but i was. .

did anyone here know about this? do you care?
it seems she's still trying to keep pace with cobain, rest his soul. she released his diairies so naturally she's following up with her own. it will never end

WRITHE THROUGH THIS
Analyzing Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
By J.R. Taylor


It’s hard to imagine that anything could make us nostalgic for the ’90s—and harder to imagine that it would be Dirty Blonde by Courtney Love. This scrapbook/memoir/ego fest is a nicely designed collection of snippets throughout the life of the professional widow. And let’s at least give Love credit for being a professional widow while her husband was still alive.

On a personal note, Dirty Blonde reminds me of a brief shining moment when mainstream entertainment journalism was fun. Publications were awash in the wake of Quentin Tarantino and the fanzine movement, and editors actually considered articles about squonky jazz artists and B-film actresses. That lasted about six months. Then the entertainment press decided that the real future was in treating the arts like they were professional wrestling. Today, that’s reflected in hipsters obsessing over the air-headed antics of Lindsay Lohan and Mischa Barton and the usual assortment of idiots. Let’s not forget that it all started with a clown called Courtney Love.

A lot of people have forgotten about Love. Her recent solo album, American Sweetheart, was a disaster, and she’s now way too far into a career where she only makes headlines for being a mess. Nobody ever took her seriously, of course. The assumption—even among corporate insiders who should’ve been defending her—was always that Kurt Cobain wrote the Hole songs that she claimed as her own.

In fact, Dirty Blonde might only exist as a chance for Love to show her handwritten lyrics to “Doll Parts.” Anybody remember that one?

Carrie Fisher’s introduction to Dirty Blonde includes a painful plug where the author insists Love’s upcoming How Dirty Girls Get Clean will be her “most remarkable” album. Fisher is presumably speaking in her role as the original riot grrrl. As an actress, Fisher wants to remind us of how we were shocked when Love didn’t get an Oscar nomination for—well, I don’t remember which film, but it sure was shocking.

Fisher is an appropriate choice to write the intro, though. Love fits into Princess Leia’s realm of lowbrow Hollywood blownbrains. Artfully torn pages litter Dirty Blonde, and the sum total is no surprise. Courtney Love turns out to be a spiritual being on the level of Pamela Anderson. “Experienced film stars,” writes Love, “are more enlightened.”

Love is also into quantum physics, as is Carmen Electra.

There’s one page, however, where Love almost reveals an arc within her life. She writes: I am a Public figure unhappy with my share of the American dream. There can only be one reason for this. I am on drugs and have the morals and mentality of a cartoon character. What did I want after all? If I wanted certain things, like respect and privacy I should have put out universal female symbols like…

Sorry, false alarm. Love’s deep thinking leads to the conclusion that her troubles are caused by our patriarchal society. It’s just her brilliance that keeps getting her in trouble. But she’s already addressed that earlier in the book. When I wonder, Hey, Courtney, why can’t you stay off drugs long enough to raise your own daughter? This quick thought answers that and a lot of other questions:

“Linear thinking does not come naturally to me…”

Dirty Blonde includes an explanation of why Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was a box-office disappointment. Love doesn’t mention the movie in the book, although there is one note where she goes on about the film roles she turned down. The Matrix, As Good As It Gets, L.A. Confidential—it’s strange to accuse somebody of lying to their diary, but this really seems like more staged delusion. Milos Forman, we’ll remember, remains the only name director who seems interested in Love as an actress.

Anyway, there’s a slip of paper where Love has written additional rules for her excessively staged rebellion, adding that “food is for peasants.” I’ve been in a lot of VIP lounges and have heard several comments where Love’s crowd plays at being a modern aristocracy. That’s probably the only history they know. It’s no surprise that Coppola’s own attempt at bringing that to life didn’t appeal to anyone outside of her social circle.

Dirty Blonde still manages to end on some interesting notes. The final pages include a sickly sweet email exchange between Love and Lindsay Lohan. I’m still pondering if Lohan’s bitching about “sickofans” was meant as a reference to “sicko fans” or “sycophants.” Is it possible that Lohan is capable of creating her own word as a reference to both? Let’s ask the scientists who put her through a maze.

