Piazzolla Goes to a French Academy

Some inspiring words...

"When I met her, I showed her my kilos of symphonies and sonatas. She started to read them and suddenly came out with a horrible sentence: “It's very well written.” And stopped, with a big period, round like a soccer ball. After a long while, she said: “Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartók, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can't find Piazzolla in this.” And she began to investigate my private life: what I did, what I did and did not play, if I was single, married, or living with someone, she was like an FBI agent! And I was very ashamed to tell her that I was a tango musician. Finally I said, “I play in a night club.” I didn't want to say cabaret. And she answered, “Night club, mais oui, but that is a cabaret, isn't it?” “Yes,” I answered, and thought, “I'll hit this woman in the head with a radio....” It wasn't easy to lie to her. She kept asking: “You say that you are not pianist. What instrument do you play, then?” And I didn't want to tell her that I was a bandoneon player, because I thought, “Then she will throw me from the fourth floor.” Finally, I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: “You idiot, that's Piazzolla!” And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds."

I love it.

Kinda cool

To the blogs or whomever

I don't know who left that comment in the last blog, but thanks. Sometimes its good to be reminded that you're appreciated. I put much more stock in comments than I should, but when I get none I feel like I'm writing for no one at all. Its depressing.

I've been too busy, and I've been getting old. Which I like. I don't take heartbreak as badly as I used to, I don't get as amped up for meeting new women like I used to. What I think I'm coming to grips with is the circular nature of life. I once had that very Christian ideology that life was linear and that we're marching toward some ideal of progression. As you can imagine, missteps on that path might give one reason for seizing, overheating stress.

Through subconscious osmosis I've come to grips with certain things: debt is irrelevant and obligatory, and fear of it actually is going to screw you much more.

I once avoided credit cards because of all that folksy wisdom that tells you if you misstep once you're going to be living in section 8 housing with a dead end job and settling for one-night stands with bar flies. Well it won't, and realizing that trying to limit yourself to the point of starvation is gross. I think the problem is I hang around with too many overprotected suburban white women whose fathers mandated that they save exponential amounts of money for that Blizzard of '76-like economic hardship that would strike suddenly, out of the blue, and would surely land you in the shackles of three-jobdom for the rest of your young adult life, releasing you on bail and good behaviour just as you escaped your youthful beautiful years.

It won't. It doesn't. I've stood on the debt, and in fact am standing on the debt of exponential debt, and the only real discomfort is pressing the quiet option on my phone when an unknown number calls me. Bad credit? Well I guess that means you won't let me get into further debt.

Once there was a time where i felt that I was under, I was the victim in the folksy story of bad credit card management and I thought, "why go on with life if thats my fate? if this is all that I have to look forward to?" I spoke to some people and asked what they thought. I asked on-line where if I'd decided to do something rash they'd have no way of finding me, or stopping me. They told me stories I was baffled by...2 filings of bankruptcy, loss of a house. And still these people were on their feet, functioning like anyone else who appeared to be CPA of their own bank account. I'd felt better after that conversation. They didn't know me, and they didn't know what I was thinking, so in a candid and honest response they told me "doesn't matter, money isn't anything to be concerned about."


I've going to quote freddy mercury here, as what will appear to be a non-sequiter but will later have meaning and a germane orientation to this rant. "I've fallen in love, I've fallen in love for the first time and this time I know its for real."

its a contradicting idea to anyone who hasn't felt that emotion. What do you mean "this time" if its the "first time"? Well its the way it goes. And I remember when it happened to me. And the most depressing thing about it, was that she was one of these people who believed the stories. She was governed by fear, marching in a linear fashion and reasoned, through the facts of scaremongering, that things would not work. I was most devastated not because of the loss of love but because I realized that she was trapped beyond my help. That the person I had for once actually felt genuine affection for was not going to make it. Not today anyway. You can't teach people freedom, they have to find it. And until you do you have this untrue understanding of what freedom is. Its just like love. And you can't teach that to anyone either, regardless of how we try.


I read a book by mark stein called "america alone" and in it he accuses the "parent states" of europe of leading everyone around on a leash of government regulation. He claims that in this system, no one is forced to grow up and be an adult because the government acts as a constant parent. I've been trying to wrap my head around this argument because there was some glaring flaw in there that I could feel but I couldn't name. A few days ago I feel as if I've figured it out. The so called parent states of europe are socialist, and for those less politically inclined, that means you get the shit taxed out of you but everything is pretty much taken care of. Any time you hear of places with socialized medicine where in no one pays to go to the hospital, thats socialism. Its apparently paternalistic because the government makes sure everything is set for you "like mommy and daddy."

But its not.See the problem with steins argument is that he associates personal responsibility with adulthood. But everyone at the age of 5 on up is personally responsible for things. Thats well before adulthood. In fact because are more inclined to give adults a break on the assumption that they've already learned there lesson.

Moreover, the saying "its better to give than receive"...kids don't get that. Its an adult thing. And more to the point, so is seeing things in a longview, like the good of society. The ideology that "i'm ok so who cares what you do" is like a child with the joystick. I'm playing so every things fine. The problems here are multifaceted and in multitude. That is to say, societies that aren't upheld are generally not worth living in. You can be a billionaire. it still sucks to live in Sudan. Or Algeria. Or Mississippi.

