Smells Like Early Adulthood

Pics of Frances Bean Cobain, who turns nineteen today, pointed out by Matt Welch.  Despite the fact that she looks like Death – I mean literally looks like the DC Comics character – she’s wearing a Wolverine t-shirt in one shot. 

Perhaps she hopes to gain Wolverine’s fast-healing powers, which he once explained enable him to smoke without the myriad terrible health effects smoking has on normal people (since she’s smokin’, in the bad sense, in several of the photos).  What kind of self-destructive idiot engages in cigarette smoking at this late point in scientific history?  (Certainly not our best and brightest, judging by the stats, by the way – but that’s my old job.  And I should return to the current one, ghostwriting, in just a moment.)

Marvel and DC should totally do a team-up miniseries with Thanos and Death.  Thanos has the hots for Death even as depicted the Marvel way, as a skeleton with a vaguely female shape.  Imagine if he met DC Death.

A friend of mine notes that Frances looked cheerful in photos just a couple years ago but now looks as if, well, her mother is Courtney Love.  On the bright side, she’s morphing in a far more lovely fashion than her dad’s contemporary Sinead O’Connor.  Yikes.

New Wave was a somewhat tamer musical genre, though I just learned that Grace Jones (early in her career) was among the performers in a short-lived Italian TV series combining acting and musical performances that generated controversy for its nudity and Satanic themes, called Stryx. 

Say what you will about her Satanic qualities, Jones has been a marvelous bridge between cultures over the years (Jamaica and the U.S., the U.S. and Europe, black and white, straight and gay, female and sort-of-female).  But tomorrow, we recall a more divisive cultural moment: the Crown Heights Riots, which took place twenty years ago this weekend.