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How apropos: Courtney Love's new film and recording venture is to be called Hello Suckers. It gets better.
The picture centers around the story of '20s singer/actor Texas Guinan, a star of Broadway and film who ran a notorious speakeasy in New York City during Prohibition and was--like the actress set to portray her--a master of media manipulation and reinvention. When I told one of Love's local friends about this latest role in which the (former? current?) Hole singer riffs on her own life story, the friend rolled her eyes and asked incredulously, "Did she just punch 'female singer, manipulator, scandal' into a web search and then make a to-do list out of the results?" Hello Suckers will feature Love performing jazz and blues standards of that era such as "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "The Prisoner's Song," and "There'll Be Some Changes Made," for a soundtrack she and Imperial Teen's Roddy Bottum will collaborate on. (Here's a little-known/remembered/ cared-about piece of trivia: Love was once a member of Bottum's less-gay band, Faith No More.)
Love is currently up north in Vancouver (filming 24 Hours), where she reportedly suffered from a recent miscarriage.
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The online version of London's popular music publication NME was ablaze last week with reports of Badly Drawn Boy's recent performance at the Showbox. You may recall that at the end of 2000, The Stranger's Nate Lippens (a.k.a. "The Thesaurus," as I affectionately call him) apologized profusely in print for recommending that readers go see BDB's late fall appearance, noting that it had been a stupefying display of pompous blathering and minor hooliganism on singer Damon Gough's part. This time 'round, Gough delivered a three-hour set, one hour of which the singer spent talking. Fed up, a woman with an English accent began talking to her companion. Gough berated her from the stage (she asked him to "quit being boring"), demanding that she listen to the conversation he was having with himself instead; a verbal altercation ensued, and Gough threw his guitar to the floor, smashed a glass, and then stormed off the stage. He came back (why do they always come back?) and remarked that the woman should have had his guitar wrapped around her neck for insulting his performance. Then ANOTHER verbal altercation ensued when a male audience member took offense to Gough's violent suggestion. The only thing the Brits left out in their account of the evening was the BDB fan who took it upon himself to avenge Gough by smashing the male heckler on the back so hard that he landed on his face. The vigilante fan was promptly thrown out--but the smile on his face portrayed a man highly satisfied.