I didn't mean for it to tie together under this maxim but fear is leading society into godless ruin. And I'm not suggesting that people who don't use credit cards and save their money are turning America into the third world, I am saying that the fear of a lack of liberation seems to be shackling us tighter to the wall in Socrates's cave, and those who are saving and worrying for "someday" might do well to worry more about what happens when "someday" never comes.
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in a completely unrelated note, I rejoined the myspace-a-verse but if people are reading here I don't think i'll follow through. Still if you'd like to see me in all my sexy clean shaven glory give me a shot, the tail address is justanotherraindog. Hoepfully I'll see you there, or here or whever. And to whoever left that message, thanks again. It means a lot to a deadbeat writer that people still care.

One From the Heart

This was written in The Guardian.


I'm getting on. No time for messing around with the likes of Prokofiev or Trollope any more. The artists I have most time for now are those who have pushed the boundaries most bravely and inventively; who have made their chosen genre into something unanticipated, and who have done it so completely that, in your delighted amazement, you just scratch your head and say: "Well, yeah, sure," as if it had been the most natural thing in the world. So I like what Thomas Carlyle did to historical writing, what Jackson Pollock did to painting, what Wallace Stevens did to poetry. It's not absurd to put Tom Waits, America's most eloquent poet-songwriter, in that company. Enough of Dylan already. Not that there's anything wrong with Dylan, but he's provoked volumes of heavyweight analytical bloviation second only to Freud, whereas people on both sides of the Atlantic have barely begun to give the singular Tom Waits his proper due.

Why should they? Because he has turned American music into the speech-song of ordinary men and women caught in that murky bad-smelling alleyway between the juvenile rhetoric of the "American dream" and the unforgiving adult reality of contemporary life. You want the most heartbreakingly truthful, poignantly dismaying utterance on the predicament of the regular American Joe, caught in a war he can't fathom, but from which he can't honourably escape? Try Waits's "The Day After Tomorrow" from Real Gone, where he drawls and growls his way through the unbearable lyrics with the raspy ruins of a voice that is itself like a building shattered by shellfire and coated with befouled sand. That voice, the organ of a much bigger man than the slight, gaunt, delicately clownish figure (one of his CDs features him in pierrot-face - this is someone who knows exactly what he's doing), is one of the great sound instruments of American art. Other very clever songwriters - Dylan, the Canadian Leonard Cohen - have also dramatised their laryngial damage in keeping with the sharpness of their lyrics. In the opposite direction, Neil Young's falsetto wail has become more painful as he has got more desperately urgent. But none of them has, over the years, thought about how they can make their voice into a sound portrait of a country as intelligently as Waits - and then gone and done it. He is imperial America's Kurt Weill (and, for a while, he studied Weill a bit too strenuously), imitating the jangly percussive fury of Weill's most abrasive songs.

But the comparison undersells Waits's originality, for there's something almost Shakespearean about the breadth of Tom Waits's take on modern American life, his astounding capacity to get into the heads and lungs of, inter alia: barflies, hookers, junkies, fairground barkers and burlesque crooners; veteran soldiers with shrapnel-freckled limbs, reduced to selling their tin stars on the sidewalk; Pentecostal thunderers roaring doom; washed-up baseball stars wasted by booze; psychos on a short fuse; woeful optimists losing it in the marinade of their martinis; and, in one improbable case, a dead man singing sweetly from six feet under, asking his lover to come sit on his grassy grave. Only Tom Waits could make an entire song out of a running string of infomercials ("Step Right Up") and somehow turn the list into an exhaustive, funny documentary on American credulousness and American cunning: "The large print giveth / And the small print taketh away".

And this is just a short list of his many incarnations. When you dive into Waits's world you're not, it's true, taking off for la-la lullaby land; you're landed in a greasy-spoon diner as the ashy dawn comes up over the trash-strewn car lot. In an intro to "Eggs and Sausage" in a live performance in 1975, he warns of veal cutlets so "dangerous they leave the counter to beat the shit out of the coffee that's too weak to defend itself".

But though he's vinegar in the wounds of American pie-in-the-sky sentimentality, there's also plenty of tender passion bowling through the songs. "Ol' 55", one of his earliest songs from his debut 1973 album Closing Time, is an ode to joy from emerging at 6am from a night of love ("My time went so quickly / I went lickety-splitly out to my ol' 55 / and I pulled away slowly, feeling so holy/ God knows I was feeling alive"). It is the single most beautiful love song since Gershwin and Cole Porter shut their piano lids.

Usually though, Waits's love lyrics sting with salty disenchantment, and are all the more touching for it. "Never Talk to Strangers" is a barstool duet with Bette Midler where the sad-sack's predictable routine ("I'm not a bad guy when you get to know me") gets pre-empted by her wise-ass knowledge of all his lines, even as they both fall for them all over again.

