Mr. Smith Goes to Heaven
Wherein our narrator is informed of a death with
just one degree of separation.
On Tuesday morning Dan "published" his copy of
Elliott Smith's album Figure
8. "I think you'll like it, Duke. Very
White
Album-y" I did download it - using the AFTRS
bandwidth for what it was worth - and put it into iTunes, which dutifully
cataloged it for me. Yay me. I didn't listen to it right away, figuring I'd
wait for an apropos moment. Like now, as I ride the train back in from Epping
to Central, on Thursday evening. Just two days later. But now, everything has
changed.
On Tuesday night (LA time),
Elliott Smith took his own life. Details are sketchy, but it seems that Smith's
girlfriend discovered his body in his Silverlake apartment, with a fatal and
likely self-inflicted stab wound to his chest. I found out this morning
(Thursday, Sydney time, afternoon Wednesday LA time) because my friend Brian
sent me a piece of mail expressing his sadness about Elliot Smith. Huh? Then I
saw another email, a post from the NY Times, sent by Dan. Elliott Smith's
obituary, hot off the AP wire.
He was
34, and cute in that too-thin-ex-junkie-rock-star sort of way. And it makes me
think back to the day that Kurt Cobain took a shotgun to his head, a decade ago.
Supposedly he blew his head off because we was tired of (among other things)
being treated as a pretty blond boy (which he was) and decided that dying young
did not include leaving a pretty corpse behind. Mr.Smith, evidentially somewhat
more concerned about such details, will leave a much easier job for the
mortician.
What's weirder, is that my
friend Liam - who I met through Brian - knows Smith's girlfriend, and, as of
this morning, had been trying to contact her. I presume he also knew Smith,
though I don't have any confirmation of this. But I'll drop Liam a note, and
get the whole story, or at least as much as he has of the
story.
And there it is, brushed by
greatness. Truth is, if he hadn't offed himself, and I had liked his album -
listening now, I can say that I do like it, it's a really nice pop sound, in the
old-fashioned before-boy-bands-and-Brittany sort of way - I probably could have
mentioned this to Liam, and maybe even met the now posthumous Mr.
Smith.
Am I being disrespectful of the
dead? I hope not. I can't imagine what drove him to suicide. Perhaps life
after junk, after drunk, wasn't all that interesting. Or perhaps the wellspring
of problems loomed too large for him. I don't know, and will never know. I
know that he was incredibly well respected (even if the album I am listening to
now was greeted with only lackluster reviews, I do like it), had garnered an
Academy Award nomination for his song from
Good Will
Hunting, and the four albums he wrote and
performed upon will be the sum total of his contribution to humanity. No
children, no clasped hands in the face of fear, no reaching out in the middle of
the night for the reassurance of love, nothing but silence, now. Good
night.
"Everything means nothing to me.
Everything means nothing to me. Everything means nothing to me." Elliott Smith
(1969 -
2003)
***
Today's
big interactive presentation went well. We managed to keep it within 5 minutes
of the running time, got lots of good questions from the attendees (at least 60
folks, not bad) and gave them lots of interesting things to look at. It's
interesting that the most notorious of the games we showed -
Grand Theft Auto: Vice
City - also elicited the most laughter. I
guess folks in cinema are capable of separating themselves from the content of
entertainment - and although I wouldn't give the game to a child, it certainly
seemed an appropriate adult
entertainment.
I'm hoping that we
managed to raise a bit of consciousness at the school, but that's far from
assured. People come to AFTRS wanting to make films (or TV shows) and it will
be hard to dissuade them from that goal, if that's their heart's desire. At the
same time, they will want to be employed - even the best Australian film
directors make perhaps 2 films a decade - and perhaps they'll lower themselves
(or more precisely, their sights) and see what's obviously in front of them: a
career in interactive. It's not as though they'll never make movies, but as
parents invariably say when their kids are applying to college, it's good to
have a fallback.
On a completely
different note, tonight I'm getting a copy of OS X 10.3. Panther! Whee! I
only hope it doesn't wreck my computer utterly when I do the install. To that
end, I'm going to leave a copy of all the data my laptop contains on the AFTRS
server this weekend. If things go poorly, I'll wipe the hard disk and do a
fresh install. I hate to think what that'll do to all my apps, but there it is.
Upgrading an OS is always a dicey procedure. Even so, I can hardly
wait...
Posted: Thu - October 23, 2003 at 05:44 PM