Bart Bull

Sex And Lies And Dutronc

2009-11-04T18:35:00.006+01:00

(Here's a little something I did earlier this year (en Anglais, remerciez Dieu!) for an oddly-titled French publication that hasn't actually gotten around to paying yet, of course, but will, undoubtedly, certainly, soon. It was, however, lavishly illustrated with some Jean-Marier Perier's amazing photos, including one of Jacques Dutronc lounging in the black interior of a yellow '69 Pontiac Firebird convertible while thoroughly surrounded by naked women. I'm not sure any of my writing has ever been so pleasantly illustrated.)

“To tell the truth, you must lie.”

Jean-Marie Perier

Possibly there are more important questions about Jacques Dutronc. Still, I have less curiosity about his living arrangement with Francoise Hardy than.... well, than practically anybody else in France. She with her quiet Paris apartment, he in his Corsican villa legendarily crawling with cats, with fifty cats, or sixty cats, or seventy cats, or more. They, together, a couple for forty years, married for more than twenty-five; how do they do it? My burning question, the only one that matters to me: Just how many cats does Jacques Dutronc actually have?

At his early career peak, Dutronc unleashed a set of sardonic songs, satirized the excesses of the moment, a moment that has since been lumped together lumpily as The Sixties. Dutronc, whose hair was only long-ish, long-esque, at a time of long-nosity, wore very stylish but very proper suits at a time of paisley and purple and Nehru collars. He was a bespoke set of ironic quotation marks. Much more a rocker than his peers on the French pop charts, he dressed instead as an up-swinging broker of stocks, a ruling-party political hopeful. It was a joke, sort of. He was a playboy (just when his pal Daniel Filipacchi was selling French Playboy back to a startled Hugh Hefner), surrounded in photos by women en deshabille. His mere proximity, said the photos, worked as a powerful anti-clothing device for women, yet he himself managed to keep unmussed and amused.

Earlier, hanging handsomely around Le Golf Druout — the ‘60’s CBGB’s of Rock Et Roll En France, with shing-a-lingin’ copains et copines, as instructed by the arm-and-leg-flinging likes of Sheila and Clo-Clo, stomping et tromping around the 16th fairway of a mini-golf course above an English tea room in Paris — the young Jacques is just another guitar-playing loup garou impatiently waiting for his mini-tee-time with fate. His greatest asset? His look, casting his ironic blue eyes up and out and at and through you from a deGaulle-esque height. And perhaps the fact that in a time of astonishingly bad bandnames (Les Chaussettes Noires; Hector & Les Mediators; Gil Now & Les Turnips), he achieves a bandname that rings out in awe-inspirational awfulness: El Toro et les Cyclones.

For this, apparently, he is made musical director of Vogue Records. But in an elevator with Jacques Lanzmann, founder of Lui, greatest skin magazine in the inglorious history of such, they are joined by Antoine, hippie kid who has just blown youthful French brains with “Le Elucubrations.” A legend in his own mind, Antoine cuts them dead, ignores the be-suited salarymen, and righteously pisses ‘em off. Together , apres lunch, they write “Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi,” a meta-parody of such youthful self-orbitration, and Dutronc is launched.

Dutronc’s music, Lanzmann’s lyrics, these are certainly, unquestionably some of what made Dutronc into a central icon of the late ‘6os — the only popstar ever noticed (and thus, automatically, denounced) by Guy Debord, Pope of Situationism. But in fact, as good as this music is and enduring as it has turned out to be, there’s no question that much of Dutronc is his image, and it arrived first in the photos of Jean-Marie Perier, Dutronc’s friend, the man he replaced at the side of Francoise Hardy.

“For thirty years, my work was shit. Now they tell me it’s art. It’s neither art nor shit. It was just pictures to put on the wall of young people to make them dream.”

Jean-Marie Perier

Jean-Marie was the photographer for Salut Les Copains, a magazine that showed up in France in the early ‘60s and instantaneously gathered in all the pop moment as no other publication ever has. If one man had singlehandedly invented MTV in the early 1980s . . . but MTV never had as much impact in any single pop universe as SLC had in France. It was everything, and Jean-Marie’s photos were everything about SLC. The only direction he ever received from his friend and boss, Daniel Fillipacchi, was this: “The parents must hate your pictures.”

As SLC arrived, so did Francois Hardy, but so much more quietly. “Everybody in Paris, in show business,” Jean-Marie observes, “was obsessed by America, because America is the future in this time. They’re all trying to look American. Suddenly Francoise arrives. She has a French name, she writes her lyrics, and she makes original stories in her music. She is the only one! Everyone else is a copy. And she had a French name.”

