"Nirvana members dismayed by 'Guitar Hero 5' "

WWW--You know...who gives a shit? He shot himself (or at least that's the story) with a shotgun sixteen years ago because, ultimately, he was a loser, Kurt Cobain. I loved a lot of his songwriting, but if you want to stop being a star, being famous, there are plenty of ways out, and he had the imagination to do it too.

Many careers in entertainment have been sabotaged, take your pick. It's funny: I recall hearing their first album before the hype and just thought they were so-so, just OK, nothing extraordinary. Did I mention that I hate Seattle and its weather and all the rich assholes that populate what was once a blue collar town? I'd do heroin too.

But seriously--so you can "unlock" the avatar of Cobain and have him play other people's songs? Great! Kurt Cobain doing Bob Seger or Ted Nugent songs seems fitting to me since all of them were the death of rock as a mass movement phenomena anyway. Cobain was just that final gurgle, now it's a microcosmic affair when it's real, generally emanating out of garages in crumbling suburbia, less and less a sad spin-off of the American dream. Who cares? The believers, the fanatics, also known as "fans," the etymological source of the term.

And considering that Cobain's estate signed-off on the deal that Activision could use Nirvana songs and his image as an avatar--well, you do the math, they did. I'm doing the math too and finding that the surviving members of Nirvana strike me as disingenuous, and that's being nice, but I guess they're entitled. With Courtney Love...forget about it. As usual, she's the loud-mouthed tramp she always was, a washed-up starfucker and a nut, and these claims that she's going to "sue" Activision just sound good, they make good copy. She's ugly in every way and her music was never good, ever, not even for a moment.

And while I'm on the subject of Cobain being dead, why not take a casual look at the suicide? I have to wonder if Alex Constantine is saying he was murdered by the government since that also sounds good and makes good copy for the terminally stoned and paranoid. But no, I don't think Cobain was murdered by anyone at all, he was simply a loser. What I believe happened is that his dirty wife was his drug enabler; he was hiding from her as much as he could to kick; she found him; they shot-up together, "for old time's sake," and he died on her of an overdose. You do the math, my take.

Frankly, when someone's totally fucked up their life as he did, having an avatar of you singing Bon Jovi songs is an afterthought that cannot compare to the original disaster. Nobody had to remind me what a pathetic and embarrassing decade the 1990s were, it was. Jimi Hendrix is on one of the games. You can unlock all of the avatars. Get over it. As many others have astutely pointed-out, Cobain left behind a child and he was therefore selfish and dishonorable. Now he's part of the "too stupid to make it to thirty" club. Courtney apparently feels the same way but now just wants to save face with her stupid, feigned drama over this non-issue.

She authorized it, the surviving members of the band did not, they lost a lawsuit against her years ago and had no control over it, she did. At least their dismay is sincere. Face it: rock as a mass movement that's real has been dead for decades, over a generation. Now it has a video game. Long live music, rock is a corpse that's been humped dry. God knows the boomers have talked about themselves to the point that nobody gives a shit anymore.

Woodstock, 40 years later

WWW--Well, it gave Carlos Santana, Richie Havens, and Mungo Jerry (I jest), a great career, and CSN is now charging $100-a-ticket (and up), so it must have accomplished something. Beyond that, I couldn't say what. Captain Beefheart actually had a chance to play at both the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock, but declined. Perhaps he was wiser for it, and hey, Squeaky Fromme's been released, it's a good vibe week in general.

It doesn't bother me to say that Jimi Hendix was probably the only reason I would have been there, but that many people in one place always bothered me. Did I say I was one at the time?

No, the real question is this: of all the people who lied about being there since August 1969, how many got laid? Hey, at least they say the acid at Altamont was good--OK, maybe a little too good. And sure, lots of people got their asses kicked at Altamont, but at least the Stones were properly amplified, they had monitors, and only one person died at each event, granted that it was murder at Altamont.

All I can say is thank God for John Waters & the Dreamlanders; thank God for the MC5 and the Stooges, bringing us punk rock; thank God for the Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention for calling a spade a spade; and thank God for Burroughs' healthy dose of skepticism as a strong coffee-antidote to Ginsberg's hopeless utopianism.

Underneath every Guilded Age is the real era, the rot, the effluvium. And when you look at many of the psychedelic posters of that bygone era, you'll see that strange fixation on the Edwardian, that moment right after the Victorian era that the 60s counterculture was also obsessed with, that moment before the fall. It's that sad and irrational American Utopian notion that America can be the redeemer of the world--partly true, but for other reasons--when it's quite the opposite. Myths won't deliver Americans and the rest of the world from American-style theocratic capitalism, that's the work of actual adults.

But more importantly: how many people got laid when they lied and said that they were at the Colombian Exposition of 1893 when they were not? Hmmm? There were no golden ages of human history. Sentimentalism is one of the single greatest threats to human survival, besides America's two party system and their shared values of Manifest Destiny. Who cares about a stupid rock festival?

Postscript, 08.15.2009: It seems to me the best thing to celebrate would be some kind of arboreal, tranquil moment in one's life. But that's just me it seems. ;0)