I'm not an artist, so I'll just list writers.
Joss Whedon. Know how people will list those things around which their life revolved? People talk about how they've seen every episode of
Friends. For me, it was
Buffy. For the first four seasons,
Buffy was my life. Tuesday nights, the world could bloody well sod off until I got my fix. After that, the show went kind of downhill. I didn't
have to watch it every week. I've still seen most of the episodes between seasons five and seven, but they weren't quite the big deal. When the
Angel series came about, I was hooked on the first season. Then I stopped watching it in the second, only to come back for the third and everything past that with a vengeance. This was the best damned show on television, or so I thought.
Then the year 2002 rolled around.
Buffy was in its sixth season.
Angel was in its third and fourth seasons. And what decided to come out, but
Firefly. Another Joss Whedon show.
I was in love. This man could do absolutely no wrong. His plot ideas were fun. He actually kept me in suspense--I couldn't predict a Whedon show like I could most other things. And the dialogue? Sweet Jesus, the dialogue! I wanted to marry this man. No, I wanted to be this man!
Joss Whedon made me want to be a writer.
Shirley Manson. She, however, cemented the idea. There isn't a single song by Garbage that doesn't resonate with me somehow. No other band has released a song that made me cry--Garbage has released several. I discovered my homosexuality the first time I heard the song
#1 Crush was playing (though it took several more years before I'd admit it).
The World is Not Enough is my absolute favourite song, followed by
Cup of Coffee. The album
Version 2.0 got me through some of my roughest moments. The song
Untouchable got me my dignity back. Garbage is still my favourite band. I want to be as mentally beautiful while discussing things so ugly as she is. Shirley Manson is the kind of person I want to be.
Courtney Love. Wha huh? People like her? Well, no they don't. I don't even like her. But she's an idol of mine. It sounds strange, I know. But I adore the woman. I can't stand her at all, but I worship her. For one, Hole was another of my favourite bands. She's a brilliant writer. Terrible person, but brilliant writer.
Anyway, the personality thing. As I said, I hate her. But I would love to be her. A close friend of mine best summed up how I feel about Courtney Love. This is what she wrote:
Ellie Fye
You know who she is.
Unwashed bleach-blonde hair, mussed red lipstick, and glaringly ironic babydoll dresses, she drunkenly slurs her insights. She is the bitter parody of the standard ideal of beauty. It surprises me that so many seem to miss the point altogether.
Courtney Love is a human sculpture of her own making.
She is called slut, whore, trailer trash, and that's the point. She is the artist, the muse, the voice of what girls aren't supposed to be—self-hating and unabashedly hedonistic. She is the disheveled Marilyn Monroe gulping down blank pills. She is intentionally ugly and awful and that's why she is treated as a leper.
Of course the decadence is an act, but it's also innately part of her.
Art isn't always landscapes and prissy Georgia O'Keefe flowers. Art is train wrecks and plagues and ugly Cubist prostitutes. It's claiming back what was rightfully ours: Not only equality in stature and suffrage and reproductive rights, but the God-given right to be vulgar. For centuries in this country, women were protected by ladies laws, sheltering them from observing foul language or deeds.
You can claim she should be a better mother, get off the drugs, become an upstanding citizen. But you miss the point entirely. Shock rockers get their stints in rehab, bang some groupies and are revered. Courtney does the same and she is reviled. She's oh-so-selfish for being an addict and mother simultaneously but Kurt's a god although he abandoned his daughter via the needle and the bullet.
But if you hate her, you should. That’s the intent.
I say, celebrate her for throwing her compact at Madonna's stuck-up a**. Celebrate her for laughing last in the name of a statement.
It's funny how none of my idols are actually comic-book related (Joss as a comic writer isn't an idol of mine: It's his television that makes me a-twitter).
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