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Still mourning

Oprah Winfrey's interview with Bobbi Kristina Brown, broadcast last night on OWN's Oprah's Next Chapter, was the antithesis of O's 2009, revealing sit-down with Brown's mother, Whitney Houston. Bobbi Kris's was conducted while standing, perhaps to feel more casual. The ultimate effect was one of discomfort, though, with a jittery Bobbi Kristina playing with her hair throughout the interview. Perhaps this was one subject where Winfrey's magic -- relaxing her interviewee better than truth serum and a magic lasso combined -- just wasn't going to happen. Broadcast exactly a month after Houston's death, Brown was still shaken, and who could blame her?

You can't push a kid in mourning, and one can only imagine the extent of the behind-the-scenes demands put on Winfrey in exchange for Bobbi Kristina's participation. Almost everything, it seemed, was off limits. Topics like Bobbi Kris's back-to-back hospitilizations (on the days of and after her mother's death), her supposed suicidal tendencies, her documented drug use and the reportedly imminent rehab stint weren't broached. Instead, we learned that Bobbi Kristina still hears her mother's voice and considers light flickerings in her house the work of her mother's ghost. She stated an agenda speaking publicly for the first since her mother's death: to let the world know what an amazing spirit her mother was. This didn't exactly accomplish that or much of anything (at least not Bobbi Kris's segment). I don't think it was "too soon" to try to talk to Bobbi Kristina, as some people have charged (as if such a concept exists in our day and age!), but I do think that she's not together enough to have any perspective. That's fine. Save it for the memoir, girl.

Bobbi Kristina revealed an interest in singing and acting, as we already knew. "I gotta carry on her legacy," is how she explained it. Where talent and career path are concerned, that is astronomical ambition. But in a way, Bobbi Kris is already carrying out her mother's legacy. She's struggling publicly, like her mother, and also like her mother, she has a legion of strangers behind her and rooting for her. I don't know what's in store for Bobbi Kristina's celebrity, but if she turns out happy and safe and lives a long, full life, she will have succeeded. Here's hoping.

Bobbi Kristina said she couldn't yet listen to her mother's music. That's in contrast to how the rest of the nation (and many parts of the world, I presume) mourned Whitney Houston's death. Post February 11, her sales skyrocketed, "I Will Always Love You" reentered the Top 5 on the Hot 100 and for a few weeks, the woman's voice was once again inescapable. When I interviewed TLC's Chilli a few years ago, I asked her if it was comforting to her and T-Boz that the rest of the world was grieving along with them over the death of their friend and bandmate Left Eye, as so many people were touched by the work they did with her. She told me that on the contrary, it made things more difficult becuase there was no option to grieve privately. Wherever they went, they were reminded of their loss and implicitly asked to discuss it by seemingly well-meaning people. For someone who found herself in an atypical existence through no pursuit of her own, things have to be even stranger and more complicated for Bobbi Kristina. Just getting through that Winfrey interview and saying the little that she did while remaining standing the entire time seems like an accomplishment.

The stuff with Whitney's brother, Gary, and his wife, Pat (also her manager and best friend) wasn't much more enlightening. Who knows if Pat was telling the truth when she said that at what would turn out ot be the end of her life, Whitney's drug days were over, as far as she knew, and that she was on an upswing. Pat seemed sincere, and certainly at other points in the interview, her candor was apparent (especially regarding her concerns over Whitney's involvement with Ray J as well as her confirmation that Whitney and Stacy Francis indeed had words at Kelly Price's Grammy party). But she also could have been attempting to spruce up Whitney's legacy by presenting a rosy picture. Maybe at this point, no one can the truth, or at least the whole truth.

I remain thirsty for it, though. It's very strange to be so moved by the death of someone I didn't know. I had a dream on Friday night that I was watching a just-taped interview with Whitney. She was happy and laughing and sharp and acting irreverent, like the rock star that she was. I felt such relief and I didn't know why. I then realized that my brain was contradicting the reality of the past month. The disappointment was worth the momentary flash of joyful deceit (in this case, the ride really was worth the fall). Whitney left behind so many of those moments, too. They're terrific places of refuge.

Probably my only ANTM post of the cycle

As I've been saying for a while now (recapping be damned), I'm over America's Next Top Model. In confirmation, I thought last night's Cycle 18 premiere was fucking dreadful. I wrote about it for work, and a tweet I sent out with a link to that piece turned into an extremely unpleasant interaction:

I know people like that person from her past appearances on reality TV (I'm not much familiar with much beyond her name and occupation), but I think on ANTM, she is on some sub-Twiggy level shit. So dull. Here's the commentary on her that appeared in my review:

The biggest alteration arrives late in the premiere, when it is announced that fashion PR and reality TV vet Kelly Cutrone has replaced André Leon Talley on the judges’ panel. While Talley brought cloaks, his own vocabulary (“Dreckitude!”) and a sense of absurd performance (“I feel like I’m in a cinematic moment of something wonderful!”), Cutrone’s sole flash of color comes when she pronounces “aristocracy” as “UH-ris-to-crasy.” She is virtually lifeless, delivering flat line after flat line in a chat forum that demands animation (“It’s an unfortunate picture,” “The clothes are wearing her, she’s not wearing the clothes”). At one point, she describes her PR work by saying, “It’s my job to make them think they want things they don’t need.” If she’s trying to convince us that she’s what Top Model needs, she’s doing a terrible job.

