Update: The debate streamed live earlier this week on our site can now be replayed in its entirety. So if you missed it the first time around, here’s your second chance…
There are few things more fraught for a writer or artist than approaching a subject that has already passed into popular legend and myth. This is surely the case with Kurt Cobain, who—deservedly or not—attained a status as cultural icon unsurpassed by any member of his generation. Cobain committed suicide an almost unbelievable twenty years ago today, and some recent approaches to his memory have been, well, awkward to say the least. First, there is the amateurish commemorative statue in Cobain’s hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. Variously described as “bizarre,” “hideous,” and resembling a “crying wino,” the mawkish statue’s existence is made even more pathetic by the fact that Cobain’s hometown didn’t care much for him in life, and the feeling was mutual. Now Aberdeen wants to cash in, declaring a “Kurt Cobain Day.” Aberdeen Mayor Bill Simpson hopes the statue will become “just as big as Graceland, eventually.” Cobain had a morbid sense of humor, but I doubt knowing he’d be turned into a kitschy tourist destination would have lightened the despair of his last days.
As exhibit B, I offer the media’s cultish fascination with newly-released police photos of Cobain’s death scene. The coverage prompted a CNN article with what Deadspin spin-off The Concourse called “The Worst Kurt Cobain Lede Ever” (they go on to mock said lede mercilessly, and deservedly). Atrocious though such coverage may be, there’s good reason beyond nostalgia, hero-worship, or sick fascination to revisit Cobain’s legacy. On April 10, Michael Stipe will induct Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, formally enshrining the once scruffy outsiders in the hallowed company of ultimate rock insider-dom. This gesture might make some people (maybe it’s just me) feel a little conflicted. After all, wasn’t it precisely the grandiose, popular-kid culture of halls of fame that drove Cobain to the margins, where he did his best work, and ultimately drove him to hate what he’d become—a star? In his strange suicide note, we see Cobain beating himself up for being unable to live up to the hype—unable, as he put it, to be a “Freddy Mercury” and “relish in the love and adoration from the crowd.” There’s something, perhaps, almost tragically insensitive, however well-intentioned, in posthumously turning Kurt Cobain into Elvis.
One might consider such things while watching the 2006 BBC documentary above, The Last 48 Hours of Kurt Cobain. In contrast to the sensationalism of most Cobain-related media, its tone is dry and unaffected as it canvasses the reluctant rock star’s life and death, interviewing fellow rock stars, band members, and journalists, as well as regular Joes and Janes who knew and interacted with him during his troubled youth in Aberdeen. Much more than its title suggests, the hour and twenty minute doc works well as a biography of Cobain and a brief history of Nirvana and the Seattle scene that birthed them. An Australian magazine accurately describes the film thus:
The documentary includes interviews with Nirvana band members, friends, and witnesses of his whereabouts during that dreadful week. The DVD also focuses on his incredible talents, showing the making of the track Drain You, excerpts from Smells Like Teen Spirit, In Bloom, Come As You Are and more. Also featured is the story behind the controversial Nevermind cover and an interview with the star.
Opinion on the film’s quality is, unsurprisingly, strongly divided among Nirvana fans on Youtube. But as you surely know, with all such widely sensationalized subjects on the internet, it’s generally best if you don’t read the comments.
You can find The Last 48 Hours of Kurt Cobain listed in our collection of Free Documentaries, part of our larger collection of 675 Free Movies Online.
Anyone who’s suffered through the hell of growing out a short style or spent a pre-awards show afternoon getting sewn into extensions will appreciate the brisk pace of London-based illustrator Gary Card’s “Prince Hair Chart” slideshow.
It’s only 15 seconds long, but seriously, can you name another Prince with coiffures amorphous enough to merit such prolonged gaze? Certainly, not Charles, or even the compellingly flame-haired Harry.
As this chronological speed-through of 35 years of hairdos attests, musical chameleon Prince (aka Love Symbol #2,Prince Rogers Nelson)has never shied from standing out in a crowd. Thirty-six looks shimmer and writhe atop his lavender pate, as he stares cooly ahead, more mantis than Medusa.
Not all of them worked. If we were playing Who Wore It Better, I’d have to go with Liza Minelli (1985) and Jennifer Aniston (1990), but the slideshow is richer (and a couple of fractions of a second longer) due to such silliness.
Doubtless Prince will have rearranged his locks before the doves can cry again. His latest look, as evidenced by a recent guest cameo opposite Zooey Deschanel on the TV comedy, ‘New Girl’, is a return to roots, a la 1978.
