face98

She�s a psychopathic control freak. She won�t talk about Kurt. She�s the most hated woman in America. You think you know about Courtney Love. But spend time with her. Get to know her. And you�ll find she�s more frightening than you ever suspected.

Text by Philip Weiss

LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES

The Face November 1998

Courtney Love was talking about Al Gore. Vice President of the United States of America.
�He goes, �I�m a really big fan,� and I was like, �Yeah, right. Name a song, Al.� �I can�t name a song, I�m just a really big fan.��
You said that?
�Yeah. I went to this big fancy producer�s house. There were about 14 of us invited to dinner with Al Gore. And I said, �Why am I here?� Because the only other famous person there was Kevin Costner. He said, �We�ve done our research and we want your vote,� and I was just so proud. There were pictures of it. Edward has them. For some reason I looked really wholesome that night, and when the pictures got developed, it�s like me and Al, and we�re dancing a little and we�re fighting. I was throwing my hands at him. I brought them up to my mother in law at Christmas and framed one for her. I was really impressed, which happens very rarely.�
Love drew another French cigarette out of the pack on the kidney shaped table. Edward was Edward Norton, the actor with whom she�s been linked romantically.
You�re jaded, I said.
�No. Yeah. It�s because really early on, living in Los Angeles, when I first hung out with Eric� �Erlandson, Hole�s guitarist- �we�d see famous person and he�d gawk and I�d say, �Eric, that person is no better than you, don�t gawk,� so in order to catapult to where I wanted us to be, we had to deal with people that we were impressed by, like Kim (Gordon) and Thurston (Moore, both of Sonic Youth) or Michael Stipe- you have to be able to afford that person the consideration that they and their fame are very, very separate. I just learned to do that from an early age.
Love finished the cigarette and got up to go to an alcove, and I heard a blender going, slicing through organic vegetables. This was late at night in the greenroom of a recording studio off Times Square in New York, and she was working on Hole�s new record, Celebrity Skin. She came back out of the alcove wearing a moustache of green purple juice. It set off the black, fashionable outfit she had put on for her meeting with movie people that day.
�Madonna was talking to me about responsibility,� she said. �Our responsibilities. Some of what she says I think is a load of hogwash, and some of what she says is true. A 17-year old girl comes up to you and tells you that she does drugs because you did drugs. I mean, that�s like a heavy, negative and social responsibility. How do you atone for that?�

That girl is doing drugs because she wants to, I said.
Love would have none of this. �I see pictures of how I looked, � she said. �It�s disgusting. I�m ashamed. There�s death and there�s disease and there�s misery and there�s giving up your soul, there�s this creaky old-man phenomenon that happens to you. The human spirit mixed with certain powders is not the person, it�s the demonic presence.
�If you want to go back to Madonna for a moment, a quote from Vanity Fair: �She doesn�t have a self destructive bone in her body.� Well, I have a bunch. I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think that self-destructiveness can also mean self-reflection, can mean poetic sensibility, it can mean an empathy, it can mean a hedonism and a libertarianism and a lack of judgement. But when you�re living the fantasy of someone else�s shadow, you�re not light. Everyone�s scared of you, you can�t really make any friends, they want to have a big Hollywood meeting with you just so they can stare at you for ten minutes. You know what I mean?
She slumped on the couch and lit a cigarette.

This spring and summer, as Hole prepared their third album, Courtney Love was under attack everywhere. The film Kurt and Courtney aired accusations that Love played a role in the 1994 death of her husband, Kurt Cobain, and while even film-maker Nick Broomfield said he didn�t believe the claims, they were treated seriously in the press. (A book published by a fringe press but picked up by the American media, actually suggested she was a prime suspect,) The movie tapped into what appeared to be a widespread hatred of Love. She was a Yoko figure, demonised for sucking the lifeblood from Kurt Cobain. Once an icon of uncompromising female rage, she now seemed grasping and shallow, hungering for fame and acceptance as a movie star, putting on designer gowns to attend the Academy Awards and posing for Versace ads. Was she anything more than just desperately ambitious? And as for her music, rumour had it that Hole�s long-delayed new record had abandoned the hard edge of the classic Live Through This for a deracinated California sound. Could she do anything right?

