Courtney Love loses Kurt Cobain's face

Courtney Love has left the management of End Of Music, which controls the exploitation of Kurt Cobain's image, in return for a massive loan from Frances Bean Cobain's trust fund.

You know, this sort of seven-figure deal over who signs-off the crappy tshirt designs was probably what Kurt was hoping would be the final outcome when he went off to the conservatory that day.

Courtney Love realises she might have been wrong

After going on Twitter and bellowing that Dave Grohl had tried to get off with Frances Bean Cobain, Courtney Love appears to have sobered up:

Courtney Love apologized to Frances Bean Cobain via Twitter early this morning.

"Bean, sorry I believed the gossip," she wrote. "Mommy loves you."

Oddly, Love seems to have neglected to apologise to Dave Grohl - which is odd, considering that the original claim marked Bean out as a victim of a predatory older male. It's like driving a car into someone, and apologising to the fender.

France freezes Three Strikes activity

Things getting worse for the French copyright farmers - the operation of the Hadopi (three strikes) organisation has been frozen after the company charged with doing the snooping part, Trident Media Guard, turned out to not have adequate security. The French authorities say they won't work with TMG until this is sorted, and TMG are the only company doing the work.

Making it worth for TMG, TorrentFreak is reporting this morning that not only has TMG lost control of its own data, but also the data it had picked up through its spying activities. Let's hope, for TMG's sake, that there was nothing in the data that shouldn't have been there.

Downloadable: Evelyn Evelyn

You're on the internet at the moment, so you'll already have heard of Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley's Evelyn Evelyn side-sorta-main project. Stereogum have got a free sample, MySpace, which is a bit like a We Are The World everyoneathon. Only not for charity. And with Andrew WK.

Oh, also in there is Frances Bean Cobain. Somewhere.

Courtney Love: Part of the union

Here's a funny thing. When someone like Courtney Love turns up to address the Oxford Union, the press dutifully treat it as if it somehow confers a confirmation of intellectual rigour on the guest. The BBC do it tonight:

Love, singer in rock band Hole, followed in the footsteps of Michael Jackson and former US president Bill Clinton by speaking at the forum.

Michael Jackson might just give a hint that sometimes having an act which pins you in the tradition of a bear riding a bicycle can be enough to get you in. They've also had Gerard Way, Sally Gunnell and Kermit The Frog.

As bookings go, it's a bit like being invited to talk to Clive James. While you might find yourself sat in a library talking about Heidegger, you're just as likely to be sat doing a pretend satellite link-up with a humorous singer.

Courtney, though, clearly feels she's been called in for her brain and not her likelihood to fall in the trifle, and - at least on reports so far - managed to come across like a teenage girl trying to impress the technical college lads with the breadth of her knowledge.

From a personal perspective, though, what really matters is the likely effect on Milton Keynes house prices. It's not good news:

Love, who went to Summerhill boarding school in Suffolk and later lived in Liverpool, described herself as "Amglish".

"This is where I want to live, either Oxfordshire or Buckinghamshire," she said.

Try Bedfordshire, Courtney. Or Northamptonshire. Leicestershire, maybe?

In other Courtney Love news, the other half of Frances Bean's trustees, Laird Norton Tyee Trust Company have subpoenaed the records of the trust fund. They appear to be investigating if Love has "misappropriated" funds.

Well, she did seem quite convinced that someone was dipping into the money.

Nobody, as yet, has made any formal allegations, and Love has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Courtney Love: Yes, that'll help

Having lost custody of Frances Bean Cobain, Courtney Love has done her best to prove how fitting she is as a nurturing, supportive parent by, erm, sticking a rambling, vindictive attack on her daughter on the Facebooks:

"I hate to sound cold but any kid of mine who pulls this shit has lost her position... she was deceptive, she lied and she's lying to herself."

Still, at least it's shut Courtney up about money for once... hasn't it?

"Frances is clearly deluded that can buy her grandmother a small house in LA. I'd love to see how that works. She thinks she has all this money. The point is I have all the money she has."

Hang about Courtney - didn't you say that you didn't have all the money she should have had, because people have bought sixty-squillion houses in Kurt's name and the rest got creamed off by Ryan Adams or something?

Courtney Love loses custody

More misery from the heart of Courtneyworld this morning: Love has lost custody of Frances Bean. Again.

Given that Frances Bean is now 17, this might be the last time her guardianship is swapped out by the legal system. Let's hope.

After Miley, the deluge: Courtney quits Twitter

As if the disappearance of Miley Cyrus wasn't enough for Twitter to cope with, now both Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain have wiped their accounts, too.

It seems that it's after Frances had a go at Ali Lohan via Tweets:

According to Spinner.com, Frances blasted Lohan after seeing her get VIP treatment at Fashion Week in Paris, writing, "(You're) not entitled to anything simply because your sister has a recognizable name. Your idea of fame isn't fame. It's infamy. You want to be famous? Work your ass off and make decisions that could potentially catapult your career into a lasting one."

So, one piece of fair comment from the daughter, and it's Twitter switched off. Whereas Courtney spends months flinging out half-mad, borderline libels and that seems to be alright...

