HOT: About a Card
While Kurt Cobain notoriously developed a disdain for fame, he did have a good sense of absurdist humor. So it’s difficult to know if he’d be disgusted by the exploitation or delighted by the ridiculousness of several items tied to his legacy (in various, sometimes routine ways) that recently went on the auction block. In service of an “unnamed family member,” Julien’s Auctions has offered fans a chance to own several of Cobain’s personal possessions, including Nirvana’s Video Music Award trophy for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (the bid for which has reached $25,000), a Xeroxed flier from Mudhoney’s first show in 1988 (with Cobain’s scribbles on the back) and Cobain’s crusty, beat-up Blockbuster video rental card, which has scored a $1,500 high bid (so far).
WARM: Angry or Mad?
Here’s a brain-teaser so incredibly mystifying it could lead to institutionalization — in a partnership between iconic Heavy Metal cult heroes Iron Maiden and one-time popular video game Angry Birds, who exactly benefits? Last year’s Angry Birds movie seemed to suffer from being released more than a year (or, in current pop-cultural time, a century and a half) after the mobile-game sensation’s popularity peaked, so perhaps making Maiden’s “Eddie” monster mascot a character (“Eddie the Bird”) in the game’s Halloween update is just desperate flailing by the game’s maker, Rovio.
COLD: Music Biz Sucks Too
Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault scandal verified what many have long assumed about Hollywood power-wielders. But there has been a rash of subsequent sexual-assault allegations that shows such behavior is much, much more widespread. In the Indie music world over the past week, relatively obscure musicians like Alex Calder and The Gaslamp Killer lost bookings and more due to accusations, while it was revealed that Matt Mondanile of the band Real Estate left the group last year partly due to sexual-assault allegations (his current project, Ducktails, had shows cancelled in light of the news).
