“Warning: Horrific Spelling And Grammar Per Usual!”

mmatos | July 19, 2007 5:16 am
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Bad writing is one thing; unhinged bad writing is another category altogether. But there’s more than one kind of unhinged out there, and nothing demonstrates it better than a compare-and-contrast between two of the more entertainingly unhinged things we’ve seen recently–one by a well-known musician and actress, the other by an obscure Midwestern music writer. It’s after the click-through.

In this corner: Courtney Love. You remember her. She writes songs, she sings them in her frayed nasal bellow, she challenges Michael Jackson for the most misguided plastic surgery on a musician, she gets around. And as she has intermittently since the mid-’90s, she posts the most amazingly rambling what-the-fuckery on the Internet. Take her screed from this past Saturday, titled “nyc wtf?Warning, horrific spelling and grammar per usual!” Here’s a taste:

wehn im onstage for some reason, i dxont read my press, i just know who after allthese years is after me and whop willgive me a shake, if i blow it thats my frault, but someone told me new york mnagazine had got in and i just said please do0nt speak abnother word, thetyre so orrelevant noone reads it and its so transparent, until the regim e there changes they wiull always have an agenda and it is sexist and ageist and lame, if one daY THEY GAVE me the greatest review in the world i still woildnt read it

If it makes Courtney feel any better, the total word count of this MySpace post–7.705–is longer than even the lengthiest New York feature, so she’s got them beaten in that sense. Still, the most instructive part of this missive is the disclaimer tucked a few paragraphs in:

PS. I DO NOT DRINK. I DO AND HAVE NOT TRASHED A HOTEL ROOM IN MANY MANY YEARS AND MY SEX AND PERSONAL LIFE IS BELOW THE RADAR DISCRETE, I WOULD NOT BE PHOTOGRAPHED WITH THE PERSON I AM INTIMATE WITH, SO STOP TRYING TO GUESS AND JUST ROCK WITH US.

“Rock with us”? Hey–she has something else with Michael Jackson!

Still, keeping up with Courtney is pretty tough going, given all those unpunctuated pile-up paragraphs. If a giant mug of steaming “um … ” is what you crave, you might want to try the work of Minneapolis’s Tom Hallett, former contributor to Pulse of the Twin Cities. With that paper defunct, Hallett has moved over to a new Web venture titled Reveille, where his “‘Round the Dial” column continues unabated.

Hallett is small fry. But his entertainment value is tremendous–like prime Onion, only you’re not actually reading The Onion. For example, his take on “Censorshit” (ouch!), in which he takes on Russell Simmons: “Remember, this is the guy who put out classics like ‘Banned In The USA’ by 2 Live Crew”–a group with its own label, one Russell Simmons had nothing to do with. But fact-checking is beside the point here. The forced “ya”s and “yer”s, the pickled rock-is-going-to-save-the-world rhetoric, the I’m-just-a-common-dude bluster, all made somehow worse by his obvious sincerity. Or, as he puts it, riffing about mid-’60s Beatles record-burning:

(Funny side-note — the station who held the largest boycott/burning was based in Texas, and immediately after the event, the station was hit by a bolt of lightning, killing the station owner and seriously injuring several other station employees. Even God gets pissed when ya mess around with rock and roll, pal.)

Please, Hallett, don’t hurt ’em!

Courtney Love’s MySpace blog ‘Round the Dial [Reveille]