Web series might have a reputation for being amateurish, but that’s not entirely fair. High Maintenance, created by husband and wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, for instance, is a highly polished web series, featuring subtle characterizations, wry humor and some of the tightest writing this side of Louis C.K.’s series Louie.
Each episode, which generally runs between five and fifteen minutes, is about a new character — generally a young professional Brooklynite — who is wrestling with life’s small problems. The one common denominator is their nameless put-upon pot dealer, played by Sinclair. The show operates on the same world of neurosis, self-absorption and loneliness as does Louie and Lena Dunham’s Girls. Marijuana is the thing that makes their urban woes a little more palatable.
Sinclair recently described his series to the New Yorker:
The thing about weed is, we didn’t want to use it as a punch line. Instead, it’s this substance that, like chocolate, causes people to expose their own foibles. People become so human in pursuit of this thing. And the interaction they have with the person bringing it is often tragic, because there are a lot of lonely people out there who order it and then that is their human interaction for the day.
The story of each episode hinges on the character’s interaction with the dealer. In the episode titled “Heidi” (above) – one of my favorites – the dealer tells a guy that the vivacious lass he has fallen for after meeting her on OK Cupid has a dark secret.
The episode “Brad Pitts” operates in an entirely different tone. A woman suffering from cancer is feeling too nauseated to eat until her middle-aged friend calls up Sinclair. The results are not quite what anyone expected.
In “Rachel,” an author, played by Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, struggles with both creative and identity issues.
And finally, “Olivia” is about two of the most awful, toxic twits you would ever care to (not) meet:
You can watch all of the episodes here. And at some point this month (probably 4/20) three new episodes are slated to premiere.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
From January 24 through April 27, 2014, The Morgan Library and Museum is staging an exhibition on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, a story that speaks to the hearts and minds of children and adults alike. Though Saint-Exupéry was French, he wrote and published his great tale while living in New York City in 1943. Twenty five years later, in 1968, the Morgan acquired the original manuscript, which is now on display.
If you can’t travel to New York, you can virtually pore over ten original illustrations from Le Petit Prince online. We’d recommend clicking here, and then clicking on the Full Screen icon in the bottom right-hand side of the first illustration you see. Then start flipping through the pages and enjoy. As the Morgan notes, the pages are “replete with crossed-out words, cigarette burns, and coffee stains.” You’ll find one such burn on the illustration immediately above.
The first part of this 1966 Oscar winning animated short is so utterly charming, I’m surprised it hasn’t spawned a contemporary remake. The theme—a brave little flea going up against greedy developers who are transforming his rustic homeland into a high rise vacation paradise for cigar-chomping high rollers and their stacked molls—sounds like the sort of thing that might appeal to Dreamworks.
Of course, we’d need to flesh out the characters if we’re shooting for feature length. Give that shambling donkey and plump-bottomed hen some wisecracking attitude, and maybe some mirrored shades. I’m thinking something in the Chris Rock/Whoopie Goldberg/Nathan Lane-type vein. Get a kid to voice the flea. Doesn’t matter who, as long as he’s relatable and bland. Who’s that kid with the hair?
Obviously, we’re talking 3D CGI. If we thought we could sell the kiddies on a retro 20th-century vibe, we’d bring in Wes Anderson or Tim Burton. They’re sort of into that creepy stop motion deal, right?
Speaking of retro, we could maybe hang onto a bit of the “Spanish Flea” thing out of respect and because of the character being a flea and all. I’m thinking maybe a hip hop remix as the credits roll? Find out if that kid with the hair raps. I forget what he’s famous for…
Enough!
The original is absolutely perfect as is, funky and funny, with loads of loose‑y goose‑y personality. Like the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass sound that drives it, it’s both kid-friendly and a bit adult. (If that gyrating changing cabana puts you in mind of the Dating Game, it’s likely more than the “Spanish Flea”/“Bachelor’s Theme” connection. Surely I was not the only child viewer tantalized by the thought of what might happen when the winning bachelor and bachelorette flew off together to take their shared vacation-prize.)
The other half of the short, a riff on “Tijuana Taxi,” another hit from Alpert’s 1965 album, Going Places, is pretty great too.
A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1966. You can find it in our collection of 675 Free Online Movies, plus our collection of 35 Free Oscar Winning Films Online.