It’s her complete lack of ye’-ye’ loco-motion, her disinclination to twist disrhythmically, that distinguishes her. She will become, whether we in the English-speaking world ever got it or not, the first Girl With A Guitar. Silent, serene, seventeen, she stands in front of Jean-Marie and his camera and she captures the Canal St. Martin, le Tour Eiffel, him, his Nikon, and all the rest of us. She begins, mild and beatified and bemused, as if she happens to know the precise spot where Lourdes and Fatima triangulate with the 14th Arrondissement, as though she’s perfectly prescient about how many cats Jacques Dutronc will posess in Corsica in the year 2009. Presumably Jean-Marie treated her to a croque madame to celebrate before dropping her back home to la mere. He was, after all, as dazzled as the rest of us.

“She was extremely beautiful — she didn’t know it — and she was great, especially for a girl of her age, and especially for a guy who’s in love with her.” And what follows, what transpires, what we can still see, is the greatest series of photographs a lover has made of just how lovely his love is. And she is. Dante’s Beatrice was kind of butt-ugly by way of comparison. Nobody ever loved Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn nor Louise Brooks in quite this way.

But Jean-Marie cuts to the chase. Or in this case, the crash. “So we live together five years, and then one day she tellls me, ‘I’ve met someone.’ I met her when I was twenty-two, she was seventeen ... we were children. Ok, life separates us, voila... I said, ‘Alright, so I want to meet him....’ Because for me, it would not have been possible to not love the person that she loves, since I love her. She’s my best friend, so who she loves, I will love.” A pause. “So she presents me Jacques." Another pause, but shorter. "For at least two years, I was more in love with him than with her.

“And with his music, it’s the same thing as with Francoise six years before. These are the two who are saying things in their music, Francoise and Jacques, because all the rest of the singers are singing stupid lyrics, stupid copies of stupid songs.

“Plus Jacques had an.... insolence? Isn’t that the right word? So loose, so....almost aggressive, that all the people in the business, I mean all the singers, used to go and look at him ....What he was daring to do on stage, he was daring so much! When Giscard was President, a big charity show, and the announcer asks Jacques, ‘What do you think about singing in front of the President?’ And Jacques pushes the President — like this! — and says to the crowd, ‘I fuck him like a rat at the pinball machine!’" Jean-Marie is pensive. "Jacques was the most insolent person of all the Sixties and Seventies.”

“Eddie Barclay said, just before he died, ‘Today there is more business than show.’” Jean-Marie Perier

Looking at Jean-Marie’s photos of Francoise Hardy, a friend said, and with truth, “But she doesn’t look this way any longer.” C’est vrai; this can be said of us all. She has returned to be the sixty-some-year-old version of the petit-bourgois French schoolgirl she was when her life exploded merely because she wrote a few simple songs. She has fulfilled that girl’s destiny. But more, much more: Once Jean-Marie’s astonished, astonishingly loving photographic eye left her, once his eye fell more modestly away, she was free, in her way, to be perhaps even a bit more of an artist, but ever so less an icon. It’s easier to be an artist than an icon, and surely so for Francoise Hardy. Pursued hotly by Mick Jagger, by Bob Dylan, by Peter Sellers, by the florist’s assistant down the street, by any guy with eyes, she is now the mother of Thomas Dutronc, manouche guitarist, gypsy-esque Djangoist of much modesty and some style, who waited into his thirties before bothering to venture near the mass-media launching pad that was his inadvertant birthright; of whom his mother has said, in effect, in her way, “He’s really quite good....”

And an email, as I write, from Jean-Marie:

“Jacques has actually 30 cats.”

In journalism, accuracy is all.

Aphorism (sorta) Fifty-Eight: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-11-02T15:00:00.000+01:00

I was Dr. Pepper and she was Mrs. Hyde.

Aphorism Fifty-Seven: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-10-23T22:21:00.001+02:00

No use crying over split milk.

Aphorism (Sort of) Fifty-Six: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-28T16:35:00.002+02:00

Some cultures like kites more than birds.

(Translation into English [never my native language]:

Some cultures prefer kites to birds.

Aphorism Fifty-Five: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-22T18:15:00.000+02:00

The French — they're so German!

The Marshal of Tombstone

2009-09-21T11:58:00.005+02:00

The marshal of Tombstone reaches down to his gun belt, runs his hand over the black leather loops that hold the cartridges in an orderly row. His dry fingers push bullets up against the loop, six of them, one after another. One after another, he pushes six bullets down.

The squad cars are parked with their bumpers backed up to the gate of the OK Corral, ready to roll. The southern Arizona sun is rising but the morning is still cool and quiet — maybe too quiet.

from The Washington Post, August 31, 1897 (oops, 1987)

Aphorism Fifty-Four: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-18T14:05:00.005+02:00

“You say one thing,” he said, “and then you say the exact opposite.” I thanked him for the compliment. “There’s a reason for that,” I said. “It’s because I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

William Michaelian

Aphorism Fifty-Three: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-18T14:05:00.001+02:00

I've spent my whole life avoiding men's underwear...

