by Mike Barthel

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 said her favorite part of the job was going home at night, because “that’s when the screaming stops.” But despite a decade of so of not accomplishing much that would justify continued attention (two good-to-great albums, neither of which sold well), and despite a public that more than likely finds her, at best, unsavory, she remains in the spotlight in a way none of her cohort have managed or, more likely, desired. Love’s persistence in the public’s field of vision testifies to a fundamental truth of her character: she is the dark mirror of our desires, reflecting not our more self-serving excuses for following gossip, but the gross reality of our appetite for stories of fame pursued and lost.

There are lots of people who play their life stories out in the media as a kind of career. It’s hard to think of anyone who’s kept it going as long as Love has. That’s because, when it comes to the celebrity media, “they are manipulating one another,” as Eric Wilson writes of Courtney and her fashion-world fellow travelers. The media has become almost Fordist in their ability to identify someone hungry for fame and bait them, through coverage and personal attention, into self-destructing.

But Courtney would self-destruct with or without media attention, and this gives her a kind of power. It’s hard to think of anyone who could’ve survived having their kid taken away from them after admitting third-trimester heroin use to a magazine writer, but here Love is, still separated from her child and still being written about. The logical response to having your life destroyed by the media is to pull away from the media, but this is not Courtney Love’s style. She falls and rises and falls and rises in a way so personally traumatic that it can’t possibly be planned and yet is so perfectly reflective of the stories we want to hear about the famous and famous-for-being-famous that the media almost have no choice but to cover her. This attention merely inflames her tendency toward auto-immolation, rewarding her bad behavior with greater fame and providing every incentive to keep using those Nirvana dollars to do stupid things.

Love’s public actions also seem to critique and take advantage of the expectations we have for celebrities, and that makes her considerably more sympathetic. Wilson’s piece notes that Love “has avidly embraced social media,” but she’s been a presence on online message boards (the web 1.0 version of social media) for years. In addition to regularly responding to fans on her own site, she took to The Velvet Rope, a music industry gossip board, to post punctuation-free jeremiads laced with given-name-only references to biz heavies that were sometimes understandable (“Lyor”) but most often not, and these offered fascinating revelations regarding the industry’s machinations and Love’s own skewed thought process. Courtney Love does not believe in the public-private divide. The personal is political enough for her that she embraces perfect transparency, making it possible for the public to always know what she’s thinking, even when what she’s thinking doesn’t make any sense. Like Courtney herself, this seems like a combination of admirable and misguided, a brave symbolic gesture that in practice would’ve been better off un-made.

Then, of course, there is the subject a mountain of dissertations could be (and probably have been) written on: Courtney’s body. Wilson begins his piece with Love bursting into a hotel room naked, putting on a see-through gown, and then walking through the lobby “with her breasts exposed to an assortment of prominent fashion figures.” If you’ve ever had any sort of affection for punk rock, it’s hard not to love this gesture as a fuck-you to the Madonna-whoring of the female form, flipping the bird to cultural attitudes that hold women’s bodies to be something so precious that they can only be revealed in private. They’re just boobs, after all! But then, this is Courtney; it’s entirely possible she just didn’t realize her tits were out, and it’s hard not to feel this would undermine the power of the gesture maybe a little. Wilson notes that one of the things Courtney’s been in the news for lately has been her abundance of plastic surgery, and while you can construct a good feminist argument about women’s right to alter their appearances without facing public censure, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Courtney did go a little nuts with it. She may be a feminist, but she sure as hell seems to have internalized the ol’ beauty myth. It feels like a disappointing rejection of the message sent by her more au natural public appearances, the ones that felt anarchic and genuinely disruptive. And yet, at the same time, going overboard with plastic surgery seems like another kind of fuck-you.

So yeah: Courtney Love, comma, it’s complicated. What makes her still a useful object of inquiry, I think, is the way these contradictions drag in our most conflicted feelings about celebrity. The biggest excuse we use to reconcile our desire for gossip with our distaste for gossip is the argument that these people are dumber than us. But for as many problems as Love has, she’s nothing if not sharp as a tack. For instance, I don’t know anyone who’s ever written a text message as lyrical as “I trust you understand that our hearts can take us all to dark and ill timed places,” and I know some reasonably smart people. Her fuck-ups prompt an easy feeling of superiority, but then she’ll go and do something that has us rooting for her again. This stings all the more when she, inevitably, fucks up one more time.

