The only thing better than cheesy B horror movies is cheesy B horror movies with rock stars in them! Yeah, it was terrible, but it made me laugh. The cringe-worthy acting reminded me of those old Japanese films with the voices dubbed over, especially since the dialog didn’t quite match the lip movements. Even the dogs’ snarling was out of sync with their happy wagging tails. Alice Cooper was hilarious donning 80’s blue eye shadow and someone else’s fake American accent. A great movie to skewer with friends.

Worth watching for the credits alone. Awesome.

I have never seen so many stupid people congregate in a single documentary before. And by stupid, I don’t mean style-challenged or drunk. I mean, these people set their brains down at some point and never picked them back up. That’s what made this movie a train wreck, the kind you rewind and watch again in disbelief.

What I learned from this movie: It takes brains to become a rock star. Most of the bands in this movie were dumb as rocks and sounded exactly like each other. Their careers went nowhere. The successful musicians were much more original and were the only people in the movie with anything insightful to say. The director, however, understanding the enduring entertainment value of stupid people behaving badly, focused on the former. It was actually pretty hilarious.

Watch this movie if:

It makes you feel good about yourself to know that there are people in the world you could crush with your brainpower. (Believe me, you are smarter than the bands in this movie.)

You like to be horrified by someone behaving badly in front of their mother. (This part is painful to watch, actually, but again, it’s a train wreck and you can’t help it.)

You like glam metal.

You hate glam metal.

You want to sit around with your friends and make fun of people.

Wallace and Halperin present a compelling case that Kurt Cobain was murdered by his not so loving wife, Courtney Love. I tried to read this book cynically since I actually like Courtney Love (for what unfathomable reason, I don’t know.) I also didn’t want to jump unthinkingly onto the conspiracy bandwagon, however fun that might be. Conspiracy theories abound when celebrities die young and most of them are untrue. (Except that Elvis really does run a donut shop in Arkansas. Really.)

I started out taking the time to come up with logical explanations for each piece of damning evidence, but by the half way point of the book there were so many “coincidences” to explain that it made more sense to let them fit together sensibly than go on denying the murder. It was getting to the point where I was grasping, “Ok, maybe aliens came down and shuffled the space/time continuum.” A series of increasingly bizarre events would have had to transpire for this to have been a suicide. But if it was a murder, everyone behaved normally and the universe was operating within its usual parameters. In the end, even my last respite, “Courtney is a crazy woman on drugs and had no idea what she was saying,” makes less sense than that she was a crazy woman on drugs and knew exactly what she had just done.

This book is an intense, engrossing read whether you’re interested in either of the Cobains or not. Wallace and Halperin work hard to stay objective, and they discredit much of what they’re told if there isn’t evidence to back it up. A sizable chunk of their information comes from recorded conversations with Courtney Love, who unwittingly forgets to protect herself when she’s desperate for ego stroking. It’s a well balanced, disturbing, and fascinating look at how badly humans can behave when they’re needy and hurting.

I love the way this man thinks.

Sometimes William Burrough’s honesty is painful, and that’s what makes this more than just a memoir of beloved cats. He has a way of looking right into what is ugly or hurtful without flinching, transforming what he sees into a deep understanding of life and human nature. (And cat nature!) There are images from his words that I will never forget.

I couldn’t figure out why Zampano wrote a nonfiction book about a house that didn’t exist with references to articles no one wrote. I did sense the metaphor at the heart of the Navidson Record: the house as the self, containing the dark hallways of the unconscious where the source of our deepest pain is hidden. But why all the annoying analysis? Why were there so many opinions and theories on what everything meant, almost none of them in agreement? And then it hit me, hard.

That’s exactly what most of us do when faced with our inner demons: we analyze our behavior, trying to logically work out what it means that we feel this way. We think a lot. And just like those endless scholarly articles, it rarely solves anything. It creates a lot of chaos and shifting walls.

(Spoilers Ahead!)
It’s rare that we go deep into ourselves to experience what’s there, exploring it without trying to alter it, letting it show us what it is instead of guessing. When Navidson does that, everything changes. Healing starts to occur, a window appears, and ultimately he is reunited with his beloved — finally free and outside of himself.

Johnny Truant is freed in the same way, setting fire to his obsession once he looks at his own darkness, once he finds it was “just a foyer and maybe not dark at all.”

This only scratches the surface of what I’m finding in the pages of this book. Each new understanding changes the meaning of what I read before. I want to read the whole thing again, right now! But then, is that missing the point? Maybe I’m really still stuck in the footnotes.

Really the Blues is just as much about the counter culture of the twenties and thirties as it is about the music. That’s what I loved most about this book, that through it I saw how much of the social movements of the last fifty years were rooted in that time. Mezzrow sometimes sounds a lot like a DIY punk, frustrated at the money makers of the music industry even seventy five years ago. Like musicians do today, there’s lots of talk about “the kids”. Even then it was the young that were embracing new forms of music and the social changes that often go with them. It made me feel hopeful that there are always people who see through false values and work towards change. But then, it’s also a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.