peaks and valleys january 2024: meet me behind club shay shay
there were 525,600 days of this month...
peaks
this was the longest month in the history of the world. and yet, JUST UNDER THE BUZZER, justin timberlake capped off january by saying he would like to “apologise to absolutely fucking nobody” at his concert1. articles covering this would be posted the next day, which also happened to be the 20th anniversary of him exposing janet jackson’s breast at the superbowl only to then use her body as a shield from all criticism for it for the next eighteen years. timbaland may be in the studio cooking up actual listenable music for the first time in a decade outside of a trolls soundtrack for jessica biel’s baby daddy but i will never know. i am glad he is finally not pretending that he has ever cared about anyone other than himself almost as much as i am glad that two britney spears songs have entered the charts again. so don’t forget to stream selfish and liar !
people moved on but i’m still at the oscars where kylie said no selfies with timothee to selena gomez. i love these two little freaks. i hope a24 makes a movie about this. and i hope club chalamet writes, directs, and stars in it.
gypsy rose is free2! from locked up to locked in, she has become a social media sensation! every single one of her instagram posts and tiktoks are doing kardashian numbers! she is also doing a docuseries on lifetime and has released an e-book. to quote the poet laureate hannah montana, “everybody has those days. everybody makes mistakes.” i wish her nothing but happiness, peace, and continued “fire D”.
steamboat willy is now public domain. after nearly 100 years of driving his little steamboat, this version of micky mouse has been keeping his options open. he is rumoured to be juggling offers of a horror film, starting an onlyfans, and being the celebrity vip at fyre festival 2. maybe even all three. and more!
passengers survived their plane falling apart midflight3. in many ways, i understand what they went through as someone who watched j.lo’s new movie trailer. i have watched it so many times, actually. and yet. i could not even begin to describe a plot or what i witnessed in those moving two minutes and twenty-seven seconds. does ben affleck know he’s in this? i do think an emergency post will be in the cards for paid subscribers
when this drops. maybe even combined with an album review for its soundtrack. do i think it will be good? no comment. post-hustlers snub, i will stand by ashanti’s shadow and i will certainly be seated for what will certainly one day be a celebrated double feature with joker: folie à deux.
fortesa latifi (truly incredible writer whose articles i could not recommend more both for quality and topic) tweeted about how she had just interviewed an undisclosed mommy blogger’s adult child. “i just have to say we are not ready for the stories that are going to emerge in the coming years.” fortesa, i AM ready. long time readers know that this is probably the only thing i would consider a guilty pleasure. i am part of the problem and have been a family channel/content consumer, but ultimately have always walked away feeling so gross and concerned for the child’s wellbeing. i still have massive amounts of empathy for even jake and logan paul who themselves were made to be content by their parents’ youtube channels as young adults. but the majority of the most popular type of family vlogs typically features children under the ages of 12. there has never been any children or stories that come forth to talk about their experiences positively, yet content featuring children on the internet continues to be one of the most unregulated and lucrative aspects of the entire entertainment industry. psychologists have documented for nearly two hundred years the fragility of a child’s brain in early development. youtube itself has had to make statements/massive changes because of pedophiles explicitly and blatantly consuming the content. yet other than turning off comments, neither of these things have really changed the number of children vulnerable to overexposure, blurring of reality and fiction, and having their most intimate moments mined for views and public discussion. i fear that, much like child acting not really having to budge much despite people like alyson stoner and jenette mccurdy violently shaking the tables, the amount of money made from ad revenue and sponsorships on “family” content will always prevent any real and protective corrective action to help the children from happening. alas, i will be seated like tiffany pollard on that bed waiting for fortesa’s article to drop.
elmo casually checking in on twitter. 65,000 people had things to get off their chest, apparently!
valleys
someone took a line in megan thee stallion’s latest single, despite it naming no names and actually applying to multiple people, extremely personally. to quote aretha franklin when asked about this person: “no comment.” stream hiss.
polar vortex made the midwest (and me) freeze. not having heat and my apartment getting to about 20F/-6.6C… i think i like this little life….
umg pulling all its artists’ music from tiktok. go. to. hell! what ever happened to good, innocent fun?!?!
“you must have gone to spy school at devry university”: the argyle chronicles. this month, people online theorised that nils sjöberg had risen from the grave to secretly publish her first novel. instead, after years of VERY EXTREMELY STRANGE publishing delays and marketing smoke & mirrors, vanity fair revealed it was not the cardigan clad popstar, but some random british spy novelist. the real victim in this is my favourite nepo baby: bryce dallas howard. she deserves one good project! PLEASE!!!! i fear the movie will be horrible but i will be seated for my girl. (update: bryce, as always, great gowns. beautiful gowns, even.)
aliens spotted in miami / underground jewish tunnel dug / stanley cup frenzy / ben shapiro is now a rapper / stephen hawking on epstein island. ok. maybe we are living in a simulation. i cannot even begin to elaborate on any of these without having my brain exploding but unfortunately these are all very Real Things That Happened. i need to lie down thinking about the inevitable musical collaboration between nicki minaj and ben shapiro and how it will likely still be better than her song with 6ix9ine…
the safdie brothers have officially professionally broke up. (allegedly, they will remain brothers.) the baddest bitch in bushwick just fell to her knees.
favourites
album: revisited MY album of last year SOS by sza. no skips! a perfect january album. and feb-december. but something about it just hits different at the top of the year.
article:
book: ok… despite january being 6 months long this year, i did not read any books other than scattered passages by franz kafka. reading kafka is like reading walt whitman to me. i know all my favourite bits that are highlighted and page turned and they are more comfort than consumption. unfortunately, this did inspire me and i am sorry to report that i actually got back into journaling again. i forgot how fun it is to dear diary your darkest secrets. shoutout to notebooks! big ups to college ruled even!!!
movie: meet the robinsons (2007). one of my best friends and i have nearly 14000 kilometres between us. one way we bridge that gap is by watching movies together that we loved as kids. some of them have been real, to borrow some of my bestie’s vernacular, “fail whales”. but this one was so genuinely good and sweet. i did not remember it being it this good. keep moving forward!
song: listen. 2023 was not a fun year for me. 2024 not off to a great start, either, but we have hope! we always have hope. that being said. if you saw me listening to i can’t by radiohead for the billionth time, no you didn’t…
tv show: the curse. can i be honest? i didn’t really like this show. i love everyone involved and i didn’t have a bad time watching it but after finishing it, i just felt kinda meh. i am so sorry to everyone involved but it did remind me of the feeling i got watching aloha (2015). all the people were behind and in front of the camera are people i love and enjoyed but it never really clicked. it still was the most interesting thing i watched this month so i do recommend it. i did really enjoy That ending.
speaking of curses, what a truly cursed month. dry january is so evil. raw dogging the past year’s failures/growths and hopes for the new year? despite The Horrors, i actually only had one damp day because when in rome, drink josh…
january may have taken fifteen years to get through but february is racing by. going to make the most of it by going right now to celebrate megan thee stallion’s birthday in a god honouring way…
xx
it really is funny how far he has fallen in the public eye since firing his longtime publicist sonia muckle in 2018. without her and timbaland i wonder where that flop would truly be. he needs to go back to the woods !!!!
what if i said she was currently living five minutes away from me. how am i supposed to process That
“when one door closes, another door opens.” -boeing