Field Trip City

For the last fourteen years, half of my life, I've been haunted by the ghost of Kurt Cobain. This feeling was not counteracted by hearing his disembodied voice pour over landscapes and streets and stages he had seen with his own eyes (and some he never will). At the moment of Kurt's death I had no real conception of what was happening in his personal life. I suppose I'd heard about his drug overdose in Rome, because I'd seen a picture of Courtney in the ambulance in a magazine. But it never registered how far into turmoil the band had spun, and how close to the end Cobain was coming.

I suppose if I learned anything new from Kurt Cobain About a Son, it's how much Kurt truly despised journalists for picking apart his life. He felt that he couldn't defend himself in either business or from personal attacks on his family. It puts a new spin on his artwork and obsession with invisible man models, organs and skeletons - he was fascinated with the way a person could be dissected. There are chilling moments when he reveals how much his parents' divorce and abuse fucked up his perception - chilling because despite his chastisement of their actions, he would abandon his own daughter and wife a year later. There are touching moments such as his revelation that he thought of himself as a funny, happy person a lot of the time, but that people always took it for granted that he was depressed or angry. And there are funny moments as he describes the band's various interactions with record companies. He was an ambitious guy who was also lazy. And he hated feeling intruded upon.

I've always had a hard time coming to terms with learning more about Kurt, because he was so vocal about his life not being anyone's business. It's for this reason that I won't read the personal journals that were released a few years ago. But in this film, I got the sense that he was giving these interviews to tell a more complete story of himself, one that wasn't slanted to hell by the media that constantly called him a worthless junkie and a bad father. It fleshes him out more as a person, without making it feel as if he's being violated, which is very important to me on a certain level. As a whole, the film is very good. The use of imagery is mostly cogent, but at times it seems as if it serves as no great companion.

I watched Jurassic Park III (better than Lost World, not as good as the original) yesterday before heading to campus. I read Wole Soyinka's "Death and the King's Horseman" and Sophocles' "Philoctetes," which is fantastic. I also started into Marjorie Perloff's "Radical Artifice," which I think I'm going to enjoy as it relates a lot to technology's effect on art and the attitude of decadence enforced by postmodernism.