Happy Birthday, Lorelei Vashti!

Lorelei Vashti is probably my favourite writer in the world. She’s The Age’s new TV writer and she’s doing a sterling job, but if you really want to lose your heart to her, go to her blog and trawl through the archives. She is simply a genius. And it’s her birthday today!

To celebrate, let’s revisit the amazing guest post she did for Defamer Australia where she translated Courtney Love’s Twitter updates – AND THEN COURTNEY LOVE COMMENTED! Go make yourself a cuppa and then settle down to relive the magic.

Courtney Love saunters into the hotel room and throws her Marc Jacobs Sweet Punk handbag on to the sofa. A little out of breath, she explains that she is ‘late for vocal warm-ups, and wearing fierce towering Kirkwoods and debuting an Alessandro Dell’Acqua white wriggle dress.’ But not even the veritable glamour of her wardrobe can disguise the fact that something is clearly rotten in the state of Courtney Love.

She explains the reason for her stormy mood while casually kicking an assistant to illustrate her point. ‘When—with three assistants, and a half sort-of-lawyer, two CPAs and et cetera, noone advances your apartment with toilet paper or water,’ she thunders, ‘—it’s time to throw a real strop!’ Her half-sort-of-lawyer, who has so far dodged the Kirkwoods, edges towards me and helpfully explains in a hushed tone that Love is vexed because the New York apartment they have organized for her is not to her liking.

She punches the wall, missing him by inches, and suddenly begins shouting: ‘I mean, like maybe a UTENSIL? A SHEET?’ She gestures to her roomful of staff and explains to me: ‘These are close to plus-six-figure-salaried people and I’m NOT amused! My kid needs a desk! Air-conditioning! Cable! Not all my shit dumped on the floor! Rude!’ she hisses.

She turns to address the room, her apparent disbelief in the situation forcing her to switch to the third person: ‘Courtney Love is shaken and very, very sick and tired of nosey and negative staff.’ She paces up and down the room, eyeing each employee menacingly. ‘Be supportive PASSIONATELY or fucking LEAVE NOW. UGH!’ Two of her assistants, both the CPAs and a wretched-looking bunch of et ceteras all shrug in unison, and promptly vamoose.

Flopping onto the couch with apparent relief, Love swings her Kirkwood-clad feet up on to the coffee table as her last remaining assistant hands her a large paper cup of Ceylon bop. ‘I am aware I do things to attract attention. They aren’t designed to!’ she protests. ‘Music is.’ She blows demurely on her tea.

After a moment or two of unbearably eerie silence, I ask her how she’s feeling. ‘I’M feeling the recession,’ she booms. ‘And YOU? Tell me stories!’ I say that I guess the economic downturn has been pretty hard on everyone. She nods her head sagely. ‘I’m really concerned. Today at Wholefoods, of all places, it looked like the Weimar Republic,’ she says in a colourful reference to the period of hyperinflation in Germany during 1921–1923 when it cost a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread.

But the former Courtney Michelle Harrison is battling these hard times with her favourite new term: ‘recession-proof’. ‘You make your fashionista life recession-proof by going FULL vintage and only shopping for seasonless designers. Rick/Viv/Wang,’ she instructs, familiarly. ‘You recession-proof your wardrobe by STOPPING the high end “It” bag shit and upcycling,’ she trumpets. So, if Ms Love had to give just one recession fashion tip to share with the world, what would it be? ‘Gotta get a seamstress!’ she barks. ‘Cheaper!’

I move on to a more delicate topic: the shock death this week of Adam Goldstein, aka DJ AM. Her tone turns instantly sombre. “I rode out here on the plane with Adam—DJ AM,’ she explains, and then suddenly breaks down. ‘I’m righteously freaked,’ she admits. ‘Too many people bodies!’ This sudden outburst of poetic abstruseness is followed by a kind of spluttering: ‘What the fuck? KNOCK OFF THEM DRUGS!’

Noticeably distressed, she runs to the window where hundreds of her supporters are crying out for her, and she addresses the flock below, like Eva Peron in a white wriggle dress.

‘NO, I cannot explain “The Raven” By Edgar Allen Poe!’ she shrieks, clinging haphazardly to any new subject she can locate on the balcony of the Casa Rosada of her erratic mind. ‘It just keeps screaming “Nevermore” in the poem! Noone gets it!’

But the fresh air soon brings her back to her senses. ‘A lot of you are bugging me for gossip!’ she bellows. A cryptic smile, like a drowsy wave lapping against the shoreline of her Botoxed lips, appears momentarily before vanishing almost as suddenly as it appeared. She clears her throat importantly.

‘Gossip!’ she begins, holding up her first finger to indicate point number one. ‘Scarlett Johansson impressed me mightily the first time I met her. She had a highly intelligent and very brilliant debate with Bono. She “won”.’ The crowd cheers adoringly.

‘Gossip!’ she continues, holding up a second finger to signify her second point. ‘My beautiful-on-the-inside dear friend Gwyneth—www.goop.com—walks it like she talks it. She wears Estee Lauder perfumes or none. INTEGRITY.’

Whoops of admiration for Paltrow’s principles drown out any further tidbits Love might have wanted to share with the crowd, but the former Mrs Cobain seems to have grown tired of the banter anyway. She shushes them fondly, and bids them farewell. ‘Time for Mommy to go to bed with a copy of Middlemarch,’ she announces. The surprisingly bookish crowd goes wild.

And, forgetting about the vocal warm-ups she was running late for, she snuggles up on the couch next to her Marc Jacobs handbag, and murmurs her daily incantation of—‘I want to spoon Billy Corgan’— before drifting peacefully into whatever the dreams are that rock goddesses dream.

Because I love her so much, I wrote her a Prince-esque pop tune today. Listen to it here.

“SPEW-O-RAMA” said award winning Australian songwriter Kate Miller-Heidke, before adding “I enjoyed your song. I like how the lyric ‘deep sea diver’ is so evocative (of muff)”

I dare say this is the beginning of a pretty amazing pop career for me.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LORELEI VASHTI!