“If you’re really a mean person you’re going to come back as a fly and eat poop.”
- Kurt Cobain (1967-1994)
I have been asked -- my follower sent me an email -- why I never got around here, or anywhere online, to mentioning
Kurt Cobain to mark the 20th "anniversary" of his
stupid death. When jazz guitarist
Jim Hall passed, I put up a couple of his tracks
on SoundCloud. I nod in
respect to dead writers often ... To "celebrate" the 34th year of a
world without love, I posted
a piece about Lennon here.
But April 5th came and went with barely a pause ... for remembrance ... stage diving ... a global moment of angst or moshing. No one seemed to light candles, or say much. The
kids in alterna-clothes,
spirited teens once, kept creeping up in age, towards
forty ... and
Courtney Love keeps being dissed or ignored - in short,
regarded like she's batshit and kept in the attic.
While a cursory google, if you will, of the phrase, "
Courtney Love found the jet", may
induce a giggle or two, the fact that EVERY snarky twenty-something with a phone or keyboard picked up on that "meme" to insult the woman, is wholly sad.
That's the soul difference between
us and them ... the gaping divide between
our Generation X -- Kurt's, Courtney's, mine -- and our Gen Y, Z and Millennial offspring ... younger siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, eventually grandkids:
Any self-effacement
or actual humor is vanished. Our kids today -- unoriginal, uninspired (except to "share") and
largely untalented -- get off on maligning and effacing others ... with no hint of playfulness -- no
irony -- and whether or not it's truly deserved, or they have any clue who they're talking about when they're
cutting, and pasting ... and narcissistically, or derisively, "sharing".
Apparently, Courtney Love was on the
Tomnod website, participating in the online challenge they've got there. She (now infamously) tweeted,
"Prayers go out to the families #MH370 and it’s like a mile away Pulau Perak, where they 'last' tracked it 5°39'08.5“N 98°50'38.0”E but what do I know?"
According to their website, "(t)he Tomnod mission is to utilize the power of crowdsourcing to identify objects and places in satellite images." The
Search for MH370 would seem to be the perfect measure of that platform, which has previously mapped search campaigns for Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the ruinous Oklahoma tornado of May 2013.
As far as I can tell ('but what do I know?'), Courtney Love was participating.
How is that batshit (or "deranged", as it's actually been nastily written in some places)? And why are there literally pages on Google, serving up dozens of this obnoxiously mocking "story" about her participating?
I can't help thinking Kurt Cobain would have loathed what the internet has become for most people: less an information superhighway, and much more a clogged high school corridor of cliques, desperation for acceptance, intolerance, peer pressure and bullying ... from which even the strongest among us prefer to escape.
The damaged and fragile do not stand a chance.
