Janet Hubert, most known as the original Aunt Viv from the hit ’90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and her open letter to Wendy Williams just proved that there’s nothing worse than somebody, who just won’t let go of old -ish.

Tatyana Ali appeared on The Wendy Williams Show last week to promote the show Second Generation Wayans. However, in true Wendy Williams form, they end up talking about everything but the show, including bringing up why Hubert was replaced as Vivian Banks after the show’s third season. Not really pleased with Williams mentioning her in any context, Hubert wrote an open letter to Williams, which was also read on BlogTalkRadio, basically giving Williams the business.

While I won’t go through the entire letter, because by now most of you have probably already seen or heard it, she does say some pretty ugly things about Williams, including calling her a demon, body snarking and questioning Williams’ “sense of womanhood or manhood as some suggest.” She also took Williams to task for other unrelated offensive remarks that Williams has made over the years, including her comments about natural hair not being red carpet appropriate and kissing up to her fans on her show and then turning around and berating them later:

“Now perhaps other black women have allowed you to berate them and continued to support you in this manner of madness and rewarding hatefulness. It seems to become the norm and has taken over our society completely. But I, Janet Hubert, sat there and watched you tell the world that I was not a nice mother. I’m thinking to myself, the only person who has the right to say that is my child. So I sat there and watched you like some devilish sinkhole swallow up Tatyana Ali. You reduced her to a child sitting there tempting to keep some symbolism of dignity about her as you pried and invaded her life until you got what you wanted.”

First off, can we start a Change.org petition to get Janet Hubert on the next season of Celebrity Apprentice? I just need to see her on some sort of reality-based television, where she is just reading other people about both real and imagined infractions. Hollywood, can we make this happen?

But more to the point, I had to go back and watch the episode to better put this blow up into context. Without it, you are likely think of this as just the maddening, yet hilarious, rambles of an obvious self-absorbed, crazy woman. Not to mention that this is the second time Hubert has penned a open letter to the current Queen of talk; the first time she called Williams a “bully” and accused her of using Whitney Houston’s passing for money. After watching the episode, I have to say that while the conversation between Williams and Ali strayed completely away from what Ali was ultimately there to discuss, which was her show, I don’t think that Williams was exactly “devouring her poor soul” as Hubert suggested in the letter. In fact, Ali didn’t look very bothered by Williams’ prying at all. So maybe Hubert might have been exaggerating there a bit.

And I’m not quite convinced that Hubert is that offended by the gossip. While there is an entire industry built around the dirty business of tongue wagging and rumor mongering, not all gossip is bad. Recent research has suggested that the same backbiting speak, which can be used to drag a person through the mud, is also said to have positive outcomes, such as helping us police bad behavior, provide a boost to one’s career or even prevent exploitation. Now whether or not you personally buy that is up to you, but the over-arching point is, there is a market for gossip. And Williams is quite good at this sort of ditch-digging and producing little nuggets of dirt like, Ali and Drake might have been/are hooking up? Um, how come we are not discussing that?

With that said though, there is such a thing as old gossip. And I think that gets to the heart of Hubert’s annoyance. I don’t know about you all but Hubert strikes me as a woman who really wants to leave the entire Fresh Prince-era behind her. Every time I hear her discuss it, it always sounded like the experience was really a traumatic part of her life. And yet she is reminded of it daily, both directly and indirectly, through the gossip host and fans of the classic sitcom alike, who keep bringing up a situation that occurred nearly 15 years ago. Everybody else got to move on. Correction: Will Smith got to move on. You don’t see anybody asking Smith about Hubert (or anybody else from the show for that matter) in interviews do you? And yet every Fresh Prince actor, who is not Will Smith, will forever be pigeonholed to identifying with that show. Granted those roles made most of them somewhat household faces, however, as serious actors with probably other acting ambitions, they probably don’t want to get typecast either or thought of by the public as one character for the rest of their lives. After all this time, people still refer to Hubert as Aunt Viv as if it were her actual name and identity. Alfonso Rivera is most known by Carlton and people don’t even think about the other television shows he did before and after the Fresh Prince. Matter of fact, I think I saw him recently doing some sort of Carlton dance flash mob. I’m convinced that he is going to be doing that dance-for-pay through his twilight years. Even poor Ashley…er…I mean Ali, who despite being on The Wendy Williams Show to talk about herself and her new show, was dragged way back into the early ’90s for some old-timey gossip.

Janet Hubert has to find a way to move on past the drama surrounding the Fresh Prince from years ago. At the same time, we have to allow her and the other cast members to move on past it too.

