To Slur with Love

Ahh, Courtney - my favorite human train wreck is in the news again with word that her daughter's finally had enough of the babbling head-on collisions, opting to live out the waning months of her life as a minor with her paternal grandma. Better known as Amy Winehouse's AA sponsor (she wishes!), Ms. Love has lately taken up roost on Facebook, hammering out head scratching non-sequitur-laced status post/rants from her computer keyboard like Cecil Taylor pounding free jazz from the ivories. Well ... perhaps not so much. More like what I would imagine Captain Beefheart might write were he to put pen to paper immediately after being beaten senseless with a baseball bat. Or maybe Allen Ginsberg shot through Andrew "Dice" Clay suffering from advanced dementia with a touch of LA Law's Benny Stulwicz. You get my point: batshit lunacy and scatterbrained linguistic scats.

But I say all this with love in my heart for the gal. I'm serious about that. She just seems so little-girl-lost that it's hard to get pissed at her antics. But I imagine it's a different story from the vantage point inside the eye of her particular storm. And she's certainly managed to marginalize what could be a considerable artistic career, were she to shake off the shakes long enough to want that.

I'm serious when I say I think Courtney Love's got mad skills. She did more than a fine job as an actress when she put her mind to it (see The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon). And I think Hole's Live Through This is a great fucking album. One of my absolute favorites. And that's largely her doing. She's no "Yoko Ono", for sure. Of course, Yoko Ono wasn't really a "Yoko Ono" either - after all, the B-52s are indebted to her innovations. Now Linda McCartney - she was most definitely a "Yoko Ono."

Of course, what's Courtney done in the decade of the "00"s? I'm not sure even (or perhaps especially) she knows the answer to that.

Good luck, Frances. I hope you make it out of childhood in repairable shape - I feel a kinship with you. In an odd way, we had a similar set of parental units. Now, to be clear, my Chuck and Ruth were hardly Kurt and Courtney. But they did share a surprisingly similar brand of addiction and dysfunction. And, I imagine, myriad ways to embarrass.

It could always be worse. Sounds like your granny's got your back and just think: your name could be Lohan - now that would be a bitch, eh?