I saw My Own Private Idaho in the theater when it was released back in 1991. I mention this because the seemingly-timeless ‘Idaho simultaneously feels like a movie of its time, and of my time. In the 1990’s Generation X took over the culture: Nirvana, Bill Hicks, Tarantino. Anna Nicole Smith brought back the bombshell, and Ben Stiller had a television show on MTV. Independent movies exploded in the 1990s and a number of homegrown storytellers emerged to spotlight a crop of smart young actors like Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. Those two looked just like our friends who were leaving college and stepping into a recessed economy where creative young people flourished on strong coffee and clove cigarettes, and decorated themselves in thrift store style. My Own Private Idaho is one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations, it’s a great story about growing up, and I’m reminded of the movie because the 1990s most timeless film screens at midnight on Friday at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville.

My Own Private Idaho came out in September of 1991 at the beginning of my last year in college in Michigan where I was growing my hair long, writing my first newspaper stories and living in an off-campus apartment. On Halloween night in 1993 River Phoenix died at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. He was two months younger than me. I’m a Gemini. He was a Virgo. Generation X is haunted by the Age of Aquarius and it’s inextricably linked to America’s 1960s. A generation of rockers, rebels, hedonists, hellions, and righteous rabble rousers caused our seismic cultural shift after World War II, but Generation X was the result. Manson, Kennedy, MLK, LSD, Mutually Assured Destruction – the 1990s wrapped them in cynicism, side-eyed them with suspicion, and eventually steered the culture from sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll toward satire, techno and MDMA. 90 is 60 upside down, and the more things change the more they stay the same. River was our Janis.

My Own Private Idaho tells the stories of two friends from different worlds: Mike (River Phoenix) is searching for his long lost mother. Mike is also the film’s narcoleptic narrator, and the images director Gus Van Sant creates to evoke Mike’s dreamlike reveries are the film’s visual signature. Van Sant is one of our most consistently challenging filmmakers, but ‘Idaho’s many indelible – if ineffable – frames make this movie the auteur’s most poetic. Mike and his friend Scott (Keanu Reeves) are both young prostitutes who live on the streets in the Pacific Northwest. They get picked-up by both men and women, and sometimes sleep in places like abandoned apartment buildings. They belong to an underground network of prostitutes and drug addicts who serve as a freaky foster family of runaways and throwaways. Secretly, Scott has a very different background from Mike and the other street kids, and his story borrows from Shakespeare’s “King Henry IV” and “King Henry VI.”

Cinematographers John J. Campbell and Eric Alan Edwards lens some gorgeous pictures here, but ‘Idaho’s quiet beauty is effectively contrasted against the grimy scene that Mike and Scott move through, and the angular, off-beat performances by many of the non-actors cast in the film. At one point Van Sant was planning to shoot his script using only real street kids that he knew in Portland. In the end he cast many of them as Mike and Scott’s fellow hustlers and they help to ground the film’s time-lapse tapestries in a real-feeling milieu of black coffee and blowjobs, cigarettes, sentiments and heartache.

My Own Private Idaho is a love story focused on Mike’s deep alienation and the numbness that results from his drug use and his sleep-inducing condition. Because Mike can’t find his mother and re-connect the fundamental break that defines his sense of himself, he instead simulates something like love with the strangers he engages with for money, and he projects his feelings onto those around him no matter if those feelings are appropriate or reciprocated. My Own Private Idaho is a deep, sometimes surreal vision of complex people with complex feelings trying to negotiate the connections and boundaries that define friends, family and lovers. And it’s also about the damage that can result when those connections and boundaries become confused, constraining or sometimes suddenly severed.

At one point in “King Henry IV,” Shakespeare writes about how people sometimes make decisions to transform themselves. But My Own Private Idaho reminds us that we are forever part of the people we come from, and the film’s final scenes seem to say that life is a but dream, but not a dream we get to choose or one we can wake from.

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

In the early 1990′s Nirvana made a massive impact on popular music, and the band’s influence seems even more impressive when remembering that they only released three studio albums. Of course, like most artists, their official output is only part of the story of the band’s production. And fans like me are always on the lookout for more material that will help us to understand where the band was coming from or where their music might have gone if not for Kurt Cobain’s untimely death.