Courtney’s refusal to recognize the public-private divide — that continual simultaneous acknowledgment of Dorian Gray’s public face and private picture — is both what makes her special and what makes her a failure. It’s the right message, but by sending it in the wrong way, she undermines her authority. But what else would we want from the ultimate unreliable narrator? Maybe there’s a real redemption coming someday for Courtney — certainly it would be the next logical step of her story. But that would almost be a betrayal of all she’s stood for so far. Courtney Love is the whipping-girl of American culture, the one who always fucks things up, who breaks the rules and suffers the consequences, both rebelling for us and showing why it’s better not to rebel. She is a still-living repudiation of our myths of success and progress. Courtney Love is the avatar of an America where everything is always awful, where nothing ever changes, and where we really, really like it that way.

Mike Barthel has written about pop music for a bunch of places, mostly Idolator and Flagpole, and is currently doing so for the Portland Mercury and Color magazine. He continues to have a Tumblr and be a grad student in Seattle.

Ah, British irony: “In an incident befitting his stage name, the rap artist and anti-knife campaigner DJ Ironik was stabbed near his Highgate home in the early hours of Saturday morning.”

College basketball is an imperfect game. In fact, it’s gloriously imperfect.

Its players — even the best ones — miss open shots. Top prospects turn into pumpkins, while barely recruited kids become household names. Guys with no pro future play alongside blue chip, one-year rent-a-players. And win.

Its coaches make dumb mistakes, lose and get a free pass with “get ’em next time” platitudes. They improve mildly on lousy seasons and are then rewarded for making progress. (My personal favorite is the hot-seat-to-contract-extension-in-a-season maneuver.) Most of them keep their jobs, often for years, based on some unsolvable logarithm of personal charm, fading past success and nebulous “father figure” role-playing. If a coach is genuinely, truly horrible at his job, he’ll probably still get two years at a six-figure salary.

The whole system seems backwards: prominent schools are put in situations where they can lose to nobodies, sending the biggest draws and fan bases home early. But in a weird twist, it actually works out better that way.

Fans expecting accountability and some guarantee of a positive outcome avoid the college game, either for the NBA and its professional-grade robo-athletes and boardroom-interesting production quality, or other sports whose players always respond in the clutch and whose “best of” playoff series usually ensure that Cinderella heads back home dejected, crystal slippers in shards at her feet.

But I’m fine with that. Those of us who love college basketball love it almost entirely because of these foibles. Players suit up for scholarships, not Bentleys (even, despite the rumors, at Kentucky). Kids learn humility and the extent of their own limitations from their failures. Even at the elite programs, where gaming the system has become something of a black art, there is always that equalizer, the one-game chance of failure, no matter the talent on your roster.

And what’s most enthralling, what keeps us coming back for more: how often teams still lose that one game. For us diehards, college basketball represents a (mostly) egalitarian system where the real treat lies in Colossus U falling prey to some shitty walk-on’s chucked up three pointer.

We think of ourselves as purists of an impure game, lovers of the not-so-neat.

So it is in some ways curious that we enter a new season with Duke, one of the college game’s elitist of the elite — hell, one of academia’s elitist of the elite — looking about as perfect as it gets in college basketball. Meanwhile, everyone else must do what they always have to do and transcend imperfection to cut down the nets in April.

Perhaps the most respected and most despised program in the game, Duke won its fourth national championship last spring, much to the surprise and chagrin of most everyone outside the castle walls back in Durham and the wealthiest enclaves of New Jersey. Duke’s iconic coach, Mike Krzyzewski, then headed overseas to save America’s ass by achieving global basketball supremacy with a patchwork national team, two years after winning Olympic Gold with this generation’s edition of the Dream Team. Hooray for Coach K and America!

Of course, before he redeemed America’s soul in Turkey (“Thanks again, Coach! Seriously, you can stop now.”), Duke’s boss led his jarringly pasty Blue Devils to championship glory at the expense of one of the best underdog stories in the game’s history. While the game was close, Duke’s assemblage of scholar-warriors rather bloodlessly ended hometown Butler University’s magical run to the title game, maybe enjoying it a bit too much, like big brother stealing his lesser sibling’s new, hot girlfriend. But while it was deflating in a way, it managed to only further illustrate college basketball’s funhouse mirror version of the ideal.

