spending some time studying pycurl and libcurl documentation, i still can't find a (simple) way, how to get HTTP status message (reason-phrase) in pycurl.
status code is easy:
import pycurl
import cStringIO
curl = pycurl.Curl()
buff = cStringIO.StringIO()
curl.setopt(pycurl.URL, 'http://example.org')
curl.setopt(pycurl.WRITEFUNCTION, buff.write)
curl.perform()
print "status code: %s" % curl.getinfo(pycurl.HTTP_CODE)
# -> 200
# print "status message: %s" % ???
# -> "OK"