Elliott Smith’s Kind and Gentle World at the Clinton Street Theater
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In March of 1998, Elliott Smith made his first TV appearance. Engine-grease hair poking from below a blue-gray beanie and a leather cuff on his wrist, he looks like any ’90s Portland dude strumming his unremarkable Yamaha acoustic and playing the song that won him a Grammy. He’s on an eerily quiet Late Night with Conan O’Brien set, and every 30 seconds or so he softly flutters his eyes open and lets on the sparest intimation of a smile, as if to say, Hey guys. You can find a scratchy pirate of the clip on YouTube, but it’s better viewed in Heaven Adores You, the gentle and misty 2014 documentary about Smith that the Clinton Street Theater is screening Saturday (7pm, $10).
A few months before he was on Conan, Smith was sling-shot into the mainstream public eye when Gus Van Sant put his songs in Good Will Hunting. He seemed to arrive fully formed, his shy charisma and neatly wound, penetrating songs shimmering ever so ambivalently with a dingy ’90s beauty. He was truly a reluctant star, which made his records feel intimate as home movies, like his mom was showing you the family albums. But this documentary goes a layer deeper, pairing rough cuts and demos from as far back as his teenage years with interviews of the engineers and producers who worked on his albums in lieu of the expectant who’s-who of famous talking heads he inspired. “Smith fans wishing for the pristine gut-punches of his perfect studio recordings already own those songs,” NPR’s Stephen Thompson wrote in 2016, specifically of the documentary’s proprietary soundtrack; “here, they instead get an enlightening match-lit stroll along the margins.”
Smith made his second TV appearance the very next day. Wearing yesterday’s clothes, he shared a tender story about the Ferdinand tattoo on his arm with Carson Daly on MTV Live (a precursor to TRL). “It’s like a bull who doesn’t want to go to the bullfight, but, he does,” Smith explains of the famous children’s book, cutting a sharp and joyful smile as if by accident. “That’s awesome,” Daly offers as a non sequitur. Their conversation is awkward like a National Lampoon movie. Daly stiltedly runs through his talking points, but it’s as if the two are from different planets, Smith from an overwhelmingly kind and sensitive world and Daly from one where you’re born with gel in your hair. An impressively long 15 seconds later, Daly asks Smith how he got “hooked up with this, uh, Good Will Hunting soundtrack, in general; how’d this happen?”
“Um, I knew Gus,” Smith says. “He plays music, too.” Soon he starts the song everyone knows, I’ll fake it through the day.…
More Things to Do This Week
Music Arooj Aftab
8pm Wed, Jan 22 | Aladdin Theater, $30
“Last Night Reprise,” a track on Aftab’s latest album, Night Reign, is a three-dimensional space filled with flutes, harps, a doting sticky organ, and her slinky voice. The bilingual album, sung in Urdu and English, is the Pakistani American singer and composer’s fifth. Drawing from Urdu poetry and jazz standards (the album features a version of “Autumn Leaves”), Aftab creates a new musical aesthetic that blends familiar tones from around the globe, creating, as Geeta Dayal writes in 4Columns, “a style that breaks new ground from what came before.”
Books Anis Mojgani
7pm Thu, Jan 16 | Tomorrow Theater, $15
Former Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani is the guest for this live taping of Oregon Humanities’ podcast, The Detour. Mojgani and host Adam Davis plan to unpack Mojgani’s laureateship, which ran through 2024, and discuss the places art and politics overlap—and also where they don’t, as the event’s cheeky title,
“Poetry and Politics, or Not,” suggests.
theater Jaja’s African Hair Braiding
Jan 19–Feb 16 | Portland Center Stage, $24–93
Jocelyn Bioh’s recent Broadway hit, which is now touring the country, is a bright splash in the world of workplace comedies. In a Harlem braiding shop, its cast of West African stylists and their regulars conjure, per the reviews, something extraordinarily close to its real-life inspiration, as well as the energy of an immigrant community’s home away from home.
What We’re Reading About Elsewhere
- Mike Young’s “ineffable sense of how things fit together and belong,” at Elbow Room. (The Believer)
- Your favorite painter’s favorite painter, Ralph Pugay! (OPB)
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