Quote of the Day posts

“We all need genius. It's essential to know that Great Souls are out there, revealing the potential of the species, and we want to believe that true genius creates itself, and forces itself on the world. But we only know those geniuses who have broken through, and when we look at their stories, we often find that a random stroke of luck or a passionate believer made all the difference. If ever there was a movie genius, it was Charlie Chaplin. But anyone who works in movies will tell you that when it comes to pictures, nobody does anything alone.”

--Jon Boorstin, from the article “Who Invented Chaplin's Tramp?” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Charlie Chaplin in “The Kid” (1921). But who helped him invent the Tramp?

“The New York Yankees have their own cologne. It's made from the most expensive ingredients of all the competing colognes.”

—Stephen Colbert

“I guess some of this mad right-wing love comes from the idea that in America, anyone can become a Rich Guy if he just works hard and saves his pennies. Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay—not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay—in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.”

--Stephen King in a must-read, fun-to-read column, “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!” on The Daily Beast site

“There’s just something about Sarah Palin that upsets me. Sometimes you can’t argue with a stupid person. It’s like a toy super villain absorbing your firepower—you point out their mistakes and it makes them stronger.”

--Barry Blitt in the online article: “New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant To See.” I also like Blitt's Monica/Hilary cover and Art Spiegelman's Lady Justice.

“'She was funny and lethal right up to the end,' said Craig Seligman, a speaker at Pauline Kael's memorial service. 'One day when she was near death and I was trying to divert her with chatter about working as an editor, I said, ”It never ceases to amaze me how many people who call themselves writers actually can't write.“ And she said — very weakly — ”Yes, they say things like 'It never ceases to amaze me.'“'”

--from “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” by Brian Kellow, which the old man, Bob Lundegaard, is currently reading. Thanks, Dad!

“I hate America very deeply. The economic repression of the masses—institutionalized. Even Lenin couldn't foresee the extent of that.”

--Bill Haydon (Ian Richardson) in the 1979 BBC-TV miniseries, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” based upon the novel by John le Carré.

Bill Haydon, Soviet spy and traitor, with George Smiley (Alec Guinness) in the foreground.

“Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.”

—Opening line of Roger Ebert's review of the new movie “Think Like a Man.”

“It’ll never be boring with him.“

-- Miami Marlins' owner Jeff Loria, about manager Ozzie Guillen before the ”I love Fidel Castro, I respect Fidel Castro“ controversy that led to his five-game suspension last week. The above quote is taken from the April 9th New Yorker article ”Old Fish, New Fish: The Marlins get a Miami makeover,“ by Ben McGrath.

At one point in the article, just before Loria says the above, he and Guillen engage in what sounds like an Abbott & Costello ”Who's On First" routine. It's really someone rational trying to follow the logic of someone who is ... less so:

Guillen: If I get this man [Loria] to where he should be, it gonna be a raise.
Loria: The World Series?
Guillen: Oh, no, that’s up to them. [Nods toward players on field.]
Loria: Oh, so they should get the raise.
Guillen: I get paid to win World Series.
Loria [impatient]: O.K. So just do it.
Guillen [nods toward players again]: They gonna do it. My job? Hey, listen, if I get involved in the game more often, that means we’re horseshit. See, I stay away from them? That means we winning.

The full article, worthwhile, can be read here.

Guillen and Loria practice their routine earlier this year.

“Remember how he used to agitate on the bases? You never knew what he was going to do... So I decided I had better switch over and work from a stretch position. But you can see right there what happened—Robinson had broken my concentration. I was pitching more to Robinson than I was to Hodges, and as a result I threw one up into Gil's power and he got the base hit that beat me.”

--Vic Raschi, pitcher, New York Yankees, most likely talking about Game 2 of the 1949 World Series, which Brooklyn won 1-0.

“Carl Furillo got all the headlines the next day, and he deserved them, because he did the job. But I knew that it was Robinson who had distracted me just enough to get me to hang that curve.”

--Gene Conley, pitcher, Milwaukee Braves, most likely talking about a game, May 2, 1955, in which, in the bottom of the 12th inning, with one out, Robinson walked and Furillo followed with a 2-run, walk-off homer to beat the Braves 2-0.

It's stories like these, both from Donald Honig's oral history, “Baseball: Between the Lines,” which must give any sabremetrician pause about their ability to quantify every aspect of the game. Some stuff just doesn't show up in the stats.

Jackie Robinson, in 1955, breaking concentration

“The written rules were rigid and righteous, while the real rules were often wide open and dirty.”

--Eliot Asinof in “Eight Men Out,” his great book about the 1919 Chicago White Sox/Black Sox scandal.

Eight men who got caught, and punished, so we wouldn't know the written rules weren't the real rules.

“The moment you start preaching in a film, the moment you want to teach your audience, you are making a bad film.”

--Douglas Sirk (1897-1987), film director. I first heard this quote in Martin Scorsese's documentary “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” a must-watch for anyone who cares about film.

“You get Ingrid Bergman giving you a certain look in a movie and everyone thinks you're gorgeous."

--Humphrey Bogart

“They just came back and said, 'You're fired.' I really didn't say anything. It was like — God, I can't lose my job. I got to have my health insurance.”

--Jennifer Owens, who worked in an Amazon.com warehouse, called a “fulfillment center,” in Campbellsville, KY, in the article, “Intense Pressure on Warehouse Floor,” the fourth of The Seattle Times' four-part series on the online company.

“I'm just trying to get along without shoving anybody, that's all.”

--Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in John Ford's “The Grapes of Wrath”

SCENE: Yesterday on the Wenatchee ferry during the 4:35 PM run from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. A middle-aged man, quiet but charming, and devastatingly handsome, is hanging on the prow of the boat by himself, in the sun, and attempting to ignore the cold winds buffeting his windbreaker. He looks around toward the rest of the boat, and then up, where, on the level above him, another middle-aged man, less quiet and not quite so charming, and certainly not devastatingly handsome, is hanging with his wife. He yells down at the more charming man.

LESS QUIET MAN: You're supposed to spread your arms wide like you're in that “Titanic” movie! “King of the World!” [Laughs]

[More charming man looks up at the man, back at the prow of the boat, then back up at the man.]

MORE CHARMING MAN: Isn't there supposed to be a girl?

LESS QUIET MAN'S WIFE: That's right! [Laughs]

MORE CHARMING MAN: You get me a girl who looks like Kate Winslet and I'll do that 'King of the World' thing for you.

In truth, I was surprised we were still making 'King of the World!' jokes on the Wenatchee ferry in 2012, but I guess the movie did just get a re-release. But I had a nice ride over to Seattle. Kate Winslet did not show up.

“[Early French filmmaker George] Méliès was non-stop women. He loved the ladies, married often, had 150 mistresses if not a thousand. Méliès in a nutshell. Méliès died poor—the fate of all those who pursue something out of love.”

--Henri Langlois in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque.” Langlois died in 1977, aged 62, and poor.

Langlois, who pursued film.

“Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose.”

--Pauline Kael, from her 1969 essay, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” which I culled from this Jonathan Kirshner quadruple book review. I'm not sure if Kirshner's review had an obvious purpose, but he told me so much of what I already know, or what is already established, that I never bothered to finish it.

“I am certainly not an advocate for for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects.

But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

-- Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816. I first came across this while reading Gore Vidal's "The Second American Revolution and other Essays (1976-1982)

“People who look ahead are very rare. Most people look to the past. We walk backwards, we back our way through life. We move forward but always while looking backwards. People who envision their future and move toward it, peering ahead, are incredibly rare.”

--Henri Langlois in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque.”

“Jack [Kirby] also watched the [1990] Captain America movie. He attended the premier with Mike [Thibodeaux] by his side and thought the beginning--Cap fighting the war--wasn't that bad. Once the film moved to the present, however, showing the Red Skull on an island, he was appalled.

”'He fought to get his name on that thing,' Thibodeaux said. 'But when he came out of the theater, Jack was saying he wanted his name off the movie.'“

--from ”Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution,“ by Ronin Ro

”Captain America" was created by ... Ah, forget it.

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

--Ernest Hemingway.

I forget where I read this. I have an old Word doc with favorite quotes in it that I haven't looked at in a while and this was among them. It's also my 100th Quote of the Day, or the 100th Quote of the Day officially titled “Quote of the Day.” There are others with different titles. I chose this one for the 100th quote because ... well, that's it, isn't it? That's what we need to do. It's a quote that should be tattooed on the knuckles of my hands.

“There is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.”

--Gore Vidal, in his essay, “Love Love Love,” which first appeared in the Partisan Review, Spring 1959. Vidal was a privileged man: most things in life are more debasing than this. But the description does fit most every job I've had in my adult life.

“It's quite simple to kill off your public. A distant example: Moscow. 'Ivan the Terrible' is released in Moscow and audiences flee. They can't take it. But why not? Because the were no longer operating on the film's level of artistry. Why? They'd seen nothing but crap for ages. When you feed the people crap, they lose their taste buds.”

--Henri Langlois, in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the  Cinémathèque” (2004). Langlois is considered the father of film preservation, the father of the auteur theory, and the father of the Nouvelle Vague.

“If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the world. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.

”Kubrick apparently did very little of this. The more invested he became in his secretive, secluded, every-detail-controlled, nothing-left-to-chance lifestyle in England — which he began to construct when he left Hollywood and moved there in the early '60s — and the less familiar he became with the rude hustle-bustle of life on the outside, the more rigid and formalized and apart-from-life his films became.“

--Jeff Wells, from his 2000 review of Stanley Kubrick's ”Eyes Wide Shut,“ recently resurrected on his Hollywood Elsewhere site after rewatching the film on Blu-Ray. He also quotes from David Thomson's review: ”It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison."

“Apparently, he was not totally ignorant of one of life's great secrets: women don't look for handsome men, they look for men with beautiful women.”

-- Milan Kundera, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” pg. 12.

“It’s not intellectual. You’re mostly aware of what you don’t like. Henry Moore said something like that. You keep chipping away at what isn’t an elephant. And Miles Davis said: ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there’ — I’ve put it on my wall. We think the conscious is the determining factor, and actually it’s the least reliable instrument. The knowing is the infringement.“

--Dustin Hoffman in ”The Tao of Hoffman" by Giles Foden in The New York Times Style Magazine, Sunday, March 4, 2012

“Despite its soft environmentalist message 'The Lorax' is an example of what it pretends to oppose. Its relationship to Dr. Seuss’s book is precisely that of the synthetic trees that line the streets of Thneedville to the organic Truffulas they have displaced. The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.”

--A.O. Scott in his review “How the Grinch Stole the Lorax” in The New York Times

“The studios that churn out 'This Means War' and its ilk ... seem geuinely worried that an audience left to contemplate human deeds without the assistance of sonic or editorial frenzy might start to think for itself. People might look at Chris Pine's eyes and wonder, first, why a blue so startling and unreal should suggest not the gleam of a born seducer but one of the stronger brands of industrial cleaning gel. And, second, whether the character he depicts here, for all its vigor, is anything more than a jerk.

”That is certainly how Lauren [Reese Witherspoon] reads him at the start. They meet at a video store, a setting that might have seemed fresh and topical sometime around the summer of 1993. He actually says, 'I know movies. And women,' a boast that would be correct only if uttered by George Cukor.“

--Anthony Lane in ”The Current Cinema: Big Men," in the 2/27/12 issue of The New Yorker

Cukor and subject. His IMDb CV.

“The fact that the Oscar telecast is a bust, that it is doomed—almost designed—to be a bust, and that the varying degrees of bustness are all that separates one year from the next, should neither surprise nor even dismay us, because the Academy Awards are like teen-age sex. It’s all about the fizzing buildup, and the self-persuading aftermath: the occurrence itself, nowadays, is nothing but fumble and flub...”

-- Anthony Lane, “The Oscars: Man or Muppet?” on The New Yorker site, in what is easily the best post-Oscar commentary. Most critics fulminate. They snipe. Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes of The New York Times write about the Academy's doomed ratings ... even though, they admit, the ratings were up 3.7 percent. The Hollywood Reporter slams host Billy Crystal, as it slams all hosts, even though he was funny and got off several of the evening's best lines, particularly: “Nothing takes the sting out of these tough economic times like watching a bunch of millionaires giving golden statues to each other.” Julia Turner over at Slate.com actually criticized the way Penelope Cruz looked. (“The look is blah ... stupid princess gown.”) Lane keeps the proper distance. He expects little and is amused when he gets less. He unleashes bon mots with a shrug. All other critics should read and learn.

“Ryan Seacrest,” Lane writes, “whose very name resembles a brand of luxury yacht, so smooth are the waves on which he sails through life...” Choppier waters here thanks (and yes, thanks) to Sacha Baron Cohen.

“When Ted Williams refused to wear a necktie in the late 1940s, he got scant argument from Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy, even though the skipper insisted that everyone else on the club be so attired. When a sportswriter asked McCarthy why he let Williams get away with it, the manager offered a simple answer. 'I want to be fair,' he said. 'Any other gentleman on this club hits. .390, he won't have to wear a necktie, either.'”

--Jason Turbow and Michael Duca in their book, “The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing & Bench-Clearing Brawls: The unwritten rules of America's pastime.” According to the book's footnotes, they got the quote from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cooperstown,” by Mickey McDermott and Howard Eisenberg.

Ted Williams, tieless, signing a contract at the desk of Red Sox general manager Eddie Collins at Fenway Park in the late 1940s. Photograph by Leslie Jones (1886-1967). Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

“...rarer has it been clearer to me that 'the Academy' is not a monolithic individual entity we conveniently paint it as for the purpose of analysis, but a hive of conflicting individual opinions and personalities. The new voting structure for the Best Picture race is a case in point. We know each of these nine nominees received at least 5% of the number-one votes cast, suggesting a diverse range of committed camps. The people responsible for The Tree of Life being on the list are not the same people who put War Horse there, who in turn are different from the sneaky contingent who came through for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

”There's evidence of contrasting impulses within individual branches, too. Are the actors who rallied for Demián Bichir the same ones who are high on Rooney Mara? Are there Academy screenwriters who are equally jazzed about Bridesmaids and A Separation? I'm sure there are some — speaking as the person whose best-of-2011 list found room for Margaret and Immortals — but I'm sure you'd find plenty more who are befuddled by at least one of those nominations. Get angry with the Academy if you like, but wonder first what — or who — you're even getting angry with.“

-- Guy Lodge, ”Stuck in the middle with you: Thoughts on the Oscar nominations,“ on the ”In Contention" site. Which is now, what, HitFix? Too bad.

