Month: February 2022

Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott have welcomed their second child together, a baby boy. Jenner announced the news on her Instagram, sharing his birth date, “💙 2/2/22.” You can see the announcement post here, and the first photo of Scott and Jenner’s new addition. Big sister Stormi, 3, holds onto her brother’s hand in the shot. Jenner did not reveal her son’s name in the post.

Jenner and Scott did not know their baby’s gender. Jenner shared that news herself in her Vogue 73 Questions video when asked about if they had any baby names in mind. “Well, we need to find out the gender first [before we choose a name], and we decided to wait,” she said.

In late December, a source told Us Weekly that Jenner and Scott’s private relationship was flourishing ahead of their baby’s birth.

“She feels incredibly confident and is so overjoyed about expanding her family and becoming a new mom again,” the source said.

They continued, “Kylie has never felt more prepared for something in her entire life. Kylie and Travis are so elated to be on this journey again together….They are so in love with each other. They share a special bond as parents that no one else can touch.”

Jenner announced the news that she was expecting her second child in September. You can see her announcement video here on her Instagram. A source told E! at the time that Kylie had initially planned a red carpet pregnancy reveal at the September 2021 Met Gala. “[It] didn’t work out the way she had hoped,” the source said.

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Spoilers for Euphoria below.

The past few weeks, Euphoria has served up an assortment of everyone’s problems, including Cassie and Nate, Maddy and Nate, Fez and Lexi, Jules and Elliot, and even Cal’s harbored dilemmas; but tonight’s episode is all about Rue, and all the trouble she’s gotten herself into.

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At home, all hell has broken loose. Rue’s mother, Leslie, has found out her daughter is back on drugs. And worse, Rue’s suitcase stash–which she’s supposed to be selling but is using herself–is missing. Rue suspects that Gia ratted her out. She barrages her little sister with insults then targets Leslie, blaming her so-called bad parenting for her drug use. But it turns out, Jules was the one who told Leslie the truth.

Now Rue is irate. It also doesn’t help that she’s suffering from withdrawal. She’s madly scouring the house for her pills, knocking down tables and throwing things across the room. She’s in a screaming match with her mother, and when things escalate, her mom slaps her across the face and pushes her out, closing the door shut behind her. Still desperate to learn where her pills are, Rue screams and kicks on the door repeatedly, banging against it until it opens. By now, Leslie and Gia are sobbing on the bed together. Rue, exhausted, drops to the floor, crying and apologizing. And we’re only about five and a half minutes in. The sequence is so jarring and uncomfortable to watch–it’s impossible to root for Rue when she’s treating the people who love her with such hostility–but that’s just a testament to Zendaya’s committed, uninhibited performance. (Do we smell another Emmy?)

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Rue is still looking for those pills, though. “What did you do with them?” she demands her mom. “Flushed them down the toilet,” a voice calls out from the living room. Rue pauses. It’s Jules; she and Elliot have been here the whole time and they heard everything.

Jules is in the line of fire next. Rue resents her for snitching. Taking it further, she blames Jules for leaving her when she was at her lowest. Jules insists she loves Rue and wants to help her get better, but Rue won’t buy it. (Just wait until she finds out Jules was making out with Elliot.) Meanwhile, Elliot regrets opening his mouth. It wasn’t even his place to get involved, he says.

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Rue ultimately gives in and lets her mom drive her to the ER. But when she learns Leslie is trying to take her to rehab again, she wants out. Rue opposes the idea so much that she bolts out of the car and runs into traffic. Her mom and sister are screaming for to get back in the vehicle, but it’s too late. Rue is on the run.

