We're All Mad Here and the Tiniest of Mammals
House. Some assembly required. June 2021.
Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
- Tom Waits
On Tuesday I was uploading a video I made for work to YouTube and one of the recommended videos was an interview with Tom Waits called “We’re All Mad Here” and somehow it comes out that the smallest mammal on the planet is the bumblebee bat which is as cute as it sounds and the interview goes on about an emu farm—I think he was promoting his albums “Alice” which is obviously from “Alice in Wonderland” and “Blood Money” which less obviously is the story of Woyzeck based on the play by Georg Büchner and the opera/musical directed by Robert Wilson a few years ago that Waits wrote the music for. I remember hearing a spurious story that Queen Victoria loved “Alice” so much she asked that Lewis Carroll dedicate his next book to her which was the book “An Elementary Treatise on Determinants” by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson the mathematician of course. But like “The Black Rider,” also directed by Robert Wilson and written by William S. Burrows, yes the “Naked Lunch”-and-shot-his-wife-William-Tell-style Burrows, Waits didn’t sing in the opera so I didn’t make an effort to hear it but he did play Renfield in Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” that year.
Otherwise, these things inspired me recently:
Bees can tell time. This article explains the very weird way we know this.
The Touré-Raichel Collective - Azawade. What happens when a guitarist and singer from Mali and a pianist from Israel meet by accident in an airport and then record a concert in Tel Aviv?
Trassel. Just scroll.