On a rainy February afternoon, Love came into the Quad Recording Studios in Times Square wearing a Peruvian wool hat down to her eyebrows, beige corduroy jeans with a hole in them, and a chic green sweater. A guy with a video camera was taping her from a tripod set up by the mixing desk. �For posterity,� Love said a little self-consciously as she crashed down on the couch. �Don�t worry, we control the tapes.�
Later that night, Love, Erlandson and bassist Melissa Auf der Maur were in the greenroom talking about the record. The guy with the video camera was back. A large man, Love�s voice coach, sat on the black leather couch next to her, hands draped around her head, massaging her sinuses. Drummer Patty Schemel was the only one who wasn�t there. The band argued over the name for the album.
�I love the name Holy War. It�s a statement of such pretence and import. It�s incredibly ambitious, I like it for that,� Love said.
Erlandson held out for Sugar Coma.
�Do you want to live with that 20 years later?� Love asked. �Sugar Coma is so pedestrian it denotes the end of a cycle. Something deadly. If executives like it, you know it�s bad.�
�What about Sunday Best Dress?� Auf der Maur asked.
�It sounds like Kurt Weill, � Love said.
Auf der Maur was leafing through a Harper�s Bazaar when I asked Love what it was like to run across people she knew in magazines. �You�re nervous. Don�t ask stupid questions,� she said, and she was right. I was nervous; it was a stupid question.
As she went on, talking about how she meant the record to be a �masterwork�, I began developing a critique of her in my mind. She was big and queenly. Like all ambitious control freaks, she�s bent others to her will.
Later, Love was gentler. �Darwinism got me through a hard time,� she said, lolling on the couch. Darwinism could explain drug addiction and the chemical of love. Darwinism made Freud look ridiculous.
Aren�t you being reductive? I said. It�s just a lens for looking at stuff.
What about astrology as a lens? (the band enjoyed zodiacal talk.) �There�s a truth in it, but I sort of stopped after I learned that Harrison Ford and I have the exact same chart,� she said. �We�re like the only two celebrities with double cancer.�
Maybe you share qualities.
�Yeah,� Love said. �He�s a stoic.�

Although Celebrity Skin doesn�t have the unharnessed anger of Live Through This � nothing as awesome as the moment when Love sang of the betrayer, �Go on, take everything/Take everything, I want you to!� on �Violet� � it does have mature complexities, an atmosphere of regret and mistakes and disgust. The songs that stayed with you the longest were �Petals� or �Boys on The Radio.� In Boys On The Radio� there was undying anger and love and contempt, mythicpoetic images of vanity and self-loathing, all interwoven in a pop melody. �When the water is too deep/�I will ease your suffering/�I know that you are rotten to the core/I know that you don�t love me anymore.�
A few nights later, Erlandson was eating take-out Chinese, his long body folded on the floor. Love was clicking away on-line. �I�m not pregnant,� she said to the screen, then asked Erlandson to disengage the computer for her. Love is flaky about these sorts of things-keys, money, and so forth.
I asked them why the album took four years.
She said, �Someone dies (Cobain). Have a child. Someone dies (bassist Kristen Pfaff). Do a movie. Oh, by the way, stop putting things into your body that you�ve been putting in for, oh, a decade. Umm, gee, I don�t know, is that four years? I think that�s about four years of your life. I mean it�s pretty obvious. I don�t care about prolific, I want a body of work that is like, everything was good.
Erlandson said, �That there is so much crap out there that people are putting out � I say, write for yourself, record your music for yourself, but don�t put out crap to the public if you know it�s not�.�
�Be trustworthy,� Love interrupted, �If my and Harrison Ford�s charts are exactly alike, the one thing about Harrison Ford I can seem to relate to is, you put out the product, you kind of know it�s going to have some level of quality to it.�
�We had another record in this four years we could have put out, and it was shit,� Erlandson said.
�It was self-indulgent,� Love said. �It was Plath, it was shit.�
�Thank God we didn�t. Why torture the world with another crappy record?�
A man came to the door who was by all appearances Edward Norton and, seeing a reporter, disappeared. Love grabbed Erlandson�s acoustic guitar and went out to the hallway. As she did, the body of the guitar banged hard against a metal folding chair.
�Aaah,� Erlandson said, with buffered pain.
When Love came back, the two of them spoke of how they had always wanted Hole to be a mainstream success. �That was our biggest worry back then,� Erlandson said of the bands start, �that Hole (the name) could not be a mainstream band, and we wanted to be popular enough to sell enough records.�
But also, when we started out, all I really wanted to do was piss everybody off,� Love said.
�I think it�d be great if (Celebrity Skin) pissed a lot of people off,� Erlandson said.
�It won�t piss anybody off,� Love said. �It�s supposed to provoke thought. There�s a good quote. I can only paraphrase it. Ninety-five percent of all popular culture is pornography, five percent creates inspiration, new aesthetic, and grace in people. I�d like to be in that five percent, using pop.�
Erlandson went into the studio to work, and I brought up Kurt Cobain. Love had said there was a personal subtext in certain songs, but she was unwilling to decode the messages. �I won�t talk about it because it�s none of your business,� she said simply. �Because you will never know.�
Right now we are talking about the death of your husband?
�Or whatever, specifically, all of that shit � you will never know what that was like. And you will never know what that person was like. And you will never ever ever know the personal truth of that relationship. And I will never exploit it for you. So that�s all I have to say about it, you know, and in the beginning, somebody should have locked me in my fucking room for a year.�
But was it helpful to you? I asked.
She stopped short. �The truth is, it was.�
So why are you lacerating yourself?
�You�re right, it was cathartic, but I think people really took advantage of it. Let me tell you, I gave some of the most amazing performances that people have ever seen, they�ll never see stuff like that again. It was like opera. But all I�m saying is that I can�t and I won�t engage in this kind of deep discussion of that situation because it�s�.you weren�t there. You don�t know! It�s mine, it�s mine, and it�s already been robbed from me.�
Angered, she was vital and present. I kept at it. Isn�t there a way that certain aspects of it are not yours?
�You know what; I�m concerned with my emotional life.�
But you�re a performer, you like things epic.
�That whole other part of it, the mythic element, the archetype element of it, that has nothing to do with my reality. What was mine has been�a lot of it has been stolen from me.�
The mistrust that had been underlying the conversation came to the surface. �I don�t know how bad your jones (Courtneybabble for �desire�) is for this shit,� she said, �and I hope it�s not huge�.it�s a gender thing too. I fucking lived in that shadow and I�m alive and I�m going to live and I�m going to have great romances that were more than that was. I�m not going to live in that fucking shadow, it�s not my fucking shadow. I refuse.�
At the end, when I�d transcribed nearly 40,000 words of Courtney Love�s conversation, I did a search for the word �Kurt�. It came up twice, both times Kurt Weill.

