IN THE DARK WITH KURT COBAIN

The voice of a generation (?) talks like a regular guy in About a Son

Pity the fool hired to scribble the DVD-jacket copy for Kurt Cobain: About a Son—the film sounds horrific on paper. It's a 92-minute experimental documentary about the endlessly lionized "alternative" icon that doesn't include a guitar lick of his music, a testimonial from anyone personally acquainted with the man, or even Cobain's likeness—that is, until the final scene. Plus, the film's director is A.J. Schnack, whose most notable credit is a rock doc about They Might Be Giants. It's like entrusting James Dean's legacy to a Don Knotts biographer. Never mind that the producer is fond of saying, "The whole idea of this film is not to look back at Kurt, it's to look into Kurt." Rape me, my friend.

In truth, the film doesn't seem exploitive at all. Producer Michael Azerrad was Kurt's friend—at least as much as Truman Capote was a confidante of Perry Smith's. In the early '90s, Azerrad extensively interviewed the generational lodestar for the authorized biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, a project that left the New York–based reporter with 20-something hours of Cobain on tape. Schnack, who'd met Azerrad while working on his aforementioned TMBG debut, edited the audio into a kind of narration. About a Son is essentially a dead rock star talking about his life for an hour and a half, and—here, jacket-blurbers!—it's deeply moving.
If Cobain's death is the 9/11 of the modern-rock canon—an epochal tragedy that recklessly opportunistic minds have flattened into a sad, one-dimensional cartoon—then Gus van Sant's tedious and arrogant Last Days is the World Trade Center of the posthumous Kurt industry: a fictionalized piece of shit by a big-name director. (And Nick Broomfield's Kurt & Courtney is the Fahrenheit 9/11.) "I started to feel like Woody Allen in Annie Hall when he's waiting in that line, listening to that guy pontificate about Marshall McLuhan," explains Azerrad, who's thanked in the liner notes to Nirvana's In Utero. "I kept hearing people argue about Kurt, talk authoritatively about Kurt, make these bombastic statements about Kurt that were completely inaccurate portrayals of the guy I knew. I finally felt like it was time to let Kurt talk for himself."
Schnack built the film around Kurt's words, shooting contemporary scenes of the Pacific Northwest to correspond factually. When the Washington State native references his father's lumber mill, there's a logging montage; unbeknownst to the viewer, it's recent footage of the actual place where Cobain's dad worked. "I didn't want to identify the locations and say, 'Yes, this is what he's talking about—his dad's real office!' " says Schnack, in Bryant Park with Azerrad one recent afternoon. Subtle, yes, but there are times you're left wondering just who and what the faces and places are. "I guess I thought people would just assume that of course we went [to] that length. I'm kind of surprised when I read something where they think we went to a random lumber mill. Nope—actual lumber mill where his dad worked. And that's Kurt's actual Olympia apartment. And those are real Aberdeen residents."

But the footage isn't the star—the voice is. There wasn't YouTube in the early '90s, so Cobain's speech isn't a familiar part of his mythology. Hearing him expound while eating cereal or sucking on a smoke, it's easy to forget that this is the voice of the "Gen-X anthem" for apathetic kids. "When we were making decisions about the film, looking at cuts, my mantra was: 'Don't break the spell, don't break the spell,'" says Azerrad. "It's supposed to be this immersive, dream-like, associative experience."

Azerrad caught his subject at a rather poignant moment. Frances Bean had just been born, grunge was a juggernaut, and Kurt was contemplative, candid, and lucid—able to reflect on the factors that would inevitably kill him. "Drugs are bad for you, and they will fuck you up. I just knew that I would eventually stop doing them. Being married and having a baby is a really good incentive," Kurt says late in the film. "If I would've kept doing drugs, I would have lost everything." This line is truly devastating. Likewise when Azerrad asks, "Is yours a sad story?" "No, not really," Kurt responds. "It's nothing that's amazing or anything new, for sure."

