today has been a kind of blah day. the sky is overcast. my mom is out. its just me and the cats schlepping around the house. i browsed through the DVR list and finally figured it was time to watch “About a Son” this documentary thing about Kurt Cobain that had been on the list for about two months. its basically just recording of an interview played over seemingly unrelated video footage with some little doodles and pictures thrown in here and there. it was a nice in that it didn’t seemed geared towards that angsty teenager in high school who’s writing there English paper on how capitalism causes cancer or something. it didn’t really have a concrete time line or try to make events seem very linear, but was just very personal and raw in nature. i think i only heard the “nirvana” about a handful of times and most importantly didn’t hear the term “grunge” once. overall, it was just very nicely done.
after i watched that, i returned back to the list to watch a documentary about Nick Drake ( I guess the running theme I had going was dead musicians) but five minutes into it, i decided i didn’t want to watch it. not because it didn’t seem interesting but something some guy said about how Nick Drake had this sort of mystic aura about him. how there’s no motion picture or much recorded word by Drake. and i realized that’s what i like. sometimes i don’t like knowing the musician, there music is just enough that i don’t feel the need to know the person behind the music.
its like back in the day when you’d hear a song on the radio and didn’t know who the band or artist was or even the name of the song. and for the next couple of days you’d sit next to the radio hoping they’d play it again and that the DJ would come on afterwards and say the artist name so you could go down to the music store and let your fingers walk over the alphabetized plastic letter dividers until you finally find the CD. there’s just something mystical in that period when you don’t really know much about the people behind the music, but just love this musical entity. nowadays, i think that’s really missing. hell there’s an app for the iPhone that allows you to hold your phone up to a song playing on the radio or over the TV and not only tells you the band but pulls up their entire music catalog for you to purchase right then and there.
there was a really interesting line in “About a Son” where Kurt talks about this virtual reality where people will just tune in and eventually become so codependent on this technological high where people will just be found on couches from a virtual reality overdose. okay, so i can’t make it sound as intelligent or make it resonate like he did, but you get the gist.