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Maybe African-Americans in Hollywood are slowly learning that if no one will give us the “green light” for programming we’d like to see, we have to start doing it for ourselves.

Enter Alchemy Networks. The new channel which joined forces with YouTube in December, was founded by media veteran Peter Griffith and will center around urban lifestyle and celebrity entertainment. It will also feature original programming.

Griffith told Lee Bailey of EURweb that they’re not interested in being the biggest channel but instead, they want to be the best within every market they target. In fact, they didn’t just “sign on” with YouTube when they came to the table with their ideas. Griffith, along with his partners Alvin Williams, Anthony Maddox ad Xothil Arkin, came up with their own plan, took it back to YouTube and hoped they were still on board:

“What we told them was ‘We’re not the same.’ Let us come back to them and tell what we thought was the best way to approach this community,” he recalled. “And we came to them and said ‘Look. What we’d like to do is develop not just one channel, but several channels that target different demographics of the African-American community.”

Luckily, YouTube jumped aboard. So far, they have two premium channels: Kaleidoscope, which targets 18-34 year olds with a focus on music, gossip and entertainment as well as FWD, launching this month, which targets 25-54 year olds with a focus on the same but also including beauty and fashion.

Kandi Burruss is the first celebrity to sign on with the network. Her new show, Kandi & Friends, will debut later this month. There’s been no word if it’ll be similar to her own show Kandi Koated Nights but it will feature some of her celebrity friends.

Alchemy, to date, boasts one million views per week and has 900,000 subscribers.

Hopefully, with the formation of Alchemy Networks and other independent online shows, we will see more programming that we’ve longed for. Over time, who knows? It might even filter onto actual television stations.

Will you check out Alchemy channels on YouTube?

For most people, when you’re a kid, you take everything your parents say, especially your mother, as gospel. But sometime around puberty, you start thinking that you’ve seen and experienced it all. That you know what you’re talking about. So you become less likely to take the words of your mother to heart…and in most cases, you probably should have listened.

Source: Wenn.com

When you open the gates of conversation with Denzel Washington, there’s a chance he might say something that’ll make you say, “Well, alright now!”

During a recent trip to London to promote his most recent film, Flight, Denzel spoke with The Guardian about his role and how he got into the business.  As they further discussed his character and his relationship with God, the reporter noted that it must be interesting to be a Christian actor (as Denzels says he is) living in a place like Hollywood.  That clearly piqued his interest because he told the reporter he was confusing the glitz and glamour ( and bs) of Hollywood with the city of Los Angeles. He continued:

“But actually, even within the industry, I don’t have any actor friends. My friends are old friends. One’s an ex-music guy, the other’s a restaurant owner and the other’s an ex-pro ballplayer.”

That’s not even the good part. Here’s what he had to say about why he doesn’t have any actor friends:

“Because I don’t make friends! Maybe I’m not a butt-kisser, maybe I’m not a schmoozer. I’m not about to go to a party to try to get a job. And then when you have children, the other friends become other parents. We’d coach baseball or basketball. My wife and I were raised right. I don’t want movie-star friends. And being African American, there were no big movie stars to hang out with anyway, not when I was starting out, they were just the third guy from the back! For whatever reason, I never befriended any white actors.”

Listen, when you’re an actor’s actor and can transform yourself into any role given to you, it seems you are able to fully be yourself when you’re not working and everyone will just deal with it.   He is not here for the shenanigans that he’s known since the 80s that the entertainment industry brings. He wants no parts of it and it clearly hasn’t bothered any directors because he’s held down a job since about 1983.

But Denzel knows that he’s major…right? I mean, the ladies have been loving him since…maybe A Soldier’s Story? Well, he doesn’t subscribe to the whole celebrity thing either:

“I’m a working actor! What’s a celebrity anyway? Paris Hilton’s a celebrity. I’m just a working actor.”

Indeed.  I wonder will his daughter Olivia, who he took as his date to the Golden Globes Awards to seemingly introduce her to the other movers and shakers of the industry, have the same attitude if she reaches a certain level of success.

What do you think of Denzel’s comments?

oprahwinfreyshow.com

In the latest “Oprah’s Lifeclass” episode, Oprah and her new gal pal Iyanla Vanzant discussed all the horrific and terrible things that women do to each other, including betraying each other, lying, gossiping and being competitive.