“After nearly twenty years in England, my wife and I had taken the decision to move back to America for a while, to give the children the chance of experiencing life in another country and my wife the chance to shop until 10 P.M. seven nights a week. I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.”

--Bill Bryson, “Notes From a Small Island” (1995), pg. 5

“Feeling wrapped in light gives me a sense of spiritual atmosphere. You've got light, you needn't feel alone.”

--Cinematographer Sven Nykvist (1922-2006), in the documentary “Ljuset håller mig sällskap” (“Light Keeps Me Company”), which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Some of the movies Nykvist photographed:

• 1993 What's Eating Gilbert Grape 
• 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors
• 1989 New York Stories (segment “Oedipus Wrecks”)
• 1988 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• 1983 Star 80
• 1982 Fanny and Alexander
• 1978 Autumn Sonata
• 1978 Pretty Baby
• 1976 Face to Face
• 1973 Scenes from a Marriage
• 1972 Cries and Whispers
• 1970 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• 1968 Hour of the Wolf
• 1966 Persona
• 1963 Winter Light
• 1961 Through a Glass Darkly
• 1960 The Virgin Spring

“Has there ever been a more decent, upstanding, all-American president, with his dog and his family and his Apollo Theatre song solos, treated more shamefully by his opponents? I’d be more horrified by the abuse if I wasn’t sure it was backfiring.”

--Joan Walsh, “Demonizing the decent guy who is president: Will the crazy-nasty GOP attacks on Obama provoke a voter backlash to defend the flawed but human Democrat?,” on Salon.com.

“As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.”

--Adam Gopnik in the article, “THE CAGING OF AMERICA: Why do we lock up so many people?” in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker

“Many would argue, if they ever had cause to think about it, that one Bad News Bears movie was enough. But no nine-year-old baseball-loving boy in 1977 would agree, not even one who had, unlke me, seen the first movie. The sequel came out that summer, after Little League season had ended all over the land, and who wouldn't want the season and the summer to somehow go on and on?

”The makers of the Bears sequel keyed in on this need to go on and on. Really, the premise of another Bears movie couldn't have been otherwise: there would have to be another game. But whether by design or happy accident, or some combination of the two, the sequel not only centers on the idea that the season can go on but continually frames it as an urgent question: can the season go on? It is, in a way, the prototypical sequel. Its plot mirrors the very question of its exisence. One story has ended. Can there be another?“

-- from ”The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,“ by Josh Wilker, part of the ”A Novel Approach to Cinema“ series edited by Sean Howe.

I think ”Breaking Training“ one of the worst baseball movies ever made; but Wilker's short book, with its asides to the American myth of the road, the catchphrases of ”Happy Days,“ Jimmy Carter's ”malaise“ speech, the ”USA! USA!" chant, and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and how they all intertwine with this horrible, horrible movie, is something close to a work of art.

“When I had lunch with the unnaturally clever actor Stephen Fry, for instance, he said it was no big deal that he was an actor, a novelist, memoirist, television personality, talk-show host, and amateur magician who in his spare time had written the script for a Christmas pantomime at the Old Vic, and who, when his friend Emma Thompson's book was swallowed by her computer, resurrected the lost chapters by single-handedly repairing the hard drive (he dabbles in technology on the side). Fry suffers from manic-depressive disorder--also in his spare time, he researched and hosted a television series in which he explored his and others' experiences with the illness--and I think one of the things that distresses him is that no one else is as smart as he is. Bu he would never put it that way; he claims it's all a fluke.”

--Sarah Lyall, “The Angle Files: A Field Guide to the British,” pg. 147.

“Perhaps the master of the British art of telling stories against oneself is the writer and playwright Alan Bennett, who is about the closest thing Britain has to a national treasure. He seems genetically incapable of being pleased with himself. When asked by the actor Ian McKellen in 1987 whether he was gay or straight, he responded that it was like asking a man crawling across the Sahara Desert what sort of water he preferred, Perrier or Malvern.”

--Sarah Lyall, “The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British,” pg. 154

“It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and downright meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than [Thomas] Frank is willing to give him.”

--Michael Kinsley in his review of “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right,” by Thomas Frank, which is as critical of Pres. Obama as Frank's previous book, “What's the Matter with Kansas?,” was critical of Kansas.

“Mantle's might inflicted damage on bats, balls and egos. ... Billy Pierce, then pitching for the White Sox, recalled a July night at Yankee Stadium in 1959 when Mantle KO'ed a rookie outfielder with a line drive. '[Jim McAnany] went to catch the ball, and it hit him right in the chest,' Pierce said....

”'Just to the right of the breastbone,' McAnany said. 'I just went down like I was shot. It knocked me off my feet.'

“Jim Kaat of the Minnesota Twins sought divine intervention when he fell behind on The Mick. 'Two-and-oh on Mantle, Earl Battey would wave his arms and make the sign of the cross.'”

--from Jane Leavy's “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of Amerca's Chlldhood”

“The best days of the Tri-State Mining District were ten years gone when Mutt [Mantle] moved his family to the region. The land's lucre was first discovered in 1848, the year Mantle's great-grandfther, an English coal miner, immigrated to America. The Twenties were the glory days. Between 1908 and 1930, the ore that came out of the mines was worth more than $300 million. The human cost of extracting the wealth was clear as early as 1915, when doctors noted pulmonary disease in almost two out of three miners ...

”Silicosis was feared and far more common than the random but inevitable collapse of rock. A clinic opened in Pitcher in 1927, but it was for the benefit of the mine operators, who were anxious to cull the sick from the workforce. Doctors provided advice but no treatment. Annual X-ray examinations were compulsory. Miners were required to carry a wallet-sized health card certifying that they were free of disease. Those whose X-rays came back positive were fired the same day and could never be hired by another mine. An attorney for Eagle-Picher explained the company's methodology for ridding the area of silicosis and the rampant tuberculosis that ensued: 'When they get sick and can't work, we throw them on the dump heap.'“

--From Jane Leavy's ”The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood," pg. 43

Q. How did you prepare for the role [of a former P.O.W. turned war hero who might also be an undercover jihadist in Showtime's “Homeland”]?

A. I investigated post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been to a unit where people are suffering from it, and I read a lot of literature. I looked at footage of soldiers in the combat zone. I found “Restrepo” to be unbelievably useful.

--Actor Damian Lewis (“Band of Brothers”) in the Q&A “A World War II Soldier Enters the Post-Iraq Age,” in the Sunday New York Times

“I love baseball. You know, it doesn't have to mean anything, it's just beautiful to watch.”

--Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen's “Zelig” (1983)

Target Field, July 4, 2011.

“The greatness of 'Funny People' hinges on Sandler’s ability to adeptly capture the sadness of a comedic actor looking back on his career when confronted with mortality. And Sandler nails it! Hits every goddamn note, moment and scene, masterfully. And while I do believe he’s a great actor (when he wants to be), part of it also comes from Judd Apatow so skillfully tapping into Sandler’s own regret about his own choices and then seamlessly filtering them through the character of George Simmons. That’s why the parodies within 'Funny People' — like 'Re-Do,' where a lawyer gets magically turned back into a baby or 'MerMan,' the story of a male mermaid — hit so hard. It feels like Sandler is acknowledging the ridiculousness of his filmography and owning up to it.

”That’s what makes 'Jack and Jill' so perplexing. How can you soberly acknowledge all that one year, and then star in 'Jack and Jill' the very next? And more important, how can you leave that much talent on the table? It’s like turning down the opportunity to play for a championship in order to spend another year on a bottom feeder.“

--Toph Eggers, screenwriter, in the salon.com piece ”The Tragedy of Adam Sandler."

“If you live in France and you have written one good book, or painted a good picture, or directed one outstanding fim, 50 years ago, and nothing ever since, you are still recognized as an artist, and honored accordingly. People take their hats off and call you maitre. They do not forget. In Hollywood--in Hollywood you're as good as your last picture. If you didn't have one in production in the last three months, you're forgotten, no matter what you have achieved ere this.”

--Erich von Stroheim, “Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury” by Joe Franklin

“Yes, a great game and never mind the early stuff. Tied five times, it produced six lead changes, and rehabilitated itself, from stinker to thriller, along the way. Stricken Cardinals fans at Busch Stadium stood in silence in the ninth inning and again in the tenth, with their mittened paws covering their faces up to the eyes, while their team teetered on the brink of elimination, one strike away from winter. In the ninth, with the Redbirds down by two runs, there was a brief shot of Cardinals ace pitcher Chris Carpenter and a couple of teammates laughing about something at the dugout rail, and I thought, What’s with these guys? Now we know...”

--Roger Angell in his New Yorker post “Cards Win”

*  *  *

“The Cardinals' next four hitters were Lance Berkman, Allen Craig, David Freese, and Yadier Molina. Holland throws left-handed. Berkman, a switch-hitter, is significantly better against righties than lefties, so letting Holland pitch to Berkman made sense. Indeed, Holland retired Berkman on a fly ball.

”After that, though? The Cardinals had three right-handed hitters coming up, and Washington had Mike Adams, one of baseball's best right-handed relief pitchers, warming up in the bullpen. It was the eighth inning. Mike Adams makes his living in the eighth inning. Against right-handed hitters, especially.

“Washington didn't leave the dugout, but Craig left the yard with a solo homer that trimmed the Rangers' lead by a run. Eventually, Adams did enter the game and killed an incipient St. Louis rally. One wonders, though ... Would Allen Craig have hit a home run against Mike Adams?

”Oddly, nobody's really talking about Adams' late entrance, perhaps because everybody still seems to think that Derek Holland walks on water. Hint: He doesn't. He's a good pitcher who pitched great in Game 4, and might be slightly more effective coming out of the bullpen than starting. But he's not Mike Adams.“

--Rob Neyer, ”2011 World Series, Game 6: Did Ron Washington Blow It?“

*  *  *

”Feliz looked uncomfortable on the mound, but I think he tends to look that way. Part of the magic of Mariano is the placid look, the slumped shoulders, as if this is all just a formality, as if he had already saved the game a few hours before and is only performing it once more for those people who missed it. Feliz, though, is a bit twitchy, he expresses disgust, his motion is violent and impassioned, and I thought after he walked Berkman he looked unsure.“

--Joe Posnanski, ”Game Six“

*  *  *

”Really and truly, this was an ugly game for about six or seven innings. But then it got beautiful right at the end.“

--Lance Berkman in Jayson Stark's piece, ”David Freese, St. Louis, Force Game 7"

“I find they are pedestrian people. Their consensus is cliche. Something is good because they've seen it before.”

--Herbert B. Leonard (1922-2006), producer of “Naked City,” “Route 66,” and “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” and known as a writer's producer, as quoted in Susan Orlean's biography, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and The Legend.” The “they” he is referring to are studio executives.

“Hitler cared deeply about animals and animal welfare. 'In the Third Reich,' he once announced, 'cruelty to animals should no longer exist.' Some of the earliest laws enacted by the Nazi Party pertained to animal protection, and violators could be sent to concentration camps. Vivisection, tail docking, and neutering were banned...

”What accounted for this concern for animals? Some of these laws, such as a ban on kosher butchering and on Jews having pets, were probably enacted because they furthered the goal of religious persecution; the restriction on vivisection might have been an effort to inhibit Jewish scientists. But the Nazi reverence for nature and natural order was more far-reaching and fundamental than a simple anti-Semitic attack. The pagan-like worship of nature as an immutable force was at the core of the Nazi belief system. Nature, with its invioable schematic and pitiless ranking of strong over weak, was held up as a model and a justification for the Nazis' worldview, and therefore nature and animals had to be honored and protected...

“Nazis also used their attention to animal well-being as a way to further humiliate their victims ... illustrated by the Angora Project, a rabbit-breeding program operated by the SS at the Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Raised by inmates at the camps, the rabbits lived in gorgeous hutches and were fed lavish meals; their fur was trimmed and used as insulation in Luftwaffe pilots' winter jackets. But Henreich Himmler, the chief of the SS, who ran the project and kept a notebook documenting it, also wanted the rabbits for another purpose; he liked the starving prisoners to be reminded, as they prepared meals for the animals and cleaned their cages, that they had less value in the Nazi world order, deserved less dignity and fewer rights than the animals they cared for.”

--Susan Orlean, in one of the many interesting sidebars in her book, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” pp. 145-46

“That year [1927], Rin Tin Tin was designated the most popular performer in the United States, and his four films—A Dog of the Regiment, Jaws of Steel, Tracked by the Police and Hills of Kentucky—were box office hits as well as critical successes. The Academy Awards were presented for the first time, and Rinty received the most votes for Best Actor. But members of the Academy, anxious to establish the new awards as serious and important, decided that giving an Oscar to a dog did not serve that end, so the votes were recalculated and the award was diverted to Emil Jannings, for his performances in both The Way of the Flesh and The Last Command.”

--Susan Orlean, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” pp. 88-89. Orlean will appear next Friday, October 28, at SIFF Uptown for a reading, a Q&A, and a showing of the Rin Tin Tin silent film “Clash of the Wolves.”

The original Rin Tin Tin in “Hills of Kentucky” (1927).

“To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.”

--Andrew Sullivan, “A Tale of Two Presidents”

Also worth reading: Sullivan's post, “The Untold Story of the Actual Obama Record.”

I'm disappointed that we didn't get better articles about the Yankees' quick postseason exit from stalwarts Rob Neyer or Joe Posnanski. But the Internet's a big place and good comments could be found. My favorite is listed last. Enjoy.

“It hurts. It hurts for the Yankees to lose in the playoffs and for their season to end. I once knew a therapist who said that sports were a leading cause of depression among men – trailing behind events like losing a loved one or being fired from one’s job. I take these losses seriously. I also know that the closer your team comes to winning it all, the harder it is to have them lose. I remember 2001. I know this might sound like self-entitled nonsense to fans of teams like the Cubs who haven’t sniffed a World Championship in eons. But every Yankee fan is also a fan of less successful teams. My California Golden Bears haven’t seen a Rose Bowl since Eisenhower was President, but it didn’t hurt that much when they gave up 29 unanswered points to Oregon last night.”

--ItsAboutTheMoney.Net, “A Rational Goodbye to the 2011 Season”

*  *  *

Dear Mr. Manners,
I'm really enjoying the fact that the Red Sox choked to miss the playoffs and that the Yankees lost in the first round. Is it poor manners to root against them and mock the teams and their fans?

-- United S. (of America)

Dear United Schadenfreude of America,
Normally it is poor manners to find joy in the failure of others, but rooting against the Yankees and Red Sox is as American as mom, apple pie and baseball teams trying to buy championships. I have no problem reveling in their defeat. However, I would encourage you to balance your ridicule with a positive comment to show that you are a person of refined manners.

