Tom Waits True Confessions

I'm a pretty big Tom Waits fan. I was only introduced to his music a few years ago, and at first I absolutely did not understand it, but it gets into you and festers till you have this dark, ugly wound that you just have to scratch. It's a little hard to explain why, but I was telling a friend recently that I'm just oddly drawn to the man, his music, his acting and his persona. I actually wrote a bit about this on my short-lived, nary-updated Myspace blog. You can read it here if you like. He just seems to have that effect on people. If you're not aware, Scarlett Johansson actually put out a Tom Waits cover record this Tuesday. All Tom Waits covers, save for one original. It's a train wreck that I've been following since I first heard about it. You can hear some of them at Scarlett's myspace page, though I don't necessarily recommend it. Link here.

Being a Tom Waits fan, I grab onto any Waits-related news that pops up on my daily round of music blogs. I ran across this self-interview on Anti's website. It's highly entertaining and pretty fitting. Who better to interview Tom Waits then the man himself? You can read Tom's true confessions here.

He talks about what it means to be a gentleman (my favorite quote of the interview), his upcoming roll as the Devil in the new Terry Gilliam flick, his favorite sounds, his most interesting record and many other curious peculiarities.

He's going on tour this summer, and I'm going to try really hard to catch him in either Phoenix or Atlanta. I missed him last time he was here in Nashville at the Ryman and had to hear about what a great show it was from some friends that went. I will not be left out this time.

"Well I said anywhere, anywhere, anywhere I lay my head, boys. Well I'm gonna call my home."

Radiohead and Atlanta

I got back in to town from Atlanta around 1:30pm this afternoon and immediately had to go to the studio and do some work, but I'm home now and preparing to enter a mild coma. I will be unreachable for about an 18 hour period while my body exacts its revenge on me.

So, before I pass out. Atlanta. Here's how it went:

The Ride Down
There were 5 adult males in one "five-seater" SUV. I was, of course, not riding shotgun. I'm a skinny guy, but the size of my ass is the size of my ass. As often as I try, I still haven't been able to bend the laws of physics, much less break them. What did I learn? My ass is wider than four and a half inches. Here's the thing, guys have junk between their legs. I know. I know. We don't always like to talk about it, but it's there. When sitting in a car, a triangle is formed. I'm no mathematician, but I'll break it down for you with a formula. Kneecaps + junk = triangle. Now if we graph this data, putting "space between kneecaps" (aka space for your junk) on the X axis and "pain level" on the Y axis, we clearly see that as the space between the kneecaps decreases, the pain level due to "junk-related discomfort" increases. While the ride down to Atlanta included much good story-telling and some listening-to of good music, these small pleasures were greatly overshadowed by the fact that my FUCKING BALLS HURT!!!

The Meal
Ok, so we're in Atlanta proper and en route to the, supposedly, soul-crushing Chinese food. At this point I am literally ready to strangle someone. Fuck the stress ball. I want a neck. We pull into the shopping center (if you can call it that) that houses this epic Chinese cuisine, and this is what I see: 1) A burned down hotel. When I say burned down hotel, I don't mean the Raddison Inn tragically burned down in a hair dyer-related incident. I mean a fucking crack pipe burst into flames and ignited the gas fumes in the air from the Meth lab down the hall. This is not a good part of town. 2) A Latin disco club next door with a legal indemnification sign outside so verbose it would make Alan Derschowitz blush. People have been shot here. 3) Ok, I can't wait anymore. The shopping center was bad, but this place was called Tasty China. Tasty China. That's like having a Chinese karaoke bar called Wan Ton Sing Song. This place did not look legit. So we go in, and we are literally the only people in the place. Plastic tablecloths, bulk packets of chop sticks, menus with items crossed-off by hand. I know what you're thinking...fucking nightmare. Long story short, this was some of the best tasting food I've ever put in my mouth. I have three words for you: Dry. Fried. Eggplant. The flavors and textures that this one dish alone produced are beyond description. I'm not even going to try to describe any of the other things we ate. Bottom line: It makes no sense that a restaurant in Marietta, Georgia, in one of the shadiest suburb neighborhoods I've ever been in, can produce some of the best Chinese food in the world. I later learned that the chef/owner/whatever is psycho and was the personal chef to the president of China for like ten years. Epic.