Then there’s a final page that announces, “This is the end of my Journal, like it or not.” Rebellious to the end. That’s our Courtney.

There’s also an afterword where Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards further bury feminism. Forget anything I said about pining for the ’90s. These two have set up camp in a time warp. “People care about Courtney because she is an icon,” they explain, “not due to her crazy antics, but because she has been an emboldening presence in the lives of so many women and girls.”

In truth, Nirvana—being Love’s sole claim to fame—is unique in being the only rock band with a fan base that would move on to teenybopper acts. That’s right, folks. The Backstreet Boys had an audience that was recovering from a dreary trend summed up by dead Kurt and his pontificating widow.

Oh, well. At least David Grohl survived. But then, he had all the talent.

And that’s pretty much the Dirty Blonde experience. A list price of $35 is a lot to ask for a book that reads more like an issue of In Touch or TV Guide. Love is certainly no more interesting than any old cast member from “Friends.” Wait a minute—I went to high school with Courteney Cox. That makes her way more interesting than Courtney Love.

Volume 19, Issue 45
©2006 All rights reserved.

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11/07/06
15:42:44, Categories: Celebrity News, Music News

"Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love" Hits Bookstores
Groundbreaking rock musician. Award-winning actress.

Perceptive songwriter and author. Mother. Wife of a rock god. Fashionista and trendsetter. Provocateur.

In each and every one of these roles, Courtney Love has demonstrated a wholehearted commitment to her art, and an intense drive and lust for life that have made her a star and a celebrity icon but have also led her into some unwise, uncharted, and even dangerous territory. Simultaneously candid and enigmatic, Love is undeniably compelling, her mordant wit and vivid intelligence matched in intensity only by the extraordinary life she has led, from a bleak early childhood through great fame and terrible heartbreak to the present day. By turns exhilarating and unsettling, this is a story told for the first time in Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love, published by Faber and Faber, an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, on November 2.

An eclectic composition of deeply personal artifacts-including letters, childhood records, poetry, journal entries, song lyrics, fanzines, show flyers, other original writings, and never-before-seen photographs-Dirty Blonde leads us through the unimaginable highs and the despairing lows of one of the most captivating and creative figures in the world of popular culture. Forming a kind of impromptu memoir, the book shows Love's accomplishments, her mistakes, her history, and her future in a whole new light. Ranging from her upbringing in Oregon through her years of living in Japan, New Zealand, and London, from her career highs with Hole and as a Hollywood leading lady to her personal heartbreak and struggles, Dirty Blonde is Love laid bare-a wholly fascinating portrait of a fierce and insightful woman with an unblinking worldview and a determination to express herself no matter the cost.

"Love writes in her introduction: 'I have always said that I would never write a book, and I really haven't.' It's true- 'diaries' is something of a misnomer, as 'scrapbooks' would more accurately describe the collection of old photographs, hand-scrawled song lyrics and other documents that fill these pages. The materials assembled by Stander cover every phase of the rock star's 'wild pirate life,' from a failed childhood audition for The Mickey Mouse Club to an e-mail exchange with Lindsay Lohan about dealing with negative press coverage. (The compilation is so up-to-date it even includes her shocked reactions to the revelations about JT Leroy.) Along the way there are mimeographed flyers for early Hole concerts, a picture of the actual heart-shaped box that inspired Kurt Cobain to write the Nirvana song and photo after photo of Love herself, from candid backstage shots to more polished celebrity portraits. A foreword by Carrie Fisher and an afterword by political activists Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (Manifesta) each, in their own way, celebrate Love as an unrestrained feminist, but the best way to understand her may be to plunge directly into the raw materials." -Publishers Weekly

"Fractured and full of soul . . . A glimpse into the permutations [of] Love's artistic, political and personal selves." -Hilton Als, Fashion Rocks


