Russell Brand pens touching tribute to Amy Winehouse

I don't think too many people were shocked by the death of troubled musician Amy Winehouse. It seems right now that it may not have been an overdose (which I suspect is what most of us were thinking), but that won't be known for sure until a toxicology report is issued. Even so, her early death is likely due to her lifestyle.

All of that aside, it's sad that she is gone - as it is always sad when a wounded human being dies for lack of healing.

Russell Brand knows this life - he, too, was a heroin addict. But he survived and has sought healing. From his own experience, he offers a tribute to Winehouse.

Russell Brand pens touching tribute to Amy Winehouse

Actor urges those who know addicts to help them before it's too late

As a former heroin addict, Russell Brand has a soft spot for Amy Winehouse. In a Sunday morning blog post, the 36-year-old "Arthur" star -- who has been sober since 2002 -- reflects on the life of the British soul singer, who was found dead in her London apartment Saturday at the age of 27.

VIDEO: Remembering Amy Winehouse (1983-2011)

"I've known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma," Brand writes.

"Carl Barrat told me that 'Winehouse' (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it's kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me, with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; 'Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric,' I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable."

PHOTOS: Amy and other stars who died at 27

"I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they're not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50 pence for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his 'speedboat,' there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they're looking through you to somewhere else they'd rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anesthetize the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief."

"From time to time I'd bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was 'a character' but that world was riddled with half cut, doped up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn’t especially register."

PHOTOS: Amy Winehouse's tumultuous life

"I arrived late and as I made my way to the audience through the plastic smiles and plastic cups I heard the rolling, wondrous resonance of a female vocal. Entering the space I saw Amy on stage with Weller and his band; and then the awe. The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie [Holiday] and Ella [Fitzgerald], from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened," he writes. "Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse! That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I'd only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound. So now I knew. She wasn't just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a f**king genius."

"Shallow fool that I am, I now regarded her in a different light, the light that blazed down from heaven when she sang. That lit her up now and a new phase in our friendship began. She came on a few of my TV and radio shows, I still saw her about but now attended to her with a little more interest. Publicly though, Amy increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition," he continues.

"Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. I was 27 years old when through the friendship and help of Chip Somers of the treatment centre, Focus12, I found recovery. Through Focus I was introduced to support fellowships for alcoholics and drug addicts which are very easy to find and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking and without which I would not be alive."

Story: Winehouse was more than 'Rehab' caricature

"Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticized at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease."

"Not all addicts have Amy's incredible talent. Or Kurt [Cobain]'s or Jimi [Hendrix]'s or Janis [Joplin]'s. Some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalization doesn't even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call."

Winehouse is survived by her parents, Mitch and Janis, and her older brother, Alex.

Tags: Russell Brand, touching, tribute, Amy Winehouse, death, addiction, celebrity, popular culture, suffering, music, heroin, psychology, recovery, addicts, pain, rehab

The Perverse Selflessness of Christian Bale

I LOVE Christian Bale - hell, if I were . . . well, never mind, that's a whole other post. Let's leave it at this: He is one of my favorite actors, and I'll see pretty much any film he makes. By the way, Harsh Times is a strangely captivating and under-appreciated film - check it out.

The new issue of Esquire has a long and quirky interview with him - Christian Bale May Kill Someone Yet (by John H. Richardson) - , which is amazing because he hates interviews. He even admits that if he had "bigger balls" he'd tell the studio to eff off, he's not doing another interview for a film, ever.

Here is a bit from the first page he talks here about hating interviews:

ESQUIRE: So you want to be perceived accurately, but you also don't want to give any details. You realize that those two things contradict each other.

BALE: No, it's simpler than that. I want to be able to just act and never do any interview, but I don't have the balls to stand up to the studio and say, "I'm never doing another interview in my life!" So I tip my hat and go, "Okay mister! All right mister! I'll go do the salesman job!"

ESQUIRE: And you don't want to talk about your personal life or family background either.

