I remember my favorite nights were just getting drunk and walking around outside the East Village kicking over garbage cans. Just the night. Just that it would be night again. And you could go out, you know? It just seemed glorious.
- Legs McNeill
The old sound was alcoholic. The tradition was finally broken. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. Ultra sonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Hey, don't be afraid. You'd better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All diffrent kinds of plastic- pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, nonattached plastic.
- Lou Reed
I always thought the ONLY way to really conquer evil is to make love to it. My favourite dream is always the one where I face the devil. I'm in the nude and the devil appears, and he is a beautiful blue. He looks like a mannequin, he looks like a robot. He doesn't have any clothes on, of course, and he's blue and shiny. I keep hearing voices that say, "It's him! It's him!" And I go, "Okay."
So he comes and faces me and I look at him and he's a little taller than me, not much taller, but a little taller, and I say, "I like you." And he says, "I like you too." But he starts beating me up, RA RA RA RA, and I'm down on the floor - and then all of the sudden, he turns into a little baby, like a baby, just a few months old, and then I fuck him, ha ha ha ha. And while I'm fucking him, he's moving his hands, he's moving them like a helpless baby.
So I always thought that to conquer evil, you have to make love to it. You have to understand it.
- Arturo Vega
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I feel it's not beautiful? And very shortly you discover there is no reason...
Every something is an echo of nothing...
Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food...
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else...
Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord...
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot...
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience...
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all...
Every day you amass knowledge in a frantic race against death that death must win. You want to find out everything in the time you have; yet in the end you wonder why you bothered, it'll all be lost. I keep trying to explain this to anyone who will listen.
I could hear noises in the apartment over us, and thought about the people who lived here, the human hordes who filled the subways in the morning and sat in front of the TV at night, who sooner or later fell ill from their labor and the hopelessness of their efforts. A camp of the living and the dead, as Aldo Rossi had once described the city, where only a few symbols manage to survive.
... If you give in, you don't have to struggle.
The Road! It's an amazing thing. It runs from Guangzhou across China, then winds its way across Kazakhstan, enters through the gates in our Southern Wall, and then traverses the breadth of Mother Russia to Brest. From there – straight to Paris. The Guangzhou-Paris Road. Since the manufacturing of all necessary goods flowed over to China bit by bit, they built this Road to connect China to Europe. It’s got ten lanes, and four tracks underneath for high speed trains. Heavy trailers crawl along the road with their goods 24/7, and the silvery trains whistle. It’s a real feast for the eyes.
... “Haaaaiiiilll!”
Lord, don’t let us die...
I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.
... I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.