In most other sports the concept that the best team is the one that wins it all is a given. Sure, there are classic examples of underdog achievement in other sports — think the Miracle Mets, Joe Namath’s Jets. But in college basketball, the story behind the game is as much a part of the sport’s legacy as the outcome. For college basketball geeks, the names of the unlikeliest of winners are signposts to its greatest moments, not pauses of parity between dynastic franchise runs. The list of unlikely NCAA champions and overachieving ruffians comes more quickly to mind — Villanova, N.C. State, George Mason, Butler — than that of those annointed juggernauts — UCLA, Kentucky, Kansas and, most definitely, Duke.

For college basketball’s most avid followers and pundits, imperfection is actually the x-factor makes the struggle all the mightier. Perhaps no team this season will represent this better than Purdue University.

Purdue, coached by a former gritty point guard, was expected to be among the country’s five best squads this year. By the open of fall practice the Boilermakers appeared to have everything they needed to cross the threshold to the Final Four, a place they haven’t been since 1980. Then their best player, Robbie Hummel — already returning from a crushing knee injury late last year — proceeded to blow out his rehabbed knee in the second practice of the season and was lost for the year. When that happens in the pros, another millionaire steps in to take his place. In college ball, it’s just time to forge on, to overcome. Purdue try to weather the loss of their leading scorer and on-court leader, lacking at their core.

Other schools around the country may not have it that rough, but they’ll have their own challenges.

At North Carolina, even an abundance of elite talent wasn’t enough to overcome a lack of guts and cohesiveness last season. One of college hoops’ “brand” programs, North Carolina was an embarrassment last year. It only added injury to insult that Duke’s archrival was left to watch, helplessly, from NIT oblivion as its nemesis hoisted the NCAA trophy. Now a still-supremely talented but deeply flawed squad welcomes the nation’s best freshman, Harrison Barnes, into the fold. But many of the same personnel who brought about last year’s debacle remain, inviting the question: can you make a poodle into a pit bull just by adding a kick-ass spiky collar? We’ll see.

Nowhere does the battle between delusion and reality manifest itself more glaringly than at Kentucky, the nation’s all-time winningest program. No program’s fans love or hate their own team more. I should know. I’ve been part of that deeply sick fanbase since birth. We’ve lost all sense of perspective in pursuit of another national title, which would be the school’s eighth (but who’s counting?). Our coach is the most loathed in the game, John Calipari, but also one of the best. Outside the Bluegrass State, Calipari is near-universally regarded as a cheat and a huckster, a rule-bending car salesman of the highest order. Back home, he’s a perfect salve for the acid belly of the Big Blue beast. Kentucky will have to find replacements for a record five first-round NBA draft picks. Nice problem to have, of course.

As if he needed more fuel for his haters. ‘Coach Cal’ now awaits word about whether his prize recruit — a professionally trained Turkish man-child named Enes Kanter whose presence could make an undersized but talented Kentucky side into a title-contender — will be allowed to play by the NCAA. And Big Blue Nation, Kentucky’s rabid, insatiable and generally obnoxious fans (of which I am unabashedly one), wait with him. No one demands more from their team than we do, and no one hurts more when that demand is (very rarely) met.

Fellow blueblood Kansas faces a similar situation. Their hotshot guard recruit, Josh Selby, awaits his own NCAA fate. But no Turkish professional issues here, just your everyday “family advisor might be a player agent” situation. With a team strong at most every other position, like Kanter, Selby could be the piece Kansas is missing, the perfect fit to a championship puzzle. Never mind the ethical issues involved, of course. To win big, you play by the rules the way they are written. Or wait for them to be re-written. Just ask Kentucky fans.

There are, of course, exceptions. Michigan State’s trek to the Final Four has become an almost annual affair. Coach Tom Izzo, widely regarded as one of the good guys, brings in “character guys,” preaches a brand of smash-mouth, 54–50 final score basketball, and the Spartans take it to gyms across the northern Midwest all winter long. Ready again to run with a roster of talented but oddball overachievers, Michigan State will probably be the nation’s best team not named Duke, but will still somehow find creative ways to lose 10 games along the way. That’s just the way it works in East Lansing.