Say: “Keep your chin up ... so you can see the scoreboard, which is the official record of you being a loser.”

Or: “Hey, no one wins them all. In fact, some teams only win one of them in 11 years, which is almost impossible if you think about it, considering they had the biggest payroll in every one of those years.”

--D.J. Gallo, “Mr. Manners' Etiquette for Sports World”

Keep your chin up...

*  *  *

“Not enough fans understand that the baseball playoffs are a crapshoot. Since 1990, you know how many teams with the best regular-season record have won the World Series? Three — the '98 Yankees, '07 Red Sox and '09 Yankees. If you make the playoffs, you essentially have a 1-in-4 chance of reaching the World Series. If you get to the World Series, you have 1-in-2 chance of winning. So if you make the playoffs every season you should win a World Series once every eight years. In their past eight trips to the postseason, the Yankees have reached two World Series and won one. Exactly what the odds would predict.”

-- David Schoenfield, “The Day After: Yankees Postscript”

*  *  *

And my favorite...

To the Sports Editor:

The Yankees’ postseason failure over the last two years suggests the possibility of another Curse of the Bambino. Its predecessor never made sense: why would the Babe have been anything but thrilled to be sent from Boston to the greatest sports stage of the era? Overshadowing Ruth’s monument with the huge tribute plaque to George Steinbrenner? Well, that just might be cause for vengeance. So here is the new curse: the Yankees will never win another World Series until the plaque is moved to a more appropriate site.

-- Charles E. Knapp, Scarsdale, N.Y., “At a Loss in the Bronx”

Magic, Maier, gone.

“But [Pauline] Kael had stumbled upon something that could be very disconcerting to the best film critic in the world, just as it appalled the man [Orson Welles] who was increasingly the idol of young directors: that the movies were not and never would be good enough, deep enough, to hold his interest. He had gone deep—no one yet had gone deeper. But it was not enough, not compared with literature, music, painting or just watching life go by. The movies, in other words,  are the art of a culture prepared to settle for the shallow. The artistic status of the filmmaker was not actually substantiated by the work. Citizen Kane was the first move to reveal that—and Welles, for a long time, was the lone man who noticed it.”

--David Thomson, “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles,” pg. 398

Discuss.

“You're a Christian, right, Chad?

”Yeah.“

”You believe in Jesus?“

”Yeah.“

”Have you ever seen him?“

”No, I've never seen him.“

”Ever seen yourself get hitters out?“

”Yeah.“

”So why the fuck do you have faith in Jesus when you never seen him, but you don't have faith in your ability to get hitters out when you get hitters out all the time?“

--2002 Oakland A's pitching coach Rick Peterson to 2002 Oakland A's reliever Chad Bradford in Michael Lewis's ”Moneyball," pg. 253.

“Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of someone else's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition; they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

--Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005. Via Jim Walsh.

“[Bill] James's first proper essay was the preview to an astonishing literary career. There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurements of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- and under-valued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living.”

--Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, pg. 72. The movie, starring Brad Pitt, and which has been getting astonishingly good reviews (“Has to be described as an example of what Hollywood does best” - Andrew O'Hehir; “...in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life” - Dana Stevens), opens tomorrow.

“When the axe came into the woods, the trees whispered, 'The handle is one of us.'”

--a Turkish proverb quoted in Arlene Kim's book of poetry, “What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?”

Arlene Kim reading from her book of poetry, “What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?” at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle; September 2011

“Though I have some respect for 'The Virtue of Selfishness,' her collection of essays ... I don't think there's a need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings. I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.”

--Christopher Hitchens on Ayn Rand, from the Q&A portion of his lecture, “The Moral Necessity of Atheism,” given on February 23, 2004 at Sewanee University

“8.46 pm. So far, we have repealed universal health insurance, Dodd-Frank, much of the Pentagon, the Department of Education, and are so-so on Medicare and social security. What should government actually do to help the economy? Cut and reform taxes. Unless Obama proposes to cut taxes. Then that's more spending. ... God, this is depressing.”

--Andrew Sullivan, a half-hour into live-blogging the Republican/Tea-Party Debates, over at The Dish

“I do think there is a tendency to underestimate audiences, I do think there is an appetite to be stretched. I do think people want to hear language at its best on the screen. I'm optimistic about it having an enormous audience.”

--Colin Firth on “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” specifically, and the film industry in general, at the Venice Film Festival.

I go back and forth on this issue, bitching about audiences one minute, insisting that audiences are smarter than we realize the next. I think studios pay too much attention to market research and test screenings, and don't promote and distribute better movies the way they should, and that, if they did, these movies would make money. At the same time, there are a lot of Big Jim McBobs and Billy Sol Hureks out there.

“As the writing team came back from Victorville, and as Houseman returned to New York, Welles took over the task of making the script into a picture. From mid-April to mid-July, the script came down to 172 pages [from 268]. Many episodes were abandoned—for example, Kane's honeymoon with his first wife, Emily; a later meeting between Kane and his father, when the older man is remarried to a 'young tart'; Kane's son's involvement in a fascist movement; a good deal of political byplay with an oil scandal; scenes in Rome, when Thatcher goes to visit Kane; an affair Susan Kane has with a younger man at Xanadu. These deletions made Kane simpler to follow—and we should realize that nothing hurt it more on first release than its difficulty. In addition, Welles strengthened the line of dramatic consequence—the way Kane's career hinges upon the exposure of the love nest during the electoral battle with Jim Gettys, and the way Susan's nightmare career breaks the bond between Kane and Leland.”

--from “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles,” by David Thomson; pg. 147

“I can’t help wondering if 'Believing Is Seeing' is the first installment in a three-volume attempt to make sense of the relationship between the documentarian, the documented and the truth. I hope so. For Morris, the truth is (as they say) out there; the question is how to pick our way in its direction. There is no mechanical means of doing so, he argues; the camera is never wholly obscura or lucida. Perhaps this is why Morris’s book feels so human. It combines the hubris of his ends — the desire, shared by approximately all of us, to lay claim to the truth — with the humility of his means.”

--Kathryn Schulz in “Limited Vision,” her review of Errol Morris' new book “Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography,” in last Sunday's New York Times

At an outdoor dinner party last night, overlooking Puget Sound, the subject got around to freedom vs. safety, and I mentioned how most people would give up the former for an imagined version of the latter (not a very original thought), and that our reaction to 9/11 was indicative of this (another not very original thought). One of the other guests disagreed. We went back and forth in a genial enough manner. He felt we hadn't given up any freedoms post-9/11. Then he talked about how 9/11 was foreseeable to anyone who was paying attention. We had the following exchange:

He: Anyone who didn't see 9/11 coming was an idiot.
Me: Or in the Bush administration.
He: Don't go there.

At this point I was warned away from the conversation by the hostess. I later found out that the guy I'd been talking to was, like the hostess, a Republican and a Bush supporter. If only I'd known. I would've totally gone there.

“In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing sixty-two countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sous chef, a Barbie doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant. ... The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe. Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.”

--from pg. 415 of Lawrence Wright's “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaed and the Road to 9/11”

“Your mother has asked me to adopt you. Do you know about that? I've thought about it and I've decided that it's not a good idea. I came here to tell you that.

I didn't know your dad but I think he was a great guy. He gave you a load of things: your name, your face...

So you already have a father. Okay, he's dead. That's sad. But it was before you were born and it's not easy to mourn a stranger.

There's a German poem about a boy whose mother is dead. [Speaks German] That means,”Your mother's soul lashes out at the sharks before you.“ That poem always reminds me of you because I think your dad's soul protects you from sharks.

So it wouldn't be a good idea for me to pretend to be your father now. Your mother used to say you and I should be friends. But a grown-up and a child shouldn't be friends. I know that when I was little, I didn't like those grown-ups who'd try to charm me or try to establish complicity with me. ...

I carry you in my heart now. Even if you turn into a total bastard or I don't see you for 1279 years, I have to think about you because I enjoy doing it. As a child, you don't have to think about grown-ups or about me. Unless you need to. ...

You see, the past isn't what's vanished. No, it's what belongs to us. What belongs to us now are the memories we both have. It's weird, isn't it? Because there's no name for what we share. ...

And I'd like you to see that doctor you got on well with. A child shouldn't talk only to his mother. A mother is great to look after you, to love you, for you to love, etc. But she's not enough to make you grow up. You need an extra adult to help you to grow so you're not shut up in the love between parents... and children. Maybe that scares Nora and not you. Nora probably thinks, ”My God, am I a good mother for Elias? Let's see the doctor.“ And you think, ”Nora's the one who needs the doctor, not me!“

That's smart. You can separate what she wants from what you want. In a way, you're right but... This is the only advice I have for now: Of course, we're always right. But it's always possible that we could be a bit wrong too. Being a bit wrong is very good news! It means you don't have the whole answer. That life will be more exciting and full of surprises than you thought.”

--Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric) talking to Elias (Valentin Lelong) in the great epilogue to Arnaud Desplechin's “Rois et reine” (“Kings and Queen”) (2004).

I've had some good conversations today, long ones, too, but this short, awful conversation stands out. I was leaving Metropolitan Market on Mercer with some red peppers for Patricia, who's recovering nicely from arthroscopic surgery, thank you, when a clean-cut, 20-ish dude, a young man really, waved his hands at me to get my attention. I looked down at his table, on which there was a poster of Pres. Obama with a Hitler moustache and the words “Dump Obama.” He smiled at me. I shook my head at him and kept going. He called after me.

He: Are you ready to end the madness?
Me: Yours?

And kept going.

“Toscanini once recorded a piece 65 times. You know what he said? 'It could be better.'”

--the father (Brad Pitt) in Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life,” no doubt channeling Malick, a perfectionist, for whom 65 attempts is a dry run.

Larry Bowa: And the thing is, he did it the right way--without steroids.
Mitch Williams: He did it with hay. Oats and hay.

--MLB Network announcers, and former Major Leaguers, reacting to the news of Jim Thome's 600th career homerun.

My reaction? Thome is the 8th player in baseball history to do this. Derek Jeter was the 28th player in baseball history to reach 3,000 hits. Which got more press?

I wrote the following for an essay but it turned out to be the little darling that had to be cut. I offer it here instead:

My parents were married in 1960 and didn’t last much longer than their 13th wedding anniversary, for which, I remember, my older brother, younger sister and I made them a cake. It was single-layer and heart-shaped. You baked a cake in both a square and a round pan, set the square cake like a diamond, cut the round cake in half and then placed either end on the flat, upper-sides of the diamond. Voila: a heart. I liked how easy it was to make a heart: just take two familiar shapes and make that third, more complicated shape. It turned out that marriage—in which two familiar shapes make a third, more complicated shape—wasn’t so easy.

“I’ve never understood exactly why we [we have a debt ceiling], or why anyone can think it’s ‘fiscally responsible’ to vote against raising the debt ceiling when we’ve already incurred the responsibilities. It’s like not paying your bills. It’s silly to go through the posturing that you’re saving money by not voting to increase the national debt.”

--Rep. Tom Foley on raising the debt ceiling, in The New Yorker: April 1979

“As inconsequential and virtually indistinguishable sub-Judd Apatow white-boy comedies fueled by prison-rape gags and pants-pissing anxiety around black people go, ”Horrible Bosses“ is pretty solid entertainment.”

--Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com.

His full review here. My review here. We have pretty much the same take on the movie - right down to its inconsequentiality. “The bosses are ... three caricatures rather than three human beings,” I write. “Farrell and Aniston's horrible bosses never remotely resemble real people,” O'Hehir writes. Add it up and it's 70% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hey Little Hypocrite
What you gonna say
When you wind up standin' naked
On the final Judgement Day
How you gonna justify it
Who you gonna call
What if it turns out that
God don't look like you at all

--“Little Emperor” by Steve Earle, from the album “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive”

“When you say MEDIUM, we hear LARGE.”

--Sign outside the Southdale Theater, an AMC chain, promoting AMC's “Stubs” program, which involves tracking your movie purchases (seemingly for you, really for them), rewards for every $100 spent (encouraging you to spend that), and free upgrades on popcorn and “fountain drinks” (i.e., the cheap stuff). Bad name, bad campaign, bad slogan. Seriously, when I say 'medium,' I'd rather you heard 'medium.'

THE BELIEVER: Rumor has it that you turned down the chance to direct Disney’s remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner because you felt they weren’t interested in really exploring racism.

HAROLD RAMIS: The way they wanted to do it didn’t have a lot to do with the colossal amount of pain and violence that swirls around racial injustice. It would’ve been like an episode of The Jeffersons. What’s the point? But who knows, maybe that’s as much as most people want. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.”

THE BELIEVER: Does that offend you as a filmmaker?

HAROLD RAMIS: It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?

--Conversation between actor-writer-director-surgeon Harold Ramis and Eric Spitznagel, from the March 2006 issue of The Believer

“But the vote [on same-sex marriage before the New York legislature, which passed last night 33-29] and the lead-up to it showed us something else, too, something we ought to see often, but don’t: the spectacle of politicians changing their minds. That, in fact, has been one of the singular benefits of the same-sex marriage debate overall. On most issues, partisanship and the fear of being labelled a waffler effectively discourage politicians from publicly wrestling with conscience and contradiction. But same-sex marriage has been different. Public opinion on this issue has shifted fast in the direction of approval and party affiliation has turned out to matter somewhat less than other factors: generation, whether somebody has gay friends or relatives, gut feelings. President Obama can say that his views on whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry are 'evolving'—and in this context, as in few others, 'evolving' doesn’t by itself carry a political cost.”

--Margaret Talbot, in her post, “On Gay Marriage, It's OK to Waffle,” on the New Yorker website

“In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And [Michele] Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.”

--Matt Taibbi, “Michele Bachmann's Holy War,” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine

“In [Ayman al-]Zawahiri's hands, al-Jihad had splintered into angry and homeless gangs. ... His disillusioned followers often reflected on the pronouncement, made during the prison years by the man Zawahiri betrayed, Major Essam al-Qamari, that some vital quality was missing in Zawahiri. Qamari was the one who had told him, 'If you are the member of any group, you cannot be the leader.' that now sounded like a prophecy.”

—from page 246 of Lawrence Wright's much-recommended book, “The Looming Tower,” on one of the low points for Ayman al-Zawahri, the former leader of al-Jihad, and current leader of al-Qaeda. The Christian Science Monitor agrees about his lack of charisma.

