I wrote a post last year on my old blog where I spoke briefly about Tom Waits. This is what I said at the time:“I Love Tom Waits. Tom Waits Sounds like he was almost beaten to death with a bottle of whiskey in a graveyard. Truly Unique. If you’ve never listened to him, I recommend Bone Machine as a dark and cool intro to the man who’s influenced more music than most people could ever hope to. Supposedly he has a new box set of “Orphan” tracks coming out in Fall 2006. We can only hope.”
Fast forward to now. Since that post was written, I’ve seen Tom Waits live in Atlanta at the Tabernacle and the fabled Orphans set has been released. The show was in the top three shows I’ve ever seen (possibly the #1 slot.) The box set is 3 discs and from the limited listen I’ve given it, it’s really great. I was discussing the set with my brother the other day and we agreed that the second disc (Bawlers) is the best. I also got a look at Tom Waits from a different perspective. My brother really likes his old stuff. The records he likes (such as Closing Time) feature Waits with a much cleaner voice and sound that leans back towards the blues. I, on the other hand, am more partial towards his later stuff. Most of my favorites feature Waits with a rougher voice and more experimental sounds. With that in mind, I told him that I’d put up a list of my favorite albums and songs. Without further ado, here you go:
ALBUMS
- Mule Variations
- Bone Machine
- Rain Dogs
- Real Gone
- Blood Money
Mule Variations is the most consistent album in my opinion. Songs like Big in Japan, Hold On, House Where Nobody Lives and Georgia Lee are great. Bone Machine is my second favorite. It’s a lot darker overall and has songs like Dirt in the Ground, Who Are You, Goin’ Out West and Black Wings. Rain Dogs is the most popular album Waits has put out in his more recent years. It’s a good summary of the later Waits era. If you’ve never listened to Waits before, songs like Singapore and Cemetery Polka sound like relics that escaped from the circus. They’re some of my favorites though. Rain Dogs also has has the fantastic Tango Till They’re Sore, Hang Down Your Head and Downtown Train. Lastly, Real Gone is an album where Waits used mouth beatboxing for most of the percussion and captured a much more raw sound. It contains some great ones as well, including Hoist That Rag, Shake It, Don’t Go Into That Barn, Make It Rain and Day After Tomorrow. I’m not sure where Blood Money fits in here. I haven’t been listening to it as long as the others but it’s really good as well. I added some tracks to it below. So there you go.
To put things in a slightly different light, I made two mix cds of Tom Waits. One was loud and rowdy and referred to as the Foot Stompin Mix. The other was lower tempo and called the Oh So Sad Mix. Here is a sampling of the Track listings for the two discs:
Foot Stompin MixÂ
- Misery Is the River of the World - Blood Money
- God’s Away On Business - Blood Money
- Starving In The Belly of a Whale - Blood Money
- Earth Died Screaming - Bone Machine
- All Stripped Down - Bone Machine
- Goin’ Out West - Bone Machine
- Big In Japan - Mule Variations
- Singapore - Rain Dogs
- Cemetery Polka - Rain Dogs
- Hoist That Rag - Real Gone
- Shake It - Real Gone
- Don’t Go Into That Barn - Real Gone
- Make It Rain - Real Gone
Oh So Sad Mix
- All the World is Green - Blood Money
- Dirt In the Ground - Bone Machine
- Who Are You - Bone Machine
- A Little Rain - Bone Machine
- Black Wings - Bone Machine
- Whistle Down the Wind - Bone Machine
- Hold On - Mule Variations
- House Where Nobody Lives - Mule Variations
- Georgia Lee - Mule Variations
- Come On Up to the House - Mule Variations
- Tango Till They’re Sore - Rain Dogs
- Hang Down Your Head - Rain Dogs
- Downtown Train - Rain Dogs
- Day After Tomorrow - Real Gone
That’s about it for my Tom Waits primer. Hope you enjoyed it.
I had someone ask me about my Vista posts. Yeah, so the final verdict is the same it was with Windows XP originally. My audio drivers were iffy, CD Burning was intermittent and iTunes crashed constantly. My RSS Reader didn’t work. I hate the new menu, User Access Controls and I’m indifferent to the Aero glass interface. Office 2007 and desktop search are completely awesome but I can run both of those on Windows XP. The drivers just aren’t there yet and the applications haven’t been fixed to work with Vista yet. I’ve given up and gone back to XP. I’ll give Vista 6 months to be released for consumers and have all of the initial bugs and drivers fixed, then try it again. I’ll also have to see what the final version of Leopard looks like. It sounds better every day.
I wanted to put another Christmas post. This one is Friends. Anyone who knows me knows that I put a lot of stock in my friends. I count myself very lucky in life to have known the people that I have known. These days, I have a better group of friends in Birmingham than I could have hoped for. I also still have a lot of friends scattered around the US. I won’t call out names since those people may not want it to be public knowledge that they hang out with me. Still, I appreciate them. You all know who you are. Merry Christmas and thanks for putting up with me for yet another year.