BALE: Look, I've got incredible pride for my family. I've absolutely fallen into that cliché of a dad who could just happily talk about my daughter endlessly. But it's not what I'm about in terms of being an actor. I don't want people to know about that.

ESQUIRE: Why not?

BALE: I don't want people to know me.

ESQUIRE: Why not?

BALE: Because that buggers up my job.

ESQUIRE: How does it do that?

BALE: Because if you know something about somebody, it gets in the way of just watching the guy as the character.

ESQUIRE: But that's not really true. If you really disappeared into your role, people wouldn't realize it was the same guy from movie to movie.

BALE: No! It's like painting behind the radiator — I'd know about it even if nobody else does.

ESQUIRE: But for the audience, that's part of the pleasure. "Wow! He's a great actor! He's so different than he was in Julius Caesar."

BALE: Well, it's also just I'm bored shitless with myself.

When he was a child actor, Bale did fantasy movies and even sang and danced in a Disney musical called Newsies. Now he cringes at the words "child actor."

BALE: I spent many years trying to pretend I wasn't.

ESQUIRE: Why?

BALE: Because it's embarrassing.

ESQUIRE: Why?

BALE: Well, it's embarrassing to be a star. Most people look at you like, "That's not a fucking job, is it?" And then on top of that, you learn very quickly that you're just a tool — other people are manipulating everything you do, you're at the mercy of editors, and there's nothing you can do. But I learned that there's a certain character that can be built from embarrassing yourself endlessly. If you can sit happy with embarrassment, there's not much else that can really get to ya.

You get the first sense here of his desire to live outside of himself - but it gets more clear later int he interview.

Here is a section from somewhere in the middle, where he talks about the desire to lose himself, to seemingly annihilate his self in the roles he takes - all of which are dark and guilt-ridden in some way or another.

ESQUIRE: You're famous for losing sixty-three pounds on The Machinist. You looked scary. What's up with that?

BALE: That was just a kind of an asshole seeing if he could have the discipline to mentally control himself for an amount of time.

Squirming, he returns to his sore spot.

BALE: I have a very sissy job, where I go to work and get my hair done, and people do my makeup, and I go and say lines and people spoil me rotten. And everyone has that kind of curiosity of how far can you go, how far can you take it. I think it's always good testing yourself. With various things that could be incredibly unimpressive to other people, but there's some meaning to it within yourself — and also stupid, which many people called me during that time [laughs].

But The Machinist prepared Bale for his next part, his star-making turn as the darkest of all superheroes.

ESQUIRE: Batman's a perfect role for you. He's the only action hero who really captures you. [In fact, now that we think of it, Batman is the inconceivable middle point between the roles Bale played in Little Women and American Psycho.] Did you know that going in?

BALE: No. All I knew was that there was a whole lot more there that I'd never seen and there was some extreme in the interpretation that should be taken. So I just said, "I just gotta hope that they're gonna go with that, and if they don't, that's not the version I'd like to be involved with anyway." And it's that perverse thing in life, where when you're able to achieve a certain recklessness, you actually end up getting good results. You have to throw everything aside and say, "What the hell, I'm gonna do it this way, and if they don't like it, I wanna do it anyway." It avoids that anxiety of "How do I manipulate this and fake it so that people believe me?" That's never gonna work. So that's the kind of abandonment you gotta have.

Tugged between these polarities of control and recklessness, Bale is emerging as a paradoxical and driven person of a piece with many of his darker movies, which can feel less like entertainment than forensic research. (This probably accounts for his place on Entertainment Weekly's list of the top eight "most powerful cult heroes of the decade past.")

ESQUIRE: So what's with all the darkness and the miserable characters and the guilt?

BALE: What do you mean "the darkness"? What do you mean? Give me examples.

ESQUIRE: The Machinist.

BALE: All right, that's an extreme example.

ESQUIRE: I'll say.