Let's all look at the wacky artist

Some artist Natascha Stellmach claims to have received the "stolen" ashes of Kurt Cobain and - oh, stop my aching art-school pranked sides - is going to smoke them:

“This final act”, Stellmach told Artworld magazine, “will release Cobain from the media circus and into the ether.”

Asked how she she came by having the ashes, she said "That's confidential and kind of magic. They came to me. And I am setting him free.”

Of course, there's every chance she doesn't actually have Kurt's ashes at all, and is merely engaging in some sort of publicity stunt to draw attention to herself. If she does - she claims the ashes came to her in a way "magical and confidential" - then burning them would seem to be destroying the evidence of a crime; possessing them is holding stolen goods and that's just the legal ramifications.

The damaged moral and ethical judgement, though, is even more obvious - how is turning yourself into a media circus releasing Kurt from his? And condemning every documentary made about him from now until the eventual collapse of capitalism to have to end with "a mentally-ill woman inhaled what remained of his body" bringing an end, rather than just crowbarring a new chapter? What gives Stellmach the right to decide what happens to Kurt, over his daughter, over his wife?

Perhaps she's going to do this for everyone. Perhaps we should all deliver the corpses and bones and ashes of all our deceased to her house - in the same way parents try to stop their kids from smoking by making them do a full packet of twenty in one go, the solution would be to ask Stellmach to work her way through a charnel house.

And if she doesn't have the ashes? Exploiting the loss of Kurt's ashes, publicly announcing to a sixteen year-old girl that the remains of her too-publicly dead father are going to be used in a stunt, even if you're planning to say 'ha-ha not really' at some point in the future, seems somewhat inhumane and cruel. And what worthy sort of artist would lack empathy to such an extent?

Classy

You might have thought that Frances Bean Cobain would have had enough of suicide dominating her short life, but no: apparently her 16th birthday party was suicide-themed:

The website Gossip Rocks managed to track down Frances’s invitation to her “Suicidal 16,” which reads: “My one and only sweet 16 . .. eerrrr actually it’s my suicidal 16. .. We are also having a contest, it’s the ‘who can look most dead contest.’ If you dress up dead and are picked as the top three, you will receive an iPod Touch and a $200 gift certificate to Amoeba. So get that face paint on, and try to make it as realistic as you can.”

I wonder who won the parent's race.

And Courtney's been back on

Courtney has - despite having had all her computers removed on account of her AOL being violated - gone back on to her MySpace blog, this time to, erm, accuse Ryan Adams of funding the Rock & Roll album by stealing USD858,000 from Frances Bean's trust fund.

Yes, it came out five years ago. Courtney has only just noticed:

But i was sitting with some people going thru the 29 american express cards that i didnt know existed that were connected to a few HUNDRED bank accounts,and there were all the bills for Ryan Adams worst record and one of the worst records i can think of in rock and roll history ironically called"Riock and Roll " and it was paid for by ME and mostly by my child.

Now, let's be fair: it might be true that Adams did this. Somehow. Even if he did, you could probably argue that the best way to deal with it might not be posting a barely-legibile rant on MySpace. If he didn't, let's hope Adams is the sort of man who will swallow down being accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a child with good grace and won't, you know, instruct lawyers or anything.

We say "stealing hundreds of thousands from a child" - Courtney puts it slightly differently:

stealing from a suicide? A MARTYRED HERO? fun for you. big man. wow. impressive.
Yeah well theres nothing good about suicide and i should know- but to take my near suicidal depression and use it on my daughters paying fo ryour shit record

Um... was Kurt actually a martyred hero? Perhaps it's best not to ask.

Courtney claims to have all these Amex bills as proof of what went on. But since her post doesn't really make sense, it could be that the people who are failing to help her now failed to help her back then. And even if there is paperwork detailing this, it's a bit of a leap to suggest Adams knew what was going on. After all, if Love can't keep track of her own money, why should she expect Ryan Adams to know about it?

More to the point, if the cash was Frances Beans, shouldn't it have been in some sort of trust? Where were the trustees?

Is there nobody who cares about Love enough to suggest that she stops washing her laundry like this?

So, taking after Courtney rather than Kurt, then

Someone who won't be wearing the awful Kurt Cobain training pumps: Frances Bean Cobain. She's being lined up to be a new muse for Karl Lagerfeld. It's almost certainly what Kurt would have wanted. Or possibly isn't, but if you blow your brains out you can't actually complain if nobody listens to you, can you?

Why are you all staring?

It's a hard life being Frances Bean Cobain, it really is:

“These people are fascinated by me, but I haven't done anything.

"If you're a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I'm not my parents.

“I get it, I really do, but at the same time it's creepy. People need to wait until I've done something valid with my life."

It's quite cute she's so sweet to her Mom, pretending there are such things as "big Hole fans". Of course, her protestations that 'little ole me ain't done anything' would be a bit more convincing if she wasn't talking to Harpers Bazaar while doing a fashion shoot for them. Shouldn't she have told Harpers that she's not done anything worthy of a big spread in a glossy magazine?