I just finished Into Thin Air by John Krakauer. The book is a personal accounting of one “intrinsically irrational” attempt to climb Mount Everest. The year of the events (1996) was the most deadly season in Everest climbing history. Climbing expeditions were caught on Everest in a sudden storm and 12 climbers died. The author was a member of one of the expeditions. As a climber with previous experience, he was to write an article about the commercialization of Everest for Outside magazine. He survived the terrible events on Everest when many others did not and wrote the article for Outside. Later, he wrote Into Thin Air as a full accounting of the events on Everest. This book is a true snapshot of the the emotion, thinking and preparation that goes into a climb like Everest, as well as what happens when it suddently goes very wrong. I was reminded of watching the movie Titanic (don’t lie, you saw it too), since the events are true and the story has a known ending. In this light, reading the book becomes an emotionally gripping experience. You watch the small errors mount and the players in the events are obviously clueless as to what will eventually befall them. The story culiminates in a storm that takes the lives of good men and women. It’s rough to read the events and remember that they really happened. However, I enjoyed the book immensely and have been recommeding it to others as well. I’ve also already started on one of Krakauer’s other books, Into the Wild.
One other thing that I liked is that each chapter starts with a quote from a climber (most about Everest.) I enjoyed them all but some are more bitterweet than others, this one being a prime example:
The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It’s a small scale model for living, but with a difference: Unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually be recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period, are deadly serious. - A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. - Berthold Auerbach
I won’t make this a very long post since I could go on forever. I just wanted to point out that music is a beautiful thing. I’ve been listening to music since I can remember. I spent all my money in high school on music, worked at a music store in college (that again took all my money), DJ’d for a while in college and still have tickets from the concerts that I’ve attended over the years. Music is a background to write, a place to think, a battleground for thought and a rocking good time. Music adds texture to life. There is a reason that when you hear “that song” you can still remember that person or place.
I never had the talent to play myself but I am always thankful for music.
More posts are coming. I have about four in the works. Okay, so I have the titles for four. Either way, there will be more coming soon. For now, just know that I got to see some friends last night that I don’t get to see that often. That would be awesome enough but towards the end of the night I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about since my buddy has an Xbox 360. Yeah, I’m sure you’ve seen the trailer for Gears of War (if not, watch it here).
First, the facts. Everyone I know has played this game. It’s EXTREMELY violent (the multiplayer involves stomping the heads of the people you’ve already killed.) Yet, everyone (men, women and children) thinks it’s the best game that’s been put out on a console. It’s crazy how popular it is. As for the trailer, I’m not sure if it’s a cut-scene but it doesn’t matter. It looks that good when you actually play it. You spend most of the game running into an open area, then being assaulted by large numbers of bad guys that come out of the ground. The twist is that it’s third person (the camera is above and behind you) and you have the ability to jump in and out of cover so you can duck behind a wall and poke your head out here and there to shoot at the baddies. The camera acts like a shaky-cam from a documentary where the cameraman is running. So, if you are running for cover, ducked down low, the camera is bobbing and weaving like it’s a guy following you. It’s enormously immersive. If you add the ability to chainsaw anyone who gets too close with the chainsaw conveniently attached to your gun and you have a guaranteed winner.
Even the level design is good. The last level I played featured my character running around in darkness filled with flying creatures that kill you if you step out of the light for even one second. You’re trying to keep it all together, fight off the baddies and at the same time, shoot gas tanks that you see out in the darkness to create patches of light that you can run to.
So, anyway, the point is…wow, find someone with an Xbox 360 and play this title as soon as possible.
This post is a follow-up to a previous post called What Color Is Analytical? Not only does my mom love me (I think she has to technically) but she’s also way smart. Check out the email I got yesterday:
Brian,
I read your blog about a week ago and noticed what you put in there about color coding things. You might be interested to know that your color coding system has been tested by science. At the University of Iowa in Iowa City, they discovered that using bright colors makes the information 60 percent easier to recall, greatly
reducing to-do list stress.
You might also be interested to know that music strengthens the connection between the creative right hemisphere of the brain and the analytical left hemisphere (Daniel J. Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music). Music has been shown to boost problem-solving and information-organizing skills by up to 82 percent according to Levitin. Plus, listening to music increases the number of neuron connections in the brain’s memory center, thereby enhancing one’s ability to focus on and retain details.
So keep on listening to music and playing around with the guitar. It’s good for you.
Love you and see you soon, Mom
Yeah. I’m not crazy. Thanks mom.
It’s the holiday season and the idea is to be thankful for the things you have. I’ve been thinking about how lucky I am, especially to be surrounded by such great people at work and home. I thought maybe I’d put together a “12 Days of Christmas” thing with pictures of things I’m thankful for. Then I got all anxious and was like “What if I miss a day?”. Finally I decided to just post non-numbered items between now and Christmas that I’m thankful for. Today’s thing that I’m thankful for:
Climbing
I started climbing about this time last year. In the last year, I’ve done a lot of climbing and noticeably gotten better and worse daily. It is half balance, half strength and half experience. That’s a lot of halves. Most of all, during the summer months, it gave me a reason to get off work at five and beat sundown to the rocks, a reason to get out of the house on Saturday and get a workout and a few friends that I might not have been as close with otherwise. Overall, the climbing community is friendly and willing to help out. On the other hand, climbing is a very personal sport. Even if you climb with the same three people every day, you’re the only one on the rock when it counts. It requires a focus that is very intense and individual.
In 2006, I’m thankful for climbing.