This Wright paragraph, by the way, follows a horrific story of Egyptian intelligence drugging and sodomizing the thirteen-year-old son of a senior member of al-Jihad, then blackmailing him to spy on his father, then recruiting another boy, a friend, for the same purpose. When the two boys were discovered, Zawahiri convened a Sharia court, forced the boys to strip to determine if they had attained puberty, and, since they had, and so were officially men, had them convicted of sodomy, treason and attempted murder. “Zawahiri had the boys shot,” Wright writes. “To make sure he got his point across, he videotaped their confessions and their executions, and distributed the tapes as an example to others who might betray the organization.”

“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn't black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing.

”You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing.

“I'm tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I'm trying to do the right thing, and that's where I'm going with this.”

--State Sen. Roy McDonald (R-Saratoga), in The New York Daily News, on why he'll vote to legalize gay marriage in New York.

Ross: Face it, every Derek Jeter hit from now until the end of his career will be a major production.
Me: I think it'll die down after 3,000. Besides, even NY can only get so excited about singles...
Ross: They're not just singles, they're LEADERSHIP.

--Back and forth between me and fellow editor Ross Pfund after I posted a link to Roger Angell's New Yorker article on Jeter and 3,000 hits. (Read all the way through for a great quote from Lou Brock...)

“I don't believe you can trust a man who doesn't have a little twinkle in his eye.”

--Wendy Burden, author of “Dead End Gene Pool,” and long-time friend of Patricia's, Tuesday night during dinner at Meriwether's in Portland, Or.

“This spring, Obama officials often expressed impatience with questions about theory or about the elusive quest for an Obama doctrine. One senior Administration official reminded me what the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said when asked what was likely to set the course of his government: 'Events, dear boy, events.'”

-- from “The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring remade Obama's foreign policy” by Ryan Lizza in the May 2, 2011 New Yorker. Amusingly, Lizza's last graf begins thus: “Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine.” Oh, Ryan. Read the whole thing here.

“I was at a family function over the weekend and spent much of it talking baseball with my wife's uncle, a huge Yankees fan. The short version of his analysis: He's not too concerned about the state of the team because he's convinced the Yankees will make a few trades.

”You know ... like for Felix Hernandez. Everybody in New York still thinks the Yankees can just trade for Felix because ... well, I guess because they're the Yankees. Now, let's repeat something we've said several times:

“The Mariners aren't going to trade Felix Hernandez.

”Repeat: The Mariners aren't going to trade Felix Hernandez.

“Now, my wife's uncle says that's OK, because the Yankees will just acquire Mark Buehrle instead. Now, maybe the White Sox will eventually fall far enough out of the race that trading Buehrle will make sense. But it doesn't now.”

-- David Schoenfield, “Sweet Spot” column, ESPN.com

“One thing that stood out about Harmon [Killebrew] was that he always had his hand out to shake your hand when you were a young man. I know, when I came up as a rookie, he had a conversation with me. ...

“He, Richie Allen and Frank Howard hit the high balls that just kept going. It looked like it would be a pop-up. You’d come in for it. Then you’d have to look in the upper deck for it.”

--former Detroit Tigers' slugger Willie Horton on Minnesota Twins slugger Harmon Killebrew, who died of cancer this week.

“The Mariners are doing it with Smoak and mirrors.”

—my friend Jim McCloskey sitting with me at the M's game last night, which the M's won 5-2 over the Minnesota Twins. It's Jim's contention that the Mariners only have two Major Leaguers in their everyday lineup—Ichiro Suzuki and Justin Smoak—and yet we got to see another victory. Ringing doubles, solo homeruns. Back-to-back homeruns by Adam Kennedy and recent call-up Carlos Peguero. When was the last time I saw the M's do that at Safeco? 2003? Another great pitching performance by Michael Pineda, who's a top tier rookie-of-the-year candidate. In the 9th we saw some shoddy defense and overmanagement by Eric Wedge as he needlessly went to his bullpen to relieve a reliver. But still a victory.

Smoak now has the 8th-best OPS in the American League: .933. The next-best Mariner is 58th, Ichiro, with .700. Among the bottom seven in the league you'll find three Mariners: Miguel Olivo at .535, Brendan Ryan at .525, and dead last, Michael Saunders at .483. Smoak and mirrors, indeed. 

Oddly, I'm 3-0 at Safeco this year. The law of averages salivates at the thought of my return.

“I was just learning the basic language of baseball statistics in 1975, and so took in Harmon Killebrew’s long litany of 40-homer, 100-plus RBI years with the pure and enthusiastic fascination of the true beginner. I have an attraction to anonymous players, to failure and ignominy, to the fallen and the wilkerized, but I am as drawn to the players whose feats stand in bold opposition to the general entropy of the universe as any other baseball fan. I am sure that I found this card soothing. There is greatness in the world. There are things that won’t be forgotten. ...

”Harmon Killebrew had basically been playing baseball forever. The first few years, which occurred long before I’d even been born, were spent on a team, the Senators, that no longer even existed. They were, like the wooly mammoth and tyrannosaurus rex, long extinct. And yet, here was one of them, an Original Senator, alive and well and still grayly slugging home runs. I was drawn to this not only for its mysteriousness but also for the odd feeling of comfort it gave me. I sensed at times that I was an infinitesimally small speck, inconsequential and frail in an unfathomably large expanse not only of space but of time. The universe went on forever and time stretched forward and backward forever and I was an almost-nothing within it. But Harmon Killebrew was something, and I could hold onto Harmon Killebrew.“

--Josh Wilker, ”Cardboard Gods," on that 1975 Topps Harmon Killebrew card. All the more poignant after today's news.

''He always speaks with huge enthusiasm about the actors he's worked with and the performances he's seen. He's recently discovered the talents of Bette Davis. He said to me the other day — and this is where his youth can be alarming — he said, 'Have you ever seen a movie called ''All About Eve''?' I said, 'Yes, I have heard of it.'“

--Sir Ian McKellen on director Bryan Singer in ”An Unusual Choice for the Role of Studio Superhero," by Bernard Weinraub: The New York Times, July 9, 2000

“The city for the first time in its long history is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.”

E.B. White, Here is New York, 1949

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, surveying the books about Osama bin Laden:

As for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, most of these books agree that it was a terrible misstep that played into Bin Laden’s hands, fueling Qaeda recruitment efforts and diverting critical military and intelligence resources away from Afghanistan, which in turn led to the resurgence there of the Taliban. Peter L. Bergen’s new book, “The Longest War,” provides a devastating indictment of the Bush administration on many levels, from its failure to heed warnings about a terrorist threat, to its determination to conduct the war in Afghanistan on the cheap, to its costly, unnecessary and inept occupation of Iraq.

Both “The Longest War” and Lawrence Wright’s “Looming Tower” give readers a visceral sense of what day-to-day life was like in Qaeda training camps. Mr. Wright, noting that Bin Laden was not opposed to the United States because of its culture or ideas but because of its political and military actions in the Islamic world, observes that Qaeda trainees often watched Hollywood thrillers at night ( Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were particular favorites) in an effort to gather tactical tips.

“I wish the royal couple the very best. They seem like nice people, truly. Fellow human beings, at the very least. And that's why I hope that when in the unlikely event that they ever read this, that they won't take it personally when I say that the coverage of this whole ceremony and its run-up was revoltingly obsequious and almost entirely devoid of news value, and so altogether bubble-brained that it makes me think that if there is such a thing as karmic payback for wrong priorities, we're due for some major trauma.”

--Matthew Zoller Seitz, “The mind-numbing stupidity of the Royal Wedding,” Salon.com

That's a great paragraph but overall Seitz's analysis doesn't parse the blame properly. He blames us all equally but I wouldn't. I would mostly blame women.

Most of the men I know don't care one wit for this thing. It's noise to them. Women I assumed have better priorities, meanwhile, actually asked me to DVR it for them. They need to watch it. Why?

Here's an answer. It's from the book “Which Lie Did I Tell?” by screenwriter William Goldman, who also write the novel, and the screenplay for, “The Princess Bride”:

I loved telling stories to my daughters. When they were small, I would go into their room and stories would just be there ... I was on my way to Magic Town around 1970, and I said to them both, to Jenny, then seven, and Susanna, then four, “I'll write you a story, what do you most want it to be about?” And one of them said “princesses” and the other one said “brides.”

“Then that will be the title,” i told them. And so it has remained.

Seven and four. This stuff is as ingrained in girls as Superman is ingrained in boys. “Princesses” and “brides” are female wish fulfillment, and so the royal wedding brings out the girl in all of them as much as “Superman: The Movie” brings out the boy in me.

But I'm a boy. I get Superman. The wish is to be strong, good, and help people. It's to be able to fly.

What's the wish being fulfilled with a royal wedding? To get attention without earning it? To be greater than others by virtue of station?

Ladies? Ladies?

“I'll write you a story, what do you most want it to be about?” And one of them said “princesses” and the other one said “brides.”

“Then I went to the Uptown Theater to see 'I Am,' a documentary in which filmmaker Tom Shadyac asks 'What’s wrong with the world and what can we do about it?' Oprah has an entire television network dedicated to same, though I don’t have the stomach for her shark-swim in the shallow end. The same could be said of 'I Am' and several have, but in a culture war where three new poems by Mary Oliver (Parabola, exactly) gets no play and Donald Trump can flick a booger and be “part of the conversation” if not the next president of the United States, I’ll go down casting my vote for a mainstream film that quotes the mystical Sufi poet Rumi (love is the answer, always) and the calm spiritual minds of Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomksy, Howard Zinn, and dozens of others interviewed by Shadyac.

--Jim Walsh, ”Fear and Loving in South Minneapolis," an article which can be read in the print version of Southwest Journal, if you're in South Minneapolis, but will only be available online for the rest of us, you know, eventually. I'll keep you posted. Or you keep me posted. In the meantime, here's Jim's archive for the paper. He's always worth reading. He always reminds me what's valuable.

Jim Walsh, the man who puts the sexy in Sexy South Minneapolis

“Maybe Misrata wasn’t worth dying for—surely that thought must have crossed your mind in those last moments—but what about all the Misratas of the world? What about Liberia and Darfur and Sri Lanka and all those terrible, ugly stories that you brought such humanity to? That you helped bring the world’s attention to?

”After the war in Liberia you rented a house in the capital and lived there for years. Years. Who does that? No one I know except you, my dear friend. That’s part of Misrata, too. That’s also part of what you died for: the decision to live a life that was thrown open to all the beauty and misery and ugliness and joy in the world. Before this last trip you told me that you wanted to make a film about the relationship between young men and violence. You had this idea that young men in combat act in ways that emulate images they’ve seen—movies, photographs—of other men in other wars, other battles. You had this idea of a feedback loop between the world of images and the world of men that continually reinforced and altered itself as one war inevitably replaced another in the long tragic grind of human affairs.

“That was a fine idea, Tim—one of your very best. It was an idea that our world very much needs to understand. I don’t know if it was worth dying for—what is?—but it was certainly an idea worth devoting one’s life to. Which is what you did. What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things.”

--Sebastian Junger: “Sebastian Junger Remembers Tim Hetherington,” Vanity Fair.

Read the whole thing. Please.

“Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People”

--Onion headline, which is a truer statement of how effed-up the modern Republican party is than any headline in any legitimate newspaper.

The whole mock article is worth reading. A sample: “I don't think I can vote for someone like that,” Pennsylvania Republican Eric Tolbert said. “He says he's sorry, but how do I know that's the real Mitt Romney? What happens if he gets elected and tries to help sick people again?”

Happy Good Friday.

“I think it’s safe for me to say that what Tim was trying to do by going to war was to look into the souls of men, whose truths are perhaps more exposed in that environment than in any other—and to show the rest of us what he saw. He gave us a legacy in the important work he left behind, and, for those of us who had the honor to know Tim as a friend, a cherished memory of a man whose own soul was very intact.”

--Jon Lee Anderson in his post, “Remembering Tim Hetherington,” about the co-director of “Restrepo,” on The New Yorker site. The site has also posted a slideshow of Hetherington's photography.

“And to make sure no one steals them en route, I'll put 'ATTENTION: MARINERS TICKETS!' prominently on the envelope.”

--Our season-ticket coordinator Stephen Manes sending out tickets to the hapless Seattle Mariners, who already look like the worst team in baseball ...

“Memo to President Obama: How about appointing [labor lawyer Thomas] Geoghegan (whom you surely know, or know of, from his quiet heroics on behalf of working folk in Chicago) to the federal bench, preferably the Supreme Court? He’s eminently qualified. He writes prose that can be read for pleasure. He thinks clearly and creatively. He even ran for dogcatcher once. Admittedly, he’s not one of your chronically cautious “centrists,” but isn’t it about time the Court had a serious (and funny) counterweight to the charmless right-wing dittoheads who now dominate it and who are so politically and morally insensible that they cannot distinguish between a Fortune 500 corporation and a human being?”

--Hendrik Hertzberg in “Mr. Justice Geoghegan, Dissenting,” on The New Yorker Web site.

I'm not smart enough to say who does or doesn't belong on the USSC, but I interviewed Mr. Geoghegan for Illinois Super Lawyers a few years back—about running for U.S. Congress, about why the left seems so beaten down in this country, about why productivity goes up and real wages don't—and he's impressive. Put it this way: I'd certainly like to hear his voice, his point of view, more often in national discussions than, as Hertzberg says above, the usual charmless dittoheads. I asked him, for example, what stayed with him about his campaign for Rahm Emanuel's seat and he said: “I met a lot of elderly people living alone who don’t have enough to live on.” Please send that sentence to Paul Ryan and John Boehner, symptomatic of the unsympathetic right.

“With this budget deal, America's brief flirtation with milquetoast progressivism comes to an end.”

--Mark Siegel, the 19th floor, via Facebook. A short post on the subject is here.

“Whom do you want to believe? What vague and indeterminate misinformation do you want to poison your heart like the waves and specks of deadly low-level radiation currently not heading out way over 6,000 miles of ocean in the form of mist and seagulls and furious dolphins, soiled Toyota Corollas and shrill Fox News idiocy that makes you embarrassed to be alive in the modern world?”

