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these real reviews are pretty funny..sorry, just had to
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Date Posted: 06:36:36 03/30/02 Sat
Author Host/IP: CPE0080c6f00b88.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com/24.114.109.67
In reply to:
Andrea
's message, "BeBe Buell Book Reviews contd" on 04:38:20 01/05/02 Sat
Sorry, but I remembered seeing this in the Toronto Star and couldn't help but add to list of real reviews, as opposed to the fake ones Bebe's been planting on Amazon.com......
from the TORONTO STAR........
LIV TYLER'S MOM ENGAGES IN SOME MONEY-MAKING THERAPY AT READER' EXPENSE
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES are one of the many ways in which celebrities determine power among their ranks. If someone is genuinely successful, he or she would never write (or pretend to write) an autobiography in the first place, because books have a beginning and an end — the latter being anathema to true stars.
So while most celebrities write autobiographies as a way of cashing in their chips (such as Shelley Winters' interminable reflections on her former glories), some may write a scandalous autobiography as a way of explaining their tenuous grasp on fame, and in the hopes of bartering what they confess for greater prosperity (consider Roseanne's repeated attempts at preaching to the choir that she is a deranged grotesque).
Simply stated, has-beens confess to pleasure, and wannabes confess to pain. (The new) book from former groupie Bebe Buell falls neatly into categories A and B.
Buell, whose celebrity is tenuously predicated on having sex with Steven Tyler, has written Rebel Heart to fan the small embers of her hot youth.
Pamela Des Barres, who had sex with Buell's better conquests long before she did, has already written the definitive groupie tell-all. Her 1987 blockbuster I'm With The Band succeeded not only because of its insalubrious snitching but because Des Barres, an accomplished journalist, is an expert raconteur.
Because of Des Barres' pre-existing book (which an envious Bebe never mentions), Buell's love affairs read like sloppy seconds mixed with a number of embarrassingly distasteful episodes no one in her right mind would brag about (consensual sex with Rod Stewart, for example).
When the author of a tell-all is essentially a nobody, the reader demands a higher calibre of confession — that's why Robin, Liza, Linda and Tiffany, the anonymous hookers who wrote You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again, had to deliver such hard-core gossip as Vanna White's husband's predilection for administering hot coffee enemas, and Timothy Hutton's nonchalance about strutting around naked with a streamer of toilet paper stuck in his ass.
Buell, a shockingly conceited, if not genuinely delusional woman, ultimately refuses to pony up the goods. So while we learn that she slept with a variety of middle-range rock stars (including Todd Rundgren and Stiv Bators), we are never apprised of why this should interest us in any way.
Rebel Heart is presented as a slatternly tell-all, but its actual value lies in its accidental humour. An oblivious Buell delivers, to her talentless scribe Victor Bockris, a monologue about her life and its worth that is so self-aggrandizing and fantastic it reads like Blanche DuBois reminiscing to Stanley Kowalski about Belle Reve.
Unencumbered by editing (Buell's stories and facts change from page to page) and absorbed in hilarious revisionist analysis, Rebel Heart presents the scarcely plausible story of a woman who slept with rock stars because, deep down, she is one herself.
This narrative slant provides the highest comic moments in the book, as Buell rampages through her past in search of evidence that she was not merely a model and hanger-on, but an artist in her own right. Her lyrics are reproduced at staggered intervals ("I'm cool / I'm cooler than cool / I'm the Queen of cool") and she slavishly describes a handful of obviously terrifying solo performances at New York clubs.
Better than her gargantuan vanity ("I was dangerous and damned good looking"), feminist amendments (sex with the ubiquitous pervert Mick Jagger is constructed as a powerful attempt to be Mick Jagger) or her powerful empathy for gay men ("I really loved and depended on my fags") is her crackpot sense of her place in immortality.
She claims that Prince, for instance, whom she has never met, wrote "Little Red Corvette" for her (apparently it's not "baby" but "Bebe" who is "much too fast"). Elvis Costello, whom she dated briefly and who shuns her at every opportunity, apparently continues to write songs about her. He denies it, "but deep down he knows the truth."
It is this final bit of jet-propelled hubris that allows the mother of fading starlet Liv Tyler to proclaim, at the end of her monument to hubris, "I feel like Iggy Pop, man. I strut ... I'm in the zone. Anything is possible."
>Just thought those of you who didn't see this would be
>interested (from Q Magazine, England):
> You'd expect that a woman who spent the
>70's "hanging out" with Jagger, Bowie & Warren Beatty
>would have many a juicy tale. But Buell - model,
>singer, nother of Liv Tyler and prodigious shagger of
>rock stars - is primarily concerned with defending her
>reputation in this dull tome. Even with rock scribe
>Bockris helping her hold the pen, Buell is unable to
>recount and incident without re-iterating that she was
>a) beautiful, b)a musician in her own right and c) a
>muse NOT a groupie. For every titbit about Jagger
>wearing her lingerie, we must suffer the 'revelation'
>that Prince (who she never even met) wrote 'Little Red
>Corvette' about her, hence the lyric: "Bebe, you're
>much too fast." A little honesty and humour wouldn't
>have gone astray.
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TORONTO STAR calls Bebe Buell "Genuinely delusional" with a "crackpot sense of her place"