Dirty Blonde

I haven't wanted to read anyone else on Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love until I wrote about it. There are apparently vehement letters on Salon, Emily Nussbaum reviews it in yesterday's NY Times Book Review, and I'm sure the Amazon hordes are waxing vituperative, but I'm not even going to find the links because I don't want to catch a glimpse before I'm ready. Now I'm feeling ready, though, especially with that NY Times Book Review sitting on the table in the living room, so I'm going to go for it, even though I haven't read the book cover-to-cover, which is what I was waiting for, because I generally don't write about things before I've finished them, but then I realized that this isn't really a cover-to-cover book for me, it's more of a dip-in-here-and-there, flip-through-the-pages-and-read-what-intrigues-me kind of book.

And I like it a lot. So there.

Now, I'm a Courtney fan from way back and don't talk to me about rumors that Kurt and what's-his-name wrote her songs or...oh god, I'm not going to list all the trash-talk Courtney has been on the receiving end of because either you know it all or you don't care. But Live Through This is just a killer album (when it first came out, I was in L.A. and training for my first marathon, but it was December and dark early so I ran at the gym a lot, and "Doll Parts" was in heavy rotation on whatever L.A. radio station I was listening to and I remember hearing it while I ran seven-minute miles on the treadmill and loving every single note and word) (I have never in my life run a seven-minute mile anywhere but on a treadmill), and I love Celebrity Skin ("Malibu" is one of those songs that gets stuck in my head regularly), and, OK, America's Sweetheart is just same old same old, but she was awesome as Larry Flynt's wife in that movie, and, yeah, she's made a lot of bad choices, really bad choices, but when we saw her on tour for Live Through This she was a total demon (and I've been trying to remember if we saw her both at the Fillmore and in Palo Alto, and I'm thinking we did, but I'm wondering why we would have, and maybe it was just Palo Alto, but I don't think so, and A or Postacademic, if you're reading this and you remember, can you clarify, and was that the show where A got mad at the woman in front of us and pulled out strands of her long bleached hair, one by one, so she kept slapping at her head, not sure what was going on, and then she turned around and glared at us, sure we had something to do with it, even though she couldn't figure out what it was?).

So I'm all about Courtney and I've defended her for years (in a sure-lots-of-things-she-does-are-indefensible-but-she's-still-great kind of way), but then I saw this documentary about her on YouTube which has, alas, been removed at the request of the copyright owner because its content was used without permission, and I thought maybe I was finally over Courtney, or Courtney was just over, because she came off as a total bimbo and one thing I always thought about Courtney was that she was smart. I mean, you don't accomplish everything she's done without being smart. But in that movie, which I only watched part of because it was kind of unbearable, she just chanted a lot and showed off her clothes and bragged about her Hollywood connections and seemed really spacy and pathetic.

But Dirty Blonde redeems her. It's a scrapbook as much as a diary, with diary excerpts, song lyrics, photos, notes. It's basically in chronological order, though there's no explanatory narrative, and if you don't already know the Courtney story, it's going to be pretty confusing, though there are helpful notes at the end, but, let's face it, nobody is going to buy this book except for fans, so that's fine. And it's beautifully designed, which I always like in a book, especially a book like this (I thought the Kurt Cobain diaries were really badly executed as a book, but that's another post, which I probably won't write).

And, yes, it's narcissistic, and, yes, it's opportunistic, but what the hell, that's Courtney, and I like reading her lyrics as they are written, and her plans, even if I know how they turned out, and her anguish and excitement, and I like seeing her pictures, and I'm sure I'll never read it cover-to-cover, but I keep picking it up and flipping through it, reading a page here and several pages there, and, yes, I still like Courtney Love, and, yes, I'm looking forward to the next album (with full awareness that it could just as easily suck).

Edited to add: I like Emily Nussbaum's review. Salon is typically having-it-every-which-way pretentious (God, Courtney is ridiculous, but, hey, it kind of works, though mainly I'll just drop a lot of references so that you think I'm really smart) (thanks to M for the correct spelling of pretentious). The vitriol of the Salon letters is also typical--typically boring.

Edited once more to add: S says we only saw her in Palo Alto and the show where A plucked the hairs was Dave Alvin at the Paradise Lounge.