Torment Saint: The Life Of Elliott Smith - Plot & Excerpts
Princess Diana died fleeing paparazzi in a Paris tunnel, the world sutured to what Martin Amis and Saul Bellow called the subsequent “event glamour,” the drawn-out collective mourning that led, months later, to a new version of an old Elton John song reaching number one on the charts. As if timed to heighten the ritualized despair, Mother Teresa also died, the two figures, both mothers, cemented together in memory, Diana receiving courtesy sainthood. The music world lost The Notorious B.I.G. and INXS’s Michael Hutchence, one by gunshot in the rap gang wars, the other by suicide with a belt tied to a doorknob, or, as was later suggested, by erotic auto-asphyxiation (although the coroner disputed this characterization). Sportscaster Marv Albert was charged with biting an unnamed sex partner, Eddie Murphy got stopped by police (though not charged) for picking up a transsexual prostitute. The pop charts were ruled by Mariah Carey and “MMMBop,” cotton candy by brothers Hanson. In indie land, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Green Day, and Radiohead released records; Bob Dylan, the artist who, according to Denny Swofford, Elliott ranked number one in his pantheon, put out Time Out of Mind, which Greil Marcus called a “Western, really, made of ghost towns and bad weather, a complete and uncompromised work of American art.”1 Ghost towns and bad weather describe Elliott’s songs too, many of them haunted, many overcast and misty like the Portland in which they came to be made.
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