-----

Dirty Blonde: the diaries of Courtney Love
Make tea, get nose fixed asap
By Ben Thompson
Published: 12 November 2006

As first lines of Author's Notes go, Courtney Love's "I have always said that I would never write a book and I really haven't" certainly puts down a marker. Especially for anyone who's just paid £20 in the belief that she has. False modesty is one charge on which even the most avid detractors of this "groundbreaking rock musician, award-winning actress, fashionista and trendsetter" would be inclined to find her innocent. And it's true: Courtney really hasn't written a book. What she has done is get someone else (her editor Ava Stander) to sellotape together a scrap-book of relics, lyrics, and panegyrics, and present them as a kind of marginally more literate successor to Madonna's Sex.

By the time the reader has recoiled at the grandstanding acknowledgements (a list of people "without whom my life would suck and I'd be dead" which includes such noted philanthropists as Mel Gibson, Chris Rock, David LaChapelle and Cameron Crowe, alongside the inevitable Bono and - note the sisterly inversion - "Trudie and Sting") and gagged at the Oscar-speech sycophancy of Carrie Fisher's introduction, she or he may well be subject to an overwhelming sense of disappointment and frustration.

Imagine if this book was typed. Imagine if it didn't look like an explosion in the Oxford Street branch of Accessorize. Courtney Love's diaries would - and should - have been utterly fascinating. But rather than the grungy lovechild of Rupert Everett and Dorothy Parker which we'd all been hoping for, Dirty Blonde initially feels like the product of a creative collaboration between Bridget Jones and Avril Lavigne. And yetThe Diaries of Courtney Love are more than just a nauseating celebrity suck-fest and a casual exercise in decoupage.

For those with the eyesight to decipher Courtney's terrible handwriting, and the patience to cross-reference each entry with the list of sources at the back, Dirty Blonde quickly starts to become the distinctive and hilarious artefact that its subject's troubled yet spectacular life would seem to demand. The draft missives scrawled on airline notepaper offer poignant snapshots of her fractured family life and peripatetic upbringing. The rejection letter from the Mickey Mouse Club, which Courtney received at the age of 11 (her application had been filed under the superbly stagey name of Coco Rodriguez) testifies to the early genesis of that "blistering desire to make it somehow" she mentions in the Author's Note. The excerpts from the log of one of the reform schools Courtney attended as a teenager - "screaming and swearing... Refused to be reasonable. Became louder and more insistent" - could just as easily be a gig review.

In her late teens, Courtney moves to England and the Liverpool post-punk scene. "Why do I find Ju [Julian Cope] so much more challenging than I do Echo Macalloch?" she wonders. Had Echo and the Bunnymen's lead singer not already had reason enough to feel crushed, his misspelt name is followed by an arrow and the word "bore". "I can make tea now," Courtney applauds herself in a journal entry written at Heathrow at the start of the long journey home. "I can remain enigmatic, pose well and appear feminine."

There's a great moment in Nick Broomfield's film Kurt & Courtney, where one of Love's legion of tragic rock star wannabe ex-boyfriends emerges from the squalid shack he is living in, triumphantly clutching a piece of paper on which she had written the words "become friends with Michael Stipe". Dirty Blonde naturally contains photographic proof of her eventual realisation of this, and other, life goals. Here, she tacitly admits that it's those very unflattering depictions of Courtney's brazenness about which she protests longest and loudest (such as Broomfield's film, or the Vanity Fair interview which resulted in her and Kurt Cobain's daughter being taken briefly into care) that ultimately contribute most to her allure. "I realise now," she writes of the Vanity Fair article, in a supportive email to next generation Hollywood bad-girl Lindsay Lohan, "that as hardcore as it was, it made me a lot more interesting and somehow employable."

