“I think it’s a testament to the writing over the last five years that they’ve built animosity in our audiences towards a character that has done some pretty despicable things and, at the same time, who has lived a life in a perfectly moral way.”

I haven’t done a gratuitous Pete Campbell post in awhile. I was too busy being completely absorbed by Mad Men’s Season 5. Here Vincent Kartheiser defends his shattered, sneaky alter ego to Vulture.

He was right, I did.

As an always-writer and a once-and-future musician, that’s still what my Seattle is today: Coffee. Music. Art.

Maybe that’s why it was even more shocking that yesterday when a man shot four people point blank, it was at a coffee shop. A coffee shop. They’re supposed to be havens.

It’s one thing to have people randomly shot at a place like the defunct, ironically named Mr. Lucky across from Seattle Center, which had a criminal reputation and a widely ignored NO GUNS ALLOWED sign at the door. But not a coffee shop in Seattle. We have one of the lowest violent-crime rates in the country. I mean, we’re not Miami, for God’s sake.

A second jolt ripped through me, brighter, more personal, when I heard that the shooting happened at Café Racer. My lovely, loving friends Jo David and Marlow Harris have their Bad Art Museum there. As I was checking Facebook to make sure they were okay (they were, they are, physically at least), a woman was killed by the same gunman at Town Hall, another gathering place for the arts.

As the news from the Seattle P.D. ricocheted through twitter and the news blogs, questions were answered. Drew Keriakedes and Joe Albanese of the band God’s Favorite Beefcake were victims. The suspected shooter was Ian Lee Stawicki; he shot himself when he was apprehended and later he died. He had been kicked out of Café Racer several times recently.

Then the questions got bigger. Why was Mayor McGinn not saying anything to his city? (He eventually did.) Why don’t we have more support for the mentally ill? Why don’t we have stricter gun control laws?

The biggest question, though, not only for the artists and musicians who consider Café Racer their coffee shop haven, but for all of us as society seems to get more violent every day, is a simple one with no easy answer. Why?

Kurt, we hardly knew ya

Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld
So I can sigh eternally

Ten years after his death, the singer-songwriter who inadvertently created “grunge,” caused flannel to appear on NYC runways and became One Of The Most Important Rock Stars Of All Time is still attracting the kind of media attention that he hated.

Kurt Cobain had always been the quintessential anti-rock star. Unhappy with his fame once it extended beyond Seattle (“I don’t like my fans anymore”), he was accused by his record company of purposely trying to make Nirvana’s second (and last) studio album, In Utero, non-commercial. If that’s true, he failed: track after track became hits and are radio staples even today.

His music and persona were the perfect ironic counterpoint to the kind of attention the band began to draw after their first major-label release Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the charts and had frat boys trying to figure out what “a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido” meant.

Homeless kid, high-school dropout, roadie, junky. He seemed like an accidental superstar, yet his bandmates claim that Cobain was ambitious. He wrote a song per night, made them practice for hours every day and was a taskmaster in the studio. He was quoted as saying that when the other two-thirds of Nirvana didn’t like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” the first time they heard it, he made them play it hundreds of times in a row.

Here we are now
Entertain us

Like most people, I hadn’t heard of Nirvana before Nevermind. My boyfriend at the time lent it to me and dismissively said that the lead singer was a heroin addict. The music just sounded like noise to me, so I listened to it again. And again. I couldn’t have guessed that I was hearing the sound of the new mainstream. My relationship with Nirvana far outlasted the one with the boyfriend in both length and significance.

Despite a career that easily places him in the company of Dylan, Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, Cobain has a puny four-CD catalogue and a career that spanned just two-and-a-half years in the public eye. He has an output-to-legacy ratio that rivals James Dean’s, although he is more likely to be compared to John Lennon.

I’m so ugly
That’s okay ’cause so are you
We’ve broken mirrors.

Like Lennon, Cobain had the gift for being angry without being off-putting and for expressing intimate emotions that spoke to the masses. He also married Courtney Love, a woman who surpasses Yoko as most unpopular wife in rock & roll history. Loud, obnoxious, consistently out-of-control, Love continues to make Cobain look like even more of a misunderstood waif than his vulnerable, wrenching vocals do.

Well I swear that I
Don’t have a gun

I remember driving home from my job at UCLA when KROQ delivered the news that the body of a 27-year-old male Caucasian was found in a Seattle home, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The body was thought to be Cobain’s. I felt heartsick, although not at all surprised. It’s typical of the exploitation Cobain routinely attracted that the electrician who discovered his body immediately phoned a radio station rather than the police.

