Friday, October 09, 2009

Where It's At

Tom Waits provides the answer to that old chestnut, 'Where do you get your ideas?'
"You know how it is," he says. "If you're a writer you know that the stories don't come to you, you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were. And then when the record label would send me on tour, I always resisted checking into the usual places. I'd step off the bus and look for the hotels named after presidents." Hotels named after presidents, he argues, guarantee a certain grubby authenticity. "The Taft!" Waits says with relish. "You could usually rely on finding a Taft in every town. Take me to the Taft! You walk in and there they are: the old men in the lobby."

3 Comments:

Blogger R Schechter said...

Thanks for this - hadn't seen the Guardian interview. Typical but still amusing. Hadn't heard about the live album, either. Have you seen Parnassus yet?

October 11, 2009 9:35 pm  
Blogger Paul McAuley said...

Hope to see it next week. The trailer is bursting with all kinds of good stuff...

October 12, 2009 11:11 am  
Blogger Paul McAuley said...

Oops, this is probably a better link to that trailer . . .

October 12, 2009 11:14 am  

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