In March, Love went to Los Angeles, and soon after, Celebrity Skin�s release was put off from June to early September. The pressure on the record was enormous, some of it self-applied. Working with producer Michael Beinhorn, Hole were bent on putting out a masterwork, an album that was the equal to Live Through This, to Nevermind. Then there was outside pressure. It�s an unfriendly time for raw, guitar-based music in America, and yet Hole want this record on the radio.
For serious music fans, Hole�s new sound on Celebrity Skin is bound to stir other questions about their motivation and integrity. The band recently covered a Fleetwood Mac tune and watched them in rehearsal. Hole were impressed by the older bands professionalism. �Whoa, now I see how it all works,� Erlandson said.
Then there was Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins� leader, who is close to several members of Hole and who will inevitably get a fair amount of credit for the albums success (much as Cobain was rumoured to have been the creative genius behind Live Through This). �I hear it and it�s not there, and I can take you there,� Corgan had told Love after she sent him an early tape of the songs in 1997. He urged Erlandson to bring his guitar sound up, and worked with Love on phrasing and hooks. A song could be bloody and intense and meaningful, but without a hook, it wouldn�t get on the radio. Corgan shares music credit on five songs, and his influence can be detected in such finely turned moments as the chorus on �Malibu�, in which Love�s voice displays a rich suppleness over the bleeding edge of Erlandson�s guitar.
But two weeks of Corgan was evidently enough. The apprenticeship was sometimes stressful, and Love didn�t haunt, as Corgan likes to haunt, strip clubs and hip restaurants. �Billy is more of a boy boy,� Auf der Maur said with affectionate mockery.
Corgan discovered Auf der Maur. It was only her sixth live gig, in a small Montreal club. �Kid, you can play,� he said (and yes, she was cute, too) and it wasn�t long before the two musicians had determined that they were both Pisces (Kurt Cobain�s sign as well).
When Kristen Pfaff died in June 1994, Corgan recommended Auf der Maur to Hole. Love liked that she didn�t want to leave Montreal for fame. The girl was grounded. Erlandson called with a list of serious questions.
�Do you play with pick or fingers? (�Pick, of course� �fingertips are for funk or jazz.) Do you sing? (Yes; her biggest musical influence was the classical choirs she was in as a girl.) What about drugs? (�I don�t have any history with drugs whatsoever.�) And, what�s your sign?
�We�re all very astrologically aware,� Auf der Maur said over lunch in New York. Pisces is at the end of the zodiac cycle, and that made her a good match for Love, she said. The thought is that later signs have been through the newcomers experiences. Cancers, like Love, tend to be �immature�, Auf der Maur went on, �emotionally primitive, experimental, whereas Pisces are more refined emotional users.�

