'We're all insects crawling on the shiny hood of a Cadillac'

""[Tom Waits] was born not to circus performers but to a pair of teachers in Pomona, California. He was, by his own account, a strange little boy: bookish, overwound and with a tendency to be spooked by untoward noises. He did not thrive at school, he says, because he did not like the little holes they drilled in the cork-board ceiling, or the hooked stick they used to open the windows. He did not like being young, and took to shuffling around with his granddad's hat and cane.

Later, he fell under the spell of Charles Bukowski and the beat generation, and took to hanging out amid the flotsam of downtown LA. He was fascinated, he said, by "the great American loneliness", a loneliness that stretched from coast to coast and was as elusive and mysterious as ground fog. "Yeah, that all came from Bukowski and Kerouac," he recalls. "I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath."""

Beats the usual blog belch, or PC-kvetch from a Krugman, or Klinton. Go Bukowski State,like