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Love Lost Courtney Love made New York headlines for all the wrong reasons recently, proving once again she is a full-fledged member of Generation Excrement. This was the biggest Village bust of an aging bottle blond rock star has-been since Davis Lee Roth got arrested in 1993 for buying pot in Washington Square Park. Getting taken into custody is de rigueur for someone below the charts with a bullet. This way, she’s assured of a return engagement, even if it is at Manhattan criminal court. Love’s mischief reached a nasty crescendo at Plaid, where she left a paying customer in stitches. One can forgive her for throwing the microphone stand. One cannot, however, forgive her for holding on to the microphone. Earlier in the evening, during a taping of The Late Show with David Letterman, Love flashed herself more times than a women’s roller derby team on the long bus ride home. Fortunately for CBS--which by now stands for Caution, Boobs Showing—Letterman is on a five-hour delay—about one hour less than Courtney Love’s brain. By air time, the network had scrambled Love’s nipples. Her cerebral cortex was scrambled from the get-go. If she’s not on drugs, she ought to be. Alas, how far the Ed Sullivan Theater has fallen, descending in a brief 40 years from introducing the Beatles to watching Courtney Love doing stupid human tricks on a coffee table. Convinced she was on Howard Stern and looking like Courtney the Love Sponge, Love ignored the ongoing national debate on censorship and thought only of the PR. Apparently, FCC means For Courtney’s Career Comparisons to Janet Jackson fall flat. At least when Janet bared herself, people didn’t look away in disgust. Courtney Love needs a pastie on her mouth. Sure, Love had a lot of work done back in the day. She gave it the old collagen try. But in spite of it all, these days Courtney Love couldn’t make the cut for a Girls Gone Wild video. The trouble may have started a few years back, when audience members stopped catching her following stage dives. Today, with a face only a mosh pit could love, Courtney is in serious danger of being banned from the neck up. No one has aged this ungracefully since the cast of Different Strokes. Perhaps the low point in an evening of lows came when Love was allegedly sexually snubbed by a downtown homeless man, which tells you Michael Bloomberg is doing something right. Things weren’t always this desperate for Love. Her performance as a drug-addicted stripper in The People vs. Larry Flynt was impressive, though you could hardly call it acting. And in the 90s, she cut a few decent tracks aside from the ones on her arms. Today, however, Love is having trouble packing ‘em in at clubs the size of a Starbucks. Right now, Courtney Love couldn’t fill the dressing room in CBGB. Her record the last few years is worse than George Tenet’s. You wonder if she missed the boat when she wasn’t offered the role of Samantha in Sex and the City. I was born and raised a rock fan, but Courtney Love’ll drive a man to Norah Jones. I kid you not--I grew up in Queens in the same apartment building as the Ramones. They were known to sniff a little glue. Seems like Courtney’s been chugging it. In true punk, the music was stripped down, not the musicians. Ask the surviving members of the Sex Pistols how much plastic surgery they’ve had. At least Nancy had the decency to go before Sid. It’s ten years this month since his passing, and each year Courtney Love contributes further to our understanding of why Kurt Cobain took his own life. As marginally talented widows of rock star legends go, Love makes Yoko Ono look like Janis Joplin. Kurt made Courtney a star. She ought to remarry someone less talented than she is—if she can find him—and pay it forward. But if winning her case for the publishing rights to the Nirvana catalogue provides a sort of trust fund for performances like these, I’m rooting for Dave Grohl and Christ Novoselic. It’s nice to see someone rise up out of the trailer parks. It’ll be nicer to see her return. The Courtney Love show has all the appeal of an episode of COPS. If nothing else, Love has perfected that I’m-blitzed-and-half-naked-on-the-front-lawn-and-just-clocked-my-boyfriend-with-a-frying-pan look. And with each episode, she digs a deeper Hole for her custody case. It takes a special kind of strung out celebrity to make Michael Jackson look like a fit parent. Sadly, we are powerless to fulfill Courtney Love’s lyrical wish and make her over. We can only wish she’ll go away. Above all, Love leaves one wishing that F. Scott Fitzgerald were right—that in America, there were no second acts. Love is on her fourth act and eighth life, and she will probably live through this too—at least long enough to bring her act to a Wendy’s near you. But like the final season of Friends, you’re sorry someone in a position of authority with some sense hasn’t stopped it. Click here to rant back. |