Lindsay Lohan appears to be doing great

Have some grace for it and yourself. I'm not being pollyannish, either. Americans were in the process of a long, painful disruption (that continues today) and, more to the point, flattening, and it felt then (as it does now) alienating and personality-stripping, like paint would come off walls.

 

Spears' popularity does not include me, nor does it elude me...her fans are legion, I think, in part because she's been singing for her supper, so to speak, since she was in grade school, and is simultaneously a product of an entertainment system that stripped her of any identity beyond the, uh, "Slave 4 U" persona (the sleaze from that 4 minutes is hard to wash off) and a legitimate victim of that entertainment system. By contrast, Justin Timberlake - a more talented performer, though that's not the point - has rolled through two decades of shifting identities (and, for that, matter, partners, including whoever he was holding hands with years into his marriage) and been embraced at every turn despite being a real POS, repeatedly, to women.

Imagine a world where you have a significant mental break, and likely an addiction problem, and you have kids who you can't see, and fuckin Dr. Phil is the guy at your hospital bedside.

Spears may have been through more than Judy Garland.

 

This is the only Britney song I like but it's Hall of Fame material.

And, of course, dirty Catholic girl ...

 

Always thought Letterman was a HUGE asshole.
Guy who needed an ass-beating.

In lieu of Letterman, I give you Craig Ferguson..

Inside the Britney Spears monologue that became late-night legend

 

"Viewers tuned in hoping for a train wreck; instead, they got to see one of the more tender exchanges between Lohan and a TV personality not known for pulling punches or acting paternal."

Letterman vs the World: Dave's 10 Tensest Interviews

Someone on Twitter will now uncover this story from Tim Grierson and label it horrifying.

It's always weird to me when Twitter unearths a 50-year-old John Wayne interview or Sean Connery interview like every two years and there's a whole fresh round of disbelief and disgust. Those at least have shocking statements in them. But a *very* well-known eight-year-old Letterman clip, both at the time it happened and in the years since as it racks up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, (I especially love the online content farm stories on this where the video "resurfaced," as if it was discovered in a cave back in Indianapolis along with other Letterman artifacts) with a celebrity who had an entire team of people who were fine with her going on air at this time in her life where he acts like...David Letterman did for four decades now gets same reaction, as if tens of millions of people didn't see it originally or in the years since? Society is in a much stranger place today where this blows up years later than whatever was going on when an interview like this happened.

And to blame it on oughts culture, this is who Letterman was. Always. For 40 years. Cher called him an asshole on air in 1986 for god's sake. It's actually a huge reason he's the best there ever was at it. How many late-night interviews has anyone ever wanted to watch outside of Don Rickles on Carson? But Letterman actually had real interviews and, yes, was sometimes mean on them. Or sarcastic. Or condescending. It's who he was at times, and labeling it "horrifying" like the original Twitter guy, who somehow acted like he had the scoop of the century...come on.

It was an uncomfortable Letterman interview. Which made it the same as hundreds of other ones he did over 40 years.

The person I saw retweet this onto my timeline -- in, yes, horror -- has also been going on and on about "our" mistreatment of Britney. Meanwhile, this same person is a weekly participant in online draggings of whichever poor SOB has come up on Twitter's radar at that time. "You know what to do Twitter," being something he routinely types out in complete earnestness. Yes, so much empathy. I eagerly await his horrified response when someone resurfaces Letterman clashing with Shirley MacLaine or the clip of Dave telling the blond kid who hated how Dave pronounced "the" as "thee" that he hoped they had time for "THE invention."

 

I've heard that song a thousand times. This morning, I watched the video and heard ABBA. The romantically naive lyrics, the structure, the close harmonies: ABBA. The closest I could get in terms of creative connection is Max Martin, who wrote the song, is from Sweden. He may have cut his teeth to their music.

Early on I got the impression that Letterman wasn't too fond of women. He seemed hardest on those who were vulnerable and/or Southern. I watched his show for the music.