Aphorism Fifty-Two: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-18T14:01:00.005+02:00

from Patrick:

"Rope? If I had any rope, I would have hung myself already..."

Aphorism Fifty-One: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-08-13T12:47:00.001+02:00

"You can beat a dead horse to water but you can't make him drink it."

from How The West Was I

Really Short Fiction

2009-08-12T12:28:00.003+02:00

Here's the first line or two from the second chapter of my first novel or two, written way back...well, a while ago. And now, today, oddly, it felt appropriate to me.

"When we come back again this time it was summer time which if you go to Arizona in June or July or August and know better all ready than you are probably crazy or stupid or more."

Aphorism Fifty: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-08-11T11:35:00.002+02:00

"A lie can only thrive on truth; lies, heaped one upon another, lack substance."

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Aphorism Forty-Nine: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-08-10T14:43:00.003+02:00

"That's like trying to pick out your favorite leg."

Jerry Reed, all-'round genius guy. . . and, ironically, a master picker

Aphorism Forty-Eight: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-07-26T13:08:00.000+02:00

What's not grim is good.

What IS The Blues?

2009-07-20T14:09:00.004+02:00

Elderly Bluesman, interviewing Little Stevie Spielberg:

"So tell me, man — what is The Movies?"

(from SPIN; John Lee Hooker profile)

Aphorism (Sort of) Forty-Seven: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-07-20T13:23:00.000+02:00

Black Sabbath invented having the name of the band and the name of the first album and the name of the first song on the first album all be the same thing.

Aphorism Forty-Six: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-07-14T15:43:00.001+02:00

Guess I shouldnt'a wiped that SuperGlue on my eyelids, huh?

History Is Bunk

2009-06-22T15:57:00.017+02:00

“Ford Performance — Staying Ahead of Tradition

Performance and Ford have been synonymous since Henry Ford set the world land speed record in 1904. Ford drove the ‘Arrow,’ a car he designed and built, to a speed of 91.37 mph on a frozen Michigan lake.”

—from a Ford Motor Company advertisement, Hot Rod, April 1989

Henry Ford was a nut, but he was an ungodly rich American nut , and when he got a bug up his butt, he had the resources to do something about it. He started his own newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and when that was insufficient for spreading the hot news about the Hebrew-haters preferred hoax, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” he distributed it through Ford dealerships and had it translated into German. When he decided he needed a dam, he hired forty Negroes to dig him one, specifying an all-colored crew to his contractor, then had them knock off work to sing him Stephen Foster songs — he was especially fond of “Old Black Joe” and “Old Kentucky Home.” Once he decided that the contemporary world had gone to hell in a handbasket, he set himself up with a Never-Never Land right there in Dearborn and named it Greenfield Village. It was a psychic twin to John D. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller's Colonial Williamsburg (and both places were kin to Walt Disney's seven-eighths scaled Main Street USA, with its banjo-spanking Dixieland band, striped coats and straw hats direct from the blackface minstrel walkaround.)

These were industrialist fantasies of pre-industrial feudal villages — once she'd presided over the founding of the Museum of Modern Art, Mrs. Rockefeller sent forth her minions, collectors who whold shortly be dubbed "curators,' and they worked New England and the Mid-Atlantic states the way maidenly New Englanders were working the mountains of the South, hunting for the pure and the purer. Her employees gathered up weather vanes and quilts, pried Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs off the front of barns, loaded trucks with cigar-store Indians and sewing baskets and duck decoys, each and every one of them by that celebrated and super-prolific folk artiste "Anonymous." Then she commssioned her curators to come up with a definition of "folk art" that would fit a collection that included no totem poles or kachinas or Navajo blankets or santos or bultos or bottle trees or wrought iron work or anything else made by anyone who wasn't rustic, white, and located on the eastern seaboard. "The genesis, rise and disappearance of folk art is closely connected with the events of the 19th Century when the dissolution of the old ways left rural folk everywhere with an unused surplus of time and energy," declared Mary Black, director of Abby's collection. It was a theory to warm the heart of any Rockefeller.

Henry Ford, on the other hand, was a nouveau riche buttinski who supplied his own damn theories, and plenty of 'em. He turned collectors of his own loose, hunting for backwoods fiddlers who could remember the words and melodies of the old tunes, the fiddle tunes that were American's true pure heritage. He set himself up a dance hall in his factory's Engineering Lab, with his fiddle-and-dulcimer orchestra on hand at all times. He hired a dance instructor and produced a book, "Good Morning — After a Sleep of 25 Years Old-Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford," then distributed hundreds of thousands of copies, just as he did with the Protocols. The book's rules of etiquette were as rigid and unwavering as a manual for a mass-production line.

