the promises you'll only make...

Happy 40th, Mr. Smith.

And yes, ECEU is officially back, though at a different place and in a slightly different way. It won't be what it was - I just don't have enough time, still - but it will be something, and I will put love into it. You can find the brand new Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands here. So, that's it for this old place (though it will remain up), and for blogger (tumblr is so much easier and what i want for a music blog platform that it's not even funny). See you over there!

"I Figured You Out" - Elliott Smith (live, 1/31/03)
"Fond Farewell" - Elliott Smith (live, 1/31/03)

Update your browsers/readers/habits accordingly: http://eceu.tumblr.com


And for those of you who asked, we had a healthy and happy baby boy last month. We named him Elliott.

a tentative foot back into the water...

Well, I've been away from ECEU for a little over three months now, and I'm seriously toying with the notion of jumping back in. I think I was able to get enough distance from the site over these past few months to realize that, hassles aside, it was something I did genuinely enjoy doing most of the time, and, while I have no doubts the site can't run forever, I do think I pulled the plug rather hastily on something that had been a labor of love for nearly four years, for misguided reasons and frustrations. I don't regret the time away, it was entirely worth it for many, many reasons, but I think I'm almost ready to be able to come back to it again, with fresh eyes and ears.

Unfortunately, I deleted all the posts when I shut things down back in April, so the site as it was previously won't be back if I come back - but at the same time, perhaps that will give me the chance to start anew?

Anyway, while I grapple with this for a week or so - fully aware that I lost the vast majority of my readers many moons ago (google analytics don't lie!), as declaring your site over and done does often tend to cut down one's readership - I thought I'd let you know, a little over halfway through this year, the five records I've been listening to the most (so far) in 2009:


Hold Time - M. Ward ( video: "One Hundred Million Years", live at SXSW 2009 )
Veckatimest - Grizzly Bear ( mp3: "While You Wait for the Others" )
Upper Air - Bowerbirds ( mp3: "Northern Lights" )
Wilco (the album) - Wilco ( video: "You and I" w/ Feist, live on Letterman)
Vacilando Territory Blues - J. Tillman ( mp3: "James Blues" )


And, since you can't ever really take the Elliott Smith out of ECEU, I'll make a final decision on whether or not to re-open ECEU for business on August 6th (Thursday), which would have been Elliott's 40th (!!) birthday.

Shutting off the lights...

Thanks to all of you who made running this site for the past three and a half years worth all the effort, energy, and time I put into it. Hopefully, I've introduced you to some quality music in that time, and you, in turn, have shared good music with others. It only works if it's a circle, after all.

Don't worry about me, I'll keep listening and talking and thinking about my favorite music, just not to an audience of strangers, at least not for a long while. I might show up again down the road, though not at this address (blogger.com always left much to be desired), but for now it's time for me to move on and find different things to do with my time. It'll be strange not to have ECEU in my life any more, but I'm convinced that, in the end, it's for the best.

I'll be shutting the doors on this place for good in just a bit, but please know that your comments and emails and community were always deeply appreciated by me, and allowed me to keep doing this even when I felt like I didn't have the energy left for it any more. It was an honor to share my love of music, films, and words with you, and I hope it meant something to at least a few of you as well.

(If you leave me your email address on this post, or email me directly, I'll be sure to add you to my list of people to notify if/when I start up another site in the future.)


Division Day - Elliott Smith

See You Later - Elliott Smith


So it goes.

perspective.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

- Carl Sagan


"The Only Moment We Were Alone" - Explosions in the Sky