drink up baby, look at the stars...
Jun. 11th, 2003 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistlast night i saw elliott smith in philadelphia. the concert was amazing, once it got started,a nd once the opening act got done. i don't know who he was, but i had the same feeling listening to him before hearing elliott smith, like when i do when i see someone who is an unattractive version of someone i find attractive...like certain signature features reflected in a skewed mirror, or in this case, all the sharp lines, all the distinctive edges blanded down into a monotone of a sustained musical anticlimax. but then ES came out; high as the proverbial kite, i think; he played fine, even powerfully, but was barely lucid between songs. something about this man, this brilliant wreck in progress on stage, with unafraid lyrics, bending words out of familiar formations into mirroring feelings, with a slightly geeky, dorky enchantment, created the fragile magic that is unique to ES and his silver-gray voice. he played a lot of stuff from his self-titled album: christian brothers, st. ides heaven, the white lady loves you more, and something else...i can't remember...a couple off of XO...i thought he was not going to play Between The Bars, but then he did during the first encore, and i almost cried, that song can cut right through me...it's a metonymy for many other books, things, people, moments, stairwells, symmetries, asymmetries...i guess it is for a lot of people, but unique for everyone among them, which, i guess, is the working definition of capturing...something--some slice of zeitgeist, always manifested in different particulars, nevertheless recognizable through the code of his words and harmonies.
he played many unreleased songs that i had previously heard only on nicole's bootleg CD. "fond farewell," "a passing feeling" (which was weird, because i did not understand the words right, and had a strange momentary interpretation of the song), "memory lane" that works on the principle of descreptancy between an energetic, almost peppy beat and bleak, nihilistic lyrics, i like contrast like that (like in the Cracker song "Let's Go For A Ride"), "somebody's baby" which is so pretty and sad and seemed like a companion piece to "the white lady loves you more"...it was actually a bit overwhelming how many songs were about heroin; i mean, it wasn't news to me, but i feel like i have never listened to so many of his songs more or less explicitly (albeit metaphorically) about that in a row...usually i listen to the albums, in order, and the content sort of alternates...or maybe it was the fact that he was so obviously high, singing "i won't come down for anyone..."
the only song i really wanted to hear that he did not play was Waltz # 2 off XO, but i am drawing consolation in the fact that charlie saw him at Field Day on Saturday, and said that Waltz did not sound that great live...I've listened to that song in such a different way ever since Nicole told me that it was written about his mother, rather than a lost love...
then Nicole and I had our Odyssey of misadventures trying to get back to NYC, starting from missing the last train to Trenton, and ending with us just freaking the fuck out over this subway ad series for the Bronx Zoo on the L, featuring a tiger at the center of some inexplicable and upsetting visual semiotics, including the tiger being poised to bite some corporate yuppie's ass, a little girl in pink, upsettingly enough looking PREGNANT desipite also looking FIVE running away from the tiger, screaming in terror, and a little kid smearing an phallic-looking ice cream cone over the flimsy plexiglass that, i guess, contains the tiger, resulting in milky drips, the entire thing looking, as nicole correctly pointed out, like a "money shot." never mind, i can't do proper justice to the complete insanity of these images here, but i'll try to find them online and post a link.
he played many unreleased songs that i had previously heard only on nicole's bootleg CD. "fond farewell," "a passing feeling" (which was weird, because i did not understand the words right, and had a strange momentary interpretation of the song), "memory lane" that works on the principle of descreptancy between an energetic, almost peppy beat and bleak, nihilistic lyrics, i like contrast like that (like in the Cracker song "Let's Go For A Ride"), "somebody's baby" which is so pretty and sad and seemed like a companion piece to "the white lady loves you more"...it was actually a bit overwhelming how many songs were about heroin; i mean, it wasn't news to me, but i feel like i have never listened to so many of his songs more or less explicitly (albeit metaphorically) about that in a row...usually i listen to the albums, in order, and the content sort of alternates...or maybe it was the fact that he was so obviously high, singing "i won't come down for anyone..."
the only song i really wanted to hear that he did not play was Waltz # 2 off XO, but i am drawing consolation in the fact that charlie saw him at Field Day on Saturday, and said that Waltz did not sound that great live...I've listened to that song in such a different way ever since Nicole told me that it was written about his mother, rather than a lost love...
then Nicole and I had our Odyssey of misadventures trying to get back to NYC, starting from missing the last train to Trenton, and ending with us just freaking the fuck out over this subway ad series for the Bronx Zoo on the L, featuring a tiger at the center of some inexplicable and upsetting visual semiotics, including the tiger being poised to bite some corporate yuppie's ass, a little girl in pink, upsettingly enough looking PREGNANT desipite also looking FIVE running away from the tiger, screaming in terror, and a little kid smearing an phallic-looking ice cream cone over the flimsy plexiglass that, i guess, contains the tiger, resulting in milky drips, the entire thing looking, as nicole correctly pointed out, like a "money shot." never mind, i can't do proper justice to the complete insanity of these images here, but i'll try to find them online and post a link.