The Show
I saw Wilco at the Ryman in March and that left only Radiohead to be fulfilled in my series of shows I haven't seen but want to. We arrived at the show after sitting in many, many miles of Atlanta traffic and after one of our car's occupants had to pee so bad that he hurdled over the retaining wall of the highway, disappearing into someone's yard and proceeded to urinate for about 5 minutes while we inched forward. Eventually he caught back up to the car amidst cheers from the rest of the Radiohead fans stuck in traffic with us. By the time we got to the amphitheater the opening band, Liars, had already gone on. Radiohead took the stage just after the sun had gone completely down and darkness had filled the sky. The band was incredible and Thom Yorke's voice was in rare form. We were sitting right behind the soundboard and therefore got to hear the show just as it was intended to be heard. Every breath and every sound that left his mouth had me rapt. Unfortunately they only played one song each from The Bends and OK Computer, which are my two favorite records, but they played some great songs off of Kid A and Amnesiac. They also played "Talk Show Host" which was really cool to hear live. We left the show feeling very well satisfied.

After The Show
After the show we headed to the nearest hotel bar where most of the table drank $25 glasses of Scotch, and I settled with $5 a bottle Budweisers. We were all exhilarated from the show, making every sip we took that much sweeter. Upon arriving at my parents' condo on the North side of Atlanta (which I had never been to before), we realized two things: 1) The condo is awesome and located on the 27th floor, therefore affording us a stunning view of Atlanta. And 2) There was some port left in the pantry. With glasses poured we headed to the balcony and sipped our port looking out over the sleeping city. A perfect end to a perfect day.

The Next Morning

The light that comes into an Eastern-facing window on the North side of Atlanta at 7am, when you've only been asleep for two and half hours and are still drunk from the night before, closely resembles THE FUCKING APOCALYPSE. The alarm went off at 7am instead of 8am (fucking eastern time zone!) I awoke in, what can only be described as, vampire terror. My heartbeat felt like a scratched heavy metal song on a skipping CD. I realized that I was, indeed, in Dante's 5th circle of hell and promptly fell back into intermittent, epileptic sleep until it was time to head back to Nashville.

It was one of those trips that you know you'll always remember and be able to pull great memories from. Epic night.

Perceived Is Believed...

...that is one of the most trite phrases I have ever come across, but sadly it is also incredibly accurate. I just went outside to smoke a cigarette and I realized how high the grass in my yard is. I kid you not, the first thought I had was: "Why does my grass grow faster than my neighbors'?" This is clearly a moronic thing to think, but truly that is the first thing I thought.

After a second I realized how foolish that thought was and that my neighbors are obviously just more responsible than I am, but it got me thinking about how powerful our senses are. I would choose my brain over my senses in a fight any day. My brain is much more complex than my senses. But that's the quandary. Our brains receive input from our senses. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't operate outside my senses. As powerful as our minds are, they cannot function without input. And our senses are the input.

An image or a word or song or a smell can actually cause your heart to beat faster. How do you combat that? Once you realize what is happening you can get control of yourself, but the reaction is physical. I say something potentially embarrassing. Immediately my body reacts. My heart starts beating faster. My voice uttering an embarrassing phrase did not cause my heart-rate to speed up. It was the thing in between that did that. My mind.

Where it starts to get really interesting is when you take in to account people that don't have that reaction. What about the people whose hearts don't quicken in pace when some sensory input dictates that they should?

Unfortunately I don't have an answer for this. I'm just talking out loud.

Engrish

This picture is amazing. I found it on PassiveAgressiveNotes. It's apparently a sign posted somewhere in Japan for American tourists. Makes you feel great about your decision to take a vacation to Japan. Priceless.

Tuesday News

I'm trying to write something up here everyday, so until I get into the swing of it, you (is anyone reading this?) will have to bear with me as updates related to myself and my friends subs in for, you know, actual content.

Congratulations to my friend Erin McCarley for inking her record deal with Universal. I believe she's flying up to New York soon to sign the long form. It's been a long process for her and her husband Reid, as well as many of my other friends who worked on the record. She's a killer artist. Great songs. Great voice. And from what I've heard of the record, it's going to be pretty superb. You can check out her myspace here. I think it's alright for me to be posting this news, but I'm not entirely sure. Don't sue me.

Ian is going to Uganda for 2 months on Thursday, so we are trying to get in all possible drinking before that day. Last night we succeeded in getting supremely drunk at H Cue's, putting about $10 in the juke box with which to play every Avett Brothers song they had, singing along at the top of our lungs to every song and pretty much driving everyone else out of the bar. After they turned out the lights there, we walked to The Villager and managed to get yet another beer and some cigarettes even though it was after 3am. This is what it looks like when Ian and I get drunk.

Thursday is also the day that Reid and I go to Atlanta to see Radiohead. Oh. Yes. Our purpose for this trip is two-fold. 1) See Radiohead before Thom Yorke returns to his home planet and 2) To eat Chinese food so good it will scar you for life. I'll let you know how it goes.

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell...

