Earlier this week Mark Linkous, better known by his performance moniker Sparklehorse, stood in an alleyway and shot himself in the chest. A craftsman of indie-Americana, the 47-year old Virginian musician left behind his wife Teresa and four complete studio albums.

His music was hauntingly delicate, robust overtures of lo-fi crackle and pop. Singing with pulpy earnestness, Sparklehorse felt as melancholy as the last day of summer camp, an idyllic crunch between wafers of drugs, booze and happenstance. Linkous was the band's only permanent member, a multi-instrumentalist that marinated each measure with enigmatic personality, but without the usual weighty despondence.

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As a child of a '90s, I can remember the last hold outs, standing in bumptious defiance to the gender-and-race neutrality gestapo. Power Rangers depended on racial stereotyping so that even the slow kids could identify characters. Zack the black ranger liked to take his boom box to the park and practice break dancing. Kimberly the pink ranger was always too busy cheer leading to hang out with yellow ranger Trini Kwan, a master of praying mantis kung fu. Then there was Tommy, the long-haired teen with bushels of dope in his locker, driven to evil as the green ranger before repenting and dying his whole getup white.

Public television, on the other hand, spent every last breath insisting that each and every kid was special, intoxicating young minds with a bloated entitlement complex, so that when they came of age and the global economy lay burning before them, they could point stoically and swear, "You bastard, you said it wouldn't be this way. You told me I was special."

Thankfully we've come a long way in how we regard race and entitlement in this country, and our television has mostly followed suit. So much so that a rerun of Star Trek, television's harbinger of our uniformed, proto-chromatic future, seemed wildly offensive.

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One of my favorite bands, Icelandic ambient quartet Sigur Ros, appear to have split. The band has described it as "taking it easy" and cited falsetto Jonsi Birgission's solo project as the reason for the hiatus. But after a scrapped record and growing creative disparity amongst the band's members, it sounds more like a breakup. 

Senior year of high school I saw them play Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Their sweepingly-involving instrumentation mixed with some pretty stellar (if shoddily photographed) visual imagery. I remember, there was a woman sitting a few seats down, tan and in her late 40s, telling us about their show in Denver. She had followed them west into California and up the Pacific coast. It was that sort of transformative experience.

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