Nothing but bones in the way

“Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?”

I stole the CD from my best friend’s apartment about 8 years ago. I don’t really know why I just took it without permission. F. would’ve given it to me had I had asked for it. I guess I was high and I liked the cover, which featured a black and white and gray out-of-focus image of a man shouting with blinders on. I tried to listen to it back then, but I never did get much into Tom Waits. To me it sounded like a Bob Dylan cartoon, a send-up and a self-serving homage to the raspy untuned “three chords and the truth” school of American bards.

I have recently gone back to BoneMachine and found this song, “Who are you?” and I can’t help but associate it with my nightmarish mid-twenties: a certain art-deco Miramar apartment languishing in the sticky-humid Puerto Rican nights; the drugs and my lesbian roommates, and a year and a half without sex. There was desperation in the air. I haven’t been that desperate in a long time. Maybe I haven’t been as alive either.

The album also makes me think about love, the ones I’ve lived through, the one I live with right now. Lies and masks and love and Tom Waits wailing in his broken voice “tell me what did you do the last time?/Why don’t you do that/ well go on ahead/take this the wrong way/time’s not your friend”. Not bad for a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Thanks F., for BoneMachine, which is a way of saying thank you for so much that cannot be clearly articulated, except –perhaps- through a Tom Waits song that I stole from your apartment all those years ago.

Adolfo Pinch is my friend

Coming soon to a blog near you:
I like to think that in a past life he was one of Leni Riefenstahl's lovers, much to the detriment of his arch-rival within the party, José Huebels (that's Goebbles, for the non-Hispanics). In fact, it's no secret that Triumph of the Will was a work that featured his behind-the-scenes talent for agit-prop. He may have died in shame as an ex-Nazi hiding out in Paraguay, but he has come back, to Puerto Rico, to make up for it all. A closeted Catholic with a passion for Pope Pious XII, the Caribbean sun is now his purgatory. Visit him and enjoy his attempts at rehabilitation as they are crushed by the San Juan morass:
http://adolfopinch.blogspot.com/

Adolfo's lives are a morality play that holds valuable lessons for us all.