In my sixties I did what I couldn’t do in my twenties.
When I go on the road, I take another chair with me, a black leather recliner, so that I can have the feel of home. I have them set it up on the wings of the stage and I sit there instead of in the dressing room.
Any minute playing “Good Vibrations” is a minute that I feel spiritually whole. I hope that any minute hearing it is the same.
We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down. By fighting and taming the demons that laid them low and now reside in us.
All I do know is as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher.
When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets our town with the smell of damp coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé factory at the town’s eastern edge. I don’t like coffee but I like that smell. It’s comforting; it unites the town in a common sensory experience; it’s good industry, like the roaring rug mill that fills our ears, brings work and signals our town’s vitality. There is a place here—you can hear it, smell it—where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink themselves drunk on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town.
No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride. The success of your journey and your destination all depend on who's driving.
We are a nation of immigrants and no one knows who’s coming across our borders today, whose story might add a significant page to our American story. Here in the early years of our new century, as at the turn of the last, we are once again at war with our “new Americans.” As in the last, people will come, will suffer hardship and prejudice, will do battle with the most reactionary forces and hardest hearts of their adopted home and will prove resilient and victorious.
You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say.
Tonight the crowd looked so geriatric I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers. By the end of the set, they were all on their feet, albeit shakily, rocking.... So this, now, is what I do: assisted living.
There it sinks into a coma between two thin stretches of woods. Day after day passes. More and more empty tins are lying by the side of the train. Crows and magpies gather for the feast in larger and larger flocks. Wasteland ... solitude ... the fox has laid his stealthy tracks to the very train. The engine, one carriage hitched to it, makes daily trips to a larger station to fetch our midday meal and newspapers. Influenza has invaded our compartments. We re-read Anatole France and Klyuchevsky's History .... The cold is 53 degrees below zero. Our engine keeps rolling back and forth . . . to avoid freezing . . . we do not even know where we are.
From this train, through the darkness of night, Trotsky saw Russia for the last time. The train ran through the streets and the harbour of Odessa, the city of his childhood and his first ambitions and dreams of the world. In his memories there always stood out the old Tsarist governor of Odessa who had exercised 'absolute power with an uncurbed temper' and who 'standing in his carriage, fully erect, shouted curses in his hoarse voice across the street, shaking his fist'. Another cursing and hoarse voice and another shaking fist--or was it the same?-now pursued the man in his fiftieth year through the streets of his childhood. Once the sight of the satrap made him shrink, 'adjust the school bag and hurry home'. Now the prison-train hurried through the harbour where he was to embark on a boat which would take him to the unknown; and he could only reflect on the incongruity of his fate.
“Whoever wants the Soviet Union back has no brain. Whoever doesn’t miss it has no heart.” - Putin
That same year the same Yakovlev explained on television that the decree rehabilitating all those who had been persecuted since 1917 was not at all a measure of clemency, as people in the Party were saying, but of repentance: “We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon. The goal of this decree is to rehabilitate us, who by remaining silent and looking away were accomplices to these crimes.” In short, there was a sudden consensus that for the last seventy years the country had been in the hands of a gang of criminals.
He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag; I suspend my judgment on the matter. But … I thought to myself, his romantic, dangerous life says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that’s happened since the end of the second world war.
He walks home along Madison Avenue looking at the passers-by, above all the men, and judging them. Better than me? Worse? Most are better dressed: this is a rich part of town. A lot of them are taller. Some are more handsome. But he alone has the hard, determined look of someone who’s able to kill. And all of them, when they happen to make eye contact, look away in fright.
I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.
Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.
The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.
The hunger for land: that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind.
By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.
Duchamp, who once told William Copley that he had “developed parasitism to a fine art,” was still living on practically nothing then. The rent on his 14th Street studio was still only thirty five dollars a month. He owned one suit, which he brushed and cleaned himself. When he went to spend a weekend with Teeny in Lebanon or Teeny’s friend’s house in Easthampton, where they were often invited during the summer months, he never took a suitcase. He would wear two shirts, one on top of the other, and carry a toothbrush in his jacket pocket.
"The more I live among artists, the more I am convinced that they are fakes from the minute they get to be successful in the smallest way. This means also that all the dogs around the artists are crooks. If you see the combination of fakes and crooks how have you been able to keep some kind of faith (and in what?) Don’t name a few exceptions to justify a milder opinion about the whole “art game”. In the end, a painting is declared good only if it is worth “so much.” It may even be accepted by the “holy” museums. So much for posterity… This will give you an idea of the kind of mood I am in – stirring up the old ideas of disgust. But it is only on account of you. I have lost so much interest (all) in the question that I don’t suffer from it. You still do."
"I wanted the idea to grip the mind of the viewer like a woman's vagina grips a cock."
“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”
“Always destroy what is in you.”
“Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.”
“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement. “
“Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.”
“Thought is made in the mouth.”
“Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.”
And on the other side for lack of sun there is death perhaps
waiting for you in the uproar of a dazzling whirlwind with a thousand explosive arms
stretched toward you man flower passing from the seller's hands to
those of the lover and the loved
passing from the hand of one event to the other passive and sad parakeet
the teeth of doors are chattering and everything is done with
impatience to make you leave quickly
man amiable merchandise eyes open but tightly sealed
cough of waterfall rhythm projected in meridians and slices
globe spotted with mud with leprosy and blood
winter mounted on its pedestal of night poor night weak and sterile
draws the drapery of cloud over the cold menagerie
and holds in its hands as if to throw a ball
luminous number your head full of poetry
― Tristan Tzara, L'Homme approximatif
DADAIST DISGUST
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: DADA; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: DADA: every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: DADA; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of eve ry useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of core's soul pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: DADA DADA DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:
LIFE.
