Recent Stories with tag kurt cobain

There's still no answer to the potentially myth-building riddle that is Who Will Land the Title Role in That Kurt Cobain Biopic? But one name is no longer in the hat, if it ever was to begin with: Team Edward captain Robert Pattinson.

It's not that RPattz is too busy sucking on Kristen Stewart, that his filming schedule's too packed, or that he's Cobain-ignorant. The Nirvana fan—a dime says his favorite song is "Drain You"—essentially pulled himself out of potential contention by calling Cobain's long-self-suffering widow Courtney Love a "dick" for saying that he, Twilight Boy, would be "stupid" and "just wrong" as Kurt. "No offense," she finished. Apparently there was some taken.

While this sucks for tweens and budding cougars, it's a cause for celebration for Nirvana fans. No one would possibly see a smidgen of Cobain's soul through Pattinson's eyebrows. (He does have the pale, thin thing going for him. But no naturally disheveled, seemingly aloof gravitas.)

It's also a good thing for one Mr. Zac Efron. If you're at all familiar with the ongoing efforts to silver screen-ize Charles Cross' Heavier than Heaven, with this picture, or with Kurt Cobain's regrettably slim oeuvre, you know there's no living being better suited to portray Cobain than Efron. (I've been calling for this inevitable casting decision for years, lastly on February 21. The video above was posted February 26. Is someone really listening?) He exudes dangerous duality. He simply oozes self-loathing. And who would look better in flannel?...

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Special to The SunBreak by Heidi Boren

Things have come full circle for me and for Seattle since 1994. That was the year I danced at The Lusty Lady. It was also the April that Kurt Cobain ended his life. Now, The Lusty Lady is shutting its doors this June 27, while the Kurt exhibit draws visitors just across the street at the Seattle Art Museum.

SAM, the reborn Seattle Art Museum on First Avenue, was just a baby back then. Hammering Man had been recently, uh, erected, and The Lusty Lady had the cheek to comment on him from its pink-framed marquee with "Hammer Away, Big Guy." But as pithy as the marquee had always been, the Lusty was still just another sex arcade down at the end of  "Flesh" Avenue. A girl who worked at one of these places was probably also a hooker, and most certainly suffered from low self-esteem.

A stripper named Jane, who I met in New Mexico, had challenged those notions for me. When I asked her why she, someone who had a high school diploma, no addictions, and could have worked anywhere else in town, worked as a dancer at a strip club, she told me she didn't want to end up "one of those people from suburbia who thinks Cat Stevens is a real person."

As my musical tastes ran directly to Cat Stevens and Suzanne Vega, I didn't really grasp what she meant. When she died in a motorcycle accident a few months later, however, I decided I wanted to find out.

Having written a single, five-page play that had been well received by my professor in college, I considered myself the premier dramatic voice of my generation. My plan was to get myself back to Seattle where I had a sister who was a soft touch with money. There, I would live out Jane's quest and write an award-winning play about it....

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It's just as well that I can't afford to collect Andy Warhol. One piece just doesn't do it. You can fill half of Paris's Grand Palais with portraits and a museum in Pittsburgh with assorted pieces and still not see the same piece twice.

Or you can stay closer to home: love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death opened yesterday at SAM. It's a smart, focused selection of Warhol pieces curated by Marisa Sánchez.

She steers away from the overly familiar and focuses on Warhol's non-paintings—photobooth strips, Polaroids, sewn portraits, screen tests—and non-iconic subjects. No Marilyns, no soup cans, no neon-cow wallpaper.

Warhol's genius—or was it just a knack?—was taking a simple set of rules and milking them for all they were worth. He repeated ideas the way Letterman repeates punchlines, and was just as successful at making lightning strike the same place twice, three times, four times, or more, long after you'd think that spot had no spark left in it.

A case in point is the highlight of the show: twenty of Warhol's Screen Tests. The idea behind the Screen Tests was simple: Sit someone in front of a nondescript background and film them for three minutes. Just sitting there. Doing not much. Project the films at 16 frames per second so they last four and a half minutes.

The first time I saw any Screen Tests was last year at SAM, when Dean & Britta played their collection of songs composed for 13 Most Beautiful. "Most beautiful" was an apt title, and not just because Jane Holzer brings the hubba hubba. The Screen Tests are some of the loveliest films I've seen, but it's maddeningly hard trying to pin down why, because for the most part nothing happens. But nothing makes me feel more like L.B. Jeffries, James Stewart's character in Rear Window, and at their best they give Warhol's subjects a moment where they're as lovely as Grace Kelly's entrance in that film....

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I told you before. And I'm telling you again: If there's an actor alive today who exudes all the emotional turmoil, confounding complexity, and mystic depth that was Kurt Cobain, it is the tween magnet who did those all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world high school movies.

Can Zac Efron sing? Check. (Could Cobain? Discuss.)

Can Efron play guitar? Doesn't really matter.

Can he rock a rock tee and jeans? You decide.

