“Silly Timmy” Chalamet learns hard lesson about messing with the core

"Sacrifice the kook!"

If there is one thing I am invested in, over all others, it is ballet. My daughter has been dancing for the last seven years, hours upon hours a day, days upon days without break. Classical ballet was born in renaissance Italy, refined in French palaces and imperial Russia then, after the revolution, the great Soviet Union, throughout Europe over to United States and all points east. Master choreographers like Petipa, Bournonville, Balanchine adjusting ever so slightly. Master teachers like Vaganova and, again, Balanchine, subtly shifting, pushing forward.

It’s an exact and exacting art, requiring a specific body able to replicate precise movements from tips of toes to tops of fingers and necessitates a wild pursuit of perfection. The daughter spends, on average, three hours a day, five days a week in the studio, when there is no show for which to rehearse. Five hours a day, six days a week, when there is.

There are no holidays.

Ballet, along with opera, orchestral music and painting/sculpture make up the very core of the fine arts, pursuers of each not striving for fame or fortune but rather something deeper. The very essence of meaning, perhaps.

The whole business is much like our surfing core lords.

Derek Hynd, Jamie Mitchell, the bros who boogie Shipsterns etc.

You can image the rage that poured from ballet and opera, specifically, yesterday, then, when Kylie Jenner-Kardashian’s boyfriend Timothée Chalamet slagged the two off as “dying.”

Sitting across from Matthew McConaughey as part of a rabid Oscar push for his role as ping pong player Marty Supreme, Chalamet declared, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera. Things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’” 

“All respect to the ballet and opera people out there,” he continued, twisting the knife further until pulling it out and finishing with the coup de grâce, “Damn, I just took shots for no reason.”

Reaction from the ballet and opera world was swift and fierce.

Megan Fairchild, a principal at New York City Ballet shot back, “Timmy, I didn’t realize you were a world class dancer or opera singer, who simply chose not to pursue it because acting is more popular. Ballet and opera aren’t niche hobbies people opt out of for fame.”

Soprano Candice Hoyes throwing down, “Opera is not Keeping up w Kardashians. I hope (Chalamet’s) movies endure for a few hundred years like opera and ballet … this is why knowing history is powerful.”

On and on and on it piled, harsh recriminations, brutal fun-makings, and sharp truth-pointings, from sophisticated corners around the globe.

A real public barney execution.

I read the savage takedowns of the li’l fella from the parking lot, whilst waiting for the daughter to finish class, savoring them all, then shared a Hollywood Reporter piece on the matter with a wonderful friend who knows Hollywood, surfing and the fine arts.

He simply replied, “Never mess with the core, everyone knows that, silly Timmy!”

Everyone except kooks, that is.

The lesson, at the end, taught by one Kirk Lazarus nearly a decade ago.

“You went full Kardashian, man. Never go full Kardashian.”