To understand the war in Iraq, you first have to understand the people who are fighting it. . . .
Wilkerson has an outstanding tattoo on his foot, an arrow pointing to his big toe that reads TAG GOES HERE. Back home in Oklahoma, he'd been one half of the inspiration for an underground comic book called Split-Dick and Stretch-Nuts. Which half? Wilkerson could pull his nut sack so far out of his zipper that he could balance a sixteen-ounce can of Heineken on the outstretched membrane-tray. It was a trick the whole squad referred to, with reverent awe, as "The Grandmother's Tongue." "I just have stretchy skin, I guess," he said.
The conventional wisdom about Iraq these days is that this war was and is a colossal blunder, a classic crime of hubris that has metastasized into a disaster rapidly spinning far beyond our control. And, well, who knows, that may be true -- but only a goddamn Canadian can fail to appreciate the dream of omnipotence roaring along these Middle Eastern highways.
[speechless]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
from “Tom Petty’s Last Dance”, retrospective/interview/review in same edition:
Square One
Saving Grace (both from forthcoming CD, Highway Companion)
Don’t Fade on Me (acoustic, reviewed in “Deep Cuts”, Wildflowers)
I think of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as movie soundtrack music, i.e. how could anyone forget the last victim in Silence of the Lambs singing along at the top of her lungs to “American Girl” right before she gets shoved in the hole, on the wall of which she sees the broken nail of the last girl who tried to claw her way out? But these tracks are all really (really) good.
bonus: You Got Lucky
