side: "the General," a punisher who emerged when joviality didn't get the job done. "When the General shows up, people are shocked and confused," he wrote in "Will," his 2021 memoir. "It was sweetness, sweetness, sweetness and then sour, sour, sourness." I'm interested in the wages of niceness. You can try to be nice, but if it's a strategy — a means to an end — it's only going to work until you snap or — even if you never snap — it can fail because other people perceive you as phony or because they may rely on you to keep up the niceness charade while they proceed to take advantage of you more and more.   Remember the "Queen of Nice"? Who was that? Rosie O'Donnell? Ellen DeGeneres? Neither of them turned out to be very nice, and maybe deploying the "nice" persona made them even less nice than they'd have been if they'd gone ahead and been straightforward. And yet, where would they be if they hadn't played "nice"? Where would Will Smith be? Would he have been a big success in rap music if he hadn't taken the "goofy, G-rated" lane? But most of that NYT article is about how he's hurt his family's brand, which was "rooted in his seemingly-authentic congeniality": For several years, a growing branch of Smith family enterprises has adeptly delivered reality-style revelation and emotional intimacy across an expanding number of platforms. Beyond Mr. Smith's acting career and his introspective, best-selling memoir, there is the popular "Red Table Talk" show on Facebook Watch, in which Ms. Pinkett Smith, their daughter, Willow, and Jada's mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, hold forth on everything from racial identity to workout routines to the Smiths' unconventional marriage.... How they sold that "unconventional marriage" as part of a "goofy, G-rated" "congeniality," I don't know. I haven't been watching. I'm surprised by what counts as wholesome and mainstream sexuality these days.   "I think most people would give him the benefit of the doubt," said [Jonathan] Murray, a co-founder of the production company Bunim Murray, which pioneered reality TV. "But it really will rest on whether we believe that he is authentically dealing with this." There's that word "authentic" again — used, again, not to mean actual authenticity, but the perception of  authenticity. It's  "seemingly-authentic" and "whether we believe" we're seeing authenticity. The authenticity can be completely phony baloney, but the question is, are we — the idiots on the sofa — buying it?

"When Gramsci was four, a boil on his back began hemorrhaging, and he nearly bled to death. His mother bought a shroud and a small coffin.." Posted: 02 Apr 2022 06:39 AM PDT "... which stood in a corner of the house for the rest of his youth. As Gramsci's latest biographer... reports...  Gramsci was buckled for hours each day into a leather harness contraption that hung from the rafters, intended to repair his spine. He hardened himself with tests of endurance, such as hammering his fingers with a stone until they bled. He kept a pet hawk, and idolized the Sardinian bandit Giovanni Tolu, who outfoxed the local Carabinieri. At school he was rebellious and insolent. Once, he had a dispute with a teacher who did not believe Gramsci had found a monstrous, snakelike lizard with feet. (He had: It was an ocellated skink.)" From "The Unlikely Persistence of Antonio Gramsci/No one understood political battle lines better than a Communist politician from Sardinia" (TNR).

Must I cover the Will Smith resigns! story? Posted: 02 Apr 2022 06:41 AM PDT This is a story that hit the NYT about 30 seconds after I put up last night's café post. The café post, for me, says I'm down for the night, and I'll see you in the morning. Carry on the conversation without me.  I could see that the first comment brought up the story. Yeah, I know I can put a post on top of the café post. I do that occasionally. But I am not veering from my path because Will Smith did one more thing.  He'd like to control the narrative, and he chose this action. If I could see who advised him and hear how they gamed it out, I would be much more interested. From the Times article: Mr. Smith's resignation came roughly 12 hours after Will Packer, the lead producer of the Oscars telecast... said he had learned from his co-producer, Shayla Cowan, that there were discussions of plans to "physically remove" Mr. Smith from the venue....  "I was advocating what Rock wanted in that time, which was not to physically remove Will Smith at that time," Mr. Packer said. "Because as it has now been explained to me, that was the only option at that point. It has been explained to me that there was a conversation that I was not a part of to ask him to voluntarily leave." But then we're told: Someone close to Mr. Rock who asked to speak anonymously because the Academy's inquiry into the incident is ongoing said that Mr. Rock was never asked directly if he wanted Mr. Smith removed. Had he been asked, it was not clear how Mr. Rock would have responded, the person said. Mr. Rock was only asked if he wanted to press charges, and he said that he did not, the person said. So Packer seems to have gotten that wrong. Packer also blames Rock and Rock alone for the hair joke: In the interview, Mr. Packer also said that Mr. Rock's joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair was unscripted "free-styling." "He didn't tell one of the planned jokes," he said of Mr. Rock.... I'm seeing an effort to encapsulate Rock and move him off into the distance. I'm guessing Smith's advisers were taking that into account and maybe influenced Packer to say that. I assume there is collusion between Smith and the Academy and there's a plan to rehabilitate him, with this resignation as a device to move the public mind into the right position.  Mr. Packer said that, like many viewers at home, he had originally thought the slap might be part of an unplanned comedic bit, and that he was not entirely sure until he spoke with Mr. Rock backstage that Mr. Smith had actually hit the comedian. "I just took a punch from Muhammad Ali," Mr. Packer recalled Mr. Rock telling him.... Rock said "punch"!   Asked if, after hearing Mr. Smith's acceptance speech, he wished that the actor had left the ceremony, Mr. Packer said that he did, noting that Mr. Smith had not used his remarks to express real contrition and apologize to Mr. Rock. "If he wasn't going to give that speech which made it truly better, then yes, yes," Mr. Packer said when asked if he wished Mr. Smith had left the ceremony. "Because now you don't have the optics of somebody who committed this act, didn't nail it in terms of a conciliatory acceptance speech in that moment, who then continued to be in the room." Read that twice. It's close to gobbledygook. I think Packer is saying Smith's acceptance speech was not what they'd have been hoping for if that was the reason why they let him stay. It didn't "make it truly better," so now the Academy is stuck with bad "optics."  If the cold transcript makes Packer seem like a propagandist for Hollywood, you might, like me, want to look up the video to hear the intonation and see the demeanor. I know I did. Here: ADDED: Watching the interview, I'm getting a stronger impression that Packer is working to help reincorporate Smith into the Hollywood community. I'm inclined to reinterpret what I called "close to gobbledygook" to mean the opposite of what I wrote above. Watch and see how the interview proceeds. Packer is trying to help Smith and the Academy and iron out the whole dispute. That is his role, and though he's not an actor — he's a producer — he knows how to play it.

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