According to Vanzant, self-hate, the need for validation, unrealistic demands and poor social conditioning, among other things, are the reasons why women tend to betray other women. Oprah agreed and then reached into her mystical bag of intuitive light bulb moments, which I’m sure is some mumbo-jumbo she probably swiped from The Secret, and told us that truly successful people want other people around them to be empowered. Ah, Oprah and her enigmatic laws of attraction. I don’t know about that considering that our entire capitalistic, consumer based system is entirely operated on empowering ourselves at the expense of those countries in the third world – but that’s another post for another day and time.

Anyway, Oprah, who felt that women were the number one perpetrators of gossip, added this bit of insight: “If a person will betray you by gossip they will betray you in any other way if they had the opportunity.”

First off, can we all agree that Vanzant, whose show will premiere sometime next week, is going to single handily save Oprah’s network? Even Oprah acknowledged as much during the episode when she said that Vanzant was one of her biggest supporters, which I think is actually code for ratings generator.  I’m not a huge fan of Vanzant, which I wrote extensively before about, but I have to give her credit for knowing how to work the shenanigans we normally see on television into a bunch of random clichés disguised as self help.

I can’t wait to watch.

But back to the issue at hand, ladies, are we truly meaner than men?

It’s no secret that when it comes to building friendships, I tend to lean more to the male persuasion, however I was intrigued by this topic. And you might think because of my previous post that my answer is a flat out yes, women are meaner than men. I will acknowledge that the greatest pains and frustrations in my life have been mostly generated by women. And I will also admit that for me, friendships between women are more difficult to navigate than the ones I have with men. Men are just easier.

For instance, I haven’t spoken to one of my male friends for a good two months, despite his numerous attempts to reach me by telephone. I bet a million virtual dollars that if I was to pick up the phone and call him, he might inquire about my absence but ultimately he will shrug it off and go on to the next topic. No way in hell would that fly with a woman. I’d probably be bombarded by expressions about how my absence hurt her feelings. At this point in my life, I’m just not interested in that.

Image: Creatas

A new study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes finds that paranoid people who think people are talking about them seek out evidence of this gossip. And guess what? You’re going to find it because when your co-workers see you acting crazy, they will talk about your craziness. Self-fulfilling!

“That is, people who try to ferret out workplace enemies are likely to create some that didn’t exist before, at least in part because their own eavesdropping, snooping and gossiping sets colleagues to talking about them,” summarizes TIME.

The best course of action, the study finds, is to chill out. Perhaps you think other people are talking about you because you love to talk about other people? And all that paranoid behavior could drive your co-workers away from you on a professional level, making it hard to work in groups and, therefore, hard to do your job. When your anxieties interfere with your work, you’ve got a serious problem. Just keep in mind, the sinister goings-on in your head likely have nothing to do with reality. People are too busy for all that.

If you happen to work with someone who’s under the impression that they’re the constant topic of conversation around the water cooler, they’re probably suffering from “spotlight effect,” the narcissistic feeling that the world is paying attention to what they’re doing. In that case, just go about your business and sooner or later, the paranoid party will (hopefully) figure out that no one cares one bit about what they’re up to.

By Guest Hair Blogger Trissha Taylor

If there’s one thing most women have in common, it’s that we’ve all had our good and bad moments when it comes to our hair while sitting in the chair of a stylist. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to find a perfect one–a stylist that won’t overcharge you, helps you keep your hair healthy, gets you started on time, and doesn’t have your hair sounding like you’re lighting fireworks with her overheated flat iron. But sometimes, you get a really ratchet stylist. Here are a few signs to watch out for so you don’t lose all your hair, your money and your mind in the hands of one.

FashionBombDaily

Hey loves! It’s weekend wrap-up time and I’ve got some music news, movie news, entrepreneurial news and some other stuff to tell you about.  Let me say this in case you didn’t know: some of these celebs are crazy…and think we are too. Check it out!

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By Blair Bedford

If you have ever watched the movie The Devil Wears Prada, you might have finished the movie thinking that such behaviors on the job are a part of the normal work experience. Uh, I don’t think so. From demanding supervisors to noisy co-workers, we have all had our share of experiences in the workplace that were not-so ideal or comfortable, but we were able to tolerate it to get to where we wanted to be in our careers. But how do you know when the fine line between uncomfortable and intolerable has been crossed while on the job? Here are a few examples of certain situations that should raise a red flag:

Hey loves! Well, it’s All-Star Sunday (that’s the NBA All-Star game for you non-sports fans) and that means I’ve got the weekend wrap-up. Some of the celebs are a mess as usual and I even threw in a couple of stars that we don’t often talk about. Don’t forget I’m always on Twitter (@DrennaB) if you want to chat it up. Andddddd we’re off…

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