Tom Waits Newsletter
Sign-up to receive daily news on Tom Waits by email.
Tom Waits Filmography
Source:
Theiapolis
Tom Waits Resources
Table of Content
Tom Waits: Early Career
Born in Pomona, California, Waits' recording career began in 1971, after he relocated to Los Angeles and signed with Herb Cohen, manager of
Frank Zappa, among others. After numerous abortive recording sessions, his first record, the melancholic, country-tinged Closing Time (1973) received warm reviews, but he first gained national attention when his "Ol' 55" was recorded by The Eagles in 1974. The Heart of Saturday Night showed his roots as a nightclub singer, half speaking and half crooning ballads, often with a soft jazz background. The 1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner, recorded in a studio but with a small audience to capture the ambience of a live show, captures this phase of his career, including the lengthy spoken interludes between songs that punctuated his live act.
Small Change (1976) featuring famed drummer Shelly Manne, was jazzier still, and songs such as "The Piano Has Been Drinking" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" cemented his hard living reputation, with a lyrical style pitched somewhere between Raymond Chandler and Charles Bukowski. Foreign Affairs (1977) and Blue Valentine (1978) were in a similar vein, but showed further refinement of his artistic voice.1980 saw the commencement of a long working relationship with
Francis Ford Coppola, who asked him to provide music for his film One From The Heart
. Waits would also act in Coppola's Rumblefish
, The Outsiders
, The Cotton Club
and Dracula (as the insane Renfield), and work with such directors as Jim Jarmusch and Robert Altman. In August 1980, he married Kathleen Brennan, whom he had met on the set of One From The Heart
. With his wife, he wrote and performed in Big Time, a slightly surreal concert movie.His wife is regularly credited as co-author of many songs on his later released albums, and is often cited by Waits as a major influence on his work.
-
1980s and later >>
Table of Content
Latest Film News
Latest news on Tom Waits
LiteratureSparechange.gov
While we're waiting for the new economic stimulus plan to be unveiled on change.gov, or while we're waiting for it to kick-in, how about developing a backup plan at sparechange.gov? Here's Tom Waits in a YouTube video singing the Depression-era "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931). It's a little rougher than the traditionally smooth Bing Crosby version. They used to tell me, I was building a dream With peace and glory ahead. Why should I be standing in line Just waiting for bread? Once I built a railroad, I made it run I made it run against time Once i built a railroad, and now it's done Brother, can you spare a dime? ... Once in khaki suits, Ah, gee we looked swell Full of that yankee-doodle dee-dum! Brother, can you spare a dime? There are more and more people all around us needing our help....
Published: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:45:31 GMT - Source: Boingboing.Net - Read the articleLiteratureM.I.A. Down In The Hole
A new video, "S.U.S. (Save UR Soul)," directed by (a very pregnant) M.I.A. and featuring Blaqstarr mashup/covering Tom Waits' "Way Down In The Hole," which various artists have covered as the theme song for HBO's "The Wire," with M.I.A. crooning about her laptop. On the video's lo-fi look, from the YouTube credits: "cheapest video ever made , i spent $9.95 on it." On Myspace, M.I.A. blogs: Me and Blaqstarr found the image at the end from a Joy Division video and thought about the election and thats how people want you to see the world , black/ white , good/ evil, jesus/devil for you the words are Obama vs Mc Cain for me its terror vs genocide simple maths so we put it on at the end to show how far we've gone and how far we've come, i have to start staying at home more because i dont think i can fit through my front door anymore but i want this to do the traveling for me....
Published: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:18:34 GMT - Source: Boingboing.Net - Read the articleEuropeAdrian Searle on The Killing Machine an installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
The machinery busies itself around the chair, which looks as though it has been reclaimed from the surgery of a dead dentist. Vicious probes articulated on necks that look suspiciously like the arms of old Anglepoise lamps lunge forward and go to work about an invisible body. There's no one strapped into the chair, but you get the idea. The devices go in, stabbing and swiping. Lights go on and off. Audience participation in the operation of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's 2007 work The Killing Machine would liven up their show at Modern Art Oxford no end. As it is, all we're allowed to do is push the red button that sets the thing in motion. Can I sit in the chair? Please, Mum, please!As the machine gets into the swing of things, an automated drum beats, and more drumsticks have their way on an electric guitar that has been plumbed into the superstructure of this grisly yet risible tableau. A disco ball starts spinning overhead, filling the room with movement and light. This, I suppose, is to illustrate the ecstasies and agonies of the prisoner, who by now will have been partially shredded by the enthusiastic and tireless operations of the pneumatically powered machinery. The Killing Machine is based on the device in Kafka's 1919 short story In the Penal Colony. This has never struck me as one of Kafka's better works. At the heart of the tale is a fiendish mechanised harrow that carves or tattoos the sentence handed down to the prisoner into his flesh. Kafka seems to relish his detailing of all the embellishments and refinements too much. The artists, according to the catalogue, were also thinking about the death penalty in America. The Killing Machine comes at the very end of their exhibition. It is the coup de grâce, the finale, the main attraction. But it's a flop. No one is even mildly appalled. We've seen and heard too much for this to touch us. Show us how waterboarding works. Show me those pictures from