Mike Schmidt was standing behind a batting cage, still as trim as during his playing days. A handsome, middle-aged man with swept-back, silvery hair and a thick mustache. I asked him what he thought of the four Phillies pitchers

“Well,” he said, “now when the Phillies come to town, the other team knows they’re being challenged by four No. 1 pitchers. They have to amp up their mental game. I used to see my at-bats the night before a game when I laid my head down on the pillow. Gibson, Seaver, Ryan. I had to have a plan. When I went to Houston, they had three good pitchers. The fourth was Nolan Ryan. I could go to sleep with the other three, but Ryan kept me awake. Ryan! Ryan! Ryan! My plan was, don’t miss his fastball if he threw it over the plate. If he got two strikes on me, I’d have to face his curveball.” He turned and looked at me with his small blue eyes, which had fear in them. “Ryan was scary!” he said. He shook his head, as if seeing Ryan on the mound. Ryan began his motion and fired the ball at his head. Schmidt had a split second to make a decision. Was it a 100 m.p.h. fastball that could kill him if it hit him in the head, or was it that wicked curveball? If he dove away from the plate and the pitch was a curveball that broke over the plate, he’d look like a fool and a coward. But if it wasn’t a curveball, if it was that 100 m.p.h. fastball, and he didn’t dive away from the plate . . . well, he didn’t even want to think about that.

“Ryan, Gibson, Seaver, they made you defensive,” he said. “Does that make sense? You were afraid of the ball. There’s no fear of the ball today with cutters, splitters and changeups.”

“What about the Phillies’ four pitchers?” I said.

“They’re not scary,” he said. “Even if they all win 20 games, the Phillies don’t have a pitcher who strikes fear in a hitter.”

----from “The Phillies Four Aces” by Pat Jordan in yesterday's New York Times Magazine

I asked [Cliff Lee] which batters gave him the most trouble. Punchy hitters, he said, who foul off a lot of pitches, then slap the ball the other way. “Like Ichiro,” he said. “Sometimes you just want to let him hit his ground ball and hope someone catches it. He’s gonna get his hits. The quicker he does, the better for me. The more pitches a batter sees, the better hitters they become.”

--from “The Phillies Four Aces” by Pat Jordan in today's New York Times Magazine

Ichiro, who set the Mariners club record for hits, with 2248,
surpassing Edgar Martinez, Saturday night.

“If it had been my call, I wouldn't have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust him, and I still do.

”For now, anyway. But I wouldn't have intervened in Libya and he did. I sure hope his judgment really does turn out to have been better than mine.“

—Kevin Drum, ”Obama, Libya and Me," in Mother Jones

“For airmen [in the Pacific Theater in WWII], the risks were impossible to shrug off. The dead weren't numbers on a page. They were their roommates, their drinking buddies, the crew that had been flying off their wing ten seconds ago. Men didn't go one by one. A quarter of the barracks were lost at once. There were rarely funerals, for there were rarely bodies. Men were just gone, and that was the end of it. ...

”In the early days of 1943, as men died one after another, every man dealt with the losses in a different way. Somewhere along the way, a ritual sprang up. If a man didn't return, the others would open his foot-locker, take out his liquor, and have a drink in his honor. In a war without funerals, it was the best they could do.“

—pp. 89-90 of ”Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" by Laura Hillenbrand

“We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change. However, our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede.

”We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.

“For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws. We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.

”Send questions, or a resume/cover letter/links to clips to my email address below. If you already have your dream job, please pass this along to someone whose skills you covet. Thanks."

Matthew Doig
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
1741 Main St.
Sarasota FL, 34236
(941) 361-4903

“We will have high-definition, wide-screen television sets and a push-button dialing system to order the movie you want at the time you want it. You'll not go to a video store but instead order a movie on demand and then pay for it. Videocassette tapes as we know them now will be obsolete both for showing prerecorded movies and for recording movies. People will record films on 8mm and will play them back using laser-disk/CD technology. I also am very, very excited by the fact that before long, alternative films will penetrate the entire country. Today seventy-five percent of the gross from a typical art film in America comes from as few as six --six-- different theaters in six different cities. Ninety percent of the American motion-picture marketplace never shows art films. With this revolution in delivery and distribution, anyone, in any size town or hamlet, will see the movies he or she wants to see.”

--Roger Ebert, in Omni magazine, in 1987, as dug up by Paleofuture (a pretty remarkable-looking site)

Roger Ebert defending his position on Eddie Murphy's “Raw” in 1987. During this same period, he was also playing Nostradamus in the pages of Omni magazine.

“At any rate, I didn't ask to be an individual, but I find I am one, and by definition I occupy a space that no other individual occupies, or in other words, for what it's worth, I have my own point of view. I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals, I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am. I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.”

--Wallace Shawn, in the introduction to his book, “Essays”

“Well, now there are two Minnesotans in the 2012 race, despite the fact that the Constitution strictly states that no Minnesotan will ever reach office higher than vice president. Michele Bachmann, three-term congresswoman with no accomplishments beyond an ability to enrage Chris Matthews, will form an exploratory committee, according to CNN.”

--Alex Pareene, “Michele Bachmann is running for president now, sigh,” on Salon.com

Given that Barry Bonds passed you on the career home run list while under suspicion that he used performance enhancers, do you feel in your heart that you’re the real home run king?
I will answer that as best I can. I feel like I hit 755 home runs and somebody else broke my record. Whatever people want to say about that is fine, but I don’t think about it too much. ...

Who was the toughest pitcher you faced in your career?
There were a lot of them, but I’d have to say Curt Simmons. He was a lefty who came up with Philadelphia Phillies and he threw really, really hard.

--Part of “30 Seconds with Hank Aaron” by Vincent Mallozzi in The New York Times

“A Quinnipiac University poll that the Times’ City Room blog featured last week asked voters which of two statements about the expansion of bicycle lanes more closely resembles their point of view:

”Anti-bikism never rises above fifty per cent in any age, ethnic, political, or geographic category of New Yorkers—except one. That’s right. Republicans. By 59 to 35 per cent, they say that bike lanes are a bad thing.

“I’m sure there are many decent, sensible individual Republicans. But as a category, Republican appears to have absolutely no positive qualities whatsoever. Am I wrong about that? If so, could someone please tell me what I am overlooking?”

--Hendrik Hertzberg, “Poll Confirms New Yorkers' Bikeophilia,” on The New Yorker site.

“When I think of the elegant construction of something like 'Gunfight at the OK Corral,' I want to rend the hair from my head and weep bitter tears of despair. Generations of filmmakers devoted their lives to perfecting techniques that a director like Jonathan Liebesman is either ignorant of or indifferent to. Yet he is given millions of dollars to produce this assault on the attention span of a generation.”

—Roger Ebert, in his beautiful, scathing review of “Battle: Los Angeles.”

Follow-up: “BLA” (great acronym) isn't the worst movie Andrew O'Hehir has seen this year but it's the fourth-worst. (Be sure to read the fourth paragraph of his review.)

“Sean Penn is the guy most commonly associated with Fast Times at Ridgemont High these days, and even though his role is relegated to the B-plot, I can see why his character has endured. He’s great. If I didn’t know anything about the rest of his career, I would have assumed he was a talentless stoner they brought in off the beach and paid in Hawaiian shirts and Fritos. He’s so perfectly oblivious it looks like he showed up on set by accident. It’s a pretty impressive turn to be so broad and also so believable, especially in a movie that tends to be more earnest and deliberate in the rest of its scenes. He’s got the lion’s share of the written jokes, too, but some of the funniest stuff in the film comes from his reactions, obviously an organic byproduct of his total dedication to the role.”

—Alden Ford, “Watching 'Fast Times at Ridgement High' For the First Time”

The rest of the article doesn't do much for me, since, unlike Alden, high school kind of wrecked me. It wasn't a shrug, as it was for him.

But the above is a great encapsulation of Penn as Spicoli. As someone who's had to encapsulate that performance, too, I'm particularly jealous of the “so broad and so believable” riff. That's spot-on.

“Who would want to break into it? It’s like a bank that’s already been robbed.”

—Randy Newman, backstage at the Oscars, after a college reporter asked him about breaking into the music business. (As recounted in Michael Cieply and Brookes Barnes' article, “Younger Audience Still Eludes the Oscars,” in The New York Times.)

“Any critic who is any good is going to write out of a profound inner struggle between what has been and what must be, the values he is used to and those which presently exist, between the past and the present out of which the future must be born. This struggle with oneself as well as with the age, out of which something must be written and which therefore can be read—this is my test for a critic.”

—Alfred Kazin, 1960

“[George] Washington was a very good President, and an unhappy one. Distraught by growing factionalism within and outside his Administration, especially by the squabbling of Hamilton and Jefferson and the rise of a Jeffersonian opposition, he served another term only reluctantly. His second Inaugural Address was just a hundred and thirty-five words long; he said, more or less, Please, I’m doing my best. In 1796, in his enduringly eloquent Farewell Address (written by Madison and Hamilton), he cautioned the American people about party rancor: 'The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.' And then he went back to Mount Vernon. He freed his slaves in his will, possibly hoping that this, too, would set a precedent. It did not.”

--Jill Lepore in her article, “His Highness: George Washington scales new heights” in The New Yorker. Much recommended.

“My gosh, what a character [1960s-1970s Minnesota Twins' color announcer] Halsey Hall was. You never wanted to get too close when Halsey talked to you because you could smell the onions on his breath. During my first year in the big leagues, Halsey told me, 'You're going to make the Hall of Fame one day.' I said, 'Oh, do you think so?' He said, 'Yes, you just keep pitching like you are, young man.'”

—Bert Blyleven, who was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame today with nearly 80 percent of the vote, in Bob Showers' oral and pictoral history, “The Twins at the Met”

• Here's the ESPN story on the voting. (My man Edgar got only 32.9 percent of the vote (75 percent is needed).)
• For those on Facebook, the current Twins scoreboard with Circle-Me-Bert circled.
• Rob Neyer comments.

“I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to make-believe. Apparently, not even empty bellies can cure it. Of all the facts I dug up, none seemed so significant or so dangerous as the overwhelming fact of our lazy, irresponsible, adolescent inability to face the truth or tell it.”

—James Rorty, “Where Life is Better” (1936)

“There is no reason to believe [Cliff] Lee will forgo free agency, and when he hits the market, other teams might as well back off. Every factor points to Lee’s joining the Yankees.”

—Tyler Kepner, “Waiting for Lee, Maybe Until Winter,” New York Times, June 29, 2010

“Lee was their guy, and the Yankees believed he had the stuff, the makeup and the experience to succeed in pinstripes. But, really, Lee was never their guy. He wanted to go back to the Phillies all along, and has taken far less money to do so.”

—Tyler Kepner and Michael S. Schmidt, “Cliff Lee Accepts Late Bid by Phillies,” New York Times, December 14, 2010.

Mea culpa? Nowhere. Not even on Twitter, where, on Dec. 10, he wrote, “Still think Lee will go for highest offer, which is Yanks' 7 yrs/$161M. But sense I get from people involved is he feels pull toward Texas.”

“He mentioned another company that was making very low-budget movies, which were not terribly good, and which were doing very well at the box office. And his feeling was, ‘How would it be if somebody good did one of these low-budget movies?’”

—Screenwriter Joe Stefano on Alfred Hitchcock's pre-production thoughts for “Psycho”

“Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person. It means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny.

"Public institutions have many side benefits. For one thing they may purposely run at a loss. They're not out for profit. They may purposely run at a loss because of the side benefits. So, for example, if a public steel industry runs at a loss it's providing cheap steel to other industries. Maybe that's a good thing. Public institutions can have a counter-cyclic property. That means they can maintain employment in periods of recession, which increases demand, which helps you to get out of recession. A private company can't do that. In a recession, you throw out the work force. That's the way you make money.”

—Noam Chomsky
“The Corporation” (2002)

"What the fuck are you talking about? Willie makes fucking catches like that every day. Do you keep your fucking eyes closed in the press box?"

—Giants' Manager Leo Durocher, when asked by a reporter, after the game, if Willie Mays's catch off Vic Wertz in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series was the greatest catch he'd ever seen. From James S. Hirsch's Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, page. 199.

"Senior management's job is to pay people. If they fuck a hundred guys out of a hundred grand each, that's ten miliion more for them. They have four categories: happy, satisfied, dissatisfied, disgusted. If they hit happy, they've screwed up; They never want you to be happy. On the other hand, they don't want you so disgusted you quit. The sweet spot is somewhere between dissatisfied and disgusted."

—Greg Lippmann of Deutsche Bank, in Michael Lewis' "The Big Short," pg. 63. Last week, Lippmann, who not only bet against the subprime housing market but spread word that others should bet against the subprime housing market, too (he was, Lewis, writes, the "Patient Zero" of those bets), left Deutsche Bank for a hedge fund founded by Fred Brettschneider.

"Really, it was a federal issue. Household [Finance Corporation] was peddling these deceptive mortgages all over the country. Yet the federal government failed to act. Instead, at the end of 2002, Household settled a class action suit out of court and agreed to pay a $484 million fine distributed to twelve states. The following year it sold itself, and its giant portfolio of subprime loans, for $15.5 billion to the British financial conglomerate the HSBC Group.

"Eisman was genuinely shocked. 'It never entered my mind that this could possibly happen,' he said. 'This wasn't just another company—this was the biggest company by far making subprime loans. And it was engaged in just blatant fraud. They should have taken the CEO out and hung him up by his fucking testicles. Instead they sold the company and the CEO made a hundred million dollars. And I thought, Whoa! That one didn't end the way it should have.'"

—from Michael Lewis' "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine," pg. 18

Interviewer: Do you think we’ve learned anything from [the Vietnam War]?

Former Capt. Randy Floyd: I think we’re trying not to. I think I’m trying not to sometimes. I can’t even cry easily—from my manhood image. I think Americans have tried, we’ve all tried, very hard, to escape what we’ve learned in Vietnam. To not come to the logical conclusions of what’s happened there. You know, the military does the same thing. They don’t realize that people fighting for their own freedom are not going to be stopped by changing your tactics—adding a little more sophisticated technology over here, improving the tactics we used last time and not making quite so many mistakes. I think history operates a little different than that. That those kind of forces are not going to be stopped. I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminality that their officials and their policymakers have exhibited.

—from “Hearts and Minds” (1974), the Academy-Award-winning documentary by Peter Davis on the Vietnam War

"Freedom is moot if you waste it. If the internet is really destined to be no more than an ancillary medium, which I would view as a profound defeat, then it at least ought to do whatever it can not to bite the hand that feeds it—that is, it shouldn't starve the commercial media industries."

—Jaron Lanier, "You Are Not a Gadget"

“Politically, these issues are poisonous. That’s what Rahm Emanuel is looking at. [But] you can’t finesse it, and you can’t spin it. The President just has to lead the American people away from fear.”

—Elisa Massimino, the president of Human Rights First, on civilian trials vs. military tribunals, Guantanamo, and what kind of war is the War on Terror, in Jane Mayer's New Yorker article, "The Trial: Eric Holder and the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed."

