JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT all that could be said and done about the early-’90s Seattle music scene had been said and done, here come more exploiters.

At 2 p.m. today, a crew from New Line Cinema will go to the Seattle Center Fountain outside KeyArena to, as a flyer soliciting extras says, “re-create Kurt Cobain’s memorial vigil for a new feature film.”

The movie, tentatively titled A Leonard Cohen Afterworld (after a line in Cobain’s song “Pennyroyal Tea”), is the first fiction feature directed by Todd Philips (who made the documentaries Frat House and Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies).

The script is by Scott Rosenberg, who was involved in the “hip”-violence travesty Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead, and apparently involves a pair of troubled teens who have various misadventures while on the road to Seattle for the Cobain memorial.

Some movie-rumor websites claim it might also include “speculations” on what may or may not have happened among Cobain and his inner circle during the rocker’s last days–a plot-concept which should immediately make all of you collectively go “Ick!” or at least “Potential Ick!”

ON A SLIGHTLY HAPPIER NOTE, and as I’ve hinted at in prior installments, I’ve secured the rights to my 1995 book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story back from the original publisher. I’ve also arranged financing for an updated second edition, which, if all goes right, should be available from this site and in stores in October, four years after the first edition.

While I never got rich off the old book, I did become known as a Seattle-music-scene expert, at least to European magazine interviewers. Since the Dutch magazine that talked to me over a year ago, I’ve since talked to a Swiss magazine and now the Italian mag Jam.

Here’s some of what I told that publication’s writer:

• Q: The common opinion is that Seattle music evolved in a certain way because of the town’s isolation from the music industry. Now that the ‘grunge hysteria’ is over, the scene returned to a certain grade of isolation? Or maybe the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden/Alice In Chains’ success changed things forever?

  A: Things changed. There’s clubs to play at now. And experienced producers and promoters and studios and indie labels. The reason there didn’t turn out to be a “Next Seattle” (the next town for the music industry to scoop up promising acts from) was because Seattle had been more than just a source of talent. It was a nearly self-sufficient infrastructure for making and promoting music.

  And that’s what’s largely survived the music industry’s retreat.

• Q: When the so-called ‘grunge’ became hyped, the Seattle community reacted with comprehensible hostility. Is anything changed now that the media hype is over, or what you call “timidity” (‘Loser’, Introduction) still rules?

  A: A lot of people here wanted to succeed but only on their own terms. They wanted to be known as artists and/or entertainers, not as media celebrities or as fodder for MTV. The last thing some of them wanted was for their messages of anger and angst to be re-interpreted as something hot and commercial.

• Q: Seattle now and then (then=beginning of the Nineties): is the economic and social situation different? If it’s so, what are the repercussions on the music scene?

  A: A decade ago, the conventional wisdom was that economic stagnation would be permanent, that young people had no real future.

  Today, there’s lots of money flying about, much of it held by college-educated white young adults working at software and Internet companies. The young successors to yesterday’s “going nowhere generation” are now (at least some of them) among the most privileged young people America has ever produced. This new audience has influenced the nightlife scene greatly. The dance club ARO.Space and the new Cyclops restaurant/bar, to name only the most obvious examples, are shrines to the new monied youth.

  But for those without high paying cyber-careers, wages have stagnated and the cost of living has risen (especially housing, which has become ridiculously expensive with the cyber-monied people willing to pay just about anything). It’s harder to be a self-employed artistic-type person (or an artistic-type person with an undemanding day job) here; even as the social pressure rises (even in “alternative” circles) to be upbeat and positive and success-minded at all times.

• Q: Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that mass media didn’t put much emphasys on the political consequances of an underground and decentralized music community like the Seattle one. I mean, when you put under discussion the starmaking process at every level, the consequences are political, economical and social. When you say “I don’t wanna be part of it”, you’re saying that something has to change. Do you agreed? If it’s so, do you think that nowadays is still the same in the Seattle musical scene? Do you think that, in this field, the incredible success of bands like Nirvana, and Pearl Jam brought positive things? Or it was all in vain?

  A: What was initially intended by most of its musicians to be a reaction against music-industry fads became promoted by the industry and the media as just another music-industry fad. In the short term, that had the effect a conspiracy theorist might imagine: Audiences tired of the hype and, around 1996-97, turned away.

MONDAY: More of this.

ELSEWHERE: Jessica Hopper, editor of the Chicago zine Hit It or Quit It (linked here via the indie-rock portal site Insound), has a quaint glossary of indie-scene terminology. Example: “Nature Melt: Hippies dancing or gathering en masse. A: ‘We had to leave Lilith Fair early, the nature melt was out of control.'”