BALE: I don't like to kinda look at any patterns in my movies. But I guess Harsh Times is kind of harsh. The New World. And the Batman movies. The Prestige. Rescue Dawn. 3:10 to Yuma. I'm Not There. Velvet Goldmine. I'm sure I've got some non-dark-guilt-ridden pieces.

ESQUIRE: Newsies.

BALE:Newsies.

ESQUIRE: But you were this singing, dancing, happy kid. What happened to you?

BALE: I'm still singing and dancing and happy. I just don't like musicals, that's all.

ESQUIRE: Or romantic comedies, I hear.

BALE: I just don't find them very romantic or funny much of the time.

ESQUIRE: What about Bringing Up Baby?

BALE: Is that a movie?

ESQUIRE: It's Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

BALE: I don't know it.

ESQUIRE:The Philadelphia Story?

BALE: Never seen it.

ESQUIRE:Breakfast at Tiffany's?

BALE: Never seen it.

ESQUIRE: Get the fuck outta here.

BALE: You're not talking to a cinemaphile.

ESQUIRE: But I bet you've seen Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

BALE: Yes.

ESQUIRE:Blue Velvet?

BALE: Yes.

ESQUIRE: What else?

BALE: I saw The Wild Bunch recently. I remember being rocked by Naked when that came out — and I hate the pretentiousness of that, referencing a Mike Leigh movie, but it really did fascinate me for some reason.

ESQUIRE: It's a very grungy movie.

BALE: And Chris Farley was just phenomenal. Beverly Hills Ninja will always remain one of my tops.

ESQUIRE: Now you're lying.

BALE: I have watched that movie. One time I sat down and watched it two nights in a row, and cried with laughter both times. The guy just was a phenomenon, and is missed dearly in my household.

Now it's time to dig a little deeper.

ESQUIRE: You have these very strongly held beliefs, some of them a bit peculiar. Were you troubled by some growing egotism or vanity or something?

BALE: No. I primarily felt embarrassment through most of my performances.

ESQUIRE: Because of the quality or the doing?

BALE: I'm not sure. I never put my finger on it. But there was a love for it at the same time — and I don't think it's amazing to have those contradictions. None of us are sound bites, you know.

ESQUIRE: You seem to have a puritanical streak.

BALE: Puritanical? Really?

ESQUIRE: The embarrassment. The rigor.

BALE: The flagellations?

ESQUIRE: Yes, exactly.

BALE: I have a hair shirt on right now, you know.

ESQUIRE: Instead of reveling in the fact that you're a rich and famous movie star, you're embarrassed.

BALE: Believe me, I have things I revel in without any hesitation. This is just not something to be quite as proud of as many people would have you believe.

ESQUIRE: What do you mean?

BALE: Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise. As an actor, you're giving it up, you're at the mercy of so many other people. So are you truly reaching the lofty goals? No, of course you're not. And there are some movies where that was never the aim anyway.

After a brief pause, he continues.

You know, I've been doing this quite a long time. It doesn't make me feel special. But I actually love it more for the reality of how it is done, the sinew and the bone of how it's really put together.

ESQUIRE: Can you be more specific?

BALE: One word: immersion. It doesn't matter whether I would be acting or doing anything else. It's about taking things a little too far. It's about you don't know the edge until you've gone over it. That fascinates me.

Later, explaining why he refuses to use the "Method acting" technique of remembering the past to stimulate emotion, he returns to the theme.

BALE: I'm not on a couch having therapy. And it's very limiting if I have to be able to relate every damn thing in somebody else's life to something that's happened in mine. At the end of the day, I'm faking it. Pure imagination, and it's only phony if you don't go far enough with it. You can become obsessive and it can get to the point where you're almost losing yourself. You've become a vessel. And holy shit, things start happening. And I'm hating the way I'm sounding right now, because I sound like a tosser, but that's my secret ambition.

ESQUIRE: To become a vessel.

BALE: Yes, but I don't believe in revealing that.

ESQUIRE: Why?

BALE: Just do it! Don't talk about it, get on with it.

ESQUIRE: But you're a fucking actor! You're in the self business!