Related:

• The New York Times gives equal weight to all sides by letting five lawyers, including Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and is now legal affairs editor of The National Review, have their say. 
• Jon Stewart spars with conservative columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen on "The Daily Show." 
• Scott Horton is less kind to Thiessen in this Harper's column.
• A letter from conservative lawyers, such as Ken Starr, coming to the defense of Dept. of Justice lawyers against the attacks of Liz Cheney's organization "Keep America Safe."

"A little over a decade and a half ago, with the birth of the World Wide Web, a clock started. The old-media empires were put on a path of predictable obsolescence. But would a superior replacement arise in time? What we idealists said then was, 'Just wait! More opportunities will be created than destroyed.' Isn't fifteen years long enough to wait before we switch from hope to empiricism? The time has come to ask, 'Are we building the digital utopia for people or machines?' If it's for people, we have a problem."

—from "You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" by Jaron Lanier

"You're not so nice and polite in your fiction," he said. "You're a different person."
"Am I?"
"I should hope so."

—E.I. Lonoff talking to Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer," an underrated classic.

"A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing. It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work. ... Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more."

—J.D. Salinger, in a letter to Lillian Ross, and quoted in The New Yorker, Feb. 8, 2010

"On every single major issue of the day, [the Republicans] are incoherent. They have no workable plans to insure the uninsured and no practical way to contain healthcare costs; most deny climate change even exists; most seek to prolong wars because ... er, we have to be tough; their response to the massive debt is to defend Medicare and call for tax cuts; their position on civil rights is that gay people need to go to Jesus; their position on terror suspects is to detain them and torture them, violating domestic and international law; their position on immigration is to round up millions and force them to go home.

"My worry, however, is that there are enough Americans perfectly happy to live with this nihilism indefinitely, and to perpetuate the policies of spend-and-borrow and invade-and-occupy that any serious attempt to address our problems is impossible. And their response to that will be to blame all those problems on a Democratic president, if there is one; and if there's a Republican president, to simply deny that any of the problems exist at all.

—Andrew Sullivan, "Tactics Over Strategy"

"After all, what keeps baseball going? It's the records. People are always talking about records, and if you elminate the records, the game loses a lot of its romance. Yet that's what they're doing. They are making records easier to erase."

—Mickey Mantle on the advent of the designated hitter in 1973, with obvious repurcussions for today; from the book, "Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year That Changed Baseball Forever," by John Rosengren

Rebuttal? Joe Posnanski argues that most baseball records are hardly as sacrosanct, or as pure, as we imagine them to be; that many factors—some as small as a strike zone, some as big as a ballpark—help create even the purer records:

Stuff usually isn’t black or white, up or down, left or right. It’s complicated. Carlton Fisk, of all people, should know that. If it makes people feel better to shout “fraud” in a crowded theater, hey, it’s a free country. But it seems to me there’s already enough noise out there.

"This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. ... Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed...

"Though I derive a sense of strength and confidence from writing and from my life as a husband and father, those pursuits are notoriously subject to endless setbacks and the steady exposure of shortcomings, weakness, and insufficiency—in particular in the raising of children. A father is a man who fails every day. Sometimes things work out: Your flashed message is received and read, your song is rerecorded by another band and goes straight to No. 1, you son blesses the memory of the day you helped him arrange the empty chairs of his foredoomed dream, your act of last-ditch desperation sends your comic-book company to the top of the industry. Success, however, does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do. But you always knew that. Nobody gets past the age of ten without that knowledge. Welcome to the club."

—Michael Chabon, "The Loser's Club," from the book Manhood for Amateurs

"It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race, a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

"To make a historical analogy with the last major increase in the written word, you could earn a living in 1500 simply by knowing how to read and write. The spread of those abilities in the subsequent century had the curious property of making literacy both more essential and less professional; literacy became critical at the same time as the scribes lost their jobs.

"The same thing is happening with publishing; in the 20th century, the mere fact of owning the apparatus to make something public, whether a printing press or a TV tower, made you a person of considerable importance. Today, though, publishing, in its sense of making things public, is becoming similarly de-professionalized; YouTube is now in the position of having to stop 8 year olds from becoming global publishers of video. The mere fact of being able to publish to a global audience is the new literacy, formerly valuable, now so widely available that you can't make any money with the basic capability any more.

"This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.

"So it falls to us to make sure that isn't all that happens."

—Clay Shirky, in a collection of World Question Center pieces

As an immigrant to the United States, Mr. Tesich says, he was for a long time very positive and very optimistic about this country. That optimism, he says, has changed, and the change started with Vietnam.

"I didn't just love America," he says. "I was in love with America. I honestly believed that it was going to be one of those nations that would take care of everybody, that would try to make its rewards available to all. And now I feel there is absolutely no agenda for helping those on the bottom in this country. Nobody is really interested in them. And I don't know what the country stands for."

—from a New York Times article on "Breaking Away" screenwriter Steve Tesich, March 12, 1991

"It was, readers of The New York Times recently learned, a very good year for Paramount Pictures. Two of the year’s biggest hits, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” have helped the studio climb out of its financial hole with a combined domestic take of more than $500 million. Both movies are deeply stupid, often incoherent and hinged on the principle that the spectacle of violence is its own pleasurable end. “Transformers” is also casually racist. But hey, that’s entertainment.

Or, more specifically, that’s Hollywood entertainment in the conglomerate age. The major studios have long been in the business of serving sludge to the world, but now the reek often spreads around the globe simultaneously with massive coordinated openings. “Revenge of the Fallen,” for instance, opened the same day on more than 4,000 screens in the United States — about a 10th of all the screens in the country — and soon about 10,000 more abroad. “Angels & Demons,” the sequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” opened on some 3,500 screens domestically and ate up more than 10,000 internationally. The French film “Summer Hours,” meanwhile, the best-reviewed release in The Times that weekend, opened on two screens.

—Manohla Dargis, "Amid Studio Product, Independents' Resilience," December 17, 2009

"What delight and joy in reading the Auburn Plainsman's Ben Bartley, some red-white-and-blue type guy from Texas who's fuming that such an anti-corporate, anti-arrogant, anti-Bush legacy, pro-eco, pro-nativist pantheist tract is raking it in big-time and spreading the myth everywhere, and there's nothing this guy can do about it. Hah! Eat shit, Christian asshole!"

—Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

“[Lamont] Cranston himself I thought a little slow-moving; he was fairly sedentary, as compared, say, with the Green Hornet, who could probably lick him in a fight if they went at it visibly. I didn’t think of the Shadow as being able to jump rooftops or climb ropes or run very fast. On the other hand, why should he have to? Also, I wondered about his restraint when he could become invisible anytime he chose. I wondered if he ever took advantage of women, as I surely would. Did he ever watch Margo Lane go to the bathroom? I knew that if I had the power to be invisible I would go into the girls’ bathroom at P.S. 70 and watch them pulling their drawers down. I would watch women take their clothes off in their homes and they wouldn’t even know I was there. I wouldn’t make the mistake of speaking up or making a sound, they would never even know I had been there. But I would forever after know what they looked like. The thought of having this power made my ears hot. Yes, I would spy on naked girls but I would also do good. I would invisibly board a ship, or, better still, a China Clipper, and I would fly to Germany and find out where Adolf Hitler lived. I would in absolute safety, and with no chance of being caught, go to Hitler’s palace, or whatever it was, and kill him. Then I would kill all of his generals and ministers. The Germans would be going crazy trying to find the invisible avenger. I would whisper in their ears to be good and kind, and they would thereafter be thinking God had been speaking. The Shadow had no imagination. He never looked at naked women nor thought of ridding he world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini. If his program hadn’t been on a Sunday afternoon, I would probably not have listened to it.”

—from E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, which I recently re-read for the first time in 20 years. It’s a beautiful book, and reminds me of Willa Cather’s lyrical My Antonia. Both are coming-of-age stories. This one's about coming into consciousness and perception in the Bronx in the 1930s. Funny, but I never thought about the double meaning of the title before: Not only a destination—the 1939/40 version in Flushing Meadows, New York—but a declaration of the way things are, which, given the circumstances of the story, not to mention our own perceptions, can only be viewed as ironic. Was Doctorow ever going to call it the title of the World's Fair essay contest our protagonist enters? “The Typical American Boy”? And how much of the book grew out of writing The Book of Daniel?

"Thank you, God. For letting me have another day."

—Amarante Cordova (Carlos Riquelme) upon arising, painfully, in the morning, in Robert Redford's underrated "The Milagro Beanfield War." For all the movie's magic realism, and its issues of class and rampant development (it's a Redford movie, after all), this is what stays with me. This simple line. I wish I could live it. Doesn't mean I won't keep trying.

"I always remember that actor [in the Australian low-budget thriller "Patrick," who spends the movie in a coma]. I thought he was amazing looking in that movie with his eyes just wide open and everything, and in the original script [for "Kill Bill"] I had it written like that. Then I showed it to Uma and she goes, 'I'm not going to do that,' and I go 'Why?' and she goes 'You wouldn't have your eyes open like that if you were in a coma! That's not realistic.' I go, 'Actually I never thought was it realistic or not, it's just Patrick did it, alright, and it looked really cool."

—Quentin Tarantino in the documentary about Australian exploitation movies, "Not Quite Hollywood," demonstrating what is right and wrong about him as a filmmaker.

"But, sadly, any time a racist criticizes the President, someone cries 'racism.'"

—Stephen Colbert

"I like to be the good guy because the good guy gets to kill the bad guy."

— my nephew, Ryan, 6, talking about playacting, but encapsulating the schizophrenia at the heart of our culture, during a walk around Mountain Lake on Orcas Island.

“It is unwise for anyone of any race to raise their voice to a law enforcement officer. But the result at the end of the day is this was a man who violated no law, was in his own house, who is the top academic star at the top academic school in the nation, and he was still taken away and arrested.”

— Al Vivian, diversity consultant, Atlanta, in the New York Times article "Professor's Arrest Tests Beliefs on Racial Progress"

ADDENDUM: Stanley Fish has a great post comparing both Henry Louis Gates' troubles in North Carolina and now Cambridge with the non-issue of Pres. Obama's birth certificate: "It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it's the White House."

Added thought: From Birchers to birthers. In 50 years, the extreme right in this country has managed to change nothing but one letter.

"She may decide that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any more than Rush Limbaugh does."

—Todd S. Purdam in his August 2009 Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin, "It Came from Wasilla," published before her July 3rd resignation announcement.

Hey all. Just got back from a family vacation in Minnesota, where I re-encountered two of my favorite junk foods: Old Dutch Rip-L Potato Chips and Sebastian Joe's ice cream. It's a good thing I don't live there anymore or I'd be 200 pounds.

While on vacation I read Cinemas of the World by James Chapman, from which I'll be quoting in the next couple of days. A bit academic but mostly interesting and always informative. British press. Here's the first of them:

Triumph des Willens represented the high point of Nazi propaganda: it enshrined the 'Hitler myth' so completely that no further films of the sort ever needed to be commissioned. Goebbels, for his part, was firmly of the opinion that feature films should provide escapist entertainment for the masses and that direct propaganda should be confined to the newsreels.

"[Critics] forget what the goal of the movie ['Transformers 2'] was. The goal of the movie is to entertain and have fun. What the audience tells us is, ‘We couldn’t be more entertained and having more fun.’ They kind of roll their eyes at the critics and say, ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’”

—Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount, which is distributing "Transformers 2 for DreamWorks, in an uncredited AP article.

"Until the spring of 1978, when Salomon Brothers formed Wall Street’s first mortgage security department, the term borrower referred to large corporations and to federal, state, and local governments. It did not include homeowners. A Salomon Brothers partner named Robert Dall thought this strange...

"The problem [with the inability to see big business in home mortgages] was more fundamental than a disdain for Middle America. Mortgages were not tradable pieces of paper; they were not bonds. They were loans made by savings banks that were never supposed to leave the saving banks. A single home mortgage was a messy investment for Wall Street, which was used to dealing in bigger numbers. No trader or investor wanted to poke around suburbs to find out whether the homeowner to whom he had just lent money was creditworthy. For the home mortgage to become a bond, it had to be depersonalized.

"At the very least, a mortgage had to be pooled with other mortgages of other homeowners. Traders and investors would trust statistics and buy into a pool of several thousand mortgage loans made by a savings and loan, of which, by the laws of probability, only a small fraction should default..."

— from Michael Lewis’ “Liar’s Poker,” pp. 83-85

"In a career that spanned almost 50 years Jack Lemmon was seldom a soothing presence. Sweaty, stammering and hyperactive, Lemmon seemed to embody the countertype of the monumental, granite-jawed leading men of the 1950s — stars like John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck.

"Where Peck, for example, seemed to embody the World War II squadron leader slipping into middle age and forced to operate on the unfamiliar corporate battlefields of Madison Avenue (“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”), Lemmon was the junior officer eagerly polishing the brass of his superiors (in his Oscar-winning supporting performance in “Mister Roberts”), a tactic he queasily carried with him into the business world (“The Apartment”). Lemmon’s recurring predicament is that of the desperate conformist who ultimately discovers that conformity comes at too high a price."

—Dave Kehr in his NY Times article, "Everyman, Tempted" about a new Jack Lemmon DVD collection

James Allen: Must you go home?
Helen: There are no musts in my life. I'm free, white and 21."

—from "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932). The Worldwide Dubya isn't much help with the phrase. One assumes it was a semi-common, possibly regional (i.e., southern) comment back in the day, but I don't see any specific reference to it before this film—which, I should add, includes a lot of black actors in roles that, while mostly non-speaking, aren't too embarrassing for the time. The line subsequently wound up in a few other films from the era: "Dames" (1935) and "Kitty Foyle" (1940). It also became the title of indie movie from 1963 about an African American on trial for the rape of a white woman.

“Up,” which begins in the nineteen-thirties, is steeped in the style of that period, with its gee-whiz appreciation of exotic adventure and its worship of heroes who have journeyed to strange, distant places. A little boy, Carl, watches newsreels at a theatre, and sees an explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), first celebrated then humiliated: no one believes the skeleton of a large flightless bird that Muntz has brought back from South America is authentic. When Carl leaves the theatre, he imagines the newsreel narrator describing his walk home, turning his stepping over a crack in the sidewalk into a vault over a canyon. It’s a gracious moment: the co-directors, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, who also wrote the screenplay, pay affectionate tribute to daydreaming as a noble and necessary human activity. In dreams begin responsibilities, and in dreams begin movies, too.

—David Denby on "Up" in the June 8th New Yorker. Read on and discover why Denby feels Pixar at its best is better than Disney at its best.

I now “get” that Pup’s greatness was a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas up. Great men take risks. It’s the timorous souls—like myself—who err on the side of caution; who take in sail when they see a storm approaching and look for snug harbor. Not my old man. Or as Mum used to put it, “Bill, why are you trying to kill us?”

