Cult of Kurt: Kurt Cobain's Journals
Skinner, David
"Cult of Kurt: Kurt Cobain's Journals" would have come out in a Court with Bork on it. Of much broader significance still, Starr presents analyses of the votes and influence of the sitting justices. For a lawyer who makes much of his...
...His untimely death: at twenty-seven years old, Kurt Cobain's body was found with a 20-gauge shotgun laid across his chest...
...Volatile public behavior: Vanity Fair reported that Courtney had been on drugs while pregnant with their daughter...
...Long-time Reagan associate and chronicler, Peter Hannaford, tells how the Reagans found the ranch, their famous visitors, the major events that took place while they were there and daily life at the Western White house...
...MTV he called "empty TV...
...Thus did suicide become enthroned in all of his musings: Convinced of the righteousness of abortion and the evil of white Christian men, the logic of killing off the person you despise becomes embedded in your heart...
...I can only say that's spoken like a man who never went to the grocery store with Justice Clarence Thomas...
...A perfect Christmas gift...
...Nothing gets left out...
...Shabby beginnings: the high-school dropout Cobain, tossed from his mother's house, flopped on friends' couches or slept in his car before making it...
...The song changed his life, wrote Jamie Allen, and Cobain "was like Brad Pitt in Fight Club...
...In a factually intense text, I did find one error: in his analysis of Shaw v. Reno, a case involving congressional redistricting in my home state of North Carolina, he refers to the state legislature's drafting of a bizarre twelfth district as designed "to facilitate the election of the state's first elected black member of the House since Reconstruction...
...So benighted was the American male in Cobain's opinion that he briefly played with the idea of writing a column for boys...
...In the few short years of his public life, he'd become a symbol for everything from the Seattle sound and slacker indifference to drug abuse and, finally, teen suicide...
...When I walk down the street, I feel like I'm at a Nuremberg rally...
...I want all of you to say `asshole' really loud...
...I wear you on my sleeve...
...But not even in jest did his dermal secretions fetch any-thing like the reported $4 million Cobain's ~ widow received for publication rights to the late singer's journals...
...The twelfth district, drawn under pressure from the Reagan Justice Department, was designed to create a second district likely to produce black representatives...
...Perhaps it was a plea for forgiveness, but judging from many pages of this book, "slow" was an accurate description...
...Cobain says, "I like to feel guilty for being a white, American male...
...In a letter 1 to a British friend at the close of the Gulf War, he complains about the sidewalk sale of "Desert Storm trading cards, flags, bumper stickers," and so on...
...Beginning in his teenage years, he would often copy down in his journals and elsewhere (reportedly as graffiti) the slogans "Abort Christ" and "Mandatory Breeding Laws...
...and "four-way intersection...
...To a feminist ex-girlfriend, he writes, "all Isms feed off one another, but at the top of the food chain is still the white corporate, macho strong ox male . . . I mean, classism is deter-mined by sexism because the male decides whether all other isms exists...
...Days after the news of Cobain's demise, five thousand fans attended a candle-light vigil, where they burned flannel shirts (de rigeur fashion for cold-climate punk) and fought with police...
...For it was on these two sheets of paper that the late grunge star took notes for his driver's license exam, listing speed limits, parking rules, and the symbols for such important road signs as "two-way traffic," "merge...
...Often in these pages Cobain rails against the "right wing control freaks who are the main offender of destroying art...
...only one day the person you despise is you...
...But the very fact that he feels free to do so is a favorable comment upon both him and the the people he describes...
...For a lawyer who makes much of his living arguing before them, his frankness in describing and evaluating the current nine may surprise many readers...
...Given his success with the English language, one isn't surprised when he writes, "Words suck...
...In a list of "likes" that includes "vinyl," "to swim," and "girls with weird eyes...
...Salon.com recently ran a three-thousand-word personal essay on the subject of Nirvana's biggest hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit...
...Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townsend," is a beaut...
...Eight-year-old cavemen...
...The political issue at the heart of this antagonism is, however, somewhat surprising...
...The conspiracy towards success in America is immediacy," he wrote in one heartfelt pas-sage...
...In fact, the plan to which the bizarre twelfth district was appended had already included a black-majority district...
...Reportedly, the crowd obliged...
...I had a hard time finding anything...
...Ronald Reagan and His Ranch is a delightful book that all Reagan admirers will want to read...
...But to unearth these gems one must burrow through mounds of hatred and bigotry and reams of ignorant posing...
...Every comma and doodle receives the full poet's treatment, as if photographed from the original Elizabethan folio...
...LYN NOFZIGER, long time Reagan aide and advisor "Hannaford, who knows the former President well, traces the ranch from its earliest days and brings it to life as it was when Ronald Reagan was President...
...it said...
...Elsewhere he describes his penmanship as "scatological...
...As do men, or rather especially men, even more so if they're white and do things like play sports or love their country or listen to music played by Seattle punk rockers who are clearly their spiritual and moral superiors...
...When I hear the term right-wing I think of Hitler and Satan and Civil War...