As Love's own career moves off the adolescent drawing board and on to the big screen, her ambition somehow retains its freshness and piquancy. A publicity still from Alex Cox's Straight to Hell is garlanded with such invaluable contemporary commentary as "I'm getting nose fixed asap" and "Tim Robbins - a bit pretentious". As Courtney's endless to-do lists progress from "Practise my make-up and my pliets [sic]" and "Be glamorous - get your highlights done every 16 days", to the immortal "Make LP. Achieve LA visibility", the realisation dawns that the traditional critical categories of fulfilment or under-achievement cannot really be applied to her: the to-do lists actually are the finished product.

When it comes to what she eloquently terms "attending to the everyday common conceptual art of celebrity", Love has few peers. At a time when the unchecked narcissism of the blogosphere seems to threaten the validity of the diary form (what price the illicit thrill of gaining access to thoughts not originally intended for public consumption, when the concept of privacy no longer exists?), this volume leaves the reader with a strangely old-fashioned sensation.

"I don't understand this concept of publishing my diaries," Courtney Love scribbles on the corner of p259, "although I didn't mind publishing his [ie her dead husband Kurt Cobain's]. He'd become so fucking objectified I just stopped caring what people thought. Now I do. I wish I could take it back." We all wish she could. The publication of the Nirvana singer's journals was the most gruesome of all the seemingly endless parade of posthumous violations to which his body of work has been subject. But then again, just how precious should one be about a man who committed the ultimate pre-posthumous violation of pulling the trigger that blew his own brains out? And he would have wanted her to have the money.

There's a hand-written note from fashion designer Marc Jacobs on p214 which tells of how touched and moved he was by Courtney's extraordinary personal gift that he promises to keep private and never share with anyone else. "I wonder what that was," the reader thinks, with a slight sense of foreboding. Turning to the back of the book and discovering it was one of Kurt's jumpers, you feel exactly what someone reading someone else's diary ought to feel: slightly ashamed.

As first lines of Author's Notes go, Courtney Love's "I have always said that I would never write a book and I really haven't" certainly puts down a marker. Especially for anyone who's just paid £20 in the belief that she has. False modesty is one charge on which even the most avid detractors of this "groundbreaking rock musician, award-winning actress, fashionista and trendsetter" would be inclined to find her innocent. And it's true: Courtney really hasn't written a book. What she has done is get someone else (her editor Ava Stander) to sellotape together a scrap-book of relics, lyrics, and panegyrics, and present them as a kind of marginally more literate successor to Madonna's Sex.

By the time the reader has recoiled at the grandstanding acknowledgements (a list of people "without whom my life would suck and I'd be dead" which includes such noted philanthropists as Mel Gibson, Chris Rock, David LaChapelle and Cameron Crowe, alongside the inevitable Bono and - note the sisterly inversion - "Trudie and Sting") and gagged at the Oscar-speech sycophancy of Carrie Fisher's introduction, she or he may well be subject to an overwhelming sense of disappointment and frustration.

Imagine if this book was typed. Imagine if it didn't look like an explosion in the Oxford Street branch of Accessorize. Courtney Love's diaries would - and should - have been utterly fascinating. But rather than the grungy lovechild of Rupert Everett and Dorothy Parker which we'd all been hoping for, Dirty Blonde initially feels like the product of a creative collaboration between Bridget Jones and Avril Lavigne. And yetThe Diaries of Courtney Love are more than just a nauseating celebrity suck-fest and a casual exercise in decoupage.

For those with the eyesight to decipher Courtney's terrible handwriting, and the patience to cross-reference each entry with the list of sources at the back, Dirty Blonde quickly starts to become the distinctive and hilarious artefact that its subject's troubled yet spectacular life would seem to demand. The draft missives scrawled on airline notepaper offer poignant snapshots of her fractured family life and peripatetic upbringing. The rejection letter from the Mickey Mouse Club, which Courtney received at the age of 11 (her application had been filed under the superbly stagey name of Coco Rodriguez) testifies to the early genesis of that "blistering desire to make it somehow" she mentions in the Author's Note. The excerpts from the log of one of the reform schools Courtney attended as a teenager - "screaming and swearing... Refused to be reasonable. Became louder and more insistent" - could just as easily be a gig review.