Abu Ghraib again, or those things the junta did down in Argentina. How about a public stoning? Compared with real life, this is entertainment. The work of Cardiff and Miller has a lot going for it. It is accessible, sometimes spooky and disturbing, sometimes enigmatic and strange. The Canadian couple have been working together since the 1990s and have had many exhibitions around the world. They've won prizes at the Venice Biennale; they've shown in America, Europe and Australia. They make audio pieces, they work with orchestras, they make complex installations and tease us with their elusive stories. They are popular and accessible. I want to like them more than I do.Cue thunder, flashing lights and a grainy overlay of crackly old records, the long-dead voices of muffled tenors and warbling divas. In the middle of the gallery is a ramshackle hut from which most of these lights and sounds emit. We peer in from the surrounding darkness. Old radios flicker into life and decrepit turntables stop and restart at the whim of a spectral DJ, whose disembodied voice has been distressed by hard times and bad living. His woman has gone, and the voice tells us that the place is falling apart. "The animals are taking over. The weasels eat the mice and the squirrels. If they start on the records, I'll have to poison them ..."We are interrupted by an invisible train, clanging and rattling through the gallery, the noise projected from speakers dotted around the walls. This is fun. Maybe his baby left on the train; maybe she tied herself to the tracks - anything to get away from that damn voice and those old Enrico Caruso records. "It's only an opera, after all. Everyone dies in the end," says the voice, wearily. Maybe it was cliches like this that drove her away. Finally, waves of taped applause fill the space. Then an orchestra fires up, and the whole farrago starts all over again.Opera for a Small Room is something of a tour de force. Inspired, in part, by an old collection of opera LPs found in a sale, its most salient influences were apparently Krapp's Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett, and Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire. But an artwork can be less than the sum of its influences. To me, the unavoidable model for the unseen narrator is less Beckett's Krapp, with his old spools of memories, or the old man in Wenders and Peter Handke's filmic homage to Berlin, than Tom Waits, with his ruinous voice, his rancid memories and stewed regrets. He don't need no installation. He can do it all in a song. Even though there is much to like about Cardiff and Miller's work - its layerings of fiction; its plays on time and space, place and situation; its technical sophistication - it frequently misses the mark, or is so overegged as to make us not care very much about it. At their worst, Cardiff and Miller just do too much, and direct the spectator too much. In Oxford, we are plunged first of all into the 1995 installation The Dark Pool. This is yet another junk-shop house of memories and ghosts. Imagine one of Mike Nelson's scary rooms or an early Ed Kienholz installation redone as a ghost story, the key to which is in a dusty old suitcase slung onto a table. In the suitcase is a model lake. It is night. The shore is strung with little lights. Some cars are drawn up and tiny people stand on a beach next to the brown water. This is great - it reminds me of an early Peter Doig painting - but there's too much else going on in this meticulously dressed stage set for any of it to really matter. Many artists have attempted similarly complex installations: think of Nelson, Kienholz, Ilya Kabakov, Juan Muñoz, Gregor Schneider, Christoph Büchel, and most recently Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, in her installation in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Success or failure of their works is never a matter of realism, but of a different kind of complexity and engagement, and the purchase they can make on our imaginations. Only two works here demonstrate why Cardiff and Miller have achieved such a high international reputation. One is a slide lecture, with a wonky screen on a stand, a projector, a few rows of chairs. We hear the artists discussing the slides as they try to find an order that tells the story of Miller's grandfather's trek across Canada to New York, in order to see a cancer specialist. On the way, he took lots of pictures of the Rockies, the prairies, waterfalls and lakes. We overhear the artists' fractious conversation. Our imaginations are engaged mostly because they have introduced just a small slippage between the familiar and everyday, and the story they are trying to impose on these old and faded transparencies. It's a very simple conceit, and doesn't depend on a lot of paraphernalia.Similarly, their 1999 Muriel Lake Incident is a miniaturised cinema mounted in a big plywood box on a stand. You look into the darkened box, and there are rows of seats and balconies, with a distant screen. This is a great play on scale. Don the headphones and you're in there, too, watching. You want to turn and tell the couple whispering and munching popcorn behind you to shut up, but there's no one there, apart from their voices over the headphones. The mind wills it to be real. There is also a slippage between the little black-and-white movie on the screen, and events taking place in the model cinema itself. For a moment you forget where you are. The film jams in the projector, celluloid burns and shots ring out. Did something happen in the movie, or did it happen in our heads? This is deftly done. We never forget we are embroiled in an illusion, but it captivates us none the less. It doesn't need all the overdone theatrical flim-flam, the ghost-train histrionics. If only the magic were sustained elsewhere. ? Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's The House of Books Has No Windows is at Modern Art Oxford until January 18. Details: 01865 722733 or modernartoxford.org.uk Artguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:14:45 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the article
Sign-up to receive daily news on Tom Waits by email. See Also:
