Courtney Love’s Twitter Updates In Easy-To-Read Magazine Interview Style – Issue Four

I know exactly what you’re wondering right now. How did Lorelei Vashti cope with turning Courtney Love’s seemingly endless stream of Twitter updates about fraud and stolen social security numbers into an entertaining and easy-to-read magazine style interview? Will she address Courtney’s spat with Australian gossip rag NW Magazine? There’s only one way to find out… Read on!

Courtney Love stomps into the hotel room shouting out a volley of rambling and incomprehensible sentences. The only two words I can properly make out amidst the garble are ‘financial’ and ‘fraud’.

‘Please! Let them TRY to shut me up!’ she screams, as she kicks to the floor a well-dressed man who is trying to shut her up. ‘I’m kind of hysterical,’ she explains, as she delicately places a six-inch-heel to the man’s trembling forehead. ‘I’ve never been attacked by a well-dressed man and I’m too afraid to go to cops.’ Her assistant hands her a nice cup of Darjeeling to help calm her nerves. Sliding her deadly Louboutins down towards the well-dressed man’s chest to help her balance, Love takes a swig of hot tea. As it burns her lips, a blood-curdling scream fills the room.

‘You know, this is all Kurt’s fault!’ she screams, throwing the cup at her former guitarist, Eric Erlandson, who is standing by her side, fanning her with a palm leaf and peeling some grapes. ‘I’m really mad at him right now. REALLY! He pisses me off!’

Although he is now whimpering in the sort of high-pitched tones that only someone suffering third-degree burns can truly reach, Eric still manages to pop a grape into her mouth. ‘I have a maternal instinct that’s like a lion,’ she roars, as she wipes Eric’s scalded face with a copy of Grazia. ‘BUT I am sooo not a forensic accountant! Why is this my karma?’ she enquires, Buddhistly. ‘I feel like fucking Sisyphus sometimes!’ she exclaims cross-culturally, referring to the Greek myth of Sisyphus who was condemned to the eternal task of rolling a large stone to the top of the hill, from which it always rolled down again. ‘How did it come to this? I play guitar!’ Noone says anything, and a terrifying silence—punctuated only by the soft, sensual sound of peeled grapes hitting the velvety inside walls of the human mouth—descends upon the room.

To break the tension, I ask Love what she’s wearing. She swallows her grape and brightens up instantly. ‘I’ve made a lime green slip—one side silk, one side see-through teal chiffon,’ she models, ‘with appliqués of plums and oxbloods and a sky-blue lace dress over, etc!’ As if the word ‘oxblood’ has reminded her of the reddish-brown colour of vengeance, she then launches back into the intricate details of her legal difficulties for the next 36 hours.

‘Again, sorry,’ she says, walking around the room a day and a half later, shaking everyone’s limp bodies to wake them up. ‘I’d generally have put most of that into an email,’ she reassures us. ‘But any ideas for good journos at Time, Business Week, MSNBC who know BIG fraud?’ We all shake our heads, unable to remember even our own names anymore, let alone the names of any famous investigative journalists.

This self-confessed ‘widowed single mother, who happens to rock’ is finally starting to sound a little exhausted herself. ‘I’m, like, really, really tired from doing this shit by myself for all these years,’ she admits, wearily. ‘I want to just go on a BINGE.’ Fourteen assistants jump forward anxiously, and her daughter Frances Bean Cobain suddenly appears in the room wielding a Taser. ‘I won’t,’ she reassures them. ‘But I want to. Or set people’s heads on fire.’ She scribbles on some bright pink Post-It notes and starts hiding them around the room like the Easter Bunny hiding chocolate eggs. ‘If you want to know why I leave these items’, she explains, ‘it’s for the record.’

Suddenly, her phone rings.

‘New Weekly magazine?’ she trills. ‘You’re a rag Aussie right?’ she says, rearranging normal adjective/noun construction in her distinctive rebellious way. ‘Fuck off! You can’t even tell me your own credit score, let alone the women you refuse to educate. I love Grazia,’ she bellows, loyally.

She hangs up and throws the phone across the room before turning to me, philosophically. ‘Grazia TRIES to bring some social issues with the gossip,’ she explains. ‘Even when I’m doing my big pile of Heat! Look! Now! Okay! I hit my Grazia first.’ She picks the soggy tatters of Grazia off Eric Erlandson’s face demonstrably, and tries to piece it back together on the floor like a jigsaw. ‘Fash! Goss!’ she exclaims, pointing triumphantly to the tessellated photo of Posh Spice she has formed on the hotel carpet.

Suddenly, her pet dog, Uncle Fester, bounds over to see what she’s doing. Love picks him up adoringly. ‘Sometimes a little runt-of-the-litter French Bulldog with dwarfism who loves you is all you need!’ she purrs. ‘Doing notes on record now,’ she explains to Uncle Fester as she puts him down and takes out her notebook. ‘Need lifecoach,’ she adds, giving him a kiss on his little wet nose before sending him over to Eric Erlandson for grapes. But as she watches her former guitarist peel fruit for her current dog, her mood turns inextricably stormy. She raises herself up on one arm and, with a slight Southern lilt reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she enunciates, in one poignant monologue, the root of her family’s struggles:

‘That money is rightfully my own, my daughter’s, and my mother-in-law’s, despite the intestate will and my two sisters-in-law,’ she announces. ‘It isn’t Dave Grohl’s. He omitted from Kurt’s daughter a very large financial entity that was, and is, also extremely illegal. Then he marries a divorce lawyer’s daughter with zero pre-nup. It’s not even worthy of a discussion,’ she sighs.

Pulling herself to her feet, she closes with this chilling reminder: ‘People who steal aren’t musicians—they are thieves.’ She links her arm through her daughter’s, and while Frances Bean calls for Uncle Fester to come, Love calls for Eric Erlandson.

And with Eric and Fester barking happily at their heels, the Cobain women stride indefatigably out into the big, bad world.

Lorelei Vashti is – without question – the greatest writer I know. Hands down. I am going to make her run away with me, and we are going to write an amazing book together, and then we will probably drink tea and hang out with Courtney Love in various New York hotels, and before we know it, we’ll be eccentric old ladies who sporadically publish a slightly manic and confusing zine called Grey Garbles…