This weekend's walk-about with Courtney Love in the Times was both excellent and at the same time fundamentally indistinguishable from any other long-form profile of Love written in the last twenty or so years. There is a simple and straightforward reason for this. Courtney is the Dorian Gray of the American celebrity-industrial complex. Her public face shows us exactly what we want to see, while her private face is revolting (and even aging) and seeing the two in close proximity unsettles the viewer on an almost biological level. There's no denying that Love can be personally unpleasant; a former co-worker who went on to be Courtney's assistant [...]