By now, Henry Ford had dance fever. He traveled the country preaching the gospel of his square-danced etiquette. At his factory, engineers were constantly being dragged onto the dance floor, and on his Georgia plantation, Negro children were taught the polka. He created his own record label for "Henry Ford's Old Time Dance Orchestra." When his collectors brought Stradivarius violins for his approval, he'd saw off a fiddle tune, then write a check. He purchased the cottage where Stephen Foster was born and had it moved to Greenfield Village. He bought a Cape Cod windmill, and English shepherd's cottage, the schoolhouse where the author of McGuffey's Reader swatted his first sleeping students, the Springfield courthouse where Abe Lincoln lost his first court case and the Ford's Theater chair Lincoln was sitting in when John Wilkes Booth shot him. He came within days and dimes of buying a pickled corpse alleged to be Booth. He tried to have Foster's Old Dog Tray exhumed and stuffed but the operation was a failure. He purchased a dozen railroad cars of research on the folkloric history of "Mary Had A Little Lamb." (The poem's author died at seventeen, the lamb was gored by a cow, and Mary herself ended up in an asylum.)

Henry Ford had hated farm life when he was a boy stuck on a farm, and he invented his way out of it — a couple of ways. Late on a night in 1936, one of the many family acts who were making it through the Depression off country music drove down a Michigan road trying to find a tourist court so they could sleep. It was the Rhodes Family — brother Spec Rhodes would play bass with Porter Wagoner for many years, all the while playing the Toby role, a black-toothed rube variant from the minstrel days, the white Jim Crow, the Arkansas Traveler's squatter. Exhausted, they found a country road — it sure seemed like a country road — so they pulled over and slept in the car. A guard woke them in the morning; they had spent the night in Henry Ford's driveway. He'd let them stay there because they drove a Ford. "Sure enough," says Spec's brother Dusty, "...here comes Henry Ford with two bodyguards. He was a real nice fellow and after we talked to him for a while he asked us to plays some music. He really did like country music." He asked Dusty Rhodes if he wanted to play one of his fiddles, then sent the servants to fetch it. "This is a genuine Stradivarius violin," Ford told him, "and is worth $150,000." He asked me if I would play 'Red Wing' for him because that was his favorite fiddle tune. So I played 'Red Wing' and several other tunes for him on that Stradivarius fiddle."

Ford sure did love country music. "Red Wing" had been written and published in 1907 by Tin Pan Alley's Kerry Mills, author of "Rastus On Parade" and of "At A Georgia Camp Meeting" as well, the biggest cakewalk hit of the whole coon song era. Mills had been head of the violin department of the University of Michigan School of Music.; he'd snagged the melody, all too appropriately, from Schumann's "The Merry Peasant." To this day, "Red Wing" is known as an old fiddle tune. (My mom, Lawrence Welk's cousin, Francesca Schweitzer Bull, has always played it oom-pah accordion style on the organ, but that's pretty much how she plays everything.) It is an old fiddle tune, just as it was in 1937, maybe just as it was by 1908. The vogue for coon songs was cooling down, and a brief fad for frontier Indian romance numbers came and went. It was a coon song of a different sort, and Henry Ford was right. It was country music, just as his driveway was close enough to a country road to fool country folks in a country band. Henry Ford, the man who killed off the horse-and-buggy-era, once the fastest man in the world, died by the light of a coal lamp. And that $150,000 fiddle of his? "Well," says Dusty Rhodes, "I have to admit that I didn't like it any better than the one Daddy made for me."

"'I do not know who introduced square-dancing to Japan,' says Herbert Passin, an American professor who served in the occupation. 'But I remember meeting young [U.S.] military-government officers in the provinces who were absolutely convinced that square dancing was the magic key to transforming Japan into a democratic society.

— from the Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1991

"Never imitate another unless you have satisfied yourself that he or she is a better dancer than you are."

— from "Good Morning: After a Sleep of Twenty-five Years, Old Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived," by Henry Ford and Mrs. Henry Ford. ("The dances in this book represent those which, danced by couples or by groups, illustrated the art of dancing at its traditional best. Rhythm of movement, beauty of patter, the spirit of play and grace of deportment are all to be found in the list within.")

Aphorism Forty-Five: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-06-12T15:46:00.000+02:00

Man, if you think I look young now, you should've seen me when I was young!

Aphorismes Forty-three and Forty-four: (Two ((or maybe Three)) among a series; collect the whole set!)

2009-06-08T13:14:00.012+02:00

Patrick, who on any good night is good for a dozen or more, and on any bad night is likely capable of twice that (aphorismes, that is) had a good set of weekend nights. I was there a bunch, but the mind— well, mine, certainly— is only capable of absorbing so many pithy witty bits. From among the few I remember:

"Sobriety is a quality."