Last spring, the hive of Courtney hatred was the Mission district of San Francisco, where, despite Love�s lawyers threat to sue, the Roxie Cinema was premiering the film Kurt and Courtney. The Roxie calendar of events accurately described it as exploring Love�s �possible involvement in Cobain�s death�.
�As if. As fucking if,� Love sputtered to me.
Outside viewers said they felt the people in the film wouldn�t be saying such horrible things about Love if there wasn�t something to it.
�Kurt, who I knew well, had many problems,� said Gersh, the recently departed Capitol executive who signed Hole when he was at Geffen. �People have wanted to make her pay for Kurt�s death since the day he died, and it�s a complete fucking waste of time. People who know her well have problems with Courtney for other reasons that have nothing to do with this.
The widespread hatred toward Love draws mostly on the belief that there is nothing genuine behind her ambition. One of the worst moments in Kurt and Courtney was something Love plainly did to herself, blowing up on the Today show, saying she didn�t want to talk about her drug use to Today�s �demographic�. It was weirdly calculating.

On a Saturday morning in March, the man at the front desk of the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles called across the lobby and said Love was on the phone. I ducked into the wooden booth, she said she was lying in bed with her daughter, watching cartoons and ruing her fashion choice at the Grammys, which had taken place in late February.
�Me and Jewel were overdressed. We were wearing designer gowns. Fuck that. Oh God, I�m not doing it anymore. I�d love to be brave enough to grow my hair brown and, like armpit hair.�
She was on a roll. She said that movies were a big part of why she had become a rock star. Ten years ago, when she was chubby and her nose was no good, she�d gotten turned down for a part in a David Rape play in New York and had spied the casting director�ds clipboard. It contained a lot of rock stars names, including Lydia Lunch.
�If I went away and became a rock star, could I get these parts?� Love asked. �She said, �The world would be your oyster.��
But music was so demanding. Love wasn�t going to let happen to her what Bob Dylan said happened to Judy Garland, that she had died standing in front of a thousand clowns, still trying to give them what they wanted. That was the pathetic thing that happened to divas. Love said.
�They give up their essential femininity. It�s an onanistic thing.�
�Slow down, please Courtney,� I said, scribbling on a message pad.
�I�ll be over in about an hour.�

I sat in the courtyard and tried to unpack her rant. But it was like so many of Love�s riffs; it was performance, inspired, shimmering, and of the moment. You couldn�t take it apart. Three hours later I was called again and Love was sitting alone in the courtyard. She wore red stockings, clunky black shoes, a tweed skirt, and a pretty green shawl that made her eyes even more alive. Inspired by a show she had seen on the Discovery Channel about differences between the males and females of animal species, she started riffing on gender.
�I feel happier when I�m protected by males, that�s the big dirty secret of it all. I love men. I love men!� Her voice went hushed. �Love them! I just sort of hate them, too. I just want to sit at the table with equal grace��
A slim blond woman with a shopping bag walked under the colonnade on the other side, and Love broke off.
�Here comes Claire Danes back from Fred Segal (up-market clothing store). She�s growing up. It looks like she�s filling out. She was cast in The Rainmaker when she wasn�t even old enough to play a bride. She was 16. Maybe in Southern states you can marry at 16.�
She turned back to the subject of sex differences.
�Why don�t we get a quest? This friend off mine was trying to calm me down. She said, �Psyche enters the darkest part of the forest, too.� But you know, getting to be Psyche and getting neurotic and lunar all the time, I�m like, yeah, it�s at the mercy of all these male figures.�
A denim clad man in the hotel�s waiting area draped himself frankly against the window. Is that person staring at you? I ask.
�Yeah, he totally is. Knock it off! I don�t know him. It�s the Chateau. They should throw him right out. What were we saying?�
We were discussing how Love refused to be a gargoyle for aa public that demanded realness. �I am not here to be their Patti Smith,� she continued. �That�s Polly Harvey�s job. And if Polly Harvey isn�t doing her job, don�t blame me for it. I never said I was going to be their geek. I don�t have to go make feminine music, I�m going to make music for the people. My job is like, fuck all this gender difficulty, fuck all this female experience rage shit.�
What about the fashion stuff? You�ve hung out with superficial people. Now she began yelling. �Because �rock is so pure? Because people in rock don�t heartlessly and vilely, like, take advantage of young boys and girls and make them fucking sign their blood away on the dotted line for a four percent royalty rate? I mean, sit there and rip them off divinely.�
The Versace pictures?
�I fucking wanted to do them. They seduced me plain and simple. They sent me so many clothes, they took me places in limos. They took, like, great pictures with world class photographers.� She laughed. �And I�m like, yeah, fuck, who gives a shit? I don�t care. I feel a little funny about it, but I did it anyway. I just felt, like this profound connection with (Versace�s sister Donatella) and I love their clothes. I�m sorry � I�m not really sorry.�
Why should you be sorry?
�Because it�s kind of lame, but it�s kind of not. I don�t know. I did the Versace campaign. I did it, I did it, I did it.�

Dusk set in, and Love suggested we cross the courtyard to a table with a lantern over it. This table was under a bushy palm tree and right next to an open window in the hotel. Love leaned into the room. �We�re going to be talking loudly,� she said. �I�m just going to close this.�
The woman inside got a funny look. Love sat down. I asked her about acting versus making music. �There�s lots of bourgeois respectability to acting,� she said. �But Meryl Streep doesn�t know the sublime pleasure of standing in front of 10,000 people and, like, making them do whatever you want. And, like, diving into them and being torn limb from limb.�
The woman came to the window.
�I like this window open,� she said.
We went inside and sat on a couch in the corner. Love had more tea and the waiter gave her cigarettes and she unscrewed the little jar of honey, dripping it with a spoon into her cup.
�What is so wrong with the word manipulate?� she said. �Huh? I manipulate this spoon to do something. You have to manipulate things.�
This was the heartless, over-defended part of Love, the sense that everything is a means to an end. She seems to sense that, and tried to explain herself. �It�s just drive,� she said. �It isn�t machinations and it isn�t shrewishness, although that�s what�s ascribed to it when it�s a quality in females traditionally. It�s just drive for your own vision to be part of the world order. And that�s Darwinism. I just want to signal that I�m a worthwhile mate, and my skill at this one thing.�
She got up to go and left her little black handbag on the couch.

Over the summer, Love got even more negative press. From being nowhere, the Broomfield movie was suddenly everywhere. So much for Love�s efforts to suppress it. In London it gained positive reviews. In the US, the press seized on the film as an occasion to do stories that tried to put Love in her place. In the New Yorker, essayist Daphne Merkin focused on Love�s personal transformation, everything from plastic surgery to her contract with the PR firm PMK, and said that the change was unconvincing and made her infinitely less interesting. Love later told me that all the plastic surgery she�d had wads before the transformation, before the early nineties (and, calling the issue �cheesy�, said that if she needed any further work done she would do it). The film did set off a mild pro-Courtney backlash: lots of moviegoers expressed sympathy over the footage of her belligerent father, to which Love responded that she never knew him, saying she spent a total of only two weeks of her life with him. Yet she claimed an inheritance from him: �Nerve.�
Not all Hole�s problems came from outside. About the time the cover art for Celebrity Skin was going to the press, it was decided Patty Schemel had to leave the band. I was told that Schemel was using drugs and had not heeded efforts to help her kick her habit. But Schemel said this was not the case. She said that producer Michael Beinhorn had never warmed to her style and ultimately brought in a replacement, a man, to play the parts Schemel had written. Feelings of artistic betrayal made it too painful for Schemel to imagine going on stage with Hole, and the band concurred. �This is not my masterpiece and what the band has become I don�t want to be a part of anymore,� she said by phone from Los Angeles, now and then weeping over the end of her six years in Hole and the loss of close friendships with Love and Auf der Maur.
In spite of these setbacks, Love was in the most relaxed mood I�d experienced with her when we spoke in July. She had just returned from days of meditation in New Mexico, where she said she�d had a vision. Her acting plans were set. She was going to begin filming Man On The Moon for director Milos Forman, who had worked with Love on The People Vs Larry Flint. The new film is about Andy Kaufman, the comic, who died in 1984; Love will play Kaufman�s girlfriend. According to Love, the deal was celebrated at a june dinner with Forman at a Brentwood restaurant during which Love�s co-star, Jim Carrey, rose from the table and smashed a wine bottle on the wall to herald her birthday.
�I�m going to enter this psychic space where I will be the soul of empathy,� Love said of the role. �I�m going to play one of the softer, understanding, non-judgemental, brown haired, Seventies� dirndl-skirt, and Scholl sandals, no make-up hippie chicks who were endlessly fascinated by weirdness but also completely 100 percent supportive.�

