Did you ever stop and think about why doctors’ and dentists’ offices overflow with heaps and mangled heaps of celebrity magazines? An answer occurred to the Spandex Twins only yesterday: celebrities stave off fears and anxiety about pain and death. At the very least, they instantly absorb us into their gated (and yet paradoxically wide-open) world of beauty and fun, and draw us back into their ever-unfolding stories, no matter where we may have left them last. Just as we may feel when revisiting family members we have know since childhood, we are comforted by our passive and limitless place in these unending real life novels.
Celebrity-themed television shows are less satisfying, mainly because they tend to pack lots of ads into the “content”, usually for new shows on their networks. Also, still pictures in magazines invite the imagination to work harder. Still, the Spandex Twins have just heard from one such show that BILLY CORGAN and COURTNEY LOVE are DATING. We understand they are even living together.
In the early 00’s, Corgan wrote some songs with C-Love for Hole's “Celebrity Skin” record. We don't know if they were romanticos back then, but this new entanglement is big news. It's like 1990s planets colliding! The Spandex Twins believe that generation is historically collapsing, and this is evidence (further evidence would be if Gavin Rossdale and Gwen Stefani broke up, because Gavin would be left back in the ‘90s while Gwen plowed on towards the 2010s).
Our analysis of the love-match: In the nearly two decades we’ve “known” him, it often seemed that Billy Corgan had, or has, a Napoleon complex, and wanted to be the savior of the 90's and the voice of his generation the way that Kurt Cobain was seen to be. With Courtney in hand and lip, he's movin' in on that territory. We also observe that Corgan often says he feels burned by the media in a way that he actually isn't, and, being such a romantic, he now thinks he will suffer it out with Courtney Love, who has a history (and name) that mirrors characters in his gothic-Victorian-romanticism -obsessed mind. She's some kind of archetype to him, and all the songs he has written about love have now effortlessly, retroactively become love letters to her. No matter that they were written in the 1990’s – in fact, that makes them even more appropriate for Ms. Love, since she was in her heyday when Billy was writing them.
Anyway, Billy will love her defects for a while, but will soon realize that it's not actually anything like his fantasy, and he won't put up with her because he's got a Napoleon complex, and he will say that her demons are messing with his genius.
However, we think she will tire of him first. She's strong-willed and will sniff out that obsession of his; even if they are both out of touch with reality, their delusions differ sharply, and Courtney Love lives in the here and now, not in Victorian England or some Rock Arcady. She will totally sick out on him and say nasty things about him to Extra or The Insider or Entertainment Tonight.
What this all means for 2007 is that it will speed up our distance from the 90s, making it even more like the 80s in our distant regard for it, and faster. If the 90s were a sheet of brightly colored paper, it just got valley-folded, and is one step closer to becoming an origami swan in a museum.
1 comment:
while undergoing detox in somewhere, az, i heard a christmas carol by the smashing pumpkins, of whom i was never a big fan, and yet the experience was akin to going through a regression into a life past and suburban (i also heard a sting song, and felt nothing whatsoever, attesting to the abreactive power of billy's oeuvre).
i very much agree with your prognosis, and would advance a further idea: that b's trajectory would prove the circularity of history-- what nietzsche has called the eternal return of the same. --v.
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