She makes it to the Howard residence, where Lexi answers the door. Her mom Suze, Cassie, Maddy, and Kat are home too. Rue plays it cool and asks to use the bathroom, but Lexi and her mother sense something’s wrong. Upstairs, Rue rummages through the medicine cabinets for pills she can steal. She ends up taking a pair of earrings too–she can use the jewelry to pay what she owes to drug dealer Laurie. On her way out, Rue finds her own mother at the bottom of the stairs, along with the Howards and their guests. Rue still doesn’t want to go to rehab, though, so after Cassie gives her some well-meaning but patronizing advice, Rue causes a diversion: She reveals Cassie is sleeping with Maddy’s ex, Nate. (It’s happening!) She says shortly after New Year’s, she saw Cassie getting into Nate’s car, kissing him, and then them driving off together.

Cassie tries to laugh off the accusation, but it’s no use. Maddy is fuming and looks ready to kill her. “I’m literally going to get violent,” she threatens. Maddy and her perfectly manicured nails get in Cassie’s face and the confrontation is everything but physical before Cassie runs to her room. Maddy and Kat are on her tail, of course. While the girlies are fighting, Rue is out the door. Sadly, that’s all we get for now of the long awaited Maddy-Cassie face-off. I was waiting for a bigger, more dramatic blow-up (viewers on Twitter in recent weeks were certainly ready for Maddy to kick Cassie’s ass) but instead, the big reveal became a casualty of Rue’s intervention gone awry. Perhaps we’ll get more of that next week, though.

HBO

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Rue heads to Fez’s house next, but when she tries to steal pills from him, he won’t allow it and kicks her out. Then, she breaks into a nearby couple’s home and pockets more jewelry and some cash until the owners come back earlier than expected. The husband finds her under the bed but she bolts out the door again. Next, the cops chase her around town after she hurls on the street. After dashing through a wedding, a car shop, more moving traffic, and a few backyards Ferris Bueller-style, Rue finally loses the police when she hides in a garbage can.

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Her final stop? Laurie’s place. Rue gives the terrifyingly calm drug dealer the thousand dollars worth of jewelry she stole plus $2000 in bills, but she still needs to pay the full sum in cash. By now, Rue is in awful shape. She’s exhausted from running all night and she’s in withdrawal and she’s in pain. But she’s still itching for drugs. Laurie doesn’t have any pills, but Rue lets her administer a morphine shot–something she’s never taken before.

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In the haze, we get a flashback to young Rue’s memories with her late father: her in the bath as a baby, in the hospital after Gia’s birth, and tearfully reading a speech at his funeral. It’s touching and heartbreaking at the same time. Between this montage, last episode’s church dream sequence, and other recent flashbacks, this season is really showing us how deeply Rue is affected by her father’s passing and how badly she misses him.

When Rue wakes up, she’s in a room at Laurie’s house (with a few creepy caged birds). She wants to get out but her window is locked, and there’s a man with a gun sleeping in the living room. The doors in the hallway are also bolted and none of the keys work. Finally, she finds an unlocked window in another room and escapes before another scary-looking man in Laurie’s residence can find her.

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The final scene features Rue’s mother again, looking restless at home. Off screen, the door opens. Has Rue come home at last? We’ll have to wait until next week to find out.

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Actor Willie Garson passed away at 57-years-old after battling privately with pancreatic cancer. Garson managed to film a few episodes of the Sex and the City reboot series And Just Like That… for HBO Max before he died. The actor was famous for his role as Carrie Bradshaw’s best friend, Stanford Blatch. In the new series, Garson is married to Anthony Marentino, played by comedian Mario Cantone. In a recent interview with People, Cantone talked about how Garson shared his diagnosis with him.

“I had no idea until he told me,” said Cantone. “I thought he was kidding. And then he turned his head and I saw his look and I went, and then I sat down next to him. We both cried and it was horrible.”

For much of filming, the only person aware of Garson’s illness was his real life friend, Sarah Jessica Parker. After his death, filming continued and Stanford was written out of the show, moving to Japan to work with a TikTok star client. The show’s creator Michael Patrick King did not want Stanford to die in the series either, and Cantone thinks they handled the storyline “very well.”

