Future Mythologies

Now that Elliott Smith has killed himself, I feel bad about making jokes about his apparent sadness. That won't stop me from making these sorts of jokes in general, although jokes about sad artists are pretty lame indeed. I don't think grunge artists were any more depressed than artists from any other decade, and just because people like Michael Stipe and Eddie Vedder are famous and celebrities doesn't give them any less reason to be depressed on a bad day. Similarly, I get bothered when anyone discusses Joy Division as a depressing band. I'm not sure exactly how I feel on this subject, but a barely sensical journal entry is better than none at all, and Elliott Smith has been very important in my life.

When I was a freshman in college, I hadn't gone to any rock concerts (or shows) of artists I really liked. The first was Elliott Smith's show at the Middle East. Now I really preferred X/O over Either/Or, so I was a little disappointed that he was playing by himself. The show didn't really hit me until the last song of the last encore. He asked, "How about a cover?" and then went into "Nightime." Big Star were a very important band to me in high school, and Third helped me get through a very depressing and stressful year in my life (junior year at E. O. Smith). I knew of no one else that liked Big Star, save those I had forced them upon. When I heard him play "Nightime" I was convinced he was singing only to me, and when the song was over and the lights came up, I was amazed to remember that I don't actually know this guy.

I'm still convinced X/O is the loveliest Elliott Smith album, by the way.

It seems like the word on the street in the blogosphere is "prog" all the way. I'm not sure how much this fascination with King Crimson and Yes will go, but it seems a bit overhyped. Yes it's clear that Discovery was an amazing piece of work and will influence me a ton, but most of Simon's interest seems to spring from Kwodo's supposed interest. Now I really do believe that KE listens to Yes and America and Mannfred Mann's Earth Band all the time, but if he loves them so bloody much and he wants to be so unapologetic about it, why don't we see any of the big prog bands in his book More Brilliant Than the Sun. These guys obviously aren't the same as the future-engineers that Kwodo loves so much, and it sounds to me like it's just another trend in "good bad" taste. Or is it "bad good" taste?

OMG! OMD!. Someone who actually loves the use of OMD's "If You Leave" in Pretty in Pink. I though everyone but me hated that song. Sure, it goes nowhere, but it's in a movie, you don't need a song that progresses swiftly to a climax in 3 minutes when you're doing a movie soundtrack. It's about the moment-form, the kontakt! The article's wrong about Spader though. He's the only real badass bratpacker out there. I'd like to think his role in this movie is somehow connected to him as James Ballard in Crash. Wait, I never saw Crash.