This is The Friday Post, Hung Up’s weekly roundup of celebrity mess and miscellanea. If you like this kind of thing, why not subscribe? Tonight’s email, like many, will simply be cut off by your email so for the full read, click here.
Britney Spears was allowed to deliver a statement in court on Wednesday, and asked the judge to release her from the conservatorship that allows her flop father to run (ruin) her life. The court live streamed the statement for the media, and Variety has a transcript of her full statement. It is an urgent, heartbreaking read. This family! Their lies!
The local ghouls Perez Hilton and Justin Timberlake both had “supportive” “words” to add to a conversation that does not involve them.
One of these men was run off TikTok by teens who knew better, and the other one’s career should’ve ended after he begged for any awards attention for The Social Network! And for the Trolls song — darling …. Azkaban. In the words of Allie Jones, “I hope Britney figures out a way to sue [Justin], too!”
Meanwhile, the New York Times has a new report on the depth of the manipulation against Britney Spears and her own interests, starting with her attorney Samuel Ingham. Basic facts about her conservatorship have not been communicated to her. Her lawyer, who she pays and was not allowed to select, hasn’t addressed many of Britney’s own concerns with the court.
I hate these evil men! They deserve their flop era!
Anyway: Azealia Banks, who is right about a great many things, had this to add:
What paid subscribers got this week
I love Closer. I love Bennifer. The power of those two things intersecting here, on this Earth, on this internet? You know I’m turned all the way up.
And something I stunningly had not considered, courtesy of Miriam Bale:
Rihanna and her boyfriend were nearly denied entry to Barcade in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) because they didn’t have ID.
Alec Neimand @lgforkman
I just saw a bouncer try to not let rihanna into a bar for not having id lmaoooo whose mans is thisI’m told the Pussy Posse needs a voided check and completed W9 form and the direct deposit should be hitting the bouncer’s account shortly.
Nick Cannon has fathered four children in less than a year. Four children! In less than a year!
I did just try to find this to no avail, but someone tweeted that he’s not having babies he’s building a fanbase.
It looks like my calendar was nearly correct! Julie Delpy has passed on a fourth installment of the Before films, she told the French outlet Teledrama. The Playlist aggregated the news here:
The Sports Section
Scottie Pippen, who, iconically, “wasn’t gonna fuck [his] summer up,” was interviewed by GQ this week. This was my favorite part that requires absolutely no basketball knowledge:
Three points I would like to linger on, because the have brought me so much joy.
“I don’t know nobody he done whooped.”
“Did I apologize to him?”
“That’s what I recall.”
This has been the sixth and final edition of Hung Up’s sports section, at least until I have time to watch more Olympic trials or until my favorite basketball player Ray Allen posts another selfie.
I do love this artist named Vin Diesel, who did what he needed to do. Via Men’s Health:
Your Weekly Sharon!!!!!!!
An irregular feature where we catalog Sharon Stone’s utter genius.
This week, Sharon Stone was trending for discussing Meryl Streep in an interview published in the Canadian magazine Zoomer in May. The original tweet resurfacing the interview is here, but it’s worth reading more of the article, including the question Stone was answering. This framing is bad; the question, as posed, is weird:
I mean, true! Have you seen their scene together in The Laundromat? Is it not controversial to say that one person is truly hilarious and excellent in that scene, and that person is not Meryl. She is fine in it, playing a character very close to her Big Little Lies character, and I don’t feel like that any big tragedy. (I do not recommend watching any part of The Laundromat but that scene. Devoted Hung Up readers will recall me saying: “I love Steven Soderbergh, and he has never embarrassed me! Then I remember the last scene of The Laundromat. If a man has not embarrassed you, he just hasn’t embarrassed you yet.”)
I find this to be a really generous, smart answer to a question that reifies the exact sexism Stone spends a lot of time in her book complaining about.
Sharon!!!!!!!! was factually incorrect when she called Cher ugly. But I don’t see anything she’s wrong about here: The hagiography around Meryl is to everyone’s detriment.
I don’t see Sharon!!!!!!!! saying that anyone should have Meryl’s status, or that any of the women she lists are underappreciated. It’s that that prized status, itself, is bogus. People talk about Meryl Streep in a way they don’t talk about other working actors. It’s beyond appreciation or praise; it’s in a way that’s removed, oftentimes, even from a discussion of her work.
What’s more: this idea that Sharon “finally” got to work with someone, in a way that’s status-affirming and not personally-affirming for her as an artist, is just so insulting. She’s Sharon fucking Stone!
Okay now 😇 Let me get off my soapbox 😇
Yes I did just tell a lie — one tangential detail of that Sharon Stone interview is that the tweet was circulating on Meryl Streep’s birthday. When a Hung Up reader tagged me in the replies, requesting coverage in this week’s Friday Post, someone else chimed in:
What is the expectation here? Not this fantasy that Meryl Streep logs onto Twitter...
Anthony Hopkins up to his old tricks I see…
I have not watched Master of None’s third season because (a) I am watching too many things right now and (b) under no circumstances am I choosing to watch Lena Waithe act.
But still I did enjoy this show once, and it made a few of my friends from high school think the neighborhood I subletted an apartment one summer was cool. (That absolutely crazy Baby’s All Right scene where, if I recall correctly, a woman suggested stealing other people’s coats … for fun?) The show’s second season was less great; generally, pre-the Babe.net story, something hard to pinpoint happened to Aziz’s comedy. This piece in The Nation, by Vikram Murthi, is so smart and good:
“Sometimes Master of None made good-faith efforts at examining race or religion, probably because they came from a personal place, but his fixation on positioning himself on the ‘correct’ side of the sociopolitical zeitgeist betrayed a dramatic pledge of fealty to a presumed white, liberal audience,” he writes. “A charitable reading of this shift was a sincere attempt to “grow” through his work. In practice, however, it often felt like a performance of progressive virtue, constantly trying to hit the proper notes without ever really playing the music.”
I click Darian Harvin’s newsletter, BEAUTY IRL, the moment it hits my inbox. She’s doing a new summer series called “Beauty Take” where she sends “a beauty Instagram post, TikTok, Tweet, image, video, or weird emblem on the internet that’s sparking discussion.” These micro dispatches are usually funny, or thought-provoking.
Wednesday’s Beauty Take was the last slide of this Instagram post, and I have been laughing at it for a full hour.
You can see more from BEAUTY IRL here.
The truly inspirational friend, author, and fellow Oklahoe JP Brammer recommended Hung Up in the New York Times this week:
🤮 but!!!!
I visited the set of Gossip Girl for New York Magazine’s TV issue. I’m sorry to be so grossly emo but: I have been working on this story for most of my life! Since I was 12-years-old and put on punishment for reading the books, and had to download every episode of season one on iTunes to watch in secret! I guess what I mean is: disobeying pays, kids!!!!
Reading the iconic NYM cover story about GG was formative. (Ditto, the Reality Index.) It’s still one of my favorite stories ever to re-read. I remember seeing that magazine and feeling like my taste was somehow justified, that this was a show that was really good, not just good-to-me-only.
Maybe we should do a discussion thread the night the premiere airs? I have so many thoughts about this show and I can’t wait to discuss it with you all here.
That’s all this week! Thank you for reading. Tell someone you know to Listen to Hanna and #BlockShaunKing. This weekend I am watching The Lizzie Mcguire Movie.
About Miss Britney Spears: I was expecting the industry to be a *bit* more vocal/reactive about her statement. Her exhaustion was felt. Hopefully she gets peace and privacy.
Also, Riri and her boyfriend…😆