Lana Turner has collapsed!

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

- Frank O'Hara

I was in a Seville airport when I heard about Amy Winehouse's death. It was one of those things where you feel suddenly numb, then sad, then kind of ambivalent about it. Just running through those Kubler-Ross stages in a matter of minutes. I didn't know her, she didn't know me, far greater fucked up things go on, and it wasn't like she was a paragon of health and virtue so to say it was a 'surprise' is disingenuous at best.

But.

Oh that 'but'. Every now and then a song or a poem or a film or an essay or an entire album will just speak to you at the exact right time in your life on a level that doesn't operate on conscious thought or action or words. It will possess this greater meaning to you that; had you seen/read/watched it a few months earlier or three years later, it wouldn't have the same resonance. It explains things that are unexplainable, helps you sort through feelings you hadn't acknowledged until then, allows you to crack open and be connected to something greater than yourself. I would be willing to bet that most if not all people have had a relationship like the one Back to Black describes. Maybe with less of the moreish heroin and crack abuse forming it's central crux but one of those crazy, destructive, 'I hate you/I love you/I need you/piss off' relationships. Amy's pain and confusion and fucked-upness spoke to me like nothing else when I first heard that album. All of us feel pain and are confused and fucked-up to varying degrees in our twenties (and beyond one suspects) but she gave all that a beautiful, heartbreaking, soul chilling voice (topped off, no less, with a ridiculous beehive that I wish to this day I had the moxie to pull off).

I desperately hoped that Amy would find redemption rather than another hit off a crack pipe but that wasn't ever my call to make. Whatever her cause of death (and I may just be Saturn Returning here) I feel like this signifies the end of an era. The broken girl who sang her heart out for all the other broken girls is dead. Long live the broken girls.