"I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and nazism, I would choose communism."
Speaking in the House of Commons, autumn 1937
"I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes."
Writing as president of the Air Council, 1919
"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King."
Commenting on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931
"(India is) a godless land of snobs and bores."
In a letter to his mother, 1896
"I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place."
Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937
"The choice was clearly open: crush them with vain and unstinted force, or try to give them what they want. These were the only alternatives and most people were unprepared for either. Here indeed was the Irish spectre - horrid and inexorcisable."
Writing in The World Crisis and the Aftermath, 1923-31
"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed."
Churchill to Asquith, 1910
"One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."
From his Great Contemporaries, 1937
"You are callous people who want to wreck Europe - you do not care about the future of Europe, you have only your own miserable interests in mind."
Addressing the London Polish government at a British Embassy meeting, October 1944
"So far as Britain and Russia were concerned, how would it do for you to have 90% of Romania, for us to have 90% of the say in Greece, and go 50/50 about Yugoslavia?"
Addressing Stalin in Moscow, October 1944
"This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
Writing on 'Zionism versus Bolshevism' in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 1920
Then came the culmination in ignominy of a long career or splendour and sleaze, glory and tastelessness in movies: The Canonball Run 2.
His schoolmates had never really known him. Even his loving familiy could not tell for sure what lay within this kid who moseyed around among them with a hat on, singing. There was a pin-tumbler sidebar lock on his guts that no one could pick. That was just the way he was, and it was just the way he always would be.
Unlettered and rough-cut, Dino possessed both wiles and wisdom beyond his years – anyone trying to fuck with his mind or his body or his soul found this out forthwith. But the wisdom served by those wiles was an annihilating wisdom. It was the wisdom of the old ways, a wisdom through which the seductions of reason and love and truth and all such frail and flimsy lepidoptera would in their seasons emerge and thrive, wither and die. The sum of Dino’s instincts had to do with the old ways, those ways that were like a wall, ways that kept the world lontano, as the mafiosi would say: distant, safely and wisely at bay. That was how he liked it: lontano, like the flickering images on the theater screen that gave him pleasure as he sat alone, apart from them and unknown to them, in the dark.
Those close to him could sense it: He was there, but he was not really there; a part of them, but apart from them as well. The glint in his eye was disarming, so captivating and so chilling at once, like lantern-light gleaming on nighttime sea: the tiny soft twinkling so gaily inviting, belying for an instant, then illuminating, a vast unseen cold blackness beneath and beyond. The secret in its depth seemed to be the most horrible secret of all: that there was no secret, no mystery other than that which resides, not as a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be discovered, but as blank immanence, in emptiness itself.
There was a picnic in Beatty Park. Roozy had gotten hold of an eight-millimeter movie camera, and they were all going to be in pictures. No one who saw that movie ever forgot it. The camera captured the silent laughter of the Crocettis and the Barrs. It followed Dino’s friends back and forth as they ran and fumbled, threw and jumped in a makeshift football game. There was merriment everywhere, but there was no Dino. Then the camera scanned to the right, to a tree off in the distance, and there he was by himself under the tree, away from it all, caught unawares and expressionless, abstractedly toying with a twig, sort of mind-whittling it. That was Dino, all right; the Dino inside the Dino who sang and swore and loafed and laughed.
He was born alone. He would die alone. These truths, he, like every punk, took to heart. But in him they framed another truth, another solitary, stubborn stone in the eye of nothing. There was something, a knowing, in him that others did not apprehend. He was born alone, and he would die alone, yes. But in between — somehow — the world in all its glory would hunker down before him like a sweet-lipped High Street whore.
“I hired him,” Hawks remembered, “because an agent wanted me to meet him. And I said, ‘Well, get him around here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’ The agent said, ‘He can’t be here at nine.’ So he came in about ten-thirty, and I said, ‘Why the hell couldn’t you be here at nine o’clock?’ He said, ‘I was working in Las Vegas, and I had to hire an airplane and fly down here.’ And that made me think, ‘Well, my Lord, this guy really wants to work.’ So I said, ‘You’d better go over and get some wardrobe.’ He said, ‘Am I hired?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. Anybody who’ll do that ought to get a chance to do it.’ He came back from wardrobe looking like a musical-comedy cowboy. I said, ‘Dean, look, you know a little about drinking. You’ve seen a lot of drunks. I want a drunk. I want a guy in an old dirty sweatshirt and an old hat.’ And he said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to tell me any more.’ He went over, and he came back with the outfit that he wore in the picture. He must have been successful because Jack Warner said to me, ‘We hired Dean Martin. When’s he going to be in this picture?’ I said, ‘He’s the funny-looking guy in the old hat.’ ‘Holy smoke, is that Dean Martin?’
“Dean did a great job. It was fun working with him. All you had to do was tell him something. The scene where he had a hangover, which he did in most of the scenes, there was one where he was suffering, and I said, ‘Look, that’s too damn polite. I knew a guy with a hangover who’d pound his leg trying to hurt himself and get some feeling in it.’ ‘Okay, I know that kind of guy,’ he said. ‘I can do it.’ And he went on and did the scene with no rehearsal or anything.”
"A fearsomely cruel man . . . probably the most sadistic man I'd ever met."
- Marlon Brando
A deeply congenial character who seemed to epitomize the human condition itself, flawed and frail and funny.
