 - Page 2 On this page you'll find information about Hole-related things that you might not have known, plus my personal beliefs about certain things. Please don't steal this concept... It's one of the nowadays really few original sections on my site, and if everyone started putting all this info on their sites, this part of my page wouldn't be very special anymore Thank you. - - - - - - - - - - - - - SHORTCUTS:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - THE BAND NAME: Here is a quote by Courtney, explaining the band name: "Okay, the name, it came from my mom. She's like a therapist and I said, "I had a really fucked childhood" and she said "Well Courtney, you can't walk around with a big hole inside yourself about it." Then I realized that a lot of different kinds of anger and stuff came from inside my hole, this hole that needs to be fed, that angst inside a person is like their hole... Like when you feel that human emptiness and you have to feed it... We're trying not to be obscene, we're trying not to be gross. We're trying not to be anything, we're just a vapor of fucking hell that passes through your hole and out the other side, and if it leaves a fucking impression then it's fucking great." And another quote, also from Courtney: "It's about the abyss inside." - - - - - - - - - - - - - SAT NAM: There's been alot of discussing (and even arguing) about what Courtney said at the end of Hole's 1998 MTV Video Music Awards performance. Someone think she said "Suck numb", which to me makes absolutely no sense. Some think she said "Sat nam", and I'm willing to agree, since Courtney is a known Buddhist, and "Sat nam" is a buddhist phrase that means "I am truth". - - - - - - - - - - - - - HESTER PRYNNE: In the song 'Old Age', found on 'My Body, The Hand Grenade' and the German 'Violet' import single, there is a reference to Hester Prynne: "No one knows she's Hester Prynne, someone please tell Anne Boleyn (see below), chokers are back in again". Hester Prynne is the main charachter in the novel 'The Scarlet Letter', by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is probably the most famous adultress in American litterature. If you haven't read the book, or seen the movie (starring Demi Moore as Hester Prynne), and don't want to know what happens, then this would be a good time to stop reading. Since I've only seen the movie, and I've understood that there are quite a few things that are different in the book, I won't go into any details. A newcomer in town, Hester Prynne awaits the arrival of her husband, and while doing so, she befriends Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. There is an immediate attracktion between the two, and when Hester recieves news that her husband most likely died during an indian attack, she and the good Reverend waste no time. However, they have to be together in secret, since Hester is "in mourning", and it expected to be so for 7 (?) years. But after a couple of months she can't hide the fact that she's pregnant, and there is trial held against her, where she admits to having committed adultery, but not giving the name of her lover. She's kept in a cell until the child is born, and is then released, but forced to wear the letter 'A' in scarlet cloth, on her bosom, for everyone to see and be aware of the crime she's committed. - - - - - - - - - - - - - ANNE BOLEYN: As most of you know, Courtney makes a reference to Anne Boleyn in the lyrics for 'Old Age', found on 'My Body, The Hand Grenade' and the German 'Violet' import single, among other things. The lyric are as follows: "No one knows she's Hester Prynne (see above), someone please tell Anne Boleyn, chokers are back in again." Anne Boleyn (born: 150? was one in the long line of Henry VIII's (born: 1491, died: 1547, King of England between 1509 and 1547), many wifes. While still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragón, he fell in love with Anne and soon announced that he wished to divorce Catherine, because the marriage had failed to produce a son. The divorce didn't go through, for some reason, which frustrated both Anne and Henry a great deal. Anne's hot temper and sharp tounge got quite famous after several agruments with the King, right infront of the rest of the King's court. Finally, after several years of waiting, in January, 1533 Henry and Anne were secretly wed. Anne was crowned queen shortly after Thomas Cranmer, Henry's archbishop of Canterbury, declared Henry's marriage with Catherine void, and Henry's and Anne's marriage valid. This was the same year as Anne gave birth to hers and Henri's only surviving child: Elizabeth (later Elizabeth I). With time, Henry grew bored of Anne, and wanted to remarry, and in 1536 Anne was charged with treason (plotting to murder the King), adultery and incest (with her own brother... I think), due to plots made by the King's court, imprisoned in the Tower of London, convicted of high treason, and on May 19th, Henry had her beheaded. What's interesting though, is that shortly before her execution, the marriage with Henry was dissolved and declared invalid. One does wonder how she could be convicted of adultery, if she was indeed never legally married to the King. I've heard that supposedly, Anne had six fingers on her left hand, which