Somebody's Mother

I have posted an ad in the rideshare section of Craigslist, because Courtney Love's Hole - her new, improved Hole - is playing Live 105's BFD at the Shoreline Amphitheatre this Sunday, and it would be shameful of me not to make an honest attempt to finally see this borderline psychotic, borderline genius, enduring freakshow of a woman - an icon in whom I have, for some highly questionable reason, invested so much emotion and significance for at least 15 years now - live and in concert, at last.

How would I describe Courtney to an alien from another planet who had never heard of her? Well, to me anyway, she's sort of a rock-and-roll (Bride-of-) Frankenstein combining the poetry of Patty Smith and Anne Sexton with the fiery scorn of Lydia Lunch, the punk-rock style of Siouxsie Sioux and Exene Cervenka (not so much the talentless Nancy Spungen), the sheer emotional intensity and towering cultural iconicity of Janis Joplin, the combatively controversial persona of Madonna and Yoko Ono and Sinead O'Connor, the fragility of Tori Amos and a dozen other vulnerable and more traditionally feminine singer-songwriter types, with...the glass-and-gravel vocals of PJ Harvey and Johnette Napolitano and Medusa and Medea, the on-stage spontaneity and unpredictability of Iggy Pop and Wendy O'Williams, the plastic surgery of Amanda Lepore, the trainwreck life-as-performance-trash-ness of Frances Farmer and the late Anna Nicole Smith, the smoky glamour of an old-school movie star like Clara Bow or the younger Bette Davis, the oversexed brashness of Blanche DuBois....shall I go on? What I'm saying is, girlfriend is COMPLEX. She's not just a walking study in demonology, she's....sort of a walking study of womanhood in the 21st Century. She's an enigma, and I love enigmas. For all her TMI and metaphorical nakedness, seeming to throw it all away and tell us all the truth, there is something central and secret that she never actually gives away. That must be what keeps me guessing, and paying attention.

I just received my copy of Hole's new album, Nobody's Daughter, today - the first real, solid, physical album I've purchased in...years? (I stopped buying music about a decade ago? Abandoning it, for some reason, in favor of other art forms like film and literature.) And it's pretty fucking good. Good enough that I'm sure after a few dozen more spins it'll permanently bond itself to my soul and psyche the way ALL of Love's four previous albums - including her not-entirely-terrible solo album, 2004's cheekily titled America's Sweetheart - have done.

For better or worse, she fills a space in (un)popular culture that would be naught but a gaping hole in her absence.

From the liner notes of Nobody's Daughter (quoted without permission, yet with respect):

Nobody’s Daughter is dedicated to all the motherless children and fatherless babies in this world. This record is dedicated to the light and to the eternal clonthian fire. This record is dedicated to numinosity and to vengeance and to sobriety. To the delusion of the ten world and to the endless cycle of birth life old age and death with enlightenment firmly in our sights.
We are dedicated to the deepest love, the truest love and the purest self love. We are dedicated to a rapacious greed for living and for Gods sake holding onto yourself in a hurricane knowing you are so loved.
This is dedicated to complete surrender. Just give in baby, just give in and you will find the light inside of yourself full of hate and fury, piss and vinegar, cracked mirrors and total self annihilation.
But the light, the light will overcome, just hang on. And in the end, Love and nothing but Love.

Hole Show Thwarted by Squat Riot!

I have just read that the first surprise show that Courtney Love's newly resurrected band Hole was supposed to play at Proud Galleries in Camden last night was canceled because CL wasn't allowed to leave her house due to a "squat riot!" I'm guessing that means a bunch of people squatting in a building refused to leave and the bobbies were called in? (Link to article from Rolling Stone.)

However, there is further excitement in the air (and further reason for me to wish I was in Merry Old England just now): Love is speaking tonight at the Oxford Union, and on the 17th Hole plays a sold-out show at the 02 Shepherd's Bush Empire in London.

Our Lady of the Hole-y Trackmarks Returns!

Courtney Love @ The Boom Boom Room, NYE 2010

Even though I'm really annoyed and pissed off with Courtney AGAIN (for abruptly deleting her Facebook page after people had put so much time and energy into helping build up her photos, commenting on her opaquely repetitive posts, etc) I would give almost anything to be at her NYE concert tomorrow night at the STandard in NYC! Well, anything except air fare to NYC, the loss of my job (working New Year's Day), and the $250-and-up price of a ticket. (And that's just for standing room...to get a seat you have to pay $500-750, I hear.)