It seems that his world is as tumultuous in death as it was in life. A lot has happened with him just in the two-and-a-half years I’ve lived in Seattle. Courtney gave his private diaries to her lover and he wrote a bestseller, there was a bitter legal battle over Nirvana’s songwriting royalties (complete with an open letter to fans from Kurt’s mom and the rest of Nirvana, David Grohl and Krist Novoselic, trying to have Courtney declared insane). Of course there are the continuing rumors that his death wasn’t a suicide.

Just because you’re paranoid
Don’t mean they’re not after you

A hurricane of bizarre conspiracy theories has been twisting around Courtney Love for the past decade. A Seattle detective said that with all the drugs Cobain had in his system, he wouldn’t have had the strength to lift a gun, much less be able to pull its trigger. Although he was the perfect victim since his tendency toward self-destruction was so public, it seems far-fetched to think that someone could get away with murdering the most famous rock star in the world. Maybe to some people, thinking that his death wasn’t a suicide somehow makes it more palatable.

The end result is that Cobain has left behind a bipolar legacy. On the one hand, his suicide felt like a betrayal to a lot of people — a Seattle music professor accurately pointed out that it would have been less devastating if he had just overdosed. On the other hand, he is arguably the most important musician of the last 20 years.

When they first appeared, Nirvana was given a lot of accolades for sounding fresh compared to the hair bands who were their contemporaries. It’s over 10 years later and they still sound fresh, but this time it’s compared to all the bands who managed to rip off their sound, but not their songwriter’s talent.

Rest in peace, Kurt. I hope your Leonard Cohen afterworld is what you wanted it to be.

I doubt they’ll get RPattz and KStew back, though.

I sent my first novel, a young adult paranormal romance (not about vampires), out into the wild a week ago. I had bragged that it only took me two months to write, but then it took me eight months to revise so I shut up.

Writing my first novel was incredibly difficult and one of the hardest things I’ve ever done creatively. I keep pestering more prolific writers (aka ALL of them) to assure me that the first book is by far the hardest and the response seems to be that they’re ALL hard, but I guess I went deaf in that ear.

Having said that, I love my book. It’s sweet and funny and rock and roll, and it rubs up against being almost literary, so yeah.

Speaking of young adults and paranormal stuff I love: Have you been watching American Horror Story?

Anyone who knows me knows I love horror movies. I see pretty much everything. So of course I checked out FX’s fall offering American Horror Story. I watched like two episodes but even the credits had me lying awake at night, so I declared a ban on it, ’cause I don’t need that shiz.

But my writer friends protested, saying I needed to push through because it’s the best new show out there right now. I asked if I could skip to a recent episode because I knew there was a huge event caused by the teenage character I like, Tate, and my writer friends vetoed that. They said I had to watch the whole thing. So I forced myself to get though it and now it’s my favorite show.

It’s incredibly good. It borrows from so many horror movies that it’s an original. Francis Conroy from Six Feet Under is the older version of the housekeeper that is also played by the gorgeous Alexandra Breckenridge–whether you see her as sexy or geriatric depends on the character’s mindset at the time. This is also Jessica Lange’s first-ever television role and it’s perfect for her. Most surprising is the troubled teenager Tate Langdon, her son. Somehow the writers have made him a sympathetic heartthrob, even though he’s a crazy murderer.

I told Mark, one of my author friends, AHS makes the characters so sympathetic and real that it’s tough for me to watch.

His answer: It’s the New Horror!

Granted, I really haven’t seen many movies this summer. I’ve mostly just been hanging out with friends, going out to lunch, and fighting with this young-adult paranormal romance I’ve been writing since January (the book is winning the fight, by the way).

As you know, I have to see EVERY horror movie known to man, so I did see an interesting one a few months ago: Cannibal Holocaust. Made in 1980, I think it was the first “found footage” film and an obvious influence on Blair Witch Project, which didn’t come along until 20 years later.

The premise is that a documentary crew goes into the jungle to film cannibals and, well, their footage is found a year later. The movie is notorious for not only its stark brutality, but also for the fact that several animals were actually killed on camera.

I am not necessarily recommending this film, because if it’s something you’d like, you’ve probably already seen it and I don’t want to be responsible for traumatizing any of you.

Also, the acting by the people who find the footage and watch it to see what happened to the crew is laughably bad. They give “who farted” looks while watching reel after reel of acts that are absolutely horrifying.