deepens my interest in her, as I myself was born with six fingers on my left hand. Wether or not Anne's sixth finger really existed though, is unknown. She was considered "moderately pretty" with dark brown thick hair, dark olive-colored skin and very dark brown eyes, often appearing black. These eyes were one of her few (?) fascinating features, and she supposedly used them to her advantage, whenever given the opportunity. Another feature was her long elegant neck. Hole also make another reference to Anne in the album art on 'My Body, The Hand Grenade', that being the painting below; the female neck with a neckalce with the letter 'B' (as in Boleyn). That picture is just a part of a bigger painting. I haven't been able to find that exact painting, but I have managed to find one that looks very much like it, and you will find it below aswell. Click on the thumbnails for larger images. 
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE REAL ALTHEA FLYNT: In 1996, Courtney played Althea Leasure (later Althea Flynt) in the movie 'The People Vs. Larry Flynt'. I've heard other Hole fans express their curiousity about the real Althea Flynt, who seems to be a difficult person to find info on. Alot of fans have wondered what the real Althea looked like. Well, here you go. I've managed to find some pictures of her, and an article about her and Larry's relationship. - - - - - - - From Entertainment Weekly January 10, 1997 LARRY'S HIGHER LOVE The real Althea Flynt by Alanna Nash In 1970, 17-year-old Althea Leasure walked into Larry Flynt's Columbus, Ohio, girlie bar to take a job as a go-go dancer. Flynt took one look at the runaway with her voluptuous figure and scarred psyche and saw, as friend Roger "Ollie" Brooke remembers, that she was already "something special to him." Still, neither could guess that the meeting would spawn one of the most unconventional and tender love stories in tabloid history. That relationship, captured in The People vs. Larry Flynt, brought out the best and worst in the couple, who were married 11 years before Althea's AIDS-related death in 1987 at age 34. "The initial attraction was physical," remembers Brooke, a former Flynt bodyguard who also ran his clubs. "Then they found out how much they had in common. She was the love of his life." Yet for the free-spirited Althea - who was eight when her father shot her mother and then himself, leaving her to be shunted between relatives and finally placed in an orphanage - Flynt, fresh from his third marriage, represented even more than someone to love. "I said to myself, 'He thinks big,'" she later recalled. "'On top of it, he's a renegade, like me.'" As Flynt often says, "She was a true soul mate." When Flynt started Hustler in 1974, he named his wife, who posed for the magazine's first life-size centerfold ("Name's Leasure, rhymes with pleasure"), copublisher. Friends credit Althea, who eventually drew an annual salary of $1.6 million, with saving the blue book when Flynt wanted to revamp it during a brief 1977 religious awakening. Privately she cracked, "God may have walked into his life, but $20 million a year walked out." It was the bisexual Althea - as a wedding gift, Flynt treated her to a woman at a New York brothel - who came up with some of Hustler's most outrageous concepts ("I always liked the sick stuff," she said). To keep her husband happy, Althea procured sex partners for him, getting upset only if he kissed them. "Had she tried to stop that part of his life," says Brooke, "she knew she'd have lost him." "She was very determined to be her own person,"says Althea's sister, Sherry Maynard, a Columbus stockbroker. "I don't think she or Larry really cared which label you put on them, as long as they were okay with how they felt about themselves. Althea was against prejudice. And if anything drove her, it was that she would prove to the world not to be judgmental." - - - - - - - From Cinemania Online THE REAL ALTHEA Her sister and a bodyguard recall the woman behind The People vs. Larry Flynt by Alanna Nash Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt, now available on home video, portrays the famed pornographer (played by Woody Harrelson) as an outrageous rebel, and his doomed mate, Althea Leasure Flynt (played by Courtney Love), who succumbed to an AIDS-related death in 1987 at age 34, as his equal. The fiery, dark-haired Althea may have been a 17-year-old stripper who had just blown her $10,000 inheritance on clothes and drugs when she walked into Flynt's Columbus, Ohio, girlie bar in 1970, but within eight years, she was savvy enough to oversee his $100 million empire. Here, Althea's older sister, Sherry Maynard, a stockbroker, and Roger "Ollie" Brooke, the bodyguard who ran Flynt's nightclubs, recall the real Althea in all her complexity. CINEMANIA: Sherry, you've said in the past that your sister "worked so hard. She wanted so desperately to be somebody, to distinguish herself in some way." How do you think she'd feel about having a movie made about her life with Larry? SM: I think Althea would enjoy it very much. It was a real struggle with Larry, and with the First Amendment. Althea believed in the rights of the individual to pursue life as you choose it. And she went through a great deal. So I think a movie telling