“I love that scene [where Anthony tells Carrie about Stanford leaving],” he said. “I think it’s beautifully written.”

The show has not yet been renewed for a second season, but Cantone says the cast seems excited by the prospect.

“I think we all want to do it,” Cantone claimed. “I hope so. We had a great time this season.”

He added, “I hope I’m still in Carrie’s life, in Charlotte’s life and I hope to be in Miranda’s life more too, since she has had a shift in her life…I hope that the business continues. I would love to meet somebody, you know, a man that I can have a relationship with whether it works out or not. I’d like a little bit more.”

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This past week, Jennifer Lopez was promoting her newest film project, Marry Me, which she is starring in with Owen Wilson. On Friday, February 4, she managed to change her outfit five times and still look unruffled and fabulous as she went from appearance to appearance.

To start, Lopez was was seen in midtown in a mostly black look, with strappy pointed heels and a long black coat cinched at the waist with a belt, over a grey collared shirt. She carried a black hand bag and wore cat eye sunglasses, her long golden brown hair streaming over her shoulders.

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After Lopez’s appearance on The View, Lopez left the studio wearing a long emerald green coat over a dress in a matching green with a pattern of large white and yellow flowers splashing across the visible skirt, which just brushing her white pointed shoes. In her hand was a green handbag and her hair was gathered back into a sleek bun. She had on a bold red lip.

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Ben Affleck and Lopez went walking in the rainy weather together and she bundled up in a beige puffy coat with a large fur trim around the hood. Underneath was what looked like a white jump suit, and she was comfortably clad in sneakers.

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On The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Lopez stunned in a fiery red dress with simple thin straps and skirt that brushed the floor and followed the curves of her body. She accessorized with Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti earrings and a large bone cuff in 18k gold.

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Later, she performed as the show’s musical guest alongside her Marry Me co-star Maluma. The dramatic all-white outfit featured a short, long-sleeved jacket that offered a peek at her white bra beneath. Her toned torso was displayed and emphasized with white cord holding up the long Grecian skirt.

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She makes everything work.

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Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are always adding more proof that they’re the perfect couple, and this recent Instagram post from Reynolds check off another item on the list: Lively is the Instagram wife every man dreams about.

The Deadpool actor tends to have a comedic and somewhat snarky persona online and he and Lively love to tease each other. But this photo is just pure joy. In the picture, Reynolds stands on the beach in matching blue pajamas, holding a white mug and smiling like it is the best day of his life. He’s wearing sunglasses and seems to be looking off across the shore — or possibly at Lively. Behind him is blue sky and idyllic white clouds.

The only thing written in the caption is the camera emoji and his wife’s Instagram handle, giving her credit for the sweet pic.

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This year will see the couple’s 11th anniversary, and they are reportedly going strong. In November of 2021, Reynolds told Entertainment Tonight that he and Lively work very hard to maintain their relationship, and the key is actually a deep friendship.

“We don’t take each other too seriously, but we’re also friends,” he said. “Falling in love is great, but do you like each other? That’s kinda the question you gotta ask yourself, you know, going into it. We’ve always liked each other. We grow together. We learn from each other. So yeah, I’m lucky to have a buddy in that.”

A month later, Reynolds announced he’d be taking a break from acting to spend more time with his family. In an interview with LinkedIn News Senior Editor at Large Jessi Hempel, Reynolds said he’s focusing on other types of projects and his kids.

“I want my kids to have a pretty normal schedule,” he explained. “For many years when my wife Blake would shoot a film, I would not shoot a film and I would be with the kids and vice versa. So we would sort of trade off. We never really worked at the same time. But always we were away. So the kids were away too.”

He continued, “Now that they’re in school, they have a somewhat normal schedule. I think it’s totally important for their development and I really enjoy being a present dad. I love taking them to school in the morning, I love picking them up.”