Can he brood? Mask pain with a sarcastic grin?

That's the real question. Can Efron—or anyone else with or without a SAG card—convey soul-deep doubt, desperate ambition, seething anger, and instant likability with a twitch of his mouth? A glacier-cool, sidelong look at the camera?

Hollywood's creative/financial minds are now seriously noodling this question, because a long-in-the-works Cobain biopic is finally moving forward. Based partially on Charles Cross' Heavier Than Heaven, a David Benioff-penned script is now in the hands of The Messenger director Oren Moverman. (Courtney Love's producer credit has not doomed the flick to straight-to-DVD obscurity. Yay!)...

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Vote Nirvana this Election Day. On Tuesday, the band's seminal first record, Bleach, gets the 20th anniversary reissue treatment from Sub Pop on both CD and white vinyl. And its "I was there!" (and we all know you're lying) 1992 Reading Festival show hits both CD and DVD shelves. Oh, and you can watch the latter on Fuse (Comcast channel 476) at 8pm. How's that for bipartisan?

"This is too painful," says a lean, towering Krist Novoselic into a stage-right microphone. Then he shifts from mock compassion to mock reassurance: "You're gonna make it, man."

He's talking to a frail, blonde fright-wig- and hospital gown-wearing Kurt Cobain—and to the thousands assembled at the 1992 Reading Festival—who's being ushered to his own mic via wheelchair. The Nirvana singer grabs the mic with jittery hands and feebly pulls himself up. The chair's pilot, British rock journalist Everett True, rolls it away.

"Some say love," Cobain croaks, "It is a river ..." And he falls flat on his back.

Somewhere behind him on the huge airplane-hangar stage, Dave Grohl punctuates the faux faint with a heavy, staccato drum flourish.

 

This is the ironic, winking opening of Nirvana Live at Reading, a long-overdue, never before complete document of the band's ability to wryly enjoy the music and the hype they created. However briefly they could.

Watching Kurt Cobain poke fun at his overblown, distressed media image and then tear into what would become the most storied show of Nirvana's abbreviated existence is somehow, 15 years after his death, still a bitter pill to swallow. From the moment he dons a guitar and effortlessly forces the instrument into a tortured squeal, you want the real guy back. Not his likeness in a stupid video game.

But the Reading show is the closest we'll get to a living, breathing Cobain, and, I think, to actually seeing how he viewed his career and fame. It's also perhaps the best Nirvana performance—in a studio or on a stage—we'll ever hear.

As the band tears through most of Nevermind's already-iconic tracks (only skipping "Something In The Way"), its frontman appears healthy, engaged, and enthused. Until Cobain dedicates "All Apologies" to his divisive wife Courtney Love, encouraging the massive crowd to overlook the "crazy stuff" they may have read about her and chant, "Courtney, we love you!", there's no physical sign—other than that opening jab at the media—of his pain, addiction, or irritations.

Cobain displays, through fleeting gestures and performance techniques, many sides of his chameleon personality in the two-hour set. He enthusiastically jumps around with his guitar through "Aneurysm" and employs a casual axe-slinging swagger in "School." The singer screws with his vocal inflection for the verses of "Sliver." He clears his throat after the first line of "In Bloom," then completes the song with what has to be an intentional, extra-gravelly monotone. As he and Novoselic tease the opening of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the frontman shoots the bassist a knowing smirk. (It's the closest Cobain gets to smiling, which Novoselic and Grohl do, with obvious aplomb, throughout.) He dumps his guitar on the stage during an extended "Love Buzz" jam. The man never takes off that hospital gown.

And after he tags a brilliant, Hendrix-style "Star-Spangled Banner" to the end of closer "Territorial Pissings," Cobain calmly knocks over speaker stands with his guitar's neck, climbs down off the stage, and hands the still-wailing instrument to the crowd. Cobain, it appears, in the midst of personal struggles and media-magnified drama, thoroughly enjoyed this performance.

I can't imagine any rock music fan who won't feel the same way. This is a legendary band at its best, with its fast-burning fuse at its brightest. Add a vivid film-to-video transfer, classic music video-style editing, Technicolor stage lights, and original, freshly mastered, multi-track audio, and Nirvana Live at Reading is the best means we have to celebrate what the band was—and wonder what it could have become.

Like everything else, you can probably blame this on Courtney Love:

 

This is a statement regarding Nirvana, Guitar Hero and the likeness of the late Kurt Cobain.

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl

It's hard to watch an image of Kurt pantomiming other artists' music alongside cartoon characters.  Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world.  We feel he deserves better.

While we were aware of Kurt's image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn't know players have the ability to unlock the character. This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants.   We urge Activision to do the right thing in "re-locking" Kurt's character so that this won't continue in the future.

We want people to know that we are dismayed and very disappointed in the way a facsimile of Kurt is used in the Guitar Hero game.  The name and likeness of Kurt Cobain are the sole property of his estate--we have no control whatsoever in that area.