I speak of the one and only Kurt Cobain action figure.

A little over a year ago, a tiny indie record label in Georgia asked me to help curate a compilation CD of ’80s and ’90s Seattle rockers. The result is now out. I didn’t pick the title Sleepless in Seattle. But I did help pick the music therein.

The label had originally hoped to attain tracks by Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but found them beyond its budget. So instead, I fed the label’s people several hundred tracks by less-than-double-platinum acts. Several months’ worth of back-and-forth culling between me and them, and rights negotiations between them and the tracks’ original labels, resulted in 20 songs, mostly from the Sub Pop and C/Z archives. They represent a wide swath of Northwest noise, from the avant-art-noise of the Blackouts to the garage aggression of the U-Men to the acid-pop of the early Screaming Trees to the out-and-out assault of TAD and Coffin Break. There’s even one out-of-state band in the collection, Babes in Toyland.

There were, of course, some disagreements along the way. The LA-based independent promoter who’d been my original go-between with the label once asked, during the selection/culling of tracks, why I hadn’t included the “Seattle bands” Bush, Oasis, and Stone Temple Pilots. I had to explain to him those acts were really from such far-off places as London and San Diego, not here. I also helped persuade the label to axe its initial cover design, a cartoony sketch of longhair flannel dudes, in favor of a photo montage.

Now that it’s out, I like the fact that the compilation focuses on bands that didn’t “make it” globally. It’s more of a living artifact for concentrating on music you haven’t heard a thousand times. Parts of it could represent an average Thursday night at the Central Tavern in 1990.

There’ll be a release party and benefit concert in mid-April. More about that as it gets closer.

…is dedicated to longtime lounge organist Dick Dickerson, bastion of Belltown’s classic Dog House diner and one of the all-time true gentlemen.

There’s an authorized preteen Devo cover band, “Devo 2.0.” Under the aegis of Walt Disney Records, a 10-year-old girl sings note-for-note recreations of “Whip It,” “Uncontrollable Urge,” “Freedom of Choice,” etc. I don’t know if the kid musicians in the video footage are really playing their own instruments; some online sources say the original band actually recorded the instro tracks. Even if the kids are just miming the non-vocal performances, they’re doing a remarkable job of capturing the spudboys’ complex rhythms, chord changes, and time signatures. The CD’s scheduled to be out in mid-March.

…a music festival and nobody showed up, would it make a sound? The Red Bull Music Academy brought dozens of European techno DJs to Seattle from Nov. 7 through Dec. 8. Each year, the “energy drink” people bring assorted mastes and tyros of electronica to a different city.

The academy’s workshops and conferences were hidden behind the obscured storefront of the former Beatty Book Store on Third and Virginia, compared to ROCKRGRL’s highly promoted events in the Madison Hotel.

Aside from fancy brochures and flyers in the participating bars and nightclubs, the Red Bull event was hardly even publicized locally. Too bad; the local electronica scene’s been on stagnant times, and could’ve used some high-profile events to bring back the local crowds—even if the most famous participant at Red Bull was Eumir Deodato, who’d made a hit disco version of the 2001 theme three decades back.

Even Red Bull’s PR packet contained nothing introducing the event to Seattle; only long essays introducing Seattle to the event’s Euro performers and reporters. Some excerpts:

“Seattle, while not as large as the American metropolises of New York or Los Angeles, is host to a bustling, shucking and jiving culture…. Seattle has long had a vibrant Asian and Asian-American population, and well-established communities of Scandinavians, African-Americans, Jews, Latinos and thoroughly Native Americans. The city represents the ‘melting-pot’ that logically fosters around the coastal areas of the United States.”…The grunge proliferation and later Internet boom created a dreamlike atmosphere in the city. RealNetworks, Amazon, and Adobe populated the Employment opportunities section of newspapers with wanted ads. Seattle-baed Starbucks replicated itself exponentially on a tidal wave of too-sweet corporate coffee to jolt the technologically-inclined into their 12-hour workdays…. While the Internet boom and bust were a manic time of too much wealth and then too much poverty, they did help revolutionize the culture of Seattle. The limitations of the finite world were kept at bay, if only briefly, and allowed dreamers to indulge. The staid American work tradition of business attire was cast aside, and three-piece suits were retired in favor of ratty T-sshirts and Levi’s. Tradition was scorned for new invention. It is perhaps for this reason that Seattleites insist on proudly wearing jeans and Teva sandals with white tube socks to restaurants with $200 price fixe menus.”

Streaming audio of the Seattle performances can be heard at redbullmusicacademy.com.