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Music artist Drake was seen with his 4-year-old son Adonis at the Scotiabank Arena in Canada on Thursday, enjoying a game between the Toronto Raptors and the Chicago Bulls. They were joined by Drake’s friend DJ Future the Prince. Drake was wearing a pair of large beige pants with a matching camo print jacket and a white t-shirt. Little Adonis was in a mask and wore matching sweats and white sneakers. He was also wearing a pair of noise reducing ear muffs for the loud arena.

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The adorable pair watched the game, talked with one another, and shared a soda from the sidelines.

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Drake has been sharing more about Adonis recently, even posting a clip of a funny conversation with the toddler, who told his dad that he’s going to be “bigger” than Drake someday. Adonis then spoke to him in French.

“You want I teach you how to speak en français?” Adonis asked in the clip. He then translated after Drake asked him what he said.

“I said, ‘When you’re older, you are all broken, and you’re going to turn back into space,’” said Adonis, getting very philosophical. Drake laughed and asked his son if he was “making stuff up” which only made them both laugh more.

Drake met Adonis’s mother, French artist Sophie Brussaux, in 2017 and she was pregnant that same year. The rapper was fairly private about Adonis, but he has been more open about his relationship to Brussaux and their child lately. In 2018, he did rap about his son on a track titled “March 14.”

“Yesterday morning was crazy / I had to come to terms with the fact that it’s not a maybe / That sh-t is in stone, sealed and signed / She not my lover like Billie Jean, but the kid is mine,” he stated in the lyrics.

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It isn’t very often at all that Kate Middleton is photographed outside of events and royal engagements. But paparazzi in London captured the Duchess of Cambridge out shopping at the Peter Jones department store in the city’s Chelsea neighborhood on Friday morning. She dressed casually but stylishly for the excursion, pairing skinny jeans with a Ralph Lauren sweater, Massimo Dutti coat, and Blundstone boots. She wore her hair down.

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Kate’s appearance comes after an engagement yesterday with Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. Kate re-wore the gray Catherine Walker dress she previously wore with the Queen in 2019.

The Duchess reflected on the event on her and Prince William’s royal Instagram account. Her team wrote:

It was wonderful to be surrounded by creative activities at @trinitybuoywharf today – where an abundance of passion, talent and imagination is on display.

Trinity Buoy Wharf is home to several programmes run by @theprincesfoundation, which will provide valuable skills to help prepare young people as they transition to art school, architecture school, craft colleges or directly into practice.

It’s a great example of using scholarships to reach those who would not normally have access to such opportunities–keep up the brilliant work.

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Kate was last photographed out shopping in March 2020. She was dressed in a baby blue Mulberry coat and matching turtleneck, which she paired with skinny jeans, black loafers, and a black purse. She wore her hair down in waves and accessorized with hoop earrings.

Both that outfit and this new one offer a hint of what Kate’s casual style is like—and how the Duchess styles jeans.

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It looks like swimsuit selfies are becoming Salma Hayek’s New Year tradition.

On Monday, Hayek sent warm regards to her nearly 20 million followers on Instagram via her first vacation post of the year, just like she did at the start of 2021. The House of Gucci actress shared a photo of herself wearing a Saint Laurent leopard-print bathing suit with a low-cut halter neckline, complemented by black rectangular shades, a warm cup of coffee, and a scenic tropical view.

“First #coffee of the first #monday of the first month of a brand new year,” she wrote in the caption. “Primer café del primer lunes del primer mes del año nuevo.”

Similarly, she rung in 2021 wearing a brown bikini and rectangular shades—though that poolside look didn’t have the extra flair of 2022’s animal print, which has made a comeback in recent years. (Just ask Halle Berry.)

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Scroll through Hayek’s Instagram and you’ll quickly realize that she seems to spend a lot of time in pools. Just last month, the House of Gucci actress posed in another memorable swimwear look: a black one-piece with the words Original Gucci emblazoned across the chest, referencing the Ridley Scott film in which she plays Pina Auriemma, the “clairvoyant friend” of Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga).

