Last Days- About a Boy called Kurt

It’s probably a few days too early to remember Kurt Cobain on the fourteenth anniversary of his death April 5, but it’s never too early or too late to celebrate the appearance of a half-way decent movie on TV, even cable, which seems to be a bit lamer in Asia than elsewhere. It’s even harder when you’re stealing the signal from the Philippines so have no monthly guide to what’s on that month and your remote control’s on the blink so you don’t even know what’s on that day. You have to be alert. The worst part is always catching a movie in progress and maybe seeing it several times before you finally get it all in the right order. Fortunately some movies give the title at the end also. Unfortunately some don’t. In a way it’s good since it forces you to judge a movie on its own merits and your own critical skills, rather than advance reviews and sales figs. I’ve discovered a few gems on my own that way, like ‘Crash’ before it got flick of the year and ‘Babel’ copied it stylistically, or ‘Donnie Darko’ before it became a cult classic or the director’s cut came out or Jake Gyllenhaal became a major star and frolicked with Heath Ledger in Mr. Ang’s classic Brokebutt Mountain.

So I was so desperate for some true creativity that I welcomed a strange movie that came on at ten in the evening the other night. The best ones typically came on later than that, or earlier depending on your reference point, but that only works when jet-lagged or insomniac. Still I usually crash at ten or shortly after, so need some impetus to add some wood to the fire and stay up later. That came from a strange movie that started off something like an update version of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, though it quickly became clear that these were drug-addled meshes, of a young rocker avoiding responsibility and his friends and almost everything else but his own fantasy world. When he finally gets carried out of his house, in pieces, in the last scene, parallels with certain historical figures became obvious, and quickly confirmed when closing credits named Gus Van Sant as the director of Last Days, loosely based on Kurt Cobain’s ultimate demise.

The movie is worth seeing, if not for the biography of Cobain, which it’s not, then for the sheer artistry of Van Sant’s work. While it may seem exploitative to concentrate on an artist’s downfall rather than his highlights, it’s also enlightening. Van Sant certainly has a right, being a Pacific Northwesterner himself with subculture credentials in Drugstore Cowboy and other films, and an outspoken homosexual himself. Anybody who would put William Burroughs in cameo appearances is okay in my book. Perhaps more to the point was that Cobain himself wasn’t so enamored of his own highlights. While some critics may feel that the work was ‘oddly disjointed’, that’s probably the case with heroin addiction itself, isn’t it? If the work was not a biography, then neither was it a documentary, but rather a work of art. Is Picasso’s work not ‘oddly disjointed’? People are so accustomed to seeing film as a medium the visual equivalent of pulp fiction novels that they’re closed to other uses of the medium. The same is true of music, in particular Cobain’s music. While a simple take would consider grunge a successful blend of heavy metal and punk, Cobain himself was at heart a poet, or he wouldn’t have had fans the likes of Patti Smith, nor me for that matter. It’s no coincidence that grunge all but died with him.

While some may criticize Cobain for his failure as a role model, that’s certainly a role he never asked for, and frankly, any culture that looks for role models in rock-and-roll musicians probably deserves what it gets. To say that maybe they take themselves a bit too seriously would be an understatement. The ‘Death Cab for Cuties’ leader said a couple years ago that it was his job to interpret the world and its politics for his listeners. That’s nice work if you can get it, but the main job is to entertain, pure and simple. The fact that Cobain never aspired to be a culture hero is a credit to him. The fact that others did may have been what killed him. Looking in a mirror can be scary sometimes, especially when it’s weirdly distorted and lots of other people are looking, too. A friend of mine said school let out early that day in Japan. I became a fan from watching the ‘Live Unplugged’ gig, but mostly posthumously. If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly is clear now that many of the most famous artists and entertainers of all time got there not necessarily by skill alone, but equally by luck. My off-hand five-finger calculation is about equal parts skill, marketing, longevity, timing, and pure dumb luck. If that’s not obvious by how many underdogs rise to the top, it’s certainly obvious by how many industry darlings fall flat. Feature films may have always been and will forever be dominated by ‘the industry’, given their high production costs and massive organization required, but everything else is fair game.

Pop music, including rock, blues, jazz, hip-hop, salsa, merengue, cumbia, ranchera, mawlam, gantreum, luke toong, rai, bhangra, etc. is just that, people’s music, and left to its own devices, will likely stay that way. It was only when ‘the industry’ took over American/English pop music in the mid-70’s that the non-English-speaking world really became aware of it. Apart from the Beatles, who were marketed under a Thai name, the rest of the 60’s oeuvre was discovered in Thailand only after the mass marketing of The Eagles, John Denver, and the Bee Gees had opened doors. I assume it was similar in the rest of the world. This in turn inspired and revived a Thai music industry that thrives to this day. Still the live entertainer in Thailand is little more than a human jukebox and little more is expected or him than to faithfully reproduce a song exactly as it was recorded and played ad infinitum on the radio. Accordingly Thais clap as a song starts, at the point of recognition, not at its end as a reward for a job well done. Radio’s even more psychologically numbing, sometimes repeating a song immediately after its first play. If a song is judged by your inability to get it out of your head, this’ll put it over the top. How groups like Carabao ever did truly creative work makes their success even more amazing.

Maybe Hollywood, whether the film or the music industries, is no place for the truly creative individual, alone with his art in a sometimes hostile world. The emphasis these days is certainly more on attitude than art, more on technological posture than technical perfection. Thus technology gives and technology takes away. Accordingly I deplore the ‘dumbness’ inherent in the new mass media while admiring the democracy. But is the new Internet democracy capable of creating anything significant? Much work has been processed through the ways and means of Internet, but does anything owe its existence to it? Communism was great at distributing wealth but never created much. It would have been interesting to see where Cobain would be in his career right now if he’d survived. Most of the Grunge set have dropped from the public eye if not from life altogether, all except Chris Cornell, ex-Sound Garden. He always seemed a bit more ‘commercial’ than the rest, though I can appreciate his giving Artis the Spoonman some publicity. Kurt himself dismissed Eddie Vedder as ‘corporate’, but it’s not always easy for a poet to understand a story-teller, kind of like John and Paul. Twenty-seven seems to be the magic age for rock suicides, the age where you either straighten up or check out, doesn’t it? That’s the age I finally left Mississippi ‘for good’, so the psychological profile fits.

If Cobain were still alive I could see him singing some severe gutter blues, where his angst and anguish really lay, and a direction that fellow Grunge junkie Scott Weiland drifted toward. Maybe with time he would’ve drifted toward a more country-style blues like his hero Leadbelly, but we’ll never know, will we? With an oeuvre that consists of a scarce few works, we’ll never know how far he could have gone, but he was certainly more than a flash in the pan. I think history will see him as a latter-day Robert Johnson who sold his soul so he could play guitar, a tragic figure imbued with tragedy. Maybe one day a computer will channel his spirit and we’ll get the posthumous collection. Meanwhile see the movie. It’s got no Nirvana music, nor biographical information, but unflinchingly follows the downward slide of a US hero and heroin shooter, all without any graphic images. The movie’s been out a couple years by now, but better late than never.