Respect the dance floor because the dance floor never lies. The DJ is not the star.
Ben Watt, via one of my old PoliSci professors.
Tag: quotes
If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, “What is your greatest failure?” I always have the same answer – We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!
All these different kinds of fantastic music you hear today – course it’s all guitars now – used to hear that way back in the old sanctified churches where the sisters used to shout till their petticoats fell down. There ain’t nothing new. Old soup used over.
The primary source is the book Louis Armstrong: A Self Portrait, but I first read it yesterday in the excellent-so-far How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music.
Please don’t repeat that tired old meme about how I shouldn’t believe everything I read on Wikipedia. It knows a damned sight more than I do.
Poets put lovers under trees, and nobody asks where that tree came from. Why can’t Kubrick put his aging man in a bedroom?
I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love.
You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s what I’m doing when I begin a piece. I’m digging through everything to find something.
[…]
Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s primal, and very private. It’s a way of saying to the gods, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just wander around in these back hallways…” and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell.
Twyla Tharp on hunting for ideas.
One of the tasks of the film critic of tomorrow – perhaps he will even be called a “television critic” – will be to rid the world of the comic figure the average film critic and film theorist of today represents: he lives from the glory of his memories like the seventy-year-old ex-court actresses, rummages about as they do in yellowing photographs, speaks of names that are long gone. He discusses films no one has been able to see for ten years or more (and about which they can therefore say everything and nothing) with people of his own ilk; he argues about montage like medieval scholars discussed the existence of God, believing all these things could still exist today. In the evening, he sits with rapt attention in the cinema, a critical art lover, as though we still lived in the days of Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, and Eisenstein. He thinks he is seeing bad films instead of understanding that what he sees is no longer film at all.
The Film Critic of Tomorrow. Rudolf Arnheim, 1935. Ah, the troubles of understanding and reconciling The New with the vast collection of Things We Already Love.
I find that more and more nonfiction authors are confusing Book Idea with Long Magazine Article Idea.
This past weekend I did the 40-mile hike I’d been pondering for a while. It was hard. It was worth it. I will do it again. I hadn’t done proper hiking since early January, so I was feeling a bit like Dickens:
Restlessness, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes feel as if it had been a year—though I had the strangest nervous miseries before I stopped. If I couldn’t walk fast and far I should just explode and perish.
The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.
Warhol on good art vs bad art. Brilliant.
“It’s worth knowing about ten times as much as you ever use, so you can move freely.”—Ian McEwan
“You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.”
It’s just so damn easy to look upon someone else and jealously think, “Wow, he sure got lucky.” Real people did not have great opportunities fall in their lap. Mostly, crappy opportunities come along, and in the meantime, you make the best of them.
—Po Bronson [via powazek]
My favorite part from Randy Pausch‘s book, The Last Lecture:
I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every time, because hip is short-term. Earnest is long-term.
Earnestness is highly underestimated. It comes from the core, while hip is trying to impress you with the surface.
“Hip” people love parodies. But there’s no such thing as a timeless parody, is there? I have more respect for the earnest guy who does something that can last for generations, and that hip people feel the need to parody.
“The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.”—from a collection of McLuhanisms.
Emmet Connolly collected a bunch of worthy quotes from reading Brian Eno’s book, A Year with Swollen Appendices. I didn’t figure him to be so cantankerous. My two favorites:
I gave a talk about self-generating systems and the end of the era of reproduction Äî imagining a time in the future when kids say to their grandparents, “So you mean you actually listened to exactly the same thing over and over again?”
and
Once we get used to the idea that we are no longer consumers of “finished” works, but that we are people who engage in conversations and interactions with things, we find ourselves leaving a world of “know you own station” passivity and we start to develop a taste for active engagement. We stop regarding things as fixed and unchangeable, as preordained, and we increasingly find ourselves practicing the idea that we have some control.
“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.” —Stravinsky
“Most normal persons are now taught to neglect far too much the sort of excitement which the mind itself manufactures out of unexciting things.” —G.K. Chesterton on the Joy of Dullness
Mark Larson 