baslog

A morning in Seattle

Today I am in Seattle. I drove up yesterday from Portland and met up with Martin, an old friend from Minneapolis who came here to do his post doc. Martin was cool as ever, we had a couple of beers and some solid manly discussion about soccer, life and other things of no consequence but grave importance.

It is pretty hot in Seattle today. Not nearly as humid and hot as in Minneapolis, but still bordering the unpleasant. I decided to drive around in the comfort of my air conditioned rental car a bit longer and turn it in in the afternoon instead of in the morning, as I had planned. I took a look in the Seattle tourist guide Martin had given me for the day, and decided to head over to "funky" Fremont, a cool but very gentrified area just north of downtown Seattle. As I was heading back to my car after a light breakfast, I realized that I had been wearing the same T-shirt for days, and it showed. As I was getting disgusted by myself, I passed by a T-shirt store. Serendipity! So I went in to buy a new T-shirt. The catch was that all the T-shirts in the store were imprinted with logos or slogans from real places and businesses in Seattle. I bought one of a local music store, Easy Street Records.

The shirt reminds me a bit of an REM T-shirt (circa "monster") I once had. I like the star. Now that I had purchased the shirt, I felt that I also had to go to the actual store, otherwise I would have been a cheat for wearing it. I found out where the store was located and after getting a little bit lost in a pleasant kind of way, I found the record store, close to the space needle.

I already bought some CDs yesterday, but decided to splurge a bit and buy some more. I haven't been buying CDs for a while, and have mainly been buying music through Itunes, but I am sick and tired of all the Digital Rights Management restrictions: I am switching back to CDs. I bought 2 CDs from local bands, "Stars of Track and Field" and "The Decemberists," the best of Suzanne Vega (5$ in the used CDs section) and a posthumous album by the late Elliott Smith (New Moon). It seemed fitting because Elliott Smith hailed from Portland, where I have been hanging out quite a bit during this trip. I had been talking with someone in Portland about him, and that person had spoken in a heartfealt manner about the shock that had gone through the city when Smith had -apparently- stabbed himself in the heart a few years ago. Now being in Seattle, I started to ponder about that other icon whose suicide had sent shockwaves through the world. When Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head thirteen years ago, I was hardly a Nirvana fan. I was in full blown Smiths and Morrissey fandom mode, and found Morrissey's take on the themes of teenage angst, longing and alienation endlessly more sophisticated than Nirvana's raw emotion. Still, I was a child of my time and have had my Nirvana moments. When "Smells Like Teen Spirit" made it big, I was 16 and in my fifth year of high school (junior). The Christmas examinations that year were all in the afternoon, the mornings I spent in study hall, preparing my tests. Most students would come straight from home to school in the afternoon, but a few of us had to come to school in the morning for transportation or other purposes. I was supposed to have lunch at school, but somehow there was a loophole, and we found out that school administrators did not know who was supposed to be at school and who had permission to go home. As a result, a handful of us would end up having lunch in a local bar not too far from school, eat some soup and sandwiches, have one or two beers, get light headed on a cigarette and go through our notes one more time. Before we would head back over to school, we would always ask for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to be played, and it always made those exams seem so unimportant compared to the urgency of youth that song expresses so powerfully. I can still remember walking out in the cold December air, a titch light headed and with a subdued feeling of euphoria, not worrying too much about the upcoming test. My results were actually quite good that year, the last time in high school I was not called an underachiever when I received my score card. Somehow, I have always remembered with fondness those pre-exam lunches in bar "Plectrum" in Kortrijk in december of 1991, to which Nirvana provided the sound track.

Being in a record store in Seattle, I thought that I should therefore also buy a Nirvana album, so I added an album with remastered versions of Nirvana songs to my pile and checked out (63$). As I walked to my car, I decided to go look for the house where Kurt Cobain shot himself. I pulled over,
got out my laptop, found a free wireless signal and after a couple of minutes on google I was on my way to the unofficial Cobain shrine, located in a small park in Eastern Seattle. I did not quite know what to expect when I entered the small Viretta park.

There was a bench on which fans had scribbled all kinds of notes and which had been transformed into some kind of makeshift shrine.

I found and photographed what -based on my google research- was the Cobain house and sat down on the bench.

Of course, the whole scenery is kind of mundane. Cars and people pass by, roaring, honking, swearing
and laughing. This is just a park in a neighborhood where a junkie with talent did not see a way out and put a shotgun to his head. I see some young kids walking across the street, they look about the same age like my younger students; 18 or 19. I do the math. When Kurt Cobain committed suicide they were the same age I was when John Lennon was killed. I don't remember John Lennon getting shot.

I get out my laptop, put in the CD I bought earlier, and listen to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" a couple of times, thinking back about those December lunches in 1991. I opened a left over can of beer from my camping escapades. I don't think that drinking is allowed in public parks in Seattle, but I know that Kurt is watching over me. Because of my light breakfast and lack of water drinking, I have a nice buzz going in no time, just like sixteen years ago. No scary exam to go to this time, only a scary job, a scary move to another city and the other complexities of life. I wished the buzz of alcohol and superficial sense of youthful invincibility would carry me across these obstacles as they guided me past my exams back then. But I am afraid the buzz may wear off long before that time.

Posted by vana0047 at July 11, 2007 07:48 PM