What's Waits Doing Out There?

Tom Waits shams obnoxious playboy, edgy artist, and slightly obscure cultural icon. He isn’t a household name—only select people under twenty-five know of him—but he’s tried everything from folk to opera. Waits has a new project scheduled to release in 2008: Award winning Icelandic filmmaker Dagur Kari’s The Good Heart. Waits plays a bartender who suffers five heart-attacks and he won’t have trouble staggering or slurring; he did plenty of both for his 1993 role in Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts. He’s also sounded hung-over ever since he released his first album.

In anticipation of Waits’ new project, I want to revive a gem of a film that never made it on to youtube.com or itunes. Last fall, artist Matt Smithson composed an intonation piece to Waits’ “What’s He Building in There?” Smithson’s film is short, smart, and striking, keeping Waits’ guttural voice and eerie persona from becoming intolerable. I wish Kari the best of luck, but I doubt he can do as much with Waits as Smithson did in under a minute of screen time.

http://www.manvsmagnet.com/motion/waits/waits.html