So I won't be attending the concert. In fact, I won't be attending any concert, since I'm getting up at 5am in order to work New Year's Day. I'd love to hear all about it, though!

On a related note...Courtney will NOT be releasing her album "Nobody's Daughter" or even a single from it on 1/1/1o as mentioned, promised, and hyped many times. In case any CL fan hasn't figured it out yet...you should not get your hopes up, or believe a word Miss Love says. Bless her wicked, lying, empty heart.

Courtney reminds Britney who invented the term "Celebrity Trainwreck"

Oh, my goodness. With her second solo album "Nobody's Daughter" FINALLY due to be released January 1, 2010 (a most intriguing looking date, 1/01/10, let's hope it's binary code for MAJOR COMEBACK!), Courtney Love just made headlines by claiming that Britney Spears' dad molested her. The Spears camp has replied in an amusing fashion.

Courtney Love + Bill Clinton: Too good to be true

Check out this article from NY Mag's Culture Vulture, covering some Love-ly behavior at the 8th Annual Benefit for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. This woman's entire life is one sustained work of performance art. I love her so. And I would pay $$$ for a transcript of the conversation that took place during her breakfast with Hillary Clinton. (There's a photo of the two of them together published in Love's interesting scrapbook, "Dirty Blonde.")

Caligula Remake?

So, this is weird, and the more I read about it, confusing...apparently it's the trailer for a remake of Caligula directed by Gore Vidal, in which both Francesco Vezzoli and Courtney Love play Caligula (?) But then it turns out that it's not an actual film, just a trailer for a film that doesn't exist, sort of a joke trailer made for the Venice Biennale several years back. It's worth watching, if only to shudder at how awful it looks like it would be as a fully realized film.

Meaning no disrespect to Gore Vidal, whom I love and respect. Actually, as a sort of in-joke conflating the current worlds of Hollywood and high fashion with decadent ancient Rome before it fell, it's pretty satirical and funny.

The Return of Hole!

NME (my favorite oversized British rock mag) has an exciting new article and video footage of Courtney Love and Micko Larkin, the new Eric Erlandson, talking about her long-awaited second solo album. Turns out it won't be a solo album at all, but will be released as a HOLE album. That's right, Courtney is resurrecting Hole, one of the best bands of the 90s in my humble opinion. Their trio of albums - from Pretty On the Inside to Celebrity Skin - form an excellent conceptual trilogy of this enigmatic woman's ascension from ugly duckling wannabe to one of the most famous (or infamous, but those are only two sides of the same coin) women on the planet.

Watching the clip you can sense Courtney's charisma and humor and the force of her magnetic personality, scorched and battle-scarred as it may be by her epic tragedy of a life. I've been obsessed with CLove for years, since around the time she starred in The People Vs. Larry Flynt. (She really is a good actress, it's too bad she destroyed her film career along with her music one after about 2002.) Call me crazy, but I really see her as the last real rock star, part of a dying breed. Gay guys always have to have their divas, I suppose, and while others may go with more traditional models - Barbra, Liza, Madonna, Cher, Bette, etc. - I like Courtney because she is this weird blend of grande dame/female drag queen plus ROCK N ROLL, like REAL rock n roll, not dance music, not pop music, not American Idol, but something that is raw and real and confessional and RARE these days, to say the least.

I got tired of waiting for her follow-up to 2004's America's Sweetheart (HALF of which is actually very good and inspiring and almost spiritual) a long time ago, but I can't help feeling a little twinge of the old excitement when I see these clips.

Rise again, crazy phoenix. The show isn't over yet.

Check out the article and video clips here.

I think that will work. If it doesn't, just go to www.nme.com and type "Return of Hole" in the search field.

