By chance I happened to catch VH1's "Rock Doc" presentation of the movie "The Return of Courtney Love." I found it compelling, but then, I find Love compelling. In a mad way, I've felt for a while now that I understood her.
Part of it is that stupid-dick thing I have about seeing psychologically tortured women and thinking "Well, if only I was their lover or friend..." I do find her incredibly sexy, but it's not just about that, there are a lot of celebrity women I find sexy that I couldn't imagine actually sitting in a room and having a long conversation or even exchanging emails with.
But ...well, let me back up for a minute here. When she made her "meltdown" (as some termed it) appearance on David Letterman in 2004, she seemed to most to be incoherent. Probably, in a lateral, literal sense, she was.
Yet I watched that appearance and I remember thinking that, for the most part, I understood exactly what she was talking about. In a similar way to how I always thought I understood exactly what "Strawberry Fields Forever" meant & didn't understand all the books puzzling about it.
We're only a few years apart in age, Love and I, close enough that she was dropping references to cultural touchstones I understood, the thing is, she wasn't leaving pebbles for those in the dark to follow.
I don't do drugs; I've never done drugs, and for the most part her music isn't for me. Though I got a kick out of one or two of the singles off "Celebrity Skin." Of course I would like the glossy pop one, I'm the guy who thought it was appropriate to headline a blog post about her with a quote from a Boy George lyric.
Some of the clips of her recording the songs for her new album, seen in the doc, were promising too. But to me, there is a burning core of intelligence at the heart of the girl, however caked in psychological make-up and bad habits and protective walls. Which is, underneath the gossip sites and tabloid image we have of her, part of what keeps me coming back.
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