…can’t get enough bodies into the Experience Music Project at full admission prices. He won’t lower those prices, because that would interrupt his long-range plan to make EMP self-supporting. Instead, he’ll broaden the institution’s focus (again), this time with works by big-name painters.

…currently touring in Ireland submits its list of “bands and their corresponding authors.” Nirvana paired up with Wm. Burroughs is appropriate, since Cobain and Burroughs collaborated on a spoken-word CD single. Public Enemy/Langston Hughes and The Doors/Jack Kerouac also seem right, even though Kerouac was more of a jazz fan. Some of the other pairings, though, seem a bit odd, such as AC/DC with Julia Child and Tori Amos with Alice Walker.

…has fingered the real culprit in the music industry’s steady downturn—DVDs. The arrival of film as a home-library product, Norman Lebrecht claims, means “it has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms…. The DVD won’t replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture.”

THE NOVEMBER BELLTOWN MESSENGER is out at last, and may be our best yet. Read it online or seek it at more than 100 dropoff spots.

RAIN HAS ARRIVED SERIOUSLY in greater Puget Sound this morning, meaning the fourth category of autumnal transition has also arrived. (The prior three stages of fall: Labor Day weekend, the equinox, and the “fall back” to Standard Time.)

The grey has settled in. The washed-out watercolor look will be with us, with occasional sunbreaks, for the next three and a half months or so. This is what breaks the spirits of Californians and proves the mettle of real Nor’Westers. Can you take it?

“Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman’s breast implants.”

…the “next Seattle?”

…spent some time in New Orleans in ’04, and got shot in the leg during the process. Now he pleads, as “a dedicated follower of the city,” that it not be left to die.

…the remarks below about ’80s pop nostalgia tours, I forgot about one Britpop act that probably isn’t bringing nice memories to mind these days.

…another Bumbershoot. Seattle’s own all-you-can-eat arts buffet turned 35 this year, and seemed at times to show its age.

This year’s fest had an unspoken theme of punk nostalgia, with such headline acts as Elvis Costello, the New York Dolls, and Iggy Pop with (some of) his original Stooges–not to mention two different displays of pomo concert-poster art (the all-comers Flatstock and the invite-only “Art of Modern Rock”). Fourteen years after KNDD’s first “Resurrection Jukebox” show, it’s still weird for me to see the musical idols of my own young-adulthood marketed as golden oldies.

Not a nostalgia act, not really a “comeback” either ’cause they never really went away, the Posies wowed ’em with a new organ-enhanced sound and Ken Stringfellow’s still-youthful physique.

…music videos, mommy?

Forbes reports Apple Computer’s contacting the major record companies about selling music videos through iTunes, to be played on computers and/or a future video iPod. Sony’s PlayStation Portable game machine can already be easily used to play motion-picture content.

Don’t think of this as the Forbes writer does, as a way for the deservedly-beseiged music giants to make another buck. Think of it as a way for indie videomakers to make a buck, at last.

During the dot-dom madness days, a lot of fly-by-nite outfits popped up (including several in Seattle) making and/or distributing short online video productions in many genres–sketch and standup comedy, animation, documentary, alternative news, erotica, and even video art. Most of the nonporn efforts failed financially. (The ad-supported, big-money-backed iFilm is the chief surviving exception.)

But, following on Apple’s embracing of audio podcasters, iTunes could provide a simple, open-to-all-comers pay-per-view system. (And because it’s Apple, it wouldn’t be annoyingly Windows-only, like so many subscription net-Video systems out there.)

Of course, having a workable business model doesn’t mean indie short-video makers will have an easy path to profitability. Cheaper means of production since the ’90s have led to an explosion of indie feature-film making, resulting in a glut of unviewable semipro movies.

But freed from the need to keep a compelling story going for more than an hour, these nascent artistes with their digi-camcorders could learn their craft while getting audience feedback. Film/video is a complex collection of skills, best learned via the high-concept, immediate-impact form of the short.

In the ’90s, several instructors and advisors told young filmmakers to skip shorts and start directly in feature projects. Chief among their reasons: There was no market for live-action shorts, but features could be hawked at Sundance and other festivals, or at least sold on video from your own website. For a middle-class kid looking at a lifetime of credit-card servitude just to break into his/her chosen craft, it was an easy idea to accept.

We’ve all seen, or scrupulously avoided, the results: Innumerable, interminable exercises in “hip” violence and relationship whining, with bad acting and terrible audio.

With shorts, these kids can say what they really need to say and then stop. Like I’m doing now.