Yesterday we featured a trailer for Citizen Kane narrated by its director, a certain Orson Welles. Today we give you footage of another film that needs no introduction spoken over by another filmmaker who doesn’t need one, either: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. But instead of a polished trailer, Kubrick put together this nearly twenty-minute “promo reel,” which appears in a two-part playlist above. “Split over two parts and recorded off the wall from the projection of the rare 35mm reel, the promo reel features some alternate takes not used in the final cut,” writes Cain Rodriguez at Indiewire. “While we’re not exactly sure what the reel’s original function was — maybe to placate investors since the satirical elements are somewhat downplayed — we’re glad to see this has surfaced online.” Kubrick recounts the story of Dr. Strangelove — one as deeply familiar as ancient myth to those who have, like me, seen the movie countless times, always theatrically. He does so in a surprisingly flat, straightforward manner, given that the final product turned out so thoroughly shot through with the black comedy of the absurd.
Over audible projector noise, he tells of all the now-familiar elements: the B52‑s circling constantly, refueling in midair; Brigadier General Jack Ripper’s sudden order to bomb Russia; General Buck Turgidson’s wee-hour departure for the “War Room”; the siege of Burpelson Air Force Base; Group Captain Lionel Mandrake’s struggle for the recall code and subsequent confrontation with the “prevert”-fixated Colonel Bat Guano; President Merkin Muffley’s bad news-breaking call to Russian Premier Dmitri Kissoff; the titular German expatriate scientist’s plan to restart society after the nuclear apocalypse. But as Kubrick talks about these scenes, some of the most memorable in 20th-century cinema, we see different versions of them than the ones to which we’ve long grown accustomed: different angles, different cuts, even different lines. Despite downplaying the comedy, this reel does hint at the brilliance of the material, and moreover of Kubrick’s then-counterintuitive treatment of it. But can anyone who saw it have imagined to what an extent the final film would change the way we think about U.S. foreign policy, military intelligence, and the very concept of global thermonuclear war?
As David Bowie had his cocaine period, so too did Sigmund Freud, beginning in 1894 and lasting at least two years. Unlike the rock star, the doctor was just at the beginning of his career, “a nervous fellow” of 28 “who wanted to make good,” says Howard Markel, author of An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine. Markel tells Ira Flatow in the NPR Science Friday episode below that Freud “knew if he was going to get a professorship, he would have to discover something great.”
Freud’s experiments with the drug led to the publication of a well-regarded paper called “Über Coca,” which he described as “a song of praise to this magical substance” in a “pretty racy” letter to his then-fiancé Martha Bernays. (He also promised she would be unable to resist the advances of: “a big, wild man who has cocaine in his body.”) Two years later, his health suffering, Freud apparently stopped all use of the drug and rarely mentioned it again.
Freud’s cocaine use began, in fact, with tragedy, “the anguished death of one of his dearest friends,” writes TheNew York Times in a review of Markel’s book:
[T]he accomplished young phsyiologist Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, whose morphine addiction Freud had tried to treat with cocaine, with disastrous results. As Freud wrote almost three decades later, “the study on coca was an allotrion” — an idle pursuit that distracts from serious responsibilities — “which I was eager to conclude.”
The drug was at the time touted as a panacea, and Fleischl-Marxow, Markel says, was “the first addict in Europe to be treated with this new therapeutic.” Freud also used himself as a test subject, unaware of the addictive properties of his cure for his friend’s addiction and his own depression and reticence.
While Freud conducted his experiments, another medical pioneer—American surgeon William Halsted, one of Johns Hopkins “four founding physicians”—simultaneously found uses for the drug in his practice. Freud and Halsted never met and worked completely independently in entirely different fields, says Markel in the news segment above, but “their lives were braided together by a fascination with cocaine,” as addicts, and as readers and writers of “several medical papers about the latest, newest miracle drug of their era, 1894.” Halstead is responsible for many of the modern surgical techniques without which the prospect of surgery by today’s standards is unimaginable —the proper handling of exposed tissue, operating in aseptic environments, and surgical gloves. He injected patients with cocaine to numb regions of their body, allowing him to operate without rendering them unconscious.
Halsted, too, used himself as a guinea pig. “No doctor knew at this point,” says Markel above, “of the terrible addictive effects of cocaine” before Freud and Halsted’s experiments. Both men irrevocably changed their fields and almost destroyed their own lives in the process (see a short documentary on Halsted’s medical advances below). In Freud’s case, much of the work of psychoanalysis has come to be seen as pseudoscience—his work on dreams significantly so, as Markel says above: “Cocaine haunts the pages of the Interpretation of Dreams. The model dream is a cocaine dream.” The “talking cure,” however, engendered by the “loosening of the tongue” Freud experienced while on cocaine, endures as, of course, do Halsted’s innovations.
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