BALE: It's the opposite of self! It's actually saying, "I don't stand a chance being myself. I've gotta create somebody else in order to communicate. If I remove myself from all of my own memories and inhibitions and create another character — holy shit! I can reach out and communicate in that way." So to me, it's actually about trying to fucking destroy the self, and then you might be able to hit something. There's some quote, I think it's Oscar Wilde, "An artist puts nothing of himself into his art."

ESQUIRE: You know that's total bullshit, right?

BALE: Explain that! Explain that! Why is that bullshit?

ESQUIRE: Look at Scorsese, he's all over his movies —

BALE: He's the director!

ESQUIRE: Dostoyevsky's all over his novels!

BALE: He's the writer!

ESQUIRE: Jack Nicholson is all over his parts!

BALE: Great movie stars, that's what they do provide. Steve McQueen, you wanna fucking be Steve McQueen. What cooler fucking guy in the world than that? I can't do that. I don't believe in myself enough to do that. I've always thought, if I was in a band, I'd never want to be the lead singer.

ESQUIRE: Bassist? Drummer?

BALE: Well, I've got to admit to a bit of ego. I'd have to be lead guitarist [laughing].

Clearly, this was the site of a major — as Sig Freud used to say — "cathexis." The obvious course was to push harder.

ESQUIRE: I totally get it except for one thing.

BALE: What?

ESQUIRE: You were this way when you were thirteen, so it must be an instinctive reaction that goes deeper than any of your explanations.

BALE: All right! We're not gonna delve into this greatly, but it comes from moving around a lot and the necessity for re-creation. There you go. That's what it stems from. I was doing it in my own life well before I was doing it as a job.

One more bit from the end of the interview - I admire this part. I don't know how honest it is of him, but since I want to be understood and appreciated, I like that he does not.

ESQUIRE: I release you, you can go.

But you can't resist a last assault on his cloak of invisibility.

So how would you like people to think of you?

BALE: I don't care.

ESQUIRE: Really?

BALE: I don't care. Being misunderstood is not a bad thing as an actor. I know the truth.

He stands up and flicks his eyes across the scene before us, the balcony overlooking the Pacific with the rich men and their wives, and flashes a last charming smile — this time with a measure of mischief.

BALE: You know the reason I picked this place?

ESQUIRE: Why?

BALE: 'Cause it has nothing to do with my life. I never come here, ever. It's as far removed from any place that I would ever go to. And that's exactly why I chose it. 'Cause it has nothing to do with me.

Read the whole thing from the beginning.

Tags: films, culture, Art, self-reflection, celebrity, Esquire, selflessness, The Fighter, The Dark Knight, Christian Bale, interview, acting, being a star, The Machinist, Harsh Times, The New World, The Prestige, Rescue Dawn, 3:10 to Yuma, I'm Not There, Velvet Goldmine

Chris Hedges - American Psychosis

Chris Hedges has a new article at Adbusters (one of my favorite progressive sites), American Psychosis. He takes an honest and harsh look at the American obsession with the "cult of the self," exemplified in our "reality" TV shows, our addiction to celebrity, and our irrational belief that fame = success, and it's available to everyone.

American Psychosis

What happens to a society that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion?

Chris Hedges | 17 Jun 2010

Image on left by TOM MIHALEK/AFP, on right by LOE RUSSELL

The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame, cheered on by millions of viewers, elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities that can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows persistently teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and a constant quest for notoriety and attention.

Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens.

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman Sachs … that willfully trashed the global economy and stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

The tantalizing illusions offered by our consumer culture, however, are vanishing for most citizens as we head toward collapse. The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The jobs we are shedding are not coming back, as the White House economist Lawrence Summers tacitly acknowledges when he talks of a “jobless recovery.” The belief that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud. Freedom can no longer be conflated with the free market. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

Read the whole article.

Tags: culture, celebrity, mental illness, Psychology, consumerism, television, Adbusters, Chris Hedges, American Psychosis, fame, reality TV, cult of self, reality, illusion