But it’s not all about the pedigreed in college basketball. A slew of other programs seek their first glory in generations, if ever.

Pittsburgh will be the class of the Big East; a low-scoring, defense-focused team of scrappy streetballers who are coached to play games as grudge matches. Featuring players from all sorts of hamlets of the industrial northeast — Lancaster, Harrisburg … OK, and Brooklyn — the Panthers will try to out-will and out-tough better-heeled opponents like they always do, grace on the court be damned. And damned their brand of grace-less basketball most assuredly is.

With a roster chock full of transfers, junior college talent and vagabond prep All-Americans out in the heartland, Kansas State and maniacal coach Frank Martin look to build a hoops legacy from scratch the hard way. Kansas State is the serious college hoops fan’s dream: a hard-nosed team put together by a throwback coach at a middle-of-nowhere locale. It’s ur-Hoosiers shtick. Corn and basketball and shredded coaching vocal cords. Of course, we should probably ignore the small fact that none of the team’s good players are actually from Kansas, or anywhere near Kansas. And we will.

Of course, there are too many more stories like these to get into. And this is why Duke’s villainous narrative will dominate college basketball this season. Because while the rest of the game’s programs work to overcome their issues, Duke and Krzyzewski merely add the country’s best freshman point guard in Kyrie Irving to a team already loaded with NBA-caliber talent. And instead of trying to iron out wrinkles, the Blue Devils’ challenge will be avoiding overconfidence as they steamroll conference and non-conference foes alike. The story of Duke’s pursuit of basketball perfection will make writers breathless and opposing fans (even more) bitter.

Anguish, sloth, goofiness, disgust, unsightly basketball, unseemly rule evasion, delusional fanaticism, maddening inconsistency, frightening sideline behavior, unbridled bitterness. Yep. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

30 Rock: up to 11.64 jokes per minute.

Listen, I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare, or Scream 3. But Anthony Lane is correct that Due Date makes Planes, Trains and Automobiles appear akin to Little Dorrit. This is not really a good movie! And I knew it wouldn’t be but how delightful are Robert Downey Jr. and Zack Galdsfkdsfinas’;? I love them, in a really pure, if somewhat dicy, way. You can’t watch Home for the Holidays or Bored to Death without just adoring them both in a complicated manner — they’re like brothers you don’t want to be locked in a room with but you sure do love recounting their glittery, antisocial exploits after they pass out. Something — you know? In any event, I paid to see that movie, in an American theater. And, sure, I guess I’d like my money back? But I’d also be placated with a free Twizzlers. Or whatever, I could just live and learn I suppose. It’s just always psychically hurtful (YES) when a low-expectation movie doesn’t quite squeeze under the low expectation wire.

Would you like to see a documentary film about about the legendary British punk band, the Mekons? Would you like to help produce one? Awl pal Joe Angio recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to finish The Revenge of the Mekons, for which he has spent the last two years shooting footage. How can you know it’s going to be really good? First, because of the clip above. But also the fact that Joe’s last documentary, How To Eat Your Watermelon In White Company (And Enjoy It), about Melvin Van Peebles, is totally great.

Janet Malcolm comes down Team Carr in the matter of the Rally for Sanity and its odd “blame the media” Palinism: “No doubt it was an accident of organization that required most of the people at the rally to defer their enjoyment of the stage show until they could watch it at home on a screen. But it couldn’t have been a more fitting accident. The world of TV is the world that Stewart and Colbert inhabit.”

While other overclass miscalculations spark bailout after bailout, dissolving alpha-grade marital bonds is a far trickier business. There is, for instance, the matter of shielding your liquid assets from a grasping ex, to say nothing of the messy personal details that tend to come out in bitterly contested divorce proceedings.

Most of all, though, there’s the great preoccupation of the wealthy in every unpleasant public scrape: the question of one’s legacy. That’s the gist of an epic dispatch from the Financial Times’ Jane Croft and Michael Peel, explaining how the once-swinging precincts of elite London have found themselves in a sort of legal limbo, so far as divorce goes.

