A hole by any other name...

Apparently, Courtney Love is dead.

But before you break out the crack pipe and have a commemorative toke, bear in mind that it was Courtney Love herself who broke this astonishing story.

Rather than a Tweet from beyond the grave, which would actually be pretty cool (and might even be grammatically correct for once), this was Courtney talking to music mag NME.

She's finally woken up to something that everybody else realised about fourteen seconds after she first stepped into the limelight - we're all sick of Courtney Love. So she's decided to make a change and say goodbye to her old self.

That might have worked for David Banner, who could just throw his denim jacket over his shoulder and thumb a ride into the next town, but Courtney's no Incredible Hulk.

As a way of distancing herself from her previous life, Courtney's already adopted the third person when talking about her destructive impulses: “We love her when she goes onstage, but I don’t need her in the rest of my life." From now on, she wants a new name for her new start - “Courtney Michelle. The name Courtney Love is a way to oppress me.”

This may all get rather confusing for her fans, especially since Courtney has reteamed with her old band Hole, ahead of a new album called Nobody's Daughter this month. I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In addition, she's also said that she no longer wants to answer questions about her husband Kurt Cobain, who shot himself back in 1994, “I am not his spokesperson on Earth. I don’t know what he’d be like now, he could be into society girls, he could be into fat girls, he could be homosexual. We don’t know, he died at 27.”

It's a noble aspiration, but I wouldn't be too surprised if Courtney finds it hard to lay those old habits to rest. Just try asking artist, musician, author and peace activist Yoko Ono what she's famous for.

Flash in the pan

Imagine the horror. You're at an event, you need the bathroom and you decide to use the conveniences. With a rudimentary understanding of toilet stall etiquette, you give each door a nudge to see if the lock is engaged. Finally, you find a door that's unlocked, it swings open and you're confronted with an image so nightmarish that it could see you living out the rest of your days with your arms tied behind your back taking your liquified food through a straw.

Courtney Love, a woman who seems to spend most of her time looking like an early make-up test for Heath Ledger's Joker, is sitting on the toilet, with her skirt around her ankles. Your eyes meet, and before you have a chance to apologise or run screaming from the room clawing at your face, she launches herself at you like a screaming banshee.

For pharmacist Sebastian Karnaby, this traumatic incident was no hypothetical scenario. He found himself face-to-sort-of-face with the one-time Mrs Cobain as he was trying to leave a party at the Standard Hotel in New York. Although Love has, in the past, been quite happy spending time in bathroom stalls with pharmacists, this was clearly a step too far, and she attacked Karnaby screaming, "I am going to get you thrown out!"

Reflecting on his brush with fame, the clearly traumatised Karnaby spoke for the entire world when he told reporters "I never wanted to see Courtney Love on the toilet. It wasn't a pretty sight."

Perhaps next time he's in a public bathroom, he'll be safer if he just calls Candyman's name five times in the mirror.

The highs and lows of culture

There seems to be a media black-out on anything not related to the ex-King of Pop at the moment. The only celebrity news currently being reported is who's said what on Twitter about their grief for Michael Jackson. But as is always the case when someone is dispatched to the great VIP area in the sky, there are also a number of commentators who feel compelled to analyse the context of the grief and what it says about us as a society.

Usually, these editorials are less than complementary about the hoi polloi, and strive to intellectualise the writer's viewpoint. One such bullshit bulletin was posted on the irritating website bullypulpit.com which claims to be the ultimate destination for 'the most interesting and creative artists, authors and culture creators'.

In an astonishingly pompous posting that epitomises 'shitting on one's doorstep', entertainment writer Lou Carlozo attacks not only Michael Jackson himself, but also the entire concept of 'popular culture'. Given the nature of this very blog, Carlozo's words have a particular resonance that I'd like to address.

Having rechristened Jackson as the 'King of Pop Culture', Carlozo begins by accusing pop culture as "valuing the ephemeral over the substantive". Aside from the fact that some of Jackson's most remarkable contributions to both music and dance are almost thirty years old, who's to say that art must be enduring? Surely an artistic creation is valid, even if its lifespan only lasts for seconds rather than decades. Carlozo also sniffily dismisses Jackson as an entertainer rather than an artist, as though the two concepts are mutually exclusive.

The writer's second concern is that pop culture focuses on the artist rather than the person. Apparently his problem is that not all artists are nice people. Some of them cheat on their partners, neglect their children and focus on their career. He condemns John Lennon for being an absent father and Kurt Cobain for his selfish suicide, but it's often the demons that drive the most creative souls. Whether or not you agree with his worldview, which would imply that Pat Boone was a more worthy artist than Sam Cooke simply because he led a more virtuous life, Carlozo completely misses the point about popular culture. The convergence of celebrity and pop culture means that the life of the contemporary artist is scrutinised more closely now than at any other point in time.

Carlozo then goes on to accuse pop culture of profiting from other people's pain. Apparently, the fact that Michael Jackson memorabilia will likely proliferate on Ebay is a sign that people are looking to make money from his death. Now excuse me if I've got this wrong, but I thought that this is also true of high culture. After all, Vincent Van Gogh struggled with poverty his entire life, and committed suicide at the age of 37. It was only after his death that the true value of his work was realised. Interestingly, in 1990 one of his paintings sold for an astonishing $82.5 million.

His final, and most ridiculous claim is that pop culture "worships the wrong gods". Without any facts or evidence to base his theory on, Carlozo speculates that people crying for dead celebrity don't bother to pray for their own dead friends. In his words, "Music can salve. But it cannot save." Actually, music saves people all the time. It offers them hope, redemption and even a second chance. For example, rapper DMC famously credited Sarah McLachlan's song Angel with saving him from suicide.

You know, it's easy to lay into popular culture and condemn it as mindless ephemera for the unthinking masses. We all know someone who has a TV but refuses to pay for a license because "it's all trash anyway". We all have friends who like films, rather than movies, and will only watch something if it's black and white, subtitled and has been seen by about as many people as can fit into a Renault Clio. And we've all had a conversation with someone who claims to love Fleetwood Mac, but only the Peter Green era.

Pop culture is a broad ranging term that covers all kinds of creative expression, in a context that enables the widest possible audience to access it. And it gives them a universal vernacular that cuts across social, racial, gender and age boundaries, allowing them to connect through a shared experience. I'm proud of my love for popular culture, and if you've read this far, I'm guessing you are too.