And this one (or two, more or less), uttered as we were standing out front, Parisian twilight, not quite night, but trying hard to be, and nearly succeeding, Patrick rolling a cigarette:

"You can always lose more..."

And a contemplative pause. A puff.

"There's always more you can lose."

Me, I haven't figured out which I like more. Not that I like either one, in their essence or truth or trial; it's just that I recognize them both. Equally.

Aphorism Forty-Two: (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-05-24T20:50:00.007+02:00

Maybe I haven't been dumping out as many aphorisms lately, or maybe — and it may be a sign of extreme mental health — I haven't been listening to myself as much. Probably that.

Anyway, I fell across this one in a Chinese cookbook. A great Chinese cookbook, The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo. The first cuisine I ever really got involved with cooking (unless you count being a short-order cook in a wino cafe named "Stanley's," even though the neon outside said "Swede's," just right across from the post office in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, as being involved with a cuisine) was Chinese. It's a long story that I'll spare you, because I like these aphoristic deals to be brief. Or brief by my standards, anyway. But brief, just the same.

To this day I still cut almost everything with a cleaver, just as I learned in Chinese cooking, in those Chinese restaurant kitchens in Oakland and San Francisco, and Ms. Kuo's very thorough and accomplished book is clear and direct on cleaver technique, as it is on anything she touches. Discussing the great kitchen truth — the Great Life Truth — of why a sharp knife is safer than a dull one, she says:

"A razor edged cleaver sobers one's mind and sharpens vigilence."

If fortune cookies read that crisply, well, we'd probably stop putting "in bed" on the end.

Tom Waits; Boho Blues

2009-04-01T13:13:00.000+02:00

Tom Waits saves cigarette coupons. Moths fly from his change purse. The keys fall off his piano. Welcome to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. . . it's showtime!
by Bart Bull
(published in Spin)

Tosca, Tuesday, late, Columbus near Broadway, San Francisco.

This is a fine bar, a lovely bar, loud but not too loud. The jukebox plays scratchy opera music. Francis Coppola is in back where the tables and booths are. He's listening to Lauren Hutton tell a story and when he laughs, so does everybody else. Sam Shepard stands up from his stool at the bar to pay his tab. His MasterCard falls to the floor, unnoticed except by the redhead standing nearby. She puts her foot on top of it and carries on her conversation. Shepard leaves. Lauren Hutton leaves. Coppola and his people leave. Almost everybody leaves. The bartender works a rag across the bar, and in the doorway behind him we see someone who looks just like Tom Waits. He peers in, squints, rubbing his head. A cigarette butt, stepped on but still glowing, trails smoke across the floor, left to right. He steps through the smoke and goes to the jukebox, searches. He finds a quarter in his pants, punches buttons. A tenor yelps. It's "Nessum dorma," from Puccini's "Turandot."

A pink paper cocktail umbrella, the kind that sprouts at the rims of colorful tropical drinks, blows across the floor at the foot of the stage, left to right, pushed by an invisible wind.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks, and railroad boots. A big barrel-bellied woman sits next to him, one leg draped over his knee. She's wearing a red flamenco dress and a black mantilla, and her name is Val Diamond. She has eyeballs painted on her eyelids. She can see you with her eyes open; she watches you with her eyes closed. Polaroids are scattered on the stage at their feet.

TOM: I don't understand golf.
VAL: (mutters sympathetically)
TOM: It needs to have more sex. (Gleaming lightbulb appears directly over
his head.) Night golf!
VAL: Somebody won a lot of money golfing recently.
TOM: They get more money than boxers.
VAL: That doesn't seem right.
TOM: It doesn't seem right. Somebody gets beat up for an hour and somebody else hits a ball into a hole. Doesn't seem right.

From the floor, the DIRECTOR watches them through a little black lens, through his director's viewfinder. He hands the viewfinder to his assistant and walks off. The assistant stares carefully through the lens. Tom's zipper is at half mast.

It's dawn. Bats are hurrying back to the belfry, and below, one hand on the rope that rings the bell, Ken Nordine waits. Nordine, the word-jazzed Voice Of God as heard on Levi's commercials, has something he wants to say. This time it's Tom Waits' words and Ken Nordine's voice; sometimes it's the other way around. Here's how to tell: Tom Waits' voice sounds like he gargles with gravel; Ken Nordine's sounds like he's selling three truckloads of soft margarine in handy re-usable plastic tubs. There is no Devil (for our purposes here, at least), just God when he's drunk. Ken Nordine, God as we understand Him (for our purposes here), is not inebriated in the least, but he's willing to act (for our purposes here). He has something he'd like to say.

KEN NORDINE: (gritty voice) It's like Jack Nicholson said to me one time - Continuity is for sissies.

We're in a nightclub, an empty nightclub. A nearly empty nightclub, with a camera crew setting up in the back. Ken Nordine's butter-flavored voice is the only light.

