Cobain Unseen

For Christmas, one of my presents was the highly anticipated compilation of... "stuff" I guess... of Kurt Cobain. The compilation, a book called Cobain Unseen by Charles R. Cross, is a book with unseen pictures and other items discovered from Kurt's life.

I haven't read the full text yet, since you can actually read it like a book, but the book chronicles Cross' knowledge that he discovers about Cobain's life--most of it unknown to the public.

A lot of what he gathers is pretty obscure knowledge. Some of it isn't really that interesting, but some of it is. The book contains items such as greeting cards he wrote as a child, his food stamps, a map of his town, his immunization records from birth, childhood and adolescent drawings/paintings, old t-shirts, a van Kurt drew on (Kiss members), an art show certificate, some notebook entries, lyrics scrawled out, old memorabilia from his bedroom, sketchbook drawings, sneakers, guitars, tapes, letters, travel stubs, and of course, tons and tons of pictures.

I was very impressed at the quality of images in this book. It must have taken Cross a very long time to come across these images and compile them in a meaningful way. Some of the stuff seems to be a bit too much (immunization records...) but others are very cool to look at because it says a lot about Kurt (a broken guitar that Kurt wrote on like a journal). He would write on anything he could.

This is a great book on many levels. You could either read it like a book and go through the intense images, or you could just skim it for an hour or less (or more) and just get pleasure out of the visuals. It's a pretty cool addition to a library or book collection.

I recommend this book, especially if you are intrigued by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana.

But I just want to throw this out there too: Do you think it might be too much to go this far on someone's life? When does it become obsessive or too much? I see myself looking around at our generation thinking who would be a likely candidate to be a "rock god" like Cobain and to stalk him in this sort of way. A Beatle? Eddie Vedder? I just don't know. There's just so much hype over Cobain. Anyway...

So what do you think of Cobain Unseen?