Footnotes to history dep’t: a U.S. district court judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the band Nirvana by the baby who swims naked on the cover of their epoch-making LP Nevermind (1991). Spencer Elden, now 34, was four months old when his parents, friends of a photographer named Kirk Weddle, loaned him out for a Geffen Records cover shoot. (The dollar bill on a fishhook that little Elden is apparently transfixed by on the final album cover was superimposed later.) Nobody anticipated that the record would sell 40 million copies, or that the image itself would enter the canon of album-cover art, but that’s America for ya. Article content

For much of his adulthood Elden enjoyed and encouraged the micro-celebrity that came with being the Nevermind baby, but in 2020 or thereabouts

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