KEN NORDINE: For our purposes here, perhaps some explanation is in order. Perhaps not. Welcome, in any case, to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club.

We see the stage now, bulbs flashing in sequence across the proscenium.

KEN NORDINE: Proscenium. Butter-flavored proscenium.

We see Tom Waits in a tuxedo, slumped in a chair at the center of the stage.

KEN NORDINE: We have a purpose here. We are filming a video here, a video to accompany the tune "Blow Wind Blow," from Tom Waits' new album, Frank's Wild Years.

As Nordine speaks, we see Waits rise from his slump (as it were) and sit stiffly upright. His lips move precisely in time with Nordine's words, and his arms deliver florid gestures.

KEN NORDINE: But Frank's Wild Years is not merely an album. Frank's Wild Years is also a play, a stage production. Frank's Wild Years is two...

Val and Tom are holding breath mints in front of them. They click the packages together carefully.

KEN NORDINE: ...two mints in one. And the video from "Blow Wind Blow" is not merely a scene from the play, but an all-new and improved production. Tom is Frank, as it were, or perhaps he isn't, but in any case, he's a ventriloquist. He casts his voice into the rest of the cast. And the rest of the cast is ably portrayed by Val Diamond and a prosthetic leg.

Waits reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a pack of those personal details that reveal so much about a character's character. He smokes pre-war Lucky Strikes in the Raymond Loewy-designed green pack. Or Chesterfields, named after W.C. Fields' favorite son. In truth, they're Raleighs, and he takes a dramatic drag off the cigarette, makes nonchalant expressions as he holds it in, then looks off in another direction as Val, the ventriloquist's dummy, exhales a white cloud. Waits takes the pack, crumples it, flicks it into the wastebasket hidden in the wings. A pause, another pause, and then he leaps up, dumping Val to the floor, and we see him bent over the wastebasket, digging around for the cigarette pack. He finds it, tears a square off the back.

TOM: (turns to the camera) I save the coupons.

He sits back down. His lips keep moving.

KEN NORDINE: In truth, he doesn't smoke anymore. That would be too much like the old Tom Waits. And the old Tom Waits is over, done with, defunct, finito. Aesthetically, at least. He made his bed and he slept in it until it was past checkout time. Writing songs about dead-end kids on dead-end streets became a dead-end street. Damon Runyon demanded royalties.

Waits is making nonchalant expressions up on the stage. Val is staring baleful and blue-eyed, her eyelids clamped shut.

KEN NORDINE: And yet here we are in a nightclub, a nearly empty nightclub. Have you noticed the postage-stamp cocktail tables? The chains of garter snaps that decorate the walls? The black Naugahyde banquette booths? Once upon a time, this was Ann's 440 Club, where Lenny Bruce got that illustrious start of his. Ah, but that was along ago, and for more than 20 years this has been Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. Welcome. Have you met Miss Keiko yet?

A yellow spotlight comes on in the back of the club, illuminating a black and white photo. A signature in black felt-tip pen reads, "Miss Keiko - 1969." She stands forever on the toes of one foot, gazing over her shoulder, lifting her long dark hair above her bare back. Her costume is brief, her breasts are tassel-tipped projectiles. Tom Waits stands nearby, appraising the photograph.

TOM: (gravel-voiced) If I was a girl, I'd want to look like that.

Francis Coppola's sergeant-at-arms drops by to let Waits know that Francis is dining next door at Enrico's. He's willing to wait until the video crew takes a lunch break if Tom would care to come over and talk. There's a part for him in an upcoming project. Waits is sitting at the Chi Chi Club bar with a guy called Biff, waiting for the crew to set up the shot. Miss Keiko gazes down at them from over her shoulder.

TOM: Vegas. She worked the big rooms in Vegas. You know, I saw a guy go down with a heart attack at a crap table, and his wife was pounding on his chest, and the pit boss said, "New shooter coming up." I swear to God.

KEN NORDINE: (sounding godlike) Search me. Sounds like it could be true.

TOM: New dice, new shooter, keep it moving. Cold. Cold-blooded.

BIFF: How far away were you?

TOM: I was the new shooter.

BIFF: Were you wealthy when you left the table?

TOM: Nah. I gamble with scared money. I'm a tightwad. Moths in my change purse.

He gets up to get some cigarettes from the machine, although he doesn't smoke anymore. Moths burst forth from his change purse. He buys Raleighs. Doesn't smoke any.

TOM: So what do you think is suitable for manly footgear, Biff?

BIFF: Roman sandals. And beads to go with 'em.

TOM: I've been asking everyone I, uh, come into contact with, because I'm doin' a little survey. I'd say we're in a crisis in terms of American footgear.

BIFF: Slip-on loafers.