In her late teens, Courtney moves to England and the Liverpool post-punk scene. "Why do I find Ju [Julian Cope] so much more challenging than I do Echo Macalloch?" she wonders. Had Echo and the Bunnymen's lead singer not already had reason enough to feel crushed, his misspelt name is followed by an arrow and the word "bore". "I can make tea now," Courtney applauds herself in a journal entry written at Heathrow at the start of the long journey home. "I can remain enigmatic, pose well and appear feminine."
There's a great moment in Nick Broomfield's film Kurt & Courtney, where one of Love's legion of tragic rock star wannabe ex-boyfriends emerges from the squalid shack he is living in, triumphantly clutching a piece of paper on which she had written the words "become friends with Michael Stipe". Dirty Blonde naturally contains photographic proof of her eventual realisation of this, and other, life goals. Here, she tacitly admits that it's those very unflattering depictions of Courtney's brazenness about which she protests longest and loudest (such as Broomfield's film, or the Vanity Fair interview which resulted in her and Kurt Cobain's daughter being taken briefly into care) that ultimately contribute most to her allure. "I realise now," she writes of the Vanity Fair article, in a supportive email to next generation Hollywood bad-girl Lindsay Lohan, "that as hardcore as it was, it made me a lot more interesting and somehow employable."

As Love's own career moves off the adolescent drawing board and on to the big screen, her ambition somehow retains its freshness and piquancy. A publicity still from Alex Cox's Straight to Hell is garlanded with such invaluable contemporary commentary as "I'm getting nose fixed asap" and "Tim Robbins - a bit pretentious". As Courtney's endless to-do lists progress from "Practise my make-up and my pliets [sic]" and "Be glamorous - get your highlights done every 16 days", to the immortal "Make LP. Achieve LA visibility", the realisation dawns that the traditional critical categories of fulfilment or under-achievement cannot really be applied to her: the to-do lists actually are the finished product.

When it comes to what she eloquently terms "attending to the everyday common conceptual art of celebrity", Love has few peers. At a time when the unchecked narcissism of the blogosphere seems to threaten the validity of the diary form (what price the illicit thrill of gaining access to thoughts not originally intended for public consumption, when the concept of privacy no longer exists?), this volume leaves the reader with a strangely old-fashioned sensation.

"I don't understand this concept of publishing my diaries," Courtney Love scribbles on the corner of p259, "although I didn't mind publishing his [ie her dead husband Kurt Cobain's]. He'd become so fucking objectified I just stopped caring what people thought. Now I do. I wish I could take it back." We all wish she could. The publication of the Nirvana singer's journals was the most gruesome of all the seemingly endless parade of posthumous violations to which his body of work has been subject. But then again, just how precious should one be about a man who committed the ultimate pre-posthumous violation of pulling the trigger that blew his own brains out? And he would have wanted her to have the money.

There's a hand-written note from fashion designer Marc Jacobs on p214 which tells of how touched and moved he was by Courtney's extraordinary personal gift that he promises to keep private and never share with anyone else. "I wonder what that was," the reader thinks, with a slight sense of foreboding. Turning to the back of the book and discovering it was one of Kurt's jumpers, you feel exactly what someone reading someone else's diary ought to feel: slightly ashamed.

The Independant November 2006 12:36

you KNOW i'm buying the shit. and if she does a book signing, i'm SO there. and i even know what i'll give her as a gift...i just need to figure out what brand she smokes.

Anx said:

it's called crack you can pick it up for her probably on 4th and State St.

Meloh9 said:

i'd actually peg her as a marlboro red gal, which is about the same as crack as far as i'm concerned.

i flipped thru a copy just a minute ago @ the bookstore- it's typical but not altogether interesting. even the pics are most of what you can find on any fan site about her and /or nirvana.


meh

I knew Anx would be here wit da quickness.

I more interested in this than Kurt Cobain's published diary.

CinisterCee said:

well i guess there are more pictures but i've flipped thru his journals too. i guess he would have made more of an effort had he known she would sell him down the river after his death.

kurt was always a pleaser.