“This is not my wardrobe for ‘House of Gucci’ but I highly recommend it anyway,” she wrote in the caption. “Este no es mi vestuario en la película ‘La Casa Gucci’ pero de todos modos se las recomiendo mucho.”

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In February 2021, Hayek told Entertainment Tonight she feels liberated and empowered by sharing her vacation pictures online, in large part because she’s proud to show off the body she’s worked hard for. “I’m glad I took a lot of pictures, I have no shame on it, because it was the first week of the vacation,” she said.

She also said she isn’t afraid to share throwback photos whenever she wants. “I saved my pictures, I’m not in the same condition today and I’m spreading the love out like every two weeks,” she added. “I’m going to put up another one. I’m almost running out of them but I don’t know if you have that feeling, like, 2021!”

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“What are you?”

If you’ve been asked this question in America, you know it’s the first word that stings the most. “What” can’t be confused with “who” and all the effortless responses available there: name, job title. “What” implies your abnormality. It has a blunt, vaguely dehumanizing crackle with the onus on you to diffuse. And if you’re like me, you’ve fielded the question constantly, for as long as you can remember, because your half-Asian face is a beacon for strangers’ curiosity. To them, you have an appearance that urges a clarification they feel owed. It’s immediately isolating. And you can deflect or feign ignorance all you want—I whiled away weeks of a college retail job answering this question with a Lisa Simpson quote: “I’m a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a vest”—but always, the fastest way out is through. And it’s exhausting, answering it for the appeasement of others, accepting someone else’s dialogue of exclusion.

Unless you’re Mitski—then you don’t accept it. In fact, she doesn’t entertain the question of “what are you?” at all. And I don’t think I’m alone in finding solace both in her music and in her example of how to navigate this endless dialogue about race and belonging in America.

Mitski Miyawaki tells us who she is, onstage and off, with thrilling ownership of narrative. This is in her indie-rock music, abundantly; her lyrics are frank yet elliptical, capturing big, unruly emotions in the observations of smaller moments, quiet vignettes of intimacy. Her newly released sixth album, Laurel Hell, refines broad pop melodies through mercurial New Wave production, capturing isolation and euphoria in noirish still life images: a pillow pressed against a fevered face, clouds of sand swirling over a foreign horizon, a late knock on a new lover’s door. Though her lyrics don’t allude specifically to her heritage, they often prompt preconceptions all the same, because Asian women in America will always be considered through the lens of their ethnicity; listen to “Your Best American Girl,” from her scrappy, scabrous 2016 album Puberty 2, a clamorous power ballad ready to be saturated with your own ache for connection. Many fans heard the line “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me” as a nod to her Japanese mother, the cultural friction of interracial dating in America. It’s an interpretation she didn’t begrudge them but denied its veracity all the same.

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Her fifth album, the wry, technicolor tour de force Be the Cowboy, asserted her own experience from a complete opposite point of view—it was a concept album sung as somebody with brash and incurious ego, who has only known inclusion. Someone who doesn’t share her own need, as an Asian woman, to “walk into a room and feel like I have to apologize for existing.” In its scorched, heartsick lyrics, it could’ve been called “confessional,” that diluted pejorative often given to non-male artists, but aha! It wasn’t really Mitski singing, it was her fictional gunslinging persona with their shoot-first, apologize-never bravado.