Here Kurt Cobain, the supernatural songwriting god who discovered that the only true fountain of youth is death, is transmogrified into a mere mortal. This is About a Son's singular objective, and real accomplishment. "Every once in a while at a screening, in the Q&A afterwards, someone will say, 'Did Courtney kill Kurt?'" Azerrad says with a sigh. "The film has not reached that person. And that's disappointing. But those people, there's nothing you can do—they're like the Lyndon LaRouche 9/11 conspiracy theorists. You're never going to get to them." Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

El pájaro bebedor es un juguete bastante popular, que se mueve sin partes móviles aparentes. Una vez que se pone a oscilar continúa haciéndolo indefinidamente siempre que no le falte provisión de agua. La parte esencial de este aparato son dos bulbos de vidrio unidos por un tubo tambien de vidrio. En el centro del tubo se tiene acoplada una barrita metálica que se apoya de tal forma que el conjunto pueda oscilar. En su interior hay un líquido volátil, eter etílico normalmente, que llena algo más de la mitad del bulbo y el tubo de vidrio penetra en el líquido hasta casi llegar al fondo de este bulbo inferior. El bulbo superior, unido directamente al tubo, está recubierto de un fieltro y tiene una pequeña protuberancia, también recubierta de fieltro.

The Diggers were a radical community-action group of Improv actors operating from 1966-68, based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Their politics were such that they have sometimes been categorized as "left-wing." More accurately, they were "community anarchists" who blended a desire for freedom with a consciousness of the community in which they lived. They were closely associated with and shared a number of members with a guerilla theater group named the San Francisco Mime Troupe. www.diggers.org

esto fue mañana

MAYBE IT'S TIME WE GIVE SOMETHING NEW A TRY

Cuando nació Afrodita, los dioses celebraron un banquete y, entre otros, estaba también Poros, el hijo de Metis. Después que terminaron de comer, vino a mendigar Penía, como era de esperar en una ocasión festiva, y estaba cerca de la puerta. Mientras, Poros, embriagado de néctar -pues aún no existía el vino-, entró en el jardín de Zeus y, entorpecido por la embriaguez, se durmió. Entonces Penía, tramando, impulsada por su carencia de recursos, hacerse un hijo de Poros, se acuesta a su lado y concibió a Eros. Por esta razón, precisamente, es Eros también acompañante y escudero de Afrodita, al ser engendrado en la fiesta del nacimiento de la Diosa y al ser, a la vez, por naturaleza un amante de lo bello, dado que también Afrodita es bella. Siendo hijo, pues, de Poros y Penía, Eros se ha quedado con las siguientes características. En primer lugar, es siempre pobre, y lejos de ser delicado y bello, como cree la mayoría, es más bien duro y seco, descalzo y sin casa, duerme siempre en el suelo y descubierto, se acuesta a la intemperie en las puertas y al borde de los caminos, compañero siempre inseparable de la indigencia por tener la naturaleza de su madre. Pero, por otra parte, de acuerdo a la naturaleza de su padre, está al acecho de lo bello y de lo bueno; es valiente, audaz y activo, hábil cazador, siempre urdiendo alguna trama, ávido de sabiduría y rico en recursos, filosofa a lo largo de toda su vida, y es un charlatán terrible, un embelesador y un sofista. No es por naturaleza ni inmortal ni mortal, sino que en el mismo día unas veces florece y vive, cuando está en la abundancia, y otras muere, pero recobra la vida de nuevo gracias a la naturaleza de su padre. Mas lo que consigue siempre se le escapa, de suerte que Eros nunca ni está falto de recursos ni es rico, y está, además, en el medio de la sabiduría y la ignorancia. Pues la cosa es como sigue: ninguno de los dioses filosofa ni desea ser sabio, porque ya lo es, como tampoco ama la sabiduría cualquier otro que sea sabio. Por otro lado, los ignorantes ni filosofan ni desean hacerse sabios, pues en esto estriba el mal de la ignorancia: en no ser ni noble, ni bueno, ni sabio y tener la ilusión de serlo en grado suficiente. Así, pues, el que no cree estar necesitado no desea tampoco lo que no cree necesitar.

INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION

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