Tom Waits
Blue Valentine

I remember the summer of 2004 quite well: I had just turned 15, I managed to finish the school year (5th year at the classical high school) with a respectable average of 8, and among the formidable women at my dojo, I stood out as the one who had succeeded in defeating her older brother with a perfectly executed sankaku-jime (he hasn't forgiven me yet, even after 17 years).

Stefania, our Italian teacher, was one of those unfortunately increasingly rare teachers who view their profession as a calling rather than a burden. That July afternoon, she invited me and two other classmates to her house for tea; our chats in the gazebo of her terraced house had become a regular appointment, usually accompanied by some excellent jazz from days gone by playing from the speakers. But that day, the music was different…
That cavernous, warm, and terrifying voice at the same time captivated me instantly.
Curious, I asked the teacher who it was. “Tom Waits.” Never heard of him. There was something about that music that captivated me, something primal, remote, and eternal all at once. Did I like it? Yes? No? I couldn’t say at the moment, but that raspy roar kept echoing in my head even on the way home and in the days that followed.

I decided to visit my trusted record dealer (yes: in 2004, p2p hadn't exploded yet as it would in the following years, and streaming was pure utopia, so a teenager who wanted a record, in most cases, had to buy it); I searched for that name navigating through the dust of eons covering the CDs' edges…There it is, it's him! “Tom Waits, Blue Valentine.”
The cover evoked melancholy and solitude, the same melancholy and solitude that I eagerly sought during that period when Saturday evenings were spent at home with headphones on, music blasting in my ears, and the city noise seemed so distant, even though it would have been enough to open a window to hear it again…

Back home, I inserted the CD into the player, and the notes of Somewhere seemed so familiar. How was it possible? On the second listen, with the first being very distracted as well. There had to be another explanation. And indeed…By the end of the 49-minute duration of the album, I found it: Blue Valentine was for me the concretion of all the moods, symbols, and stereotypes through which I had built my idea of America over the years, certainly inherited from the imagery that Hollywood's mythopoetic capacity had helped to spread. Tom Waits was both displacement and condensation - for those familiar with psychoanalytic jargon - of a thousand other names, all equally significant for the history and popular culture of a country and a century, or at least the first ¾ of that century. Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gershwin, Busby Berkeley and Vincente Minnelli, B.B. King, Frank Sinatra...1000 names that at the time I had barely touched upon and that now whirl in my head when I listen to this music again.

I'm not going to make rankings here or list the titles of an album where each track is a perfect gem (perhaps the only relatively weak link in the album is Red Shoes by The Drugstore, which would have fit better in other Uncle Tom's albums), but I can say that Blue Valentines and Kentucky Avenue remain among the most heartbreaking and moving pieces ever recorded, and after all these years, I still can't help but get a lump in my throat when I listen to them.

Today things are very different from that 2004: the 15-year-old I was has given way to a 32-year-old woman, more aware and disenchanted, but with the same fears and vulnerabilities as that girl that I sometimes, looking back, still find.
My brother continues to be sore about that humiliating defeat, but that was our first and only encounter: he never wanted a rematch. Today he's married and has a daughter, he's gained quite a bit of weight, and I doubt he'll ever step on a tatami again.
Stefania passed away a few years ago due to a severe illness; she left all her former students with an important lesson: not to be fooled by what emerges on the surface, just as she saw us for who we were and not for the grades we brought home. For this teaching, her most important legacy, I will never be grateful enough.
My copy of Blue Valentine is still the same.

To Stefania, with immense gratitude and the same affection as always.