I came late to the troubadour of strip-mall ruin. A BBC director, adapting my book Landscape and Memory for television, set Waits's performance of Phil Phillips's "Sea of Love" over archive images of floods in Venice. In place of the honey-drip croon was a feral roar turning the tone of the song inside out. (He does an even more astounding makeover on "Somewhere" from West Side Story, so that you feel the utter hopelessness of adolescent grief in your bones.) I'd never heard anything like it. Who the hell was that, I asked the director. I've been hooked on Waits ever since. How could you not be hooked on a writer who comes up with a line like "her hair spilled like root beer", and have you know just what he means?

Waitsomania is not a comfy addiction. His journey from the 1970s, when he was just another guitar-picking songwriter from the midwest marrying up country and blues to his cornhusk voice, has seen him travel to ever deeper and darker places in the American psyche. While Dylan was lay lady laying, Waits was trying on tawdry, as he sang, ever so politely, "I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute". From there he descended all too predictably into the usual sump of booze and dope, eventually climbing out of it with the help of his partner-writer and co-producer Kathleen Brennan, who has been responsible for some of Waits's more brilliantly raw productions.

No one can touch him for evoking every kind of music, from carousel pump organ to lounge saxophone to Berlin cabaret, Italian bel canto, and lately African and Latin sounds. Sometimes he can push his furious refusal of songster-ingratiation to the edge of self-parody, so that the primal screams, grunts, howls backed by lid clanging and stock-banging percussion just collapse into a deep ditch of vocal rage. Listening to them is like chewing on barbed wire. And yet somewhere, in the middle of all the vocal carnage is the heavily soiled innocence of someone who still reckons the good life can, after all, be just around the corner. The kid soldier, writing home to Illinois, weary with precocious, bloodily earned knowledge, sings:

I'm not fighting

For freedom

I'm fighting for my life

And another day

In the world here

I just do what I'm told

You're just the gravel on the road

And the ones that are lucky

Come home

On the day after tomorrow ...

Da plane, Da plane...

I'm getting a tattoo. It will be something in reference to my undying passion of Tom Waits and his music et. all. If you love me, you'll leave a suggestion.

Love will in fact be determined by commentary or in lack thereof.

Dear Boston....

I wrote this the other night at work. I don't really know where any of it came from, but anyways...

It's Mardi Gras and all the colors
explode in front of a glass blown lunar lamp,
Drawn out to a surreal hyperbole with the ends pinched out and bent.
I lean against the rail of a green and white
Pistachio parlor that was built two years after my grandmother was born.
The stripped Roman columns crack with age and the chips of paint cup like
Closing Petals. -- The moon has a dim bulb tonight, Congress street doesn't seem to notice. The cars move like cut schooners through a choppy Boston youth. --
I clamor up the windy slanted staircases of old North End buildings
Where the contours of faces give way to wild silhouettes in
Poorly lit landings. We lean against the ledge and watch the State Street
towers with its erratic patters of lit offices and the blinking antenna that sell the world
secrets, and love stories, and soft drinks. We sip vodka from mismatched ceramic...the conversation grows stale and my thoughts drift to women that once loved me. They catch me smiling and wonder how third world economics is funny.

"you had to be there" I dismiss.

They go abck to their treatise and I go back to when you were here. -- And its harbor breezes still come ashore, and the express way still roars into the night, the horns of the trailers still sing to the late-night gaggles of hipsters on the overpass at the top of Newbury but... Look Boston I'm sorry, its not that I love you any less. I don't. -- The ghosts of my ex-girlfriends have taken up residency and have tea with Paul Revere in the Old North Church. And fall won't be the same and the clam chowder will suck but I have to do this. If not for myself then to prove it to myself. I'll come home for the fall, I...I'm sorry. I hope you understand.

Theres an old man sitting next to me, Making love to his tonic and gin

"and this old man in front of me wearing canes and ruby rings is like a tin can explosion when he sings, and with every chance to set himself on fire he keeps doing the same thing..."

A chill wind blows through the masionic lodge

Meanwhile Kathrine McKinnon is on the rise.

Tim Magazine told us AIDS was an epidemic

And so were boys in school. Presumption tells you

The patients were dead. The boys just grew up.

They tell me AIDS is an epidemic because it spreads.

I tell them ignorance is airborne, and the prescribe more

John Wayne films. How clever Bellhooks, that you might give

Unto to them an insecure Marion, in a cowboy-flavored pill.

The same men were outraged at Ang Lee – how dare they sulley

The good façade of the Gipper.

When America was born, Washington chopped down his fathers tree

And built a lodge by which American built its staircase to world power.

Today, Hamlet’s law rules: words, words, words. Cowboys don’t read.

Old George gave us the power to speak, and we use it to curse.

I peruse the books of Harvard and find one of Ava Gardner all pouting and seductive.

“Love is nothing”, she is quoted as saying on the cover.

Romeo is Bleeding, not so that you’d notice…

I drink alone in the Harvard tea shops every Saturday night,

Sighing at my good misfortune, in love with a dying reality

that from a distance it lacks a verisimilitude.

Down at the wharf, they wrap the fish in year old

Globe’s and I wonder if wrapping your heart in text will

Keep in fresh in the cold New England winters…