Hana

This may be a rather desultory post as I have many chronologically-scrambled impressions to record. It is actually kind of cold here right now, but that may be partly due to coming back to Haiku after spending the night in Hana, where humidity hangs like a muggy curtain of vapor in the air all the time. It’s definitely rain-forest climate. The house there, on Maia (means “banana”) Road, the one that used to be the bed and breakfast, is a little less well kept than the Hohani Place house – most notably, the pool and hot tub are dry, except for gross algae-infused rain water at the bottom, which Cousin and I spent some time pumping and scooping out – but it is BEAUTIFUL, and I can imagine how great the parties they used to throw there were. David Lachapelle, the photographer whose twisted, bad-acid-trip work I’m a fan of (his subjects include Courtney Love and the repugnantly fascinating tranny Amanda Lepore), came to one of their pool parties. The backyard/pool area is completely private and enclosed by the house and trees; what you see from the front/driveway doesn’t give any inkling of how gorgeous it is in back. They have several acres of land and it’s like a maze with walls of lush green growth and bamboo, palm trees, shower trees, and African tulips (an invasive, destructive, yet pretty exotic species) that have been sculpted with the landscaper’s hands in such a way that it creates a labyrinth of interconnected trails with walls, floor and ceiling of verdant, pungent foliage. I went for a walk through the green maze after smoking some of D’s hash and felt so strongly the green Alice in Wonderland earth magic of the place. Hana exudes a potent and sensuous enchantment. It made me wish I wasn’t single. You can see why so many people take their honeymoons there. But I didn’t get to enjoy it much; I did a lot of weed-whacking (fun, compared to machete work or indoor cleaning, but still draining in the hot sun), cleaning, vacuuming, mopping the wood floors with Orange Glo (a scam like Riddex: doesn’t really work: the floors don’t look much better, and we still have mice and cockroaches), not much else, really. J. and I went into town to get dinner at the restaurant (maybe the only one in Hana) and a redneck guy at the bar while we were waiting for the food razzed J. about his man-purse. Back at the house we found J. and Cousin’s friend Marlena and her husband/boyfriend visiting, but after eating my “saimin” (name for a ramen-noodle type soup they have here, sort of the Hawaiian equivalent of pho, but not as good) I completely fell into a sleep coma: it was like someone put a spell on me; just went to bed and couldn’t even think about getting up for hours, although I wasn’t fully asleep, and heard it when the rain started falling, INCREDIBLY hard, like a SOLID WALL of tropical rain just deluging everything, and the windows were all open so I could hear it so loud all around me, and it was like being outside, but it was nice, having a roof overhead and yet feeling like I was in the middle of it, and of course that’s what rain forests do, baby....they rain. A lot. It stopped and started a few times. I could have slept straight through until morning, but I had enough wits about me to realize I’d wake up at 4 a.m. and be in limbo, so I made myself get up around 9 or 10 and watched TV for an hour or two (including a movie called “Boys Over Flowers” on KBS which I think must stand for Korean Broadcasting System or something like that, and a Discovery Channel show on the hunt for an elusive nearly-extinct ancient fish called a goblin shark that could also be called the Pinocchio shark because it has a grotesquely elongated nose), then went back to bed, woke up this morning and we finished cleaning (Cousin in one of his stormy angry moods where I just need to get away from him until he calms down) and drove home. The road to Hana, though dangerous indeed (I was tense the whole way, especially on the way back, with the road slippery from rain and the truck occasionally fish-tailing across the road), was gorgeous beyond belief, even with vog (volcanic fog) obscuring the view: breathtaking ocean vistas, waterfalls, a place called Rolling Pig Park (I forget the actual Hawaiian name), and vegetation so dense and vibrant I can’t imagine the rain forests of Brazil being any more lush. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the other day when I went to the nude beach with J. (Cousin stayed home, stressed about the dogs) a big sea turtle swam right by me in the shallow water, between me and the shore, close enough I could have touched it. It was such a peaceful lovely animal (and so cool knowing something like 1 in 10,000 of them actually make it to adulthood) and I want to think it was attracted by the mellow non-threatening energy emanating from me into the water: it recognized me as a fellow aquaphile. Really made my day, and I called Mom to tell her, since she’s always loved turtles, but I woke her up from a nap and she sounded confused and didn’t know whether it was morning or night, or even what day it was. (Poor woman. It has to end soon.) So now we’re back in Haiku and J. and Cousin are watching silly reality TV shows downstairs and I made fruit salad for breakfast tomorrow and I changed my Ben W. portrait (HER BEAUTIFUL SON) a couple more times since the photos I took and I’m happy with it at last, actually it kind of lights me up with love and affection when I walked into the studio this afternoon and looked at it for the first time in a couple days after getting back, so yes, I love my painting. I was going to say a couple other things about Grey Gardens, too: something about the line between fantasy and mental illness (you've got to be a little loose in the wiring to live in such filth for so long) and also about the poetic beauty of the fact that Little Edie finally got to have her movie-star moment because of the documentary made about how tragic it was that she never got her movie-star moment (!) And I came up with a great new working title for Cousin’s book that I think may be THE ONE, and I wish I could tell you it, but I’d better not, because I said I wouldn’t, and we don’t want people stealing our ideas, but suffice to say it is fabulous, and it IS Cousin, it is one of his catchphrases and it encapsulates him to a T and I can see it written in lipsticky flowing script over a hilarious photo of him with a lipstick kiss mark over it – oh lord, yes, let it be, it’s purrr-fect, this book is going to be a whole lotta fun.

