A week or two ago, BBC 24 Hour non-News had a Saturday entertainment segment on drag racing. Oh god, the thrill that went through me. I know it’s the wrong time for this. I know all this is over. I do know that. But before I die I want to sit in one of those 2-seat tourist models & smell exotic substances burning & be squirted down the quarter mile, 0-100 in two seconds from a standing start. 0-100 miles an hour in two seconds is, by competitive standards, slow. I’d like to go that slow just once before I do the right thing. That’s the size of it. Mr Toad would make any number of insincere & balding speeches to return to 13 years old & achieve levels of slowness like that. He would wring his hands all right. Promise to behave better.
& you can’t better this on a bad Friday morning. I like especially–
I confess that I like the early songs as well. But it’s too late, they’re gone, disowned like bad relations. “I’m embarrassed by them,” he admits. “It was a time when I was trying to find my place within the business. I was figuring out who I was and where that person intersected with the world of commerce. It was like I was sitting there with a ventriloquist’s dummy on my knee. And the dummy is made out of wood. And after a while you start to hate each other.”
The more Tom Waits interviews I read, the more I become convinced that by engaging in sheer fabrication, he comes closer to telling us what actually drives him than anyone who’s, y’know, straight-forward. Since telling our life stories involves so much self-editing and bullshit, we barely manage to croak out one or two half-honest phrases between the fluff and filler and filth. Waits always manages these phrases but surrounds them with hilarious untruths about sailors and gongs and such. It’s kind of like someone writing an autobiography with only the parts they really care about in, surrounded and protected by whatever crazy-ass fancy happens to cross their mind.
Hi Brendan. It seems like one of the proper places–& sources–for fantasy, that act of dissemblement. Story stripped to anecdotes vast & patchworked, free-speech monologues which start here & are soon somewhere else. Suspension of disbelief forced on you–a “world” created–in a single line then broken down instantly by the next one. Much nicer & funnier & more illuminating than the rigid causalities of the “fantasy” novel. Not to say, in a sense maybe the crazy-ass stuff tells you more about him than he might want you to know… Never tell with such a trickster.