This week a trove of old Nirvana demo recordings was uploaded to YouTube by Tacoma rocker John Purkey who claims that the cassette tapes were given to him by Cobain himself. Uproxx offered this overview on the recordings…

On the four tapes, which feature over two hours of material, are recordings from Nirvana’s first ever studio session, at Reciprocal Studios in Seattle in 1988 with Melvins drummer Dale Crover. There are also Nevermind demos recorded with Chad Channing, who replaced Crover in the band for a brief period before himself being replaced by Dave Grohl. One of the tapes includes Montage Of Heck, which was later officially released a few years ago (although it didn’t sell super well). As that last point makes obvious, some of the material on these tapes has already been distributed on various bootlegs.

Kick out the jams here on my YouTube channel…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

Tonight I got to see Calvin Johnson play a live show just down the road from my house at Fond Object. Johnson is an indie music pioneer based out of Olympia, Washington. More specifically, Johnson and his K Records label — along with the scene around The Evergreen State College — created a breeding ground for some of the best music at the end of the 20th century. And here’s the thing: no Olympia, no Nirvana.

If you don’t know who Calvin Johnson is, watch this video…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts

As we continue to remember Kurt Cobain 20 years after his suicide, let’s take this opportunity to look back even further to the beginnings of what was to become “grunge.” While bands like Green River, Melvins and Mudhoney all had music released by 1988, their mixing of punk and metal mostly set the scene for grunge’s mainstream success.

While 1991 has become dubiously known as “the year punk broke” because of the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, it’s 1989 that I find most interesting. We generally think of grunge as a ’1990′s phenomenon, but its roots dig back into the middle 1980′s and that decade’s last year looks like the high water point before the damn burst.

Let me explain…

Mudhoney’s self-titled 1989 debut album is considered disappointing in light of the singles and EP’s that came before it, but it marks a milestone in grunge music: Mudhoney boasted members from both Green River and the Melvins, tying them back to the very beginnings of the Seattle sound, and Kurt Cobain acknowledged them as a major influence on Nirvana. In 1989 Mudhoney was straddling the first and second waves of grunge in a manner that makes their debut album seem much more important 25 years on.

Soundgarden’s Louder than Love came on the heels of their definitive debut LP, Ultramega OK. Louder was the band’s major label debut and the record most fans heard first as the band screamed toward mainstream success.

Mother Love Bone’s first release was the 1989 EP, Shine. While the story of the band’s tragic lead singer, Andrew Wood, has earned MLB a place in grunge history, his overdose death cut short the band’s musical impact. However, MLB’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament (who both traced their roots to Green River) would quickly go on to form two successful projects out of MLB’s ashes: Temple of the Dog and Pearl Jam.

Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach was released in 1989.

These albums aren’t necessarily my favorite grunge records. In fact, one can argue that the genre hasn’t held up particularly well. That said, grunge was a wide cultural phenomenon — one that happened to have a great soundtrack. The music still speaks to a particular time in our collective history and it always will. 1989 is the year when it all comes together for the Seattle sound. That’s the tipping point.

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts

Stupid and contagious

On a recent episode of Coincidence Control Network, I reviewed Hit so Hard: The Life and Near Death of Patty Schemel. I viewed the flick at the Nashville Film Festival and this rock doc is just now starting to open in theaters. It tells the tale of the hard living drummer of Courtney Love’s band Hole.

One of the film’s draws is the footage that director P. David Ebersole assembled out of hours of Schemel’s own home movies from her Hole heyday. The scenes capture the chaos at the center of Hole’s life on the road and include a number of never-before-seen intimate appearances by Kurt Cobain.

After my report, Ken Eakins mentioned being interested in the story behind grunge more than he cared for the music itself at this late date. Pell and Matheny quickly agreed. I’m not sure how far these gentlemen are willing to go with this line of criticism, but, surely, they’d stop short of shrugging off Nirvana’s Nevermind? Surely we agree that Nevermind is imminently listenable 20 years later?

Of course, some grunge bands/albums now sound dated – and others sound rather bad – but I wouldn’t say either about any of Nirvana’s Grohl-era music. As my companera pointed out to me “It would be hard to find a teenager listening to Pearl Jam, but there are a lot who are still listening to Nirvana.” I would agree. And although Nirvana will never have a chance to prove that they had a long run of amazing music in them, I would say that kids today discover Cobain and Nirvana the same way they discover Zeppelin, the Stones, The Doors and The Beatles. For me, Nirvana is part of the canon and they deserve their place in it.

This BBC doc was made 10 years after Kurt Cobain’s suicide. In a sometimes scathing manner, it explores whether or not Nirvana’s music was really as great as it seemed to be in the early ’90′s.

What do you think?

Stay awake!

Watch this performance of my OccupySong at Occupy Congress in DC!