The look of Love: It's just not working

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Captured leaving a powder room, in Nick Broomfield's 1998 biopic "Kurt and Courtney," Courtney Love is sleek and stunning as she runs long, manicured fingernails beneath her nose and sniffs prettily.Ten years later, Love is back in the news again, after a painful decline, and a seemingly endless round of rehab and courtroom appearances.Love has not returned as the film and fashion beauty who clawed her way out of the ashes of a husband's suicide, but instead has reverted to her pre-fashion-plate grunge-goddess tendency to dress in rags, her makeup smeared like the Joker's in "The Dark Knight."Love is into the earlier guise, with some minor modifications. She is painfully thin, and her face is a thriving complex of cosmetic alterations and amplifications. Her clothing is still couture, but couture that gestures back to her distinctive dishabille of the early 1990s: tatty roses, distressed satin, diaphanous slips.And her behavior? As gossip-blogger Perez Hilton noted recently, "We have a feeling she is may be taking the funny pills again!"Most famous for a long time for selling off Kurt Cobain's personal effects and for making music that only critics seem to hear, Love has worked hard the past year or so, to return, via her Web site and MySpace blog, as a viable celebrity with things to say.Unfortunately, because of her execrable typing, her posts have to be interpreted, and, when they are, they immediately call to mind the enormous Ziploc pouch of prescription pills she was recently seen with in London.Over the past month, Love has crawled back into our consciousness by claiming someone stole Cobain's ashes, therefore making her suicidal; by smashing her foot and being wheeled around Los Angeles in a grocery cart; by renaming her "alter ego" Cherry Kookoo. She has also written a widely circulated letter to Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan, which castigates him for not showing up at her daughter's 16th-birthday party in terms that are likely making the teen-ager, like all teen-agers, consider matricide daily.She has been photographed widely -- on a beach in Malibu, for example, hobbling into the surf with a gigantic cast and an acoustic guitar. The Gawker Web site just pronounced the singer "criminally insane" after a New York Times feature story about celebrities and court noted her tendency to play to the crowds outside the courthouse in Manhattan, by snagging cigarettes and making attention-getting statements, such as that her (appalled) lawyer had made her pregnant.All of this seems like Love as usual, as the star has always had a penchant for garnering any kind of notice, and it is, ultimately, good to have her or Cherry Kookoo back: The world is a less interesting place without her.The sad bit is the way in which she is photographed and discussed, along with the far younger Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, in roundups of "train wrecks" and so on. While the latter singers still have a chance to clean up, it is disquieting to see what appears to be an ongoing drug addiction raging in a woman in her 40s. Disquieting because the drugs, or what appears to be damage caused by drugs, diminish the great artist because they also underline her age.And America is not kind to aging women, as we all know, especially catastrophic ladies such as Judy Garland and Billie Holiday, performers whose lives and talent were slowly devoured by their monstrous appetites and pain.It cannot be easy for Love to confront images of the still-27 Cobain, who looks less like her husband and more like her son every passing year. The theft-of-the-ashes tale is another story altogether, which may be about the carelessness and mendacity of certain junkies, and/or about losing, genuinely, the last speck of what remains of Cobain, of her great romantic and artistic partnership with him.To her credit, she was never good at playing a grieving widow. She has scarcely spoken of him since his death in 1994 and has divested herself of his sad belongings -- "100 flannel shirts," as she so caustically phrased it.Yet had she been a little kinder to his memory, to theirs, she might not be so lost and furious now. Desperate to be loved (she chose her name, after all), she is also desperate to make such a feeling impossible.They threw rotten apples at Garland before she died, while she was singing, in a broken voice about birds flying high.If Love is not careful, the same dreadful, violently beautiful fate awaits her too.(E-mail Lynn Crosbie at lcrosbie(at)globeandmail.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)