a lot of the story would make her very happy. CINEMANIA: She ran Larry's businesses for seven years while he recuperated from his shooting and dealt with his addiction to painkillers. She also talked him out of shutting down Hustler magazine during his brief religious conversion in 1977, saying, "God may have walked into his life, but $20 million a year walked out." Roger, you were around for some of that. RB: Yeah, she didn't think it was good business sense, and she told him that if he shut it down just because he had enough money to live on, that he would be hurting all the families and people that depended on him for money. Larry is a very caring person, so he understood that. Althea was highly intelligent. She was the magazine's first life-size centerfold. She was 5'6" and very well built, with a voluptuous type of figure. Now, she could be vindictive. She was dominating, not actually of Larry, but of other people under her. I don't know if you want to say "clever" or "cunning," but she was unbelievably sharp. The job that she did-she didn't do it because she was Larry's wife. She did it because she did it very, very well. She had more ability than she thought. Larry educated her. CINEMANIA: Sherry, what drove her, you think? SM: I think she just wanted to prove some things to the world-how things are not exactly what they are, herself included. She was against the prejudice and stereotypes, and if anything drove her, it was that she would prove to the world not to be judgmental. We were allowed a lot of freedom as children, and our mother encouraged us to be all we could be. Even in the worst of circumstances. CINEMANIA: What was Althea like, growing up? SM: She was a very determined child. She almost died of pneumonia when she was two, and she became very precious to us. She was tiny, but very spirited, and always very strong. She was going to be her own person. CINEMANIA: What was it about Larry Flynt that appealed to her? SM: His strength and sense of humor. He's very based in reality. And he understands people. I think Althea was basically like that herself. CINEMANIA: Were they soulmates? SM: Absolutely. He loved her very much. Althea had a difficult disease, and he was very loving and tolerant, and wanted her just to have the best of everything. He was very sweet to her, and he coped very well with that. CINEMANIA: Roger, what was the initial attraction there, you think? RB: The initial attraction was physical. Then they found out how much they had in common. She was the love of his life. There was never any love in his life other than her. He had [three] other wives, and he did kind of love them, but when he first saw Althea, he knew that she was something special to him. That relationship was so complicated and intertwined. I mean, she used to get women for him. That was a fact. CINEMANIA: Why would she do that? RB: She understood how Larry was. I would say Larry was as close to a male nymphomaniac as you can get. I've known him to have sex with four women in one day, repeatedly. I never got over his sexual prowess. There were a lot of parties where there would be four, twelve, fifteen people involved. And had she tried to prevent that, she would have lost him. It was a way of life. Quitting would have been like stopping breathing. I distinctly remember one time, she was pouting and upset, and Larry was laughing. He'd been having sex with this other girl, and he'd kissed her too much like it was a personal kiss. Now, Althea didn't mind him having sex, but she did mind him kissing her like he meant it. Because that was too much like real intimacy. CINEMANIA: Do people generally have the wrong idea about Larry and what he's about? SM: Oh, I don't know. He's such a complex and brilliant person, as was Althea, that I don't know if they do or not. Because he has his light and dark side, and with people like that, it's really hard to put them in a box and label them. And I don't think they really cared which label you put on them, as long as they were OK with how they felt about themselves. CINEMANIA: Sherry, Althea was eight when your father killed your mother in a domestic dispute. After that, she was shuffled between relatives and orphanages. How did that event shape her personality? SM: It was a horrible tragedy. But it's been sensationalized, and articles always represent us as these poor, illiterate people. I've had to sort out a lot of things, myself, about my parents. I look at them now, and I see that my father was very handsome and charming-just a brilliant man. He definitely had problems-his upbringing wasn't the best. And my mother was a wonderful, nurturing spirit, very strong. Of course, our father leveled the ultimate abuse. But she had a sense of tremendous perseverance against all odds, to take care of her children with an abusive husband, and still be nurturing to us. So they gave us a lot. Althea got her intellect from our father. She was also extremely creative. You can judge the way she used that creativity, but our mother was, as well. CINEMANIA: What went wrong that day? SM: It was a long time coming. Today, we would call it codependency, and alcoholism. My father was a very authoritative person, and he wanted to control my mother in every way. Finally, the very thing he feared