Love was no longer the avatar of the angry young woman. And she seemed to agree with some of her fans when she said her old anger was �something in myself that I seem to have betrayed�.
How did you betray it?
�By getting married. By being romantic. By falling in love. By wanting to have a baby. By not being hard. By being seduced by love. I walked off from my past.�
Isn�t that growth you honour?
�Sort of, but sometimes I hate myself for it. Sometimes I get really angry. I think about all the hard divas that I met that have hard hearts and didn�t fall for the boys. And I�m going to be a woman. I�m not saying that in a Cosmo sense of the word: She has it all. But you know what, you can have whatever you want. You know why? You know why? This is America! It�s not England. It�s fucking America! God bless it! I mean it!�
That was aimed at Tina Brown, the Englishwoman who was editor of the New Yorker when it printed Daphne Merkin�s article. The message of the piece, Love said, was un-American: what she comes from she must return to. �Like, born a serf, die a serf,� Love said. �Born a coarse-featured peasant, die a fucking�Kiss my ass!�
Love clearly loves controversy, even after a week of meditation. I think you�re still motivated by a need for attention, I said.
�But so what? I feel like I have a duty. I as an architect have a need to impose my world-view on the culture. I was born with that need. But I�m not emotionally or spiritually bankrupt and I never have been. And even when I was as close to being spiritually bankrupt as you can get, I had a core in me that, still ragingly and with passion and conviction, wanted to be the person who puts my vision out.�
Was it necessary to use people here and there? I said.
Love was put off at first, then said, �Using, yeah! Mentoring, yeah. Learning craft from some people, learning self-effacement from others. Is it Athena who rises with the stallions and when they get exhausted and they fall down, she just switches and gets another one? Yeah, to win the race, to get through the gates. What did they get out of me? A lot. The men run companies. The men are multimillionaires. The one man that I loved so much and didn�t feel that way about� �she was finally talking about Cobain- �he was crushed and, I believe this, he was crushed for his love for me. They killed him because he loved me. That�s not what the weak enfeebled, emasculated Dionysian hero is supposed to do. He�s not supposed to love me. But he did. That�s the tragedy.�
Then her voice trailed off. �But he was so sensitive�.I don�t want to get into this.�

She was willing to talk about her current relationship.
�I have a boyfriend. He�s magnificent. I wrote some incredible songs about him. I don�t think I�ve ever had a boyfriend quite as great as this boyfriend. But I�m not going to serve him up for everyone to fucking slice up and emascualte. I�d cut my heart out before I�d let that happen again.�
That�s what happened before?
�I didn�t serve anybody up on purpose, but I wasn�t hiding it. I got married. There it was. Big, bold, punk-rock, crazy ass fucking ride into town, like gypsies. I didn�t know and I�m an idiot and I should have known.�
You mean the ways you allowed yourself and others to be exposed?
�Yeah.�
It was hard to imagine an equal relationship with Love. She was forceful, loud, controlling. She once said that one of the thingsa she brought to a relationship was testosterone.
�Oestrogen too,� she said. �I�m trying to balance them�OK. Let me tell you something about my personal history in terms of men. They have to be butch in the end�.They can walk around in fucking dresses for all I care. It�s a contest. I don�t care what you do for a living. If you can throw me around the room, then you�ve mastered me.�

Love�s vision had come to her while she was meditating with a group of Sikhs, but at night she had become impatient. She had to sit through lectures about the grace of the divine mother, and she had protested. What about the divine whore? She asked. Why were so many religions based on the grace of the creation of life?
�What about the woman as keeper of everybody else�s sexuality> She maybe doesn�t make the sons, but she keeps the sons. OK?�
As she recited these intensely personal experiences, I thought this is how she annoys people. She says she will never again offer her personal self up for public inspection, then she does just that. She thinks this will elevate the horde. Maybe it will. And maybe it is her own destruction too.
�So in my vision there were these gates at the end of an arch,� she continued. �Like a Roman arch of triumph, and I�m going in through the gates on a stallion, or in my case, a mare. So as I�m going through the gates I see by the side of the road this exquisite house. And I�m thinking the divine whore is the person who�s never allowed through the gates. She has to live in the nicest house outside the town before the gates. You can�t even see her trophies, because her trophies have been covered up by the trophies and inheritances of other people. And all she does is covet men�s power. And I realised, I don�t live in that house anymore