Old Dog For The Hard Road
I went to see the Asif Kapadia documentary about Amy Winehouse last night and I recommend it... It's engrossing, and features new material - family movies as well as friends' footage of teenage Amy and friends as she sets out on a promising musical career. Her talent is a naturally occurring phenomenon in an otherwise fairly unexceptional North London teenage existence. It shows her family as flawed as the next, but also that she was clearly loved. It shows that she was funny, clever and had several good close friends who cared about her and are clearly still devastated by how things turned out. It shows that she had problems which were never addressed too, certainly, which is why the movie got me thinking about that and the merits and demerits of hindsight vision
Lack of acceptance of the nature of addiction is widespread - even healthy - because an addict is sick and healthy people generally can’t bend their heads around sickness, especially of the mental variety - it's as hard to imagine, as how to dress for ice and snow when you're on a beach. When confronted by an ugly symptom, someone healthy is likely to say “No, that’s not the real person - this nice thing I always knew is". The addict will show the face that best pleases until the inevitable loss of control, making it easy to cherry pick.... And, let's face it, who doesn’t hold back here and there? Who doesn't opt for an easier life? Tracking the development of a mental illness in medical terms is one thing, but "ordinary" person thinking in the general rough-and-tumble of life is something else entirely....
Some addicts are lousy, some charming; some sweet, some vulnerable; some super smart, some too far gone; some creative, some never had a chance in the first place;. Some have more resources to resist for longer than others, but the one thing they all have in common is illness, and being on a steeper countdown than the rest of us. “Every junky’s like a setting sun”, Neil Young spoke the truth, only I would definitely infer alcoholic in that statement too, because in my opinion it's the worst drug of all.
Addiction runs amok, and family and friends are not just destined to be steam-rolled by its force, but can also end up living in a perennial state of if-only, which opens the door to blame and judgment.... which in my opinion can be hurtful and pointless when the person is gone…
Nobody knows exactly what went on...
Who can be summed up by people who only partially knew? Is there really always someone to blame? I'm not so sure.... It's very tidy to imagine a finger can be pointed, but I can point to text book cases of pretty close to identical circumstances where one sibling went one direction and the other did not...
I had a friend who was an addict…
I used to say “Half of you knows the score but the other half cancels it out…you’re an oxymoron!”
“No”, he’d correct me; “I’m a poxy moron”, because like Amy, he was clever and funny, and tortured... why? I really don't know.
A panel discussion from London followed the screening last night and I liked best of all a pre-recorded message from Amy’s friend and collaborator, Yasiin Bey (who expressed himself much more eloquently than I'm about to paraphrase).
He said (broadly) – there, but for the grace of god go any of us; celebrate her best aspects and be thankful to have brushed up against them.