—Christopher Buckley, “Losing Mum and Pup,” pg. 122

The book [on Goldwater] ends with an anecdote in which I, age twelve at the time, figure. Pup had gotten the details a bit wrong, and I had e-mailed him from Zermatt the correct version. He declined it, saying “I like my version better.” I thought to say, “Pup, it’s not a question of liking your version better, but of using the accurate version,” but then thought, Never mind.

"In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, [John] Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

—Jeffrey Toobin in his New Yorker article "No More Mr. Nice Guy." Worth reading in its entirety. I was a little perplexed that we got this now, rather than at the end of June when the decisions in the more controversial Supreme Court cases are announced. And the end of the piece is a little weak, particularly for Toobin, who's such a good writer. But worth reading, and considering, as the more vocal part of the conservative nation picks-a-little, talks-a-little about Pres. Obama's recent U.S. Supreme Court nominee.

"The Academy Awards race was hardly a gentleman's game in the 1960s. If campaigning was less costly and public than in more recent years, it wasn't due to a sense of decorum as much as to the fact that the Academy itself was half the size it is today, much more heavily populated with rank-and-file studio employees, and thus easier to manipulate and control. Oscar prognostication was not yet a blood sport; each year, the movies that would be the subject of campaigns were selected by their studios, and then essentially dictated to selected gossip columnists and writers from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times, the only major publications that then took much notice of the nominating process."

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 385

"Beatty had tried to plan his entire career by studyng the work of directors he admired, but as Bonnie and Clyde's producer, suddenly he was feeling impatient with auteurism. 'To attribute [movies] wholly to their directors—not to the actors, not to the producer, not [to] the leading lady...well's that's just bullshit!' he fumed. 'Those pictures were made by directors, writers, and sound men and cameramen and actors and so forth, but suddenly it's "Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown"... It's not healthy."

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 247, citing a Beatty quote from The Bonnie and Clyde Book

**

"If [Mike] Nichols felt relaxed as production [on The Graduate] began, the reason was probably that, as he puts it, 'I saw the whole thing—I knew what the movie was.' In that, he was a minority of one."

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 312, citing an author interview

 **

"The auteurist critics look for recurring patterns, the incandescent joining of visual style and idea. You can’t find such patterns, or even a consistent visual motif, in [Victor] Fleming’s movies. But you can find a powerful grasp of fable... He didn’t direct the entirety of either of his two classics [The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind], and he wasn’t, by definition, an auteur. But this absence from the list of the blessed suggests a fault in auteur theory and not in Fleming—a prejudice against the generalists, the non-obsessed, the “chameleons,” as Steven Spielberg called them, who re-created themselves for each project and made good movies in many different styles."

— from David Denby's article "The Real Rhett Butler: The forgotten man behind two of Hollywood's most enduring classics," in the latest New Yorker

[Mike] Nichols, who had championed the idea [of casting Robert Redford as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate], surprised himself by turning the actor down. "We were friends, we had done Barefoot, I was playing pool with him, and I said, 'I'm really sad, but you can't do it. You can't play a loser,'" says Nichols. "He said, 'Of course I can play a loser!' I said, 'You can't! Look at you! How many times have you ever struck out with a woman?' And he said, I swear to you, 'What do you mean?' He didn't even understand the concept. To him, it was like saying, 'How many times have you been to a restaurant and not had a meal?'"

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 237

"Nonetheless, by the beginning of 1965, [Dustin] Hoffman was twenty-seven, seriously demoralized by his inability to land an acting job, and considerng a change in careers. ... [Susan] Anspach, who met him during that production [of A View from a Bridge], recalls a lunch for the cast and crew of the play at which he told her with bravado, '"You know, if I were older, I'd be playing Bobby's [Duvall] part." and I said, "Sure, right, Dusty." And he said, "What do you mean? I'm fuckin' talented! Ask Bobby! He'll tell you himself!" I said to Bobby, "Is he putting me on? He's the sweep-up guy!" And Bobby said, "No, it's true, he's the most talented guy among all of us."'"

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 164

"Building is interesting, because it's ultimately impossible, I suppose, but killing is boring. It's easy to see through something—to show how stupid it is, or how wrong—but that doesn't take very long, and then you're finished. ... Killing doesn't solve the problem of boredom."

—Wendy O'Flaherty, professor at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, in Janet Malcolm's "In the Freud Archives," pg. 155

Overstates the case but it reminds me of the emptiness I feel after writing a movie review. It also reminds me that it's always easier to write a negative review than a positive one—in part because you want to do justice to the good film ("The Soloist") and could give a crap about the bad one ("Wolverine"). Writing a negative review is more freeing; you're not beholden to anything but the truth. The above quote also reminds me of most things on the Internet.

"Heighdy! See how I'm picking up the local jargon? Things going extremely well for us. Found the graves of Clyde and Buck in abandoned cemetery overgrown with weeds. One of the strangest sensations we ever had—standing six feet over Clyde. On Monday we'll see Bonnie's. ... Bob is taking a lot of pictures. Perfect Bonnie and Clyde locations! Quite uncanny to see cities and towns that look like 1932 this year."

— David Newman (with Robert Benton), in East Texas for further research for their script, "Bonnie and Clyde," May 1964. From "Pictures at the Revolution" by Mark Harris, pg. 60

""Anvil!" owes much to Penelope Spheeris’ "Decline of Western Civilization, Pt. II: The Metal Years" and “American Movie.” In all three, the rawness of people chasing -- not living -- dreams is uncomfortable to watch, because they’ve bought the concept that what they do isn’t valid unless they become big stars... Anvil plays gigs, makes records, and has a small but avid fan base. But they always want more, they rarely talk about artistry or what they want to do with their music, and whatever success they have is contingent on how others see them."

— Jim Walsh in his MN Post review of "Anvil! The Story of Anvil."

This gets to the heart of it even if Jim, who's a friend, is, I believe, overstating his case. It could be the boys in Anvil feel that what they do isn't valid unless they make a living at it. And they don't. At 50. That's when you begin to wonder if it's all worth it. But in general I concede Jim's point—for Anvil, for our culture, for me—even if I know that, with me anyway, I'll forever be trapped between doing the thing for the thing and needing a little something in response.

   "Denise is echt California," Masson said fondly. "When I first met her, you couldn't get more than six words out of her, and they were generally 'like,' 'you know,' 'I mean, like.' She spoke in half sentences. There is something so echt California about that."
   "It has nothing to do with California," Denise said.
   "But you have a basic mistrust of speech, right?"
   "It's just not fast enough," Denise said. "It doesn't say what I mean."

-- from Janet Malcolm's "In the Freud Archives."

"We are all perpetually smoothing and rearranging reality to conform to our wishes; we lie to others and to ourselves constantly, unthinkingly. When, occasionally—and not by dint of our own efforts but under the pressue of external events—we are forced to see things as they are, we are like naked people in a storm. There are a few of us—psychoanalysts have encountered them—who are blessed or cursed with a strange imperviousness to the unpleasantness of self-knowledge. Their lies to themselves are so convincing that they are never unmasked. These are the people who never feel in the wrong, who are always able to justify their conduct, and who in the end—human nature being what it is—cause their fallible fellow-men to turn away from them."

— Janet Malcolm, "In the Freud Archives," pg. 70. Here's to turning away from them. Here's to naked people in a storm.

In case the moral argument against torture isn't swaying you:

Imagine if an American operative out of uniform were captured by the Iranians tomorrow. Imagine he were put into a coffin for hours with no light and barely enough air to breathe, imagine if he were then removed and smashed against a plywood wall by a towel tied around his neck thirty times, imagine if he were then kept awake for eleven days in a row, then kept in a cell frozen to hypothermia levels, and then waterboarded multiple times, after which he confessed to being a spy trying to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. Would you believe that intelligence? Would Krauthammer? Would you believe both that he wasn't tortured and that the information he gave was reliable?

—Andrew Sullivan, taking on Charles Krauthammer, here.

"You know what the trouble is, Bruce? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."

— Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) in Season 2, Episode 11 of "The Wire," originally aired on August 17, 2003

"We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree. We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country. The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them."

— Pres. Barack Obama in a speech before the Turkish parliament.

I read this in The New York Times (newspaper version) while sitting at the Kerry Park overlook on this sunny Seattle day, eating my lunch and listening to Teddy Thompson's "In My Arms." I was pretty happy for that half hour. Tomorrow it's supposed to rain. Tomorrow things may get worse economically. But for now it's sunny and more people realize we're at least heading in the direction we should. Amen.

"They were both of them jovial about the cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day."

— "My Antonia" by Willa Cather, published 1918

"I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.... The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermillion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."

— "My Antonia" by Willa Cather

A group of friends gather in the kitchen as a friend, Honore Panisse, dying upstairs, confesses to a priest.

Cesar: One thing worries me, though. What if our God isn’t the true god?
Felix: Good lord! What are you saying?
Cesar: I know Moslems, Hindus, Chinese, blacks. Their god isn’t the same as ours. What’s a sin for us isn’t necessarily a sin for them. They may not be right but suppose they are, Monsieur Brun.
Brun: That’s the question.
Cesar: Poor old Panisse is well-prepared for a meeting with Elzear’s God. But suppose that up there in the clouds, he finds a god he doesn’t know at all. A red, black or yellow one. Or one like you see in antique shops, wth a big belly and lots of arms. What could poor Panisee says to a god like that? How would they communicate? Put yourself in his place. Tired by your death and dizzy after your journey, trying to make yourelf understood to this god. You pray and he says, “What’s that? What are you saying?” All in Chinese.
Felix: That’s tragic. You give me the creeps.
Woman: So the Bible’s all a lie? Aren’t you ashamed to talk like that in front of an altar boy?
Woman 2: If you went to church more, you’d know there’s only one god – ours!

— from "Cesar" (1936), the third of Marcel Pagnol's "Fanny" trilogy

"The days of Nicolas Cage’s sensitivity and risk-taking as an actor have been over for so long it’s hard to get worked up about a new lame performance. But I’ll try. He makes only the broadest of acting choices. He MOPES in capital letters. He DRINKS in capital letters. He SHOUTS whenever he can get away with it (the late film bad acting shouting duet with Rose Byrne is especially funny). When the movie needs him to cry he doesn’t cry so much as hunch his shoulders and jam his eyelids together as if he can force tears out physically. He’s like a Terminator mimicking emotions they’ve seen humans express that they don't quite grasp. Cage doesn’t just overact. He overacts and then underlines. Then he starts circling his emotions with a big fat red marker."

— Nathaniel Rogers, from his review of "Knowing," on Film Experience Blog

"Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay [Action Pictures] if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply because such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American."

— Vachel Lindsay, "The Art of the Moving Picture," 1915

"We all have the right to be free from the interference of petty, small-minded, single-track dirty sniffers who feel that they have to justify their official existence. The motion picture industry is often faced by pressures from narrow, ignorant individuals and groups. Some of them may have the best intentions in the world. But it’s a mistake to take that pressure lying down."

— Samuel Goldwyn on HUAC, from the documentary "Goldwyn: The Man and His Movies"

"He'll cry
Through the best of times
Then he'll ask you
Where do all the good times go?"

— from "Some Champions" by Joe Henry

"I am apparently in the lonely 1.4% of the public who is only somewhat interested in this movie. In other words I want to see it but I'm not salivating after that 15 minutes I saw. NY Post wonders if Zach Snyder is the new Stanley Kubrick. This is why I'm not salivating. Mass preemptive hyperbole just kills my will to live."

— Nathaniel R. on Film Experience Blogspot.

Check out, too, Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker in which he tears "Watchmen" (and "V for Vendetta," not to mention leering 19-year-olds in general) a new one. 

Andre Harris: Bearing in mind what you learned in the last war, the results of National Socialism, which, as you explained, had a certain appeal or charm about it at one point in your life, bearing this in mind, would you change the choices you made at that time?
Christian de la Mazière: Yes, of course. I think only an idiot would refuse to change their opinion. 

— from "Le Chagrin et le pitie" (1971), Marcel Ophuls great documentary on the occupation of France during World War II. The original New York Times review can be read here. Among the many fascinating details — the equivocation of collaborationists, the straightforward account of an aristocrat like de la Maziere, the sad amusement (and heroics) of Pierre Mendes-France, who had to wait for two lovers to seal the deal, or at least the agreement, and leave, before he could climb down from a prison wall and escape an unjust sentence, along with the horrors of such propaganda films as "Le Juif Suss" — I was also intrigued to discover that, in French anyway, sorrow (chagrin) is masculine, while pity (pitie) is feminine. True? And does this expand our interpretation of "Annie Hall"? Feel free to discuss.

"Now we see what you're really after. You're marrying Fanny because she's young and pretty and you want to rub your leathery old hide up against her soft skin. ... I find it disgusting. I am disgusted."

— Cesar (Raimu) to Panisse (Fernand Charpin) in Marcel Pagnol's "Fanny" (1932)

"My best friend gets hit by a streetcar and winds up in the hospital, civil war in Spain and earthquakes in Japan...and now you wear that hat."

— James Cagney to his girlfriend in “The Great Guy”

"Other highlights for me — two faces: Philippe Petit's, for balancing an Oscar on it, and Penelope Cruz, for just having it."

— Adam Wahlberg on the Oscars

"When asked why she had so many sexual partners, Marlene [Dietrich] shrugged. 'They asked.'"

— from "It Happened at the Hotel Du Cap" by Cari Beauchamp in the March 2009 Vanity Fair.

"You know, when you grow up in the suburbs of Sydney or Auckland or Newcastle, like Ridley or Jamie Bell — well, the suburbs of anywhere — a dream like this seems kind of vaguely ludicrous and completely unattainable. But this moment is directly connected to those childhood imaginings. And for anybody who's on the down side of advantage and relying purely on courage, it's possible. Thanks very much."

— Russell Crowe after winning best actor for "Gladiator."

"For me, [Ted] Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy."

— John Updike on Ted Williams in "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," and a reminder of what baseball used to be. 

"Those [New Yorker] reviews alone would have been enough to make a major career, each one not laying down the law for the writer but bringing news to the reader. (What editor would not cry out in delight at finding a piece that made the simple and sage distinction that purposes are not points, that, where the purpose of “King Lear” was to purge the soul with pity and terror, its point was that old men should not retire prematurely.)"

—Adam Gopnik in "Postscript: John Updike," in The New Yorker. Read Roger Angell on same here. Updike's incomparable piece about Ted Williams' final at-bat, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," can be, must be, read here.