A bit later, I recieved this reply:

There are many lessons to learn from this:

How they lost

I have discovered what I humbly consider to be the most perfect use of the gif wall medium possible: The reaction shots of Oscar losers. As they are broadcast, you simply cannot take them all in since they're spread out on the screen in tiny boxes, and last but seconds. They're just flickers of emotion. I think that placing them side by side on infinite loops works best to fully read the reactions of disappointment, bitchiness, feigned cheer and actual cheer. As much as losing an Oscar (or winning even) is kind of an emotional Rorschach for the nominated actors, reading their expressions is a Rorschach for the viewers. Except for the really bitchy ones. Those we can all agree on.

Below are so so many examples of fallen dreams. Each row is all of the (present) members of one year's given category (I'm only using actors and actresses here). On far right, I've included the reaction of the winners just for good measure. Have fun laughing at their pain!

Millie Jackson is amazing

 

I'm a little late to this one, but I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on my favorite person on TV this week, soul singer Millie Jackson. Her life story took up an hour of TV One's Unsung (basically my favorite show on TV now – did you see last week's Full Force episode?!?). And what a story it was! She got her break by shit-talking some woman that was onstage at a concert she attended. She described her marriage to a bass player like this: "He was a decent cat, but he thought we were going to be Ike and Tina, and the record company didn't sign Ike, it only signed Tina." She gave Roxanne Shanté these words of advice: "You'll be successful a lot longer for the nasty things that come out of your mouth than the nasty things you put in it." She made fun of her own music, lamented her inability to pawn gold records and showed that at age 67, she's still quite flexible (you can see that in the video above).

My favorite thing about her crazy-old-lady-ness is that she's in complete control of it – she knows exactly how funny she is. There's no guilt or irony involved in appreciating this woman. A brilliant singer and storyteller (her Caught Up album, which contains her signature song, "If Lovin' You Is Wrong (I Don't Want To Be Right)" splits its time between the point of view of a woman cheating with a married man and the point of view of his wife – Millie plays both roles), she is the definition of unsung and I really hope that her series-stealing appearance boosts her visibility. I would love to see more of Millie. This senior citizen would be a breath of fresh air to pop culture. Reality show, please.

Some gifs of her wild stage shows and a few still shots are below the jump:  

Anything goes with Anna Nicole

 

Anna Nicole Smith died five years ago on this day, and rarely one goes by that I don't think about how much I miss her. I wrote a tribute to her for work that heavily references her infamous appearance at the 2004 American Music Awards:

 

You can read my piece here. Below the jump, some other recent writing...

A week with RuPaul

(Via Georges LeBar)

I spent (roughly) the last week of 2011 with RuPaul at his place in the "Birds" section of the Hollywood Hills. He was a generous host, and not just with his time (he was inclined to pay for everything, and also gracious and unwilling to engage in one of those considerate play fights when I wouldn't allow him to). As a result, I wrote a profile for work, "The Tao of Ru." Of course, there were several things that couldn't make it into the article and so below is a brief list of outtakes...

Some kid!

 

There was an episode of Made that premiered last week that, as far as I can tell, got ZERO play despite it being UTTERLY AMAZING. It featured the kinda awkward, kinda sickly awesome high school student Jason, who has some kind of degenerative disease that will soon paralyze him (I missed the first three minutes, but the only reference to what is ailing him that I could tell came when he said he was hypermobile, although that just means double-jointed, so WHAT?). He wanted to be a rocker to get "chicks," but then once the cameras did that job for him, he kind of lost interest but still had to stick it out for his hunky Made coach Eoin Harrington (who's "like pie"). For some reason this episode isn't even online, nor is it airing again in the near future (as per a cursory survey of upcoming episodes on my cable box). So here's seven of Jason's best minutes, which are as cringey and hilarious as teenagehood itself.

This is the dumbest

 

This post should open with me saying, "I've seen some stupid as-seen-on-TV inventions in my day," and then list all the ones that now fall short of what I'm about to talk about, except my GoJo is so tight on my head it's affecting my recall. Literally a band to fasten your phone to your head so that you can walk around with your phone fastened to your head, this commercial is full of second-hand embarrassment while peddling third-. I feel like if this guy ever discovered speaker phone, he'd know the jig was up.

This was playing on a screen above a treadmill I was on this weekend. I glanced up from my iPad, saw it on mute, and figured it was a joke...until it went on for another minute and a half. I was hoping it was just a Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie flashback.

And by the way, you can strap a laptop on your head with the GoJo:

He's trolling, right? He's just trying to start a meme of things the GoJo will attach to your head, right? Someone want to get the ball rolling and make this a happy man?

Toddlers and Tiaras: The aftermath

Reality TV has the reputation of dehumanizing people, but my brief experience on it was to the contrary. In the fall, I judged a Universal Royalty pageant that was filmed for Toddlers and Tiaras (read 5,000 words of my thoughts about that here). The episode finally aired this week (I was interviewed for the show, and you can see a reel of my screen time here). Watching the early portion of the episode, which chronicled the preparation for the pageant (as every first half of a Toddlers and Tiaras episode does), was eye-opening, primarily because it was incredible to see the children that I judged actually look like children.

Isys doesn't wear glasses onstage (a lesson from the early part of the episode: her mother doesn't know "how she sees" but is convinced that she does). If she did wear them, though, I would have certainly given her a 10+ on facial beauty. That would have been a bold and endearing choice. Glasses on kids! That is heartbreaking and adorable.

Down with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

 

I cut this up from the VHS source Not Just Fun and Games. In it a Canadian Christian panel eviscerates all that was harming pop culture in the '90s like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and their damn teething biscuits, which I'm pretty sure didn't actually exist), The Simpsons, Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer. You know, everyone who ended up bringing down the civilization that I miss as I type this from a burning ember that used to be a computer.

Enjoy. I know I do. Hell is great!