TOM: Nah, can't go that route. You can't go down that road, for down that road danger lies.

BIFF: How come?

TOM: I don't like the name. Loafers. For a guy that works as hard as you do, it's just not right.

BIFF: You could call 'em slip-ons, but...

TOM: That's even worse. That's worse than loafers. You wouldn't want me to call you a slip-on.

BIFF: You got a point there.

TOM: Points. I always gravitate toward points. Things are getting better - ten years ago, you couldn't find any points. Things are getting better, in shoes and music both.

Lunch comes, lunch goes. Coppola waits impatiently at Enrico's; Waits tells Biff of movie roles he's been offered. Coppola's fingers tap the tabletop.

TOM: Satanist cult leaders. The Iceman. I could've been the Iceman in 'Iceman'.

BIFF: You turned that down?

TOM: Yep. Big mistake. Look where the guy that took it is today. I could've been the hitcher in 'The Hitcher', too.

BIFF: Jesus Christ! You turned that down? You could've had a career. You could be Boris Karloff by now.

TOM: Yep. Big mistake.

Coppola, alfresco at Enrico's, fumes silently. Fumes loudly. Fumes. Vows revenge. One week later, Waits wakes up in bed next to the oil-splattered head of a 350 Chevy. He shrieks.

A small pile of pink confetti blows across the floor in front of the stage, left to right, blown by a hand-held fan.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks, and railroad boots. His sideburns are going grey. Val Diamond wears a red flamenco dress. Her ginger hair is piled high in Spanish columns. Her left leg is draped over his right knee. Black fishnet stockings.

TOM: You know who Dick Shawn is? Was?

VAL: The World's Second-Greatest Entertainer? The guy who did that show called "The World's Second-Greatest Entertainer"?

Although he doesn't smoke, smoke rises from an invisible Raleigh between his fingers. He taps his ashes absentmindedly. They fall onto the brim of the top hat at his feet.

TOM: I did a little show with him, played the Wall Street Wino. It never aired. He had a dozen midgets on it. Thirteen.

A pause.

TOM: He died onstage. His son was in the audience. He was in the middle of a bit about death, and he threw himself to the stage in a simulated heart attack. And it was real. And everybody in the audience was laughing. Not a bad thing to hear in your last moment.

More ashes, real as life, fall into the hat; real smoke rises from the invisible Raleigh.

TOM: Good way to go, I guess. Maybe now they'll air the show.

The Chi Chi Club is empty, near empty. One chair is at the center of the stage, one chair is set in the center of the floor below. From the chair on the floor, we hear the voice of Ken Nordine.

KEN NORDINE: Curious as it is that Tom Waits abandoned his signature style of writing, it's every bit as intriguing that he jettisoned the very sound of his established style at the same time. Once known as something of a jazzed-down beat generation throwback, as the romantic street poet of the least romantic of un-poetic streets, as a narrative storyteller of the most talented sort, as a truly gifted liar, he suddenly and abruptly ceased spinning yarns. And as he did, his music itself came unraveled. Or if not unraveled, then...

A long pause. Long.

KEN NORDINE: Perhaps someone else would be better qualified to discuss what happened to the music of Tom Waits. Perhaps it would pay to introduce Harry Partch.

A small spotlight illuminates the chair onstage.

KEN NORDINE: Harry Partch, sadly deceased, was an American original. An eccentric, that is; a tinkerer, a free spirit, an inventor of instruments and of himself. A nut, in other words. A Californian, like Tom Waits, and like Tom Waits, a man who lived the hobo's life long before he captured it in music. He invented his remarkable 43-tone musical scale, and he invented gorgeous and monumental instruments specifically for playing his odd and glorious music. You may have to grant him a certain grandiosity, a certain tendency toward the making of Major Pronouncements, a certain self-centeredness, a certain extreme certainty. Harry Partch received so little recognition during life, and he required so much of it. He called his musical scale "just intonation," and he felt entirely justified in doing so.

The voice that comes from the chair onstage is deep and rugged and rigorously resonant. It sounds much like John Huston's acceptance speech upon his being unanimously voted God.

HARRY PARTCH: As I understand it, this young Tom Waits fellow has had some small contact with members of the ensemble that serves the noble purpose of preserving my music and my instruments, the Mazda Marimba, the Marimba Eroica, the Cloud Chamber Bowls, and all the rest. This contact, however limited, can't have hurt him, although it's impossible to say how much it has helped since what I've heard of his stuff is not more than a literal-minded bastardization of the eternal principles behind my system of just intonation. He'd be best served to study a little closer if he cares to attempt any further homage. Still, there is some small sense of my own music's grandeur in the young fellow's stuff. Like me, he's interested in the largest and the smallest of sounds, and like me, he's heard the music of the highway and the resonant clang of the beer bottle tapped with a church key. IMAGINE the sound of a hundred Chinamen beating spikes into the ground with nine-pound sledgehammers, laying the rails of the transcontinental railway! And the scream of the steam whistle as a locomotive flies over those same spikes. Imagine the snores of hobos sleeping in the open boxcars. Imagine the contrapuntal snores of the conductor comfortably bunked up in the caboose. IMAGINE THE THUNDER, the mighty prairie thunder that wakes them all from their slumbers! And imagine the raw COURAGE a composer would need to even ATTEMPT to create such sounds! I wish the young fellow a great deal of luck. I admire his theatricality.