happened: He lost her. She no longer wanted to be married to him. She had matured. She grew. And she said, "I don't have to do this any longer." And he couldn't handle it. Just like with O.J. Simpson. [Nicole] was crying out for help, as my mother did many, many times. And it just wasn't there. CINEMANIA: Has the press exaggerated Althea's lifestyle, or made her out to be something she wasn't? SM: Probably not that much. You know, when we live outside ourselves, we reach out for a lot of things. I don't think she ever truly owned her own magnificence. CINEMANIA: In 1985, Althea got sick with AIDS. Flynt believes she contracted the disease from a blood transfusion during a 1983 hysterectomy, insisting she always used fresh needles in shooting drugs. He also says she was faithful to him during their marriage. But Angie Bowie, David's ex, disputes that. RB: I don't know. Her maiden name was Leasure. She used to say, "It's Althea Leasure-rhymes with pleasure." And the reports about her bisexuality are certainly true. You've got to remember, we lived a different life back then. And Larry thought that was great. For her 21st birthday, he took her to a big whorehouse in New York and treated her. She got a woman for herself for her birthday. And I think he would like to watch her with another woman. CINEMANIA: Was Althea's bathtub death an accident, or was it more conscious than that? RB: Everybody wants to say that she drowned. But I think it was just heart failure. The doctor said she wouldn't have lived through another month anyhow. SM: I think it was an accident, although philosophically, I don't know if it was or not. She was dying of AIDS, and she was in a very weakened condition. She weighed only 80 pounds, and had a lot of different drugs in her body. She was worn out, and I think she just gently left us. That's about all I can say. Except that we miss her. - - - - - - - Click on the thumbnails for larger images. 
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE SONGS HEARD IN 'STARBELLY': In the song 'Starbelly', on the album 'Pretty On The Inside', you can hear clips of two other songs, fading in and playing for a couple of seconds, and then fading out again. The first song is 'Rhiannon' by Fleetwood Man, and the other is a really old version of 'Best Sunday Dress', from Courtney's days in Sugar Babydoll. - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE ALBUM TITLE 'MY BODY, THE HAND GRENADE': In an interview with Melody Maker in 1997, Courtney explained the choice of title, like this: Q: How did you choose the title? A: We were going to call it 'Use Once And Destroy", it was too much of a drug reference, too rock. But that was for a different record, one that never happened. I wanted to tell the truth of what this collection of songs really is and I just wrote it one day on a piece of paper. I was going through a lot of new Hollywood stuff about, all of a sudden, people caring what I looked like, more than ever in my life, and not being important to the film community, and that pissed me off. The truth is, I can go around and be a movie star all I want, but I'm kinda, like a punker. I just got pissed off and wrote it. It summed up the feeling of 'I'm going to explode!' - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE ANNE SEXTON REFERENCE IN 'MISS WORLD': I'm Miss World Somebody kill me Kill-me pills No one cares, my friend These lyrics from the song 'Miss World' seem to have been inspired by Anne Sexton, who, after overdosing on Barbiturates-Nembutal, called the pills "kill-me pills". - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE ANNE SEXTON REFERENCE IN 'PLUMP': I'm eating you I'm overfed These lyrics from the song 'Plump' seem to have been inspired by a poem written by Anne Sexton. See the very last couple of lines: Anne Sexton - The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator The end of the affair is always death. She's my workshop. Slippery eye, Out of the tribe of myself my breath Finds you gone. I horrify Those who stand by. I am fed. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Finger to finger, now she's mine. She's not too far. She's my encounter. I beat her like a bell. I recline In the bower where you used to mount her. You borrowed me on the flowered spread. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Take for instance this night, my love, That every single couple puts together With a joint overturning, beneath, above, The abundant two on sponge and feather, Kneeling and pushing, head to head. At night, alone, I marry the bed. I break out of my body this way, An annoying miracle. Could I Put the dream market on display? I am spread out. I crucify. My little plum is what you said. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Then my black-eyed rival came. The lady of water, rising on the beach, A piano at her fingertips, shame On her lips and a flute's speech. And I was the knock-kneed broom instead. At night, alone, I marry the bed. She took you the way a women takes A bargain dress off the rack And I broke the way a stone breaks. I give back your books and fishing tack. Today's paper says that you are wed. At night, alone, I marry the bed. The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Page 1 - - - - - - - - - - - - - |