Emily and I went to some rummage sales yesterday. At the first one, which was really this big community center benefit thing, I bought a game that apparently failed to replace Scrabble several decades ago, called Option, and a kitchen device that doesn't make much sense to me but only cost $0.10. I think it may be a grapefruit puller-outer, or at least that's what I'm using it for.

[Mark Lanegan] Tomorrow it's ten years since Kurt Cobain killed himself. I was 14 at the time, and a huge Nirvana fan. The event had as much impact on me as any cultural event probably could, and it still informs most of my thinking about death, depression, rock and roll and the mass media. I posted something a couple years ago about Bruce McCulloch's "Vigil," a spoken word track full of flip brusqueness and desperate curiosity, to the effect that I doubted I would ever be able understand what Kurt didn't see in the world and whether I couldn't see it either.

I don't know if Mark Lanegan has ever spoken publically about any of this. Lanegan, then the frontman for Screaming Trees, and Cobain were friends in the Seattle scene, and they collaborated on a couple tracks for Lanegan's solo debut, The Winding Sheet. "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" (3.6MB), the Leadbelly song with which Nirvana closed their Unplugged set, features Cobain on guitar and Krist Novoselic on bass and has a much more driving, gothic feel than does the Nirvana version. Lanegan and Screaming Trees were always the closest thing there was to a "grunge" prototype, I think, even more so than Soundgarden. I saw him perform with Queens of the Stone Age last summer and couldn't believe that the Trees never became huge arena-fillers. Their early work (and much of The Winding Sheet, to be honest) is a little inaccessible, but by the time "Nearly Lost You" got them their 15 minutes in 1992, their material was ready for prime-time.

Like everybody but Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees are gone now. After the suicide, one of Cobain's songs was given to Lanegan, but I can't find anything to indicate whether or not he's recorded it. Courtney Love has become a sad punchline, for the most part, Dave Grohl is now his own rock star and Novoselic is helping tend to the pigs on Bill Berry's farm. Ten years have elapsed in all our lives, unless you got here after Kurt left. If there are lessons in this that haven't already been summed up in 20-word greeting card poems, I don't know what they are.