...24.95 Order Today: Toll-free 888/422-3204 Images From the Past, Inc...
...Divided up, the booty comes to about $15,000 per page, which makes you wonder what the publisher's accountant would say about the $30,000 spent on pages 12 and 13...
...Because their role models, see, told them "to be mean to girls" and to "act tough and fight the boys who are known as nerds or geeks...
...LARRY SPEAKES, President Reagan's press secretary, 1981-87 Includes more than 50 color photos—many rarely seen before...
...Like much else that escaped the singer's person-al isolation chamber, the riff is a product of viewing the entire world as a high school in an especially small town...
...This fixation strangely fits with his peculiar hatred of men and worship of women...
...But the memorials continue...
...He knows them to be professional enough to be unaffected...
...Who did Cobain, a young man in his twenties—that is, old enough to have met a number of American males himself—think he was talking to...
...The closest thing to another error I could find was in the preface...
...Kurt Cobain was the single most important figure in '90s pop...
...But it seems more sensible to say that Cobain found it easy to promote abortion because he was certain that right-wing males of Christian belief, and many other undesirables besides, deserved to die...
...Sobbing and cursing, she said, "He's such an asshole...
...He is professional enough to feel comfortable presenting a frank analysis...
...A tape-recorded message from Courtney Love was played, on which she read the suicide note...
...RONALD REAGAN AND HIS 'CH Peter Hannaford NEW Ronald Reagan and His Ranch THE WESTERN WHITE HOUSE, 1981-1989 By Peter Hannaford The first book to take you inside (and all over) the 688 acres of Ronald Reagan's favorite place, Rancho del Cielo, his "ranch in the sky...
...From all this one twentyeight-year-old fan took away a different message, and when he got home, killed him-self...
...But to most readers, I think Starr's intention—of showing the consistency of pattern across the broad range of the law—will laudably emerge...
...A fixed motif of Kurt Cobain's casual imaginings was his obsession with abortion...
...Such was his contempt for sharing the world with these people that Cobain wrote, "I am in absolute and total support of," among other things, "violently organized, terrorist-fueled revolution...
...But the best line in the entire book comes from a simple love note he left his wife...
...In his suicide note, he regretted the "self-destructive death rocker" he'd become, and his journals show that he'd been cultivating a personal culture of death for several years...
...s CULT OF KURT Journals BY KURT COBAIN Riverhead Books/280 pages/$29.95 Reviewed by David Skinner efore he killed himself, Kurt Cobain would joke that of all the merchandising schemes his band Nirvana engaged in, selling their bottled sweat had proven the most lucrative...
...he was the artist in your mind, the rebellious ego bubbling up inside everyone who lives a conformist cubicle existence...
...Often his beliefs get in the way of his making sense and not just his belief that "every-one has their own definition of specific words...
...72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002...
...Journals gives us the artist in his own mind...
...The man whose "songs defined a generation," as Newsweek put it, bordered on hilarity when spewing anti-conservative bigotry...
...The author's misspellings, misused words, coffee spills, and half-torn lyric sheets all remain perfectly intact...
...Cobain dated his share of punk rock feminists from a movement known as riot grrrl, and some of this pro-choice mouthing-off could have been just a way to please the ladies...
...Certainly, it surprised me...
...With no more provisos than that, I can say that this is not just the best treatment to date of the Court after Warren, it is likely to have that distinction for a long, long time...
...Perhaps the repeated demonstration of the same theme may strike some lay readers as repetitious...
...But for all of his musical originality, the story of his decline and fall recycles many cliches of the genre...
...And it can be said that Kurt Cobain was occasionally kind, funny, and endearing...
...P.O Box 137, Bennington, VT 05201 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 addicted punk rock forbears Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen...
...When Starr is describing the individual justices, he declares that "in an age of celebrity, the only justice who might be recognized in the checkout line of a grocery store is the first woman ever appointed to the High Court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor...
...The vicious widow: the widely despised Courtney shows Yoko Ono-like ferocity when it comes to guarding the assets of her late husband's musical estate...
...As is the stoner poetry of "wisdom was pulled from her teeth...
...I suppose that to be believable, a review must contain something negative...
...Do not act like"your older brothers, uncles, cousins, and your fathers," he advises...
...A stormy romance and marriage: Kurt and Courtney Love fought like their drugDavid Skinner is an assistant managing editor of The Weekly Standard...
...But above all, there is the obsessed public, the cult of Kurt...
...The agony of triumph: Nirvana's sudden, if not quite overnight, success proves bewildering for Cobain...
...He had an undeveloped knack for word play...
...I am what they call the boy who is slow," Cobain wrote in the same note to his wife...
...Shabby behavior: the band borrowed $600 to make their debut album, never to pay it back...
...although the story was true, Kurt threatened the reporter's life...
...The suicide note: his last words, before signing off were, "It is better to burn out than to fade away...
...Drug problem: Cobain's addiction to heroin began early in the band's career...
...But this detail in no way affects the substance of Starr's discussion of the case or of his major themes...
Vol. 35 • November 2002 • No. 6