Life's a Banquet!

My cousin and J. are going to throw an AUNTIE MAME-THEMED party for me a month or so after I arrive on Maui! He said, “You’ll be the fresh new meat on the island,” meaning most of his crowd is older, and I’ll be a whipper-snapper at the tender age of 33. I’ve been researching Hawaiian centipedes and cane spiders so I know what I’m up against. Hawaii is generally pest-free, so if I don’t have trouble with these two fearsome insectoids, I should be fine. My cousin said cane spiders aren’t venomous, “just gross and scary, and they jump AT you,” and he said centipedes are what you really need to watch out for, “I’ve been bitten three times.” Supposedly they can get up to a foot long, and I saw a video of one eating a mouse (!) People occasionally end up in the hospital with baseball-sized swellings from centipede bites. The pain has been described as similar to a lighter flame being held to your skin. But I don’t think they’re poisonous either, or if they are, their poison only works on the insects and small vertebrates they prey on, not humans, so you’re not going to die.

This reminds me of hearing a woman on the bus a few months back talking about camel spiders and how soldiers in Iraq have to deal with them. She went on and on to her friend about how horrifying they are, how they have crazy jumping ability and can run 30 mph and they’ll inject a sleeping person with anesthesia so they can’t feel anything and then devour their flesh while they sleep. Then I went to the Wikipedia page for camel spiders and found that this is all either greatly exaggerated (they CAN run up to 10 mph, which IS crazy fast for an insect, though), or completely untrue (they don’t produce anesthesia, and according to almost all studies, they aren’t venomous, though their bites are certainly very painful).

People have a need to believe certain things that eclipses any intrusion by facts or reality. When faced with such facts they deny them, or more likely simply tune them out, because they’ve decided that their own constructed pseudo-reality must be defended at all costs. You can still find plenty of vestiges of the old-world, pre-Galileo belief that the earth was flat and if you sail too far you’ll sail over the edge of the world and be eaten by giant monsters. It’s like how James, poor James who I met last summer in Glacier, absolutely INSISTED that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a true story. He’s from Texas, and he KNOWS it. But it’s not a true story. It sets itself up as a true story, but so have plenty of other films from Citizen Kane to The Blair Witch Project. Chain Saw is loosely based on the exploits of Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein, who was a graverobber and artist working in the medium of human skin (but didn’t use a chainsaw). Then you throw in some Charles Manson, a bunch of social unrest and governmental deceit, the no-gas crisis of the early 70s, and the basic structure of Hansel and Gretel, and you’ve got this eerie film that is a weird mixture of modern horror and Grimm’s Fairy Tale.

How do I know this? By reading the words of Tobe Hooper, who wrote and directed the film.

Another good example: COURTNEY KILLED KURT! Or, along the same lines, KURT WROTE COURTNEY’S MUSIC! There is absolutely no compelling evidence of either of these claims, yet many people persist in believing them. A friend who visited me last week put an entertaining new spin on this by insisting that BILLY CORGAN wrote Hole’s second album, Live Through This! Now, that one I’d never even heard before, so you get points for ingenuity! But I’m afraid you’re confused. Corgan had nothing to do (and has never claimed he had anything to do) with Live Through This (except insomuch as the opening song, “Violet,” was apparently written for Corgan by Love, inspired by their on-again, off-again relationship). He DID co-write several songs on Hole’s LAST album, Celebrity Skin. Check the liner notes and you’ll see he was credited as such. And yet when I confronted my friend with this information, she sternly refused to let it impinge on her preferred version of events.

What can you do? You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.

I just watched a gay French movie called Like A Brother (Comme un frere, en francais). It was only 55 minutes long and felt more like a first draft than a finished film, and it ended very inconclusively, yet I enjoyed it, and it had many sweet and sexy moments. I think I like movies that challenge the pre-molded conception that films have to be between 90 and 120 minutes long. Why is that, anyway? Did some sort of scientific research determine that was the greatest length of time that most peoples’ attention spans will tolerate? And if that’s so, NOW, is that because of some innate threshold of the human brain, or because we’ve gotten so used to movies being that long?

One of the things I intend to work on while on Maui is a screenplay for a new film, longer than any I’ve done so far - I’m guessing 30 to 45 minutes. That’s a good next step. I’m not ready for a feature yet, though.