At the back of the club, at the bar, a light glows. Tom Waits and the guy called Biff are back there, a beer bottle in front of each of them. Tom is not smoking, yet smoke rises from between two of his fingers.

TOM: I traveled with a gas pump for years.

He tosses back a little beer.

TOM: I still have nightmare where the whole crowd is moving toward me and then the keys are falling off the piano and the curtain rips and my shoe comes off and I'm crawling toward the wings and the crowd is moving toward me, hurling insults at me. And car parts. I played cow palaces, rodeos, sports facilities, hockey arenas with the ice beneath the cardboard. It cools off the place. It's alright in August, but it's a bitch in February. But if you can appreciate the rich pageantry of it...

Biff tosses back a little beer.

TOM: Never have your wallet with you onstage. It's bad luck. You shouldn't play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.

Tom tosses back a little beer.

TOM: I don't play the piano much anymore. I don't compose on it. It's hard. Because sometimes it feels like it's all made out of ice. It's cold. It's square, so much about it is square, you know, and music is round. And so sometimes I think it puts corners on your stuff.

Tom and Biff toss back a little beer. Behind them, we see a single chair and a single spotlight on the stage, and now we can hear that Harry Partch has never stopped talking.

HARRY PARTCH: (from afar) ...the wrongheadedness of the chromatic scale of the Western world and the deleterious effect it has had on untold generations of innocent ears...a gang of Irishmen headed due west with nine-pound sledgehammers of their own...

A pink balloon blows across the floor in front of the stage, left to right.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks and railroad boots. Val Diamond wears a red dress and a black top hat. "Blow Wind Blow" is playing frantically in the background, sung by Alvin of the Chipmunks. When the soundman has re-cued it, the take begins.

A clapboard claps. A pink balloon blows across the floor, left to right.

TOM: Welcome to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. It's showtime!

Two pump organs, an alto horn, a glockenspiel. A gravel voice grumbles, singing. The voice comes from Val's mouth, and her eyes, clamped closed, stare blue ahead. Tom Waits, ventriloquist, nonchalant, takes a deep, dramatic drag on his cigarette; a smoke puffs from Val's mouth. Her lips grumble his song. He unscrews her wooden leg, pulls a pint of liquor from within it, swigs. He caps the bottle, puts it back, screws her leg back on. His cigarette rests between her fingers, his song sings off her lips. He takes his hand out from behind her back to scratch his head, and she slumps, but he catches her before she falls. The song grumbles towards an end, and as it ends, she pulls a dry-cell battery out of his back. He slumps, slumps and flops. He twitches in rigor mortis. Confetti falls free from his hand, gathers in a little pile. A hand-held fan blows it, left to right.

Wrap. The crew ascends to the stage, leaves nothing behind but a steamer trunk and a sousaphone. Tom sits on the trunk; the sousaphone sits on its side. A member of the crew grabs it and leaves.

TOM: Aw, bring the sousaphone back.

It comes back. Waits climbs inside it, adjust the mouthpiece. It makes hideous bleats, like someone is forcing it to watch its mother being turned into a coffee table. Waits' cheeks puff out, his face turns red. He hoists it off like a weight lifter. He leaves the stage with it under his arm, his tuxedo tails flapping behind. He puts his little finger in his ear and wrings it vigorously.

TOM: What should I do with this thing?

No answer. "Nessun dorma," from Puccini's 'Turandot."

Aphorism Forty-Two; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-03-12T09:58:00.003+01:00

Da mio amico, Michele Gazich, musicista e poeta e spiritu:

"Tra il diavolo e il mare . . . non vai a pescare."

(Between the devil and the sea . . . don't go fishing.")

But wait, there's more:

"Between the wood and the bark

Hide your love

Between the stone and the hammer

Make flowers grow..."

"Between Isaac and the knife

There's Abraham's heart..."

"Between the mouth and the wine

The road is short...

("Tra il vino e la mano

C'e un breve cammino...")

"Tra toro e torero

C'e poco pensiero..."

("Between bull and bullfighter

There's little thought...")

Aphorism Forty-One; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2009-03-10T13:14:00.001+01:00

I could see her point, but I could see mine better.

Aphorism Forty; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2009-03-10T13:07:00.001+01:00

Time flies either way.