Mitski understands the power of letting others project onto her, but that doesn’t mean she’ll indulge narratives that diminish her. This control extends beyond her music: It’s in the margins of every interview, in what she shares and what she doesn’t. It’s in her avoidance of the discursive trap doors set before her in the media, that I certainly recognize as a Chinese-American woman. Like the leading questions about her biracial, Japanese heritage or her feelings on being such an artist in America—which are likely well-intentioned but reinforce a narrative “otherness.” These questions carry an impossible burden: Every time Mitski, arguably the most successful Asian woman in American indie-rock, is asked to speak to how it feels to be an “Asian-American” woman or artist in America (and she has been, consistently), she runs the risk of cultural conflation. The subtext is she’s being prompted to speak to the monolith of all Asian experience in America—the dozens of disparate ethnic groups and the hundred-plus languages that lack a unifying cultural shorthand yet get flattened under that one straining umbrella term, to significant social and economic consequences. It is a monolith that no one person could ever hope to represent, yet a monolith that American society regularly dismisses and derides.

I admire how Mitski answers these questions: She doesn’t. The evidence is right there, in article write-arounds of her polite but firm demurring, her savvy avoidance of the pull-quote. (She’s acknowledged as much: “I talk about being Asian and then that becomes the article,” she told Complex in 2016. “When other young Asian girls hit me up about what it is like or what my music might mean to them, then I talk about it all day.”) If she engages with the conversation, the narrative of novelty, of aberration, could endure; if she rebukes it, an outdated dialogue would carry on. I And although another artist might give a perfunctory answer, and it would certainly make sense why, Mitski spurns the exchange. It’s not that she refuses to engage at all, or is a churlish interview; she has shared some details about her upbringing outside America, feeling lonely between cultures, and referenced racism and sexism she’s experienced as an artist. But read any recent interview with her and see the trail of conversation about her ethnicity runs cold quickly; she’s as likely to muse about it at length as she is to share her debit card number. It’s like she’s answering the dreaded “what are you?” for all of us: “I am more than this question.”

Mitski’s opacity—her resistance to label her personal identity despite the intimacy of her art, in a time so many people want to turn it into headline—feels like it reflects women like me, who are proud of our heritage but anxious about how it codifies us in America. Maybe it’s as simple as we’re just afraid, and we know that demeaning language can be prelude to greater threat. As the past two years of shown, in their heartbreaking rise in violence against Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities, we have reason to fear escalation of the degradation we’ve long felt. I’m warier than ever that strangers will define and diminish me by my appearance, will approach me with an unprompted comment, because I’m no longer just wondering if I represent the usual submissive and fetishistic stereotypes to them: I’m looking for a glint of malice in their eyes, too.

Here comes the caveat that I don’t know Mitski, have never interviewed her, and can only guess her motives for anything. She could think I’m misguided and clinging to her example with the stubborn zeal of a cat up a tree. Or she may suspect, as I am right now, that it’s a bit hypocritical to admire someone’s boundaries and then dissect them for an entire essay. Yet I’ll maintain that Mitski’s example here is a valuable contribution in this moment in which many powerful Asian women are pushing back publicly against discrimination and hate—Naomi Osaka, Rina Sawayama, Cathy Park Hong, Sandra Oh, to name a few—and to infer anything but deep consideration behind her actions would contradict the incisiveness that is the cornerstone of her music; one of her great songwriting charms is that every note feels intentional, every guitar skitter and torchy vocal tremble meticulously placed. She is both a disciplined lyricist and technician who balances tension, tenderness, aggression, and the odd splash of macabre humor with consideration; every note feels intelligent on a Mitski record.

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Both Laurel Hell and Be the Cowboy open with tracks that unspool like slow curls of smoke, ponderous with undercurrents of itchy synthetic buzz, before they’re interrupted by sharp, jarring blasts of electronics you feel in your fillings—moments that feels determined to shake the listener, and maybe Mitski herself, out of any complacency. To offer something a bit ugly, a quick cri de coeur, before easing into the nervy, cathartic pop structures she does so brilliantly. They’re flashes as defiant and singular at Mitski herself, who so confidently rejects any narrative of exclusion foisted upon her, who rejects centering her music on her identity, because she is empowered in the knowledge that she doesn’t owe anyone an explanation for it.

So, what am I? Today, I’m just glad that Mitski is back—on her own terms, as ever.

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