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that this is the last book I read. My excuse is that I picked it up in the airport on the way back from Phoenix. I only had a 3 and half hour flight, so getting something lengthy and involved didn't make sense. I was in a hurry to get to my gate, so I grabbed this book with the interesting title and strange picture and headed on.

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is basically the memoir of Tucker Max, a rich kid, Duke law graduate turned blogger and author. This is a book for guys. Girls will NOT like this book. Most of the stories are taken from Tucker's blog, and they chronicle his binge drinking and sexual adventures, which often become misadventures. Now I'm no puritan, but there were things in this book that even I had a hard time reading. At first the book is alternately funny and shocking, but as I read on the stories started to blur together. Guy goes to bar. Gets wasted. Picks up girl. Has sex. Throws up on girl. Or. Girl throws up on him. It pretty much goes like that for most of the book.

There are, however, 2 notable exceptions. 2 of these stories literally had me laughing so hard in the airport that tears were streaming down my face, and people were definitely looking at me and thinking, "What the hell is wrong with that guy?" The first story is called "Tucker Goes To Hockey Game, Causes Trouble". It can be found in its entirety here. It's a bit of a long read, but absolutely hysterical.

The second story is called "The Austin Road Trip". It can be found in its entirety here. This one is even longer than the hockey story, so if you want to get to the really funny stuff scroll down to the section titled Day Two: The Texas State Fair and The Embassy Suites Story. When I read the part about the hotel lobby I seriously thought I was not going to be able to control myself I was laughing so hard. What makes that story even better is that I'm pretty sure my friend Alayna's father owns that particular Embassy Suites. I'll have to check on that and post an update.

Bottom line: Probably don't buy this book. But if you're looking for a few debaucherous laughs, all of the stories in the book and more are located at his website: TuckerMax.com.

That's all for now. I'll see if I can't make good on the title of my blog and include some music-related content soon.

Air Travel+Alcohol+Sleep Deprivation=Fun

Last weekend I went back to Phoenix, where I'm from, for a wedding. It was a very quick trip being that I left on Friday morning early for a Friday wedding and returned to Nashville early on Sunday morning. In spite of the short visit I really had a good time. It was great to get back to the desert as well as see my friends from high school and loads of other people I haven't seen in years.

Weddings are always strange affairs, but this one was even more bizarre for me because it ended up being like a mini high school reunion. Running into people you haven't seen in years can be awkward, and while I sometimes enjoy awkward situations that I have control of, this was not one of those situations, hence drinking needed to commence post-haste.

There was no open bar at this wedding. Bollocks! What kind of Friday wedding doesn't have an open bar? The kind that hates me. There was a cash bar associated with the wedding that had prices so abhorrent that I cannot even print them here. Luckily I, being an experienced drinker, found the hotel lobby bar and was rewarded with prices half as high. Once adequately lubricated I started making the rounds and catching up with old classmates, parents of people I liked, parents of people I disliked and various other interesting and boring people.

After a while it struck me that we respond to other people on a much more primitive level than I think we realize, at least initially. When we meet people for the first time we instantly make judgments about them. Even before they speak we're deciding how we feel about this person in front of us based on their face, hair, posture, clothes, etc. Wandering around talking to people at this wedding made me realize that we do the same thing with people we already know but haven't seen in a long time. I looked around the room and spotted a lot of people that I knew I would talk to but that I, as bad as this sounds, didn't really have any interest in catching up with. I knew before I even talked to these people that I didn't really care what they'd been up to the last 5 years. And then there were the people that I instantly felt drawn to, some of them people I hadn't known well in high school. I found myself wanting to know what their lives were like, what they had been doing, who they were at this stage in their lives. I can't explain how I knew that I was interested in these people's live and not the lives of these other people, but for the most part my initial radar was pretty spot on. Who knows, maybe thinking beforehand that I wouldn't find these people interesting colored our actual interaction. People that know me well will observe that although I'm no misanthrope, one of the things I am not is a lover of all people, so maybe it's that. Either way it was an interesting social experiment.

The rest of my time in Phoenix was spent catching up with other friends not at the wedding, visiting my favorite Arizona spots, which included Mill Ave. in Tempe, The Pita Jungle (home of my favorite black bean burger), Chipotle (why do we still not have one of these in Nashville?), Kazimierz Wine Bar (this place is too amazing to be fully described here) and Jamaican Blue Coffee House/Bar which sadly closed its doors shortly after I headed back to Nashville.

There was no time for sleeping while I was there, so I continued my longterm sleep deprivation research project. Neither was this a time for not drinking, so I kept my body's alcohol level around it's usual homeostasis. Mixing drinking with sleep deprivation is a nice little cocktail that allows you to get to the place where you can say mostly exactly what you want without thinking too much about it. This is a place I like to be, so overall it was a pretty great weekend.