The wall featured in the background of Elliott Smith's Figure 8 album cover is actually part of a building that houses an electronics store called Solutions, located in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Since Smith's 2003 suicide, the wall has transformed into a memorial to the songwriter, covered with scrawls bearing messages and poems. This past summer, however, an exemplary specimen of the human race decided his "artwork" was more worthy of the wall, obscuring the top half of the memorial with blue spray paint. Not long after, another aspiring artist decided that large bubble letters were the extra touch the wall needed, essentially ruining the memorial. What's next, a touch-up on the John Lennon wall in Prague?
A group of fans restored the wall this week, but all of the previous messages written to Smith have been lost. The owner of Solutions, Stephon Lew, is planning to create a monument in memoriam to Smith, following the original artistic theme of the wall:
These are my dreams: I plan to place an electronic object of importance….a 5 foot 7 inch tall monument (of Elliott’s size--with two loudspeakers at the base of the monument to represent his two big shoes) formed from crushed electronics parts---to play and to identify Elliott’s musical influences (Elliott’s hobby, I hear, was to experiment with electronics to make music tone)---to have the monument--emanate new energy and the many solutions that music can provide.