Today's Words of Wisdom - December 7, 2015

Today is the birthday of the following people:

Noam Chomsky (1928 - ):

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”

and

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”

and

“It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”

Willa Cather (1873 – 1947):

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”

and

“Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”

and

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”

Tom Waits (1949 - ):

“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:

In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”

Damien Rice (1973 - ):

“Stones taught me to fly.

Love taught me to lie.

Life taught me to die.

Courage teach me to be shy.

So it's not hard to fall,

When you float like a cannonball.”

Album Anniversary - October 27, 2015

Today is the 40th anniversary of Nighthawks at the Diner, the first live album from Tom Waits.

Album Anniversary - September 30, 2015

Today is the 30th anniversary of Rain Dogs, the eighth studio album from Tom Waits.

Video: "Clap Hands"

December 7, 2014

Good Morning! Here are your daily birthday quotations...

Willa Cather (1873 – 1947):

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”

and

“Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”

and

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”

Noam Chomsky (1928 - ):

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”

and

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”

and

“It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”

Tom Waits (1949 - ):

“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:

In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”

Damien Rice (1973 - ):

“Stones taught me to fly.

Love taught me to lie.

Life taught me to die.

Courage teach me to be shy.

So it's not hard to fall,

When you float like a cannonball.”

Album Anniversary - October 5

Today is the 10th anniversary of "Real Gone," the 16th album from Tom Waits.

Video: "Hoist that Rag"

Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 29

Tom Waits - "Jockey Full of Bourbon"



(Album Release: September 30, 1985)
Yes, it's another one that was released on my fourteenth birthday. And what gift could have as equally thrilled me as freaked me the heck out? Why, Rain Dogs, of course! Alas, however, I was introduced to the tin pan alley meets New Orleans clapboard shack meets drunken Bowery saloon magic that is Tom Waits quite a bit after that time. But, my actual introduction to Waits' gravel-voiced poetry of debauchery and woe, as if Charles Bukowski somehow channeled Louis Armstrong, was through Rain Dogs. Normally, it's difficult and disappointing, in a way, to start with an artist's best album. Despite the sprawling gutter beauty of Rain Dogs, this was somehow not the case with mining Waits' catalog and acquiring later releases. Real Gone and Mule Variations are arguably just as good as anything else he's ever recorded. In other words, I love everything Tom Waits does. I'm a devotee. Listening to Tom Waits is like walking through a carnival after closing, not quite sure whether or not there is a roustabout with a knife hiding behind the flap of a tent, or a clown sitting alone in the lowest ferris wheel carriage, inviting you to partake in a nightcap from a flask secreted in his polka-dotted jumpsuit. Very few other lyricists could come up with something as sublimely depraved as "Bloody fingers on a purple knife / Flamingo drinking from a cocktail glass / I'm on the lawn with someone else's wife / Admire the view from up on top of the mast." Marc Ribot's guitar and Tom Waits' voice came together in this song serendipitously. It was as if they had been longing for each other throughout history. And it took Waits' oddball production directions, such as "Play it like a midget's bar mitzvah" to make it all work. The video above, with two brief interruptions including an appearance by Waits himself, is how the song appears at the outset of Jim Jarmusch's film, Down by Law. The imagery of New Orleans seems to enhance the song's power and vice versa.