the handshake

Tom Waits & Beck (Part #1)

smriti:

becktionary:

Tom Waits and Beck talk. It’s pretty amazing. Tidbits are:

BH: I was born in the McArthur park area.
TW: You remember when they drained McArthur Park, the lake?
BH: I do, yeah…
TW: They found unbelievable things: Cars, human bones, weaponry.
BH: They should have done an exhibit.
TW: I don’t know why they didn’t. I thought that’s why they drained it.
BH: I’d always heard that when they drained the Echo Park Lake they found an amateur submarine.
TW: Oh, my God.
BH: I don’t know if that was lore.
TW: You mean a homemade submarine?
BH: Yeah, I think it was older too, from the early days of “home submarine building.” I don’t know if that subculture still exists?
TW: That was the East Kids.
BH: There’s so many different versions of the city.

[…]

BH: I think of the city as a sort of mirage. If you look at pictures of the city a hundred years ago it’s just a bunch of weeds and desert dust. Its not really supposed to be here. I was always fascinated by the city it was meant to be. I guess it was a place created by developers. It’s not really like a city where some people roam around and then they find a good piece of land, and then they test it out for a while and make sure there is water so they don’t die, and then they decide to make a city. I started looking at some pictures…Beverly Hills was originally supposed to be called Morocco Junction. I started thinking, if they’d gone with that name we’d be in a whole other situation. I was wondering if there were any things that you remember? It seems like it’s shed its skin so many times.

[…]

TW: It’s like they found one of those van Gogh’s at a garage sale. This woman bought it and she was using it to block out the sun in her kitchen. She was using it as a window shade, so it was getting all faded from the sun. And she cut it because it didn’t fit the window. When they finally discovered she had a van Gogh as a window shade, they brought in all these experts from the museum and they were all filling in her living room and they said, “How can you cut off the top off this painting?” And she said, “It was just a little piece of the sky.” Sometimes it’s the value you attach to things. It’s subjective. And we record on stuff that’s going to disintegrate. Just like films are made on celluloid that’s going to vanish, it’s going to be gone. It’s like drawing on wax paper or something.