![]() ![]() They’re so crucially, unmistakable him that they’re not rooted to the era in which they were made, nor the time in which their characters exists, but drawing deeply from a distant past as well as an unforeseen future-that parallel dimension in which that Auden poem read by Thomas read by Jesse exists, layers of existence and time slathered on top of each other, that past and future fighting for dominance but always in a state of perpetual entanglement. ![]() Indeed, his songs have always had a timeless quality. ’Til you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruinĪnd yet, at the same time, Waits likes to fuck with time. $100 won't fix, she has that razor sadnessĪs the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet One for every year he's away she said, such Take, for instance, the waitress or bartender who has her moment to shine in the spoken word track “9th & Hennepin” on Rain Dogs-but she shines only to rust:Īnd the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear They are, in some ways, the real people in movies that you never see, even though they’re mostly figments of Waits’ imagination-characters that are larger than life designed to remind us how small we are and how, whoever and wherever we are, we’re all just sacks of bones and flesh, trapped by our mortality and gently decaying with every second, utterly insignificant, despite how our problems may make us otherwise feel. In fact, listening to Tom Waits-especially the three ’80s records (1983’s Swordfishtrombones, 1985’s Rain Dogs, and 1987’s Franks Wild Years) that have just been reissued-you’re drawn deep into the lives of the characters that populate the world he creates, many of whom are succumbing-as we all are-to the whims of time, their lives fading like their dreams, their hopes. ![]() After all, Jesse’s impression of Auden isn’t too far off from Waits’ distinctive growl, and the poem’s subject matter-the running down of the clock and the mortality that we all face as humans-crops up often in Waits’ songs through the wounded (anti-)heroes they’re home to, who proudly prowl the underbelly of society. It could, in some parallel dimension, be a Tom Waits song. It’s (knowingly) pretentious and romantic and beautiful-Celine lying in Jesse’s arms in the empty early morning as their single night together draws to an end, the poem unfolding first in the space between them, and then the barren city that surrounds them: Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening,” but Jesse imitates two verses from a version he owns, which is a live performance by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. There’s a scene in Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s 1995 movie about young romantics exploring Vienna on a whim together, in which Ethan Hawke’s character Jesse recites part of a poem to Julie Delpy’s Celine. ![]()
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