Where are they now?

Grunge star Courtney is . . .

Loving her Oscar chances

BEVERLY HILLS -- The guest of honor at last week's industry screening of The People VS Larry Flynt was America's porn king himself.
 
Flynt, who was paralyzed in an assassination attempt in 1978, arrived in his solid-gold wheelchair looking very much like Raymond Burr in his Ironside days.
 
By the end of the film the head of the Hustler publishing empire was sobbing.
 
"Most people have to wait until they're dead for Hollywood to make a movie about them," he explained.
 
WOODY BORN PLAY FLYNT
 
Woody Harrelson, who plays Flynt, says it's a role he was born to play.
 
"Larry and I are both poor white trash who've made good in some people's eyes and have done bad in others," says Harrelson.
 
Flynt brought his battles over his First Amendment right to publish pornography or ridicule public figures to the Supreme Court of America.
 
Harrelson is currently testing the American legal system over his right to grow marijuana plants.
 
"I'm not trying to legalize marijuana. I'm trying to legalize hemp."
 
LOVE AN DARLING?
 
Grunge star Courtney Love, who plays Flynt's deceased wife Althea Leasure, says the American press and the moral majority movement should get down and kiss Flynt's feet.
 
"This is the man who has given the press the legal right to lie about me and politicians and ministers the right to their horrible, slanderous right-wing comments," protests Love.
 
There have been rumblings that Love could be nominated for an Oscar for her powerhouse portrayal of Althea's descent into drug addiction and wanton sex.
 
"It would be weird. Really weird. I can't even grasp onto the thought yet."

The boy in the band

Hole Drummer Eric's view from the stage

The last time Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson attended Lollapalooza, he swore he'd never go back.
 
 "I went last year in Los Angeles for about an hour," the soft-spoken 32-year-old is saying yesterday from Cincinnati, "and I had the worst time ever at any concert.
 
 "There was security everywhere, I saw people pushing and beating on people.
 
 What changed his mind was this year's lineup - featuring Sonic Youth, Pavement, Beck, Jesus Lizard, and, up 'til this week, Sinead O'Connor, who has since flown home to Dublin, overcome by the side-effects of pregnancy. (The travelling roadshow pulls into Barrie's Molson Park this Sunday.)
 
 "A lot of the audiences are the same type of kids that would go see the mainstream acts," says Erlandson, "but what they're getting is a lot different. I've gone out into the crowd to watch, and there's these frat guys trying to explain to their girlfriends what these bands are about. And the girls are holding their ears and going, `It's noise'!"
 
 Enough verbal foreplay. What about that much-publicized backstage dust-up between Courtney Love and Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna? Erlandson says it went like this:
 
 All of the above were backstage at the opening show in Washington. Love was talking to Beck. She had some candy with her, and Erlandson suggested she give some to Hanna. "I'm always the person saying, `Here, be nice to people. You have enemies, but be nice to them and that will really blow everybody away'," he recalls.
 
 "But instead of giving it to her, she threw it at her."
 
 Were any punches thrown?
 
 "I don't know. I turned around," he laughs. "There was some sort of ruckus going on there."
 
 After Lollapalooza winds up next month, Hole treks up to Tuktoyaktuk on Labour Day weekend for an odd beer company promotion featuring Hole, Metallica and Veruca Salt, three bands managed by the same company.
 
 "It's one of those things that sounded like a good idea," says Erlandson, "then all of a sudden they start playing radio and TV ads every five minutes and it becomes like, `Oh no, it sounds like we're sponsoring Molson beer'." He laughs. "But none of us drink it."
 
 After that, they'll take time off to write before heading back into the studio in January. In the meantime, a seven-song stop-gap, Asking For It, will surface, likely in September.
 
 "It's stuff we did with our old lineup, mainly in 1991," Erlandson explains. "It'll have the original version of Violet, Doll Parts and Drown Soda," all done live in the studio for British DJ John Peel's radio show.
 
 The set will be rounded out by covers of The Velvet Underground, The Germs, Beat Happening, and The Wipers.
 
 Oh yeah. The cover shot will be a photo of two slashed wrists.
 
 "It's kind of controversial," Erlandson understates, "but it was all decided on back in 1991.
 
 "The fact that it's coming out now, though, is kind of weird."
 
 To which we can only add: Par for the course.

Courtney takes wing

 As befits her inimitable style, Courtney Love will spend the next six days where she's most comfortable: In our faces.
 
 Tomorrow, MuchMusic airs Hole Unplugged (9:30 p.m.), an alternately riveting/infuriating performance by Love's band, taped in Brooklyn by MTV this past Valentine's Day.
 
 On Tuesday, the June Vanity Fair hits local newsstands. The cover depicts Love decked out in a flowing dress and wearing a pair of angel's wings. It's a typically outlandish, and ingenious, move. It was Vanity Fair that ran a devastating portrait of Love and Kurt Cobain, in September 1992, that painted Love as a drug-addled gold-digger. It led, in part, to the couple temporarily losing custody of their then-infant daughter, Frances Bean. On more than one occasion, Love threatened to kill the piece's author, Lynn Hirschberg.
 
 First, Unplugged. Simply put, the 11-song, hour-long special should not be missed. Among its highlights are an unrecorded Nirvana track, You've Got No Right, one of the last songs Cobain wrote. "Maybe he can hear it," she muses during the introduction. "We'll try it and he'll go, `You know, you really f----- up my song, Courtney'."
 
 Also featured are two powerful new originals, Best Sunday Dress and Sugar Coma, the latter dedicated to "someone who knows who they are, and my friend Michael," presumably Nine Inch Nails' frontman Trent Reznor, with whom Love recently had a brief and very public fling, and R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe.
 
 Along the way, Hole offers up a darkly amusing cover of an old Crystals/Phil Spector song, He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss), and a mercifully brief snippet of Duran Duran's Hungry Like The Wolf.
 
 The undisputed highlight, however, is a radically revamped version of an old Hole B-side, Old Age. The song's startling refrain, "Rest in pieces," neatly sums up the program's tendency to both attract and repulse.
 
 Love's, too, come to think of it.
 
 Meanwhile, the Vanity Fair article is an unremittingly glowing piece that does not once mention its damning predecessor. Penned by celebrity-friendly writer Kevin Sessums, it comes off as a sort of greatest hits of Love's more sensational utterances. Among them:
 
 Cobain was not a heroin addict at the time of his death, "though he was abusing it in ways hitherto unseen ever by me. Mixing it, synergizing it, yet I've mixed it since he died and never gotten wasted like that."
 
 Love did sleep with Trent Reznor, "but it wasn't that great of an experience. I was slumming ..."
 
 She encouraged Cobain to "explore his (sexual) cravings" with Michael Stipe. "I left him with Michael Stipe one night ... He came back the next day, and I started screaming, `What happened?' He said, `I dunno. It was just weird. Nothing happened, but sort of.' I'll never know. Michael's never told me ..."
 
 But the article's most powerful quote is also one of its least blustering. While watching daughter Frances Bean trying to stitch up a heart-shaped pillow, Love cautions, "Frances, be careful. That's a needle. It can hurt you."