The present unsettled state of British divorce law, they write, “makes good copy for journalists but means stress and doubt for some very high-profile individuals — as well as putting a strain on the court system for which everyone pays.”

For starters, there’s the precedent set by a 2000 House of Lords decision, holding that couples should seek to split assets on an equal basis in divorce proceedings. That’s been a boon for “the economically weaker partner — usually the wife,” Croft and Peel observe. Hence the tidy £24 million settlement that Heather Mills, the former life partner of Sir Paul McCartney, obtained after a scant four years of marriage in the couple’s 2008 divorce — and the £48 million that Beverly Charman, former wife of insurance titan John Charman, commanded in Britain’s largest-ever divorce settlement.

What’s more, British courts have, until very recently, granted no quarter to the wealthy scion’s greatest protection from an avaricious estranged spouse: the pre-nuptial agreement. The pronounced tilt of the British courts toward the interests of the less flush partner has produced a sort of land rush in upscale monogamy-smashing. Since London is already one of the prized haunts of “a super-elite often working in international finance,” Croft and Peel note, the final stages of marital dissolution has created their own affective race to the bottom: There are accounts, they sigh, of “some unseemly races between divorce lawyers to complete paperwork, with husbands trying to file in other countries before their wives can launch cases in England.”

The only trouble is that the wife-favoring British system may soon be a receding mirage, thanks to a surpassingly odd recent case in which the English high court upheld a prenup drawn up by a German chemical heiress named Katrin Radmacher prior to marrying a French investment banker named Nicolas Granatino. In the buck-passing tradition of French investment bankers everywhere, Granatino claimed that Radmacher concealed the true scale of her family’s £106 million family fortune, and had exploited his “besotted” romantic state (in the classy locution of his attorney) to rush him into a pre-nup that shorted him out of his true stake in their now-sundered union. Radmacher’s legal team countered that it was something shy of a romantic you-and-me-against-the-world gesture for Granatino to promptly quit his day job after his marriage to work as science researcher at Oxford University and loll around his wife’s £2.5 million estate. He clearly had a pretty good idea that he was in the hands of a flush provider — and what’s more, the Radmacher attorneys noted, he was in line for a £30 million inheritance himself once his own parents, a proud pair of French tax exiles, were dispatched to their own earthly reward.

All in all, one can quickly size up the Radmacher case as a piece without heroes. But when the British Supreme Court upheld the pre-nup in an 8–1 ruling, family law specialists began to worry that ushering Mayfair’s financial moguls into the pre-nup age could mark a distinct step backwards in the cause of gender equality. The court’s sole dissenting vote came from its only female member, a family law specialist who is also — of course — a baroness, named Lady Hale. If the Radmacher precedent stands (which, by the way, the change-averse panel tried to guard against by characterizing the ruling as a one-off), it could open up “some profound questions about the nature of marriage in modern law and the role of courts in determining it.” Some far-seeing opulent lovebirds might well elect “to contract out of the guiding principles of equality and non-discrimination within marriage; others may think this a retrograde step likely only to benefit the strong at the expense of the weak.”

Of course, one can make the case that all marriage, especially at the level of the upper-caste empyrean, tends overwhelmingly to benefit the strong at the expense of the weak; why should divorce be any different? The simple status of the alleged wronged party in the Radmacher affair as a multimillion-pound scion-waiting-to-happen points up the broader invidious social uses to which the institution famously allied with the formation of private property is routinely turned. (For a brisker stateside demonstration of the same principle, we recommend close study of the New York Times’ Sunday Vows section.) From this vantage, the dawning age of the Albion pre-nup is probably a welcome development: It will bring the contradictions in the existing order of things up to an intolerable pitch — and at that point, the foundations of the big baby lottery will finally be in place.

Chris Lehmann is a secret optimist.

Here are two ways to lose weight: 1) Eat mostly Twinkies and Doritos and HoHos and Ring Dings and other junk, but limit your calories, or 2) Try the wine and anxiety method. I prefer the second myself, but, you know, it has “wine” right there in the name. You do whatever’s good for you!

Those of you who have been less than obsessive about Conan O’Brien’s return to television (which happens tonight, apparently) may find the Taiwanese summary to be all you need, information-wise.