There he was once more, Kurt Cobain. This time with intense (nearly accusing) eyes close to the highest of a blended media collage by Nelson Wilbur. It is known as “KC,” and is a part of a present at Vermillion Gallery that options work by artists related to Georgetown’s Fogue™ Studios & Gallery. I checked out “KC” for a number of minutes (the enduring sun shades, strips of music notes, phrases from Nirvana’s greatest hit, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the mysterious quantity 2567), after which I spent a number of minutes questioning why I by no means fail to cease and stare at any work that includes the lifeless rock star. “KC” is, for positive, a superb piece of artwork, but when it wasn’t for its topic, I’d have moved on to the following work by Wilbur. Cobain’s picture at all times presents me with a riddle that I attempt to resolve, and at all times fail to take action. Is it in his eyes? The reddish fish in “KC” is nearly kissing him. Why?
Late the next day, August 11, I realized that Seattle’s eminent rock critic Charles Cross died in his sleep.
The surprising passing of Seattle’s most prolific music journalist & historian Charles R. Cross has been weighing on my thoughts the previous few days.
I sat down with him a number of months in the past at his house to speak about his profession, music, and Kurt’s legacy.
RIP, Mr. Cross. I’m miss you.💙 pic.twitter.com/uMNUswIHoz
— Matt M. McKnight (@mattmillsphoto) August 14, 2024
Cross authored the definitive Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven, which was printed in 2001. In 2008 (or thereabouts), I met him at a cocktail party organized by PopCon, and we talked on and on about Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In 2019, Cross proposed on Fb that the Metropolis of Seattle purchase Kurt Cobain’s former home on Lake Washington Boulevard—then in the marketplace and asking for $7.5 million—demolish it, and rework the property right into a park linked to the park with the bench that is turn out to be a Cobain shrine. Certainly, it is now known as the Kurt Cobain Memorial Bench. Flowers, notes, loving graffiti are at all times to be discovered on and round it. Individuals from all over the world go to it. Some even expertise one thing that may solely be described as spiritual (“I tackled my midlife disaster by visiting Kurt Cobain’s Seattle shrine…”)
Sadly, our city had no time for such speak. Metropolis Corridor is painfully pragmatic. The council isn’t guided by voices. Cross be damned. Cobain’s home, based on data, was offered through the not-long-enough lockdown for $7,050,000. It is now one other of Seattle’s many missed alternatives.
“It’s potential for an owned factor to thoroughly lose its non-public worth and turn out to be invaluable solely to the general public,” I wrote in a Slog put up that did all it may to assist Cross’s proposal. “For instance, may you think about promoting the precise Roman, wood cross Jesus was nailed to? May you think about placing it in the marketplace? And placing it into the house of 1 individual? One thing comparable could be stated of Cobain’s home. It’s has a worth for tens of millions upon tens of millions of people whose lives are connected to the music and lifetime of Kurt Cobain.”
What I did not level out in that put up was our metropolis’s incapability to call and lift to the heavens its worldly gods. Assume solely of the Museum of Pop Tradition. The late metropolis prince Paul Allen constructed it as a church for Jimi Hendrix, the topic of Charles Cross’s biography Room Filled with Mirrors. It was designed by starachitect Frank Gehry to appear to be a guitar Hendrix lit on fireplace. However the neo-church factor by no means actually labored out. The believers by no means confirmed up. Ultimately reference to Hendrix, Expertise Music Mission, was watered all the way down to the Expertise Music Mission and Science Fiction Museum, and at last “Expertise” was solely dropped, as was the bit about science fiction, for the present generic identify.
The statue of Jimi Hendrix on Broadway is a joke. The cafe Starbucks dedicated to the once-thriving jazz scene on Jackson was closed way back and continues to be empty. It is arduous to consider that “a younger Ray Charles had an everyday gig at The Rocking Chair nightclub close to 14th Avenue and East Yesler Means.” And let’s not get into Ernestine Anderson. Kurt Cobain, a god of the rock world, had no probability beneath circumstances like this. He was fortunate to get a bench. Our grunge lifeless have nearly no shrines, memorials, Meccas. Why?
Flying into Memphis in 2017, I used to be shocked to see that the Mississippi delta did certainly shine “like a nationwide guitar.” Paul Simon was proper. He was going to Graceland. I used to be going to Graceland. However, as I later discovered, the entire metropolis is dedicated to its pop-music gods. Bar after bar, Beale Road (what Jackson did not turn out to be), the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (what the Museum of Pop Tradition did not turn out to be)—Memphis shows at each alternative its enthusiasm to deify the worldly. In actual fact, one of many greatest current tales and controversies to return out of Memphis issues Graceland. Poor Lisa Marie Presley died; she, after all, had money owed; the home she left now belonged to the market. The town stated no.
On the eleventh hour on a Tuesday in Could, a Memphis, Tennessee, choose put a halt to the method that might have seen the well-known property of Elvis Presley auctioned off to the very best bidder. The entire episode was surreal and appeared to mark a tragic postscript to the dying of Lisa Marie Presley, the one baby of the King of Rock and Roll, who died 16 months earlier.
Why will we, as a metropolis, not really feel this manner about the home on Lake Washington Boulevard? Cross definitely did. Seattle didn’t. Not like Memphis, we appear to lack this sense urgency or the understanding that sure elements of our tradition are supernatural. It is almost not possible for us to spiritualize the fabric. We simply cannot. Tips on how to clarify this chilling lack? Possibly Gene Balk has the reply: “Seattle is the least-religious giant metro within the U.S.” Is that what it comes all the way down to? Toots & The Maytals’ name “to really feel the spirit” is misplaced on us nonbelievers? The eyes of Wilbur’s Kurt Cobain’s regarded offended to me.