Charlie is in bed with Clarisse. She's topless with the sheet near her waist. Charlie pulls it above her breasts.

Charlie: This is how it's done in the movies.
Clarisse: Ha ha. (Pause) I saw Torpedoes in Alaska at the movies this afternoon.
Charlie: Any good?
Clarisse: John Wayne shows how America only wants peace.
Charlie: Well, well. The Yanks are just like me.

— from Francois Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste (1960)

"We almost didn't make it at first. I'd watch her over breakfast, wondering how to get rid of her. But then I thought, 'Where do you get these ideas?' And I found no answer."

— Passerby, happily married after 11 years, in Francois Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste (1960)

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

"I'm not very popular for saying this, and the missus tells me to keep it on the QT, but lately for me, the biggest, most commercial projects that I've done are the most creatively satisfying, the most collaborative and the ones that the audiences respond to. And I jump off and do an indie, and they can't hit their ass with both hands, it's 50 monkeys f–––ing a football and then you have to go and pump your kidneys dry in Sundance."

— Robert Downey, Jr., during the annual Oscar roundtable discussion in Newsweek.

"Because of you, John. Barack Obama."

—How Pres. Obama autographed a photo for U.S. Rep. (and civil rights legend) John Lewis after the inauguration on Jan. 20th. From David Remnick's must-read "Talk of the Town" piece in this week's New Yorker.

There’ve been times that I thought
I couldn’t last for long
Now I think I’m able
To carry on

It’s been a long
A long time coming
But I know
Change gonna come
Oh, yes it will

— Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come." Great use of this song, by the way, in Spike Lee's "Malcom X."

ADDENDUM: The New York Times editorial on the inaugural speech.

"It's funny that Paul Haggis says he was worried that Crash's trailer "was going to seem like overly significant claptrap," because that's how I felt about the entire movie. So I'd say the trailer was pretty accurate."

— Ross Pfund on The Man Who Sold "Crash" to the World

"A gangly Illinois politician whom 'the base' would today label a RINO—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many 'some' is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job.

"The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing."

— Hendrik Hertzberg, "Talk of the Town," New Yorker, Jan. 19, 2009

"If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands. The story from Beijing that pops up in my Google alert could have come from anywhere. As news resources are stretched and shared, it can often appear anywhere as well: a Los Angeles Times piece will show up in TheWashington Post, or vice versa."

— Michael Hirschorn, "End Times: Can America's paper of record survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism?" in The Atlantic

Johnny Depp: Out of nowhere this script arrived with a note: "Michael Mann would like to talk to you about playing Dillinger."
Entertainment Weekly: What was your reaction to that?
JD: Well, certainly intrigued. Intrigued by both Dillinger and Michael Mann. It's always interesting to get in the ring with a director and explore their process and see what does it for them.
EW: And what does it for him?
JD: The details of the details of the details. [Laughs] They should invent a word to describe it, because it's not just details, it teeters on microscopic obsession with every molecule of the moment... You got to salute that.

—From the 1.09.09 issue of Entertainment Weekly about the summer film (July 1 opening) I'm most excited about.

"I often got ahead of the dailies by simply stating what was in plain sight instead of submitting to the straitjacket of spokespeople and prepared statements and pat answers."

— David Carr in "The Night of the Gun," pg. 263

"I lost my job in March of 1987, and by the end of the next year, I had multiple arrests, and I was in long-term treatment at Eden House. In the recollection and the telling, I had always thought I washed out of journalism for many years, but it was more like a single year, counting the time I spent in the booby hatch, and even in there, I wrote stories. Regardless of what happened to me, I rarely stopped typing. Perhaps I was worried I would disappear altogether if I did."

--David Carr, "The Night of the Gun," pg. 139

—Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing the godawful Arthur Hiller film, "The Babe," starring John Goodman, in "Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville."

"Still, we must remember—and an intellectual's most persistent and nagging responsibility lies in making this simple point over and over again, however noxious and bothersome we render ourselves thereby—that truth and desire, fact and comfort, have no necessary, or even preferred, correlation (so rejoice when they do coincide)."

—Stephen Jay Gould in his essay "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown" from the book "Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville." 

"Think of science as a powerful searchlight continuously widening its beam and bringing more of the universe into the light. But as the beam of light expands, so does the circumference of darkness."

—Dr. Morris Meister, Principal of the Bronx High School of Science when E.L. Doctorow was a student there, and quoted in E.L. Doctorow's Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006.

"So, Barry. What have you brought me from America?"

I reached into my bag and pulled out one of the portable cassette players that I had bought for him [Abo] and Bernard. He turned it over in his hands with a thinly disguised look of disappointment.

"This brand is not Sony, is it?" he said. Then, looking up, he quickly recovered himself and slapped me on the back. "That's okay, Barry. Thank you! Thank you."

I nodded at him, trying not to get angry. He was standing beside Bernard and their resemblance was striking: the same height, the same slender frame, the same smooth, even features. Just shave off Abo's moustache, I thought to myself, and they could almost pass as twins. Except for...what?  The look in Abo's eyes. That was it. Not just the telltale redness of some sort of high but something deeper, something that reminded me of young men back in Chicago. An element of guardedness, perhaps, and calculation. The look of someone who realizes early in life that he has been wronged.

—Barack Obama, visiting Kendu Bay in Kenya in the 1980s, in Dreams From My Father, pg. 384

"At a Clinton event in Hampton, New Hampshire, a seventy-one-year-old woman named Ruth Keene told me that 'the Republicans would chew Obama up.'

"They tried like hell. They called him an élitist, a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, an Arab, an appeaser, a danger to the republic, a threat to small children, a friend of terrorists, an enemy of Israel, a vote thief, a non-citizen, an anti-American, and a celebrity."

—George Packer in his article "The New Liberalism: How the economic crisis can help Obama and redefine the Democrats."

"The Rush Limbaugh attacks and other attacks from the far right generate a lot of heat but not much light."

—Colin Powell, in "The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama" by David Remnick, in the latest New Yorker

More than halfway through David Grann's must-read piece in the post-election issue of The New Yorker, "The Fall," about John McCain and his disastrous campaign, Grann paraphrases McCain speechwriter and close aide Mark Salter:

In a recent conversation, Salter told me that at one moment the press was criticizing McCain for lacking a central message and the next was castigating him for not being spontaneous.

First, the media is not monolithic. More importantly, those two criticisms are not mutually exclusive — as the sentence seems to imply. One can have a central message and be spontaneous. Just look at Barack Obama. Unfortunately, McCain didn't have (a central message) and wasn't (spontaneous). The worst of both worlds.

"Life is short, Barack," he would say. "If you're not trying to really change things out here, you might as well forget it."

—Community organizer Marty Kaufman to the future president in Dreams From My Father, pg. 229

“If you’re a hard-liner in Tehran, a U.S. president who wants to talk to you presents more of a quandary than a U.S. president who wants to confront you,” remarked Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “How are you going to implore crowds to chant ‘Death to Barack Hussein Obama’?"

—from Thomas Friedman's column "Show Me the Money."

I recommend everyone read the entire column, but here (to me) are the highlights. It explains why we all felt so good Wednesday morning:

On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy. Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic...

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k)...

...Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country. 

From the president-elect's first press conference earlier today. The economy, jobs, Iran, were all dealt with. Then this.

With respect to the dog, this is a major issue. I think it's generated more interest on our Web site than just about anything.

We have -- we have two criteria that have to be reconciled. One is that Malia is allergic, so it has to be hypoallergenic. There are a number of breeds that are hypoallergenic.

On the other hand, our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but, obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me. So -- so whether we're going to be able to balance those two things I think is a pressing issue on the Obama household.

The "mutts like me" line. Jesus, I love this man.

One other thing: this is a country whose President-elect's middle name is Hussein. That is a fact to be celebrated. I received an email from a young friend, an entrepreneur in Kabul, this morning. He said, "We are all smiling now," and he attached a Pakistani press clipping--the Taliban greeted the new President and said they were ready to commence talks.

—Joe Klein, Time magazine

In an e-mail to Jeff and Sullivan...

"I have a slight headache but I can't think of anytime I've been happier. There were tears and cheers at our place. Andy, who had gone door-to-door in Ohio for Obama, was in tears. And Laurion's parents came up from the Bahamas just for the election. His dad. who's black, said to me as he left, 'I'm so proud of your country. This is very special day.'"

"Our community, we're used to the legal system letting us down," he said. "I'm used to [things] going wrong. I distrust the system so much, but this is the first time I've seen the system work in my life, and I'm 40 years old. That's harsh, but it's true. It's a relief. It's a relief to say, 'Finally. Something right happened.' But not right just for me, for everybody."

— David Hall, 39, in Jim Walsh's MNPost piece "Jubiliation at Arnellia's."

"Tonight we got Hayfield. Like all the other schools in this conference they're all white. They don't have to worry about race. We do. But we're better for it."

—Coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) in Remember the Titans.

And we are.

From James Wolcott, via Sully:

It amazes me how commentators, especially conservative commentators, can argue that (a) Obama is a socialistic avatar and a radical redistributionist and yet (b) that his election doesn't mean that the voters have been pulled to the left or bestowed a liberal mandate—that the U.S. is still (this week's reigning buzzphrase) "a center-right country."

"Like water finding its level, you will arrive at a career that suits you."

—Barack Obama's father, in a letter to a teenaged Obama, in Dreams From My Father, pg. 76.

"Let's get out of here. Your shit's getting way too complicated for me."

—Barack's friend, Ray, after Barack articulated the nuances of high school race relations in  Dreams From My Father, pg. 74.

“Marlon’s going to class to learn the Method was like sending a tiger to jungle school.”

Or wasn't acting. Brando says of his teacher, Stella Adler, "She taught me to be real, and not to try to act out an emotion I didn't personally experience during a performance." That's when I understood — as much, I suppose, as a non-actor can understand. He's got to actually feel what he's saying or it doesn't work. It accounts for the unevenness of his work. The subtitle of the piece is "How the greatest American actor lost his way," but the article is also about how the greatest American actor found his way. Everyone loses their way — everyone — but not everyone finds their way in the first place. There's a My god, what might have been? quality to the article, but, again, and maybe this is the Minnesotan in me, there's also, in the article, a sense that: My god, what WAS. The author ticks off the five or six great performances that Brando gave us in great movies, and, because of the ferociousness of his talent, that's a lament. For me, that's the pinnacle. I go back to David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla: "Mike Nichols told me long ago that there is no such thing as a career—that if a person has done five great things over three decades of work he is indeed blessed." Brando was more than blessed; he blessed us.

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."

—David Sedaris in the June 27th New Yorker

"Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms."

—from Jane Mayer's article on how John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in the Oct. 27th New Yorker.

More precise, it's a piece on how she wound up on everyone's radar. Blame those National Review/Weekly Standard luxury cruises that stopped off in Juneau in 2007. "The Governor was more than happy to meet with these guys," her aide said, and they were more than happy to meet with her. Starbursts followed. William Kristol was particularly smitten, to the point where, in a Fox News discussion on possible VEEPs this June, Chris Wallace told Kristol, "Can we please get off Sarah Palin?" Others beat the drums, and some beat those drums right next to John McCain. I suppose the real money quote is near the end: "By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company." Yikes.

"Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea. To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune. To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president."

—Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the conservative mayor of London, channeling Oscar Wilde in his Daily Telegraph endorsement of Barack Obama for president of the United States.

"Tonight we got Hayfield. Like all the other schools in this conference they're all white. They don't have to worry about race. We do. But we're better for it."

—Coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) in Remember the Titans. It's not a good movie — there are very dishonest parts — but these lines, part of the "big game" speech, resonate beyond the film. They articulate my hopes about our country. Other countries, in Asia, in Europe, haven't really been dealing with racial matters for as long as we have, and haven't gone as far as we have. And I like to think we're better for it. 

"I have been watching my life. It's right there. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it."

—Don Draper (Jon Hamm) on this week's episode of "Mad Men." 

Swimming like there's no tomorrow
Living like there's no regret
Looked up and saw the sorrow

Too far out
Too far out
This is what they said would happen
We were warned
We were warned
We were too far out

—from the song "Too Far Out" by The Tropicals

"George F. Will writes: 'Bush's terseness is Ernest Hemingway seasoned with John Wesley.'

"Well, one is hardly familiar with John Wesley's sermons, but I do know that to put George W. Bush's prose next to Hemingway's is equal to saying that Jackie Susann is right up there with Jane Austen. Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves."

—Norman Mailer, in a letter to The Boston Globe, March 13, 2002, and reprinted in a section of the Oct. 6 New Yorker. The last sentence in particular made me wonder what Norman would've made of Sarah Palin.

"It would be the easiest thing for me as president to ask for a declaration of war. A man on a horseback is always a hero. But I wouldn't have to do the fighting. Some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some great family would have to do the fighting — and the dying. When I ask them to do that, I want to be very sure that what they're dying for is worthwhile."

— Pres. Woodrow Wilson (Alexander Knox) after the sinking of the Lusitania in Wilson (1944) 

"I often think of something Woodrow Wilson said to me. 'It is only once in a generation that people can be lifted above material things. That is why conservative government is in the saddle for two-thirds of the time.'"

—Franklin (Ralph Bellamy) to Eleanor Roosevelt (Greer Garson), in Sunrise at Campbello (1960)

"There is no expert on the subject. I mean, there is no wise old man. There's... Shit, there's just us."

—Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner) to JFK and RFK on the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, after Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson, despite what he sees as the inevitable consequences of the act, recommends bombing Cuba, in the movie Thirteen Days. 

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."

— James Baldwin, from the essay "Stranger in the Village" in Notes of a Native Son. He wrote it about America in the 1950s, and I first read it in the 1980s when it seemed truer than in the 1950s. Today it seems truer still. 

"His lack of political knowledge, c'mon fellas, just makes him seem more a man of the people."

— Republican political operatives discussing running Ronald Reagan for governor of California in The Reagans (2003)

"I was running. I was always running. I was trying so hard to make the team that I was always offsides."

—Phillip Baker Hall as Richard M. Nixon in Robert Altman's underrated one-man show, Secret Honor, from 1984.

KOAT radio reporter: And now Mr. Federber. What is your reaction to this wonderful job being done here?
Mr. Federber: I think it's...wonderful.

--from Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, a 1951 indictment of a reporter, Kirk Douglas, who manufactures a media circus involving a man trapped in a mine. The KOAT reporter isn't Douglas; he's just another bad reporter. Mr. Federber, the first tourist on the scene, is played by Frank Cady, who, in the 1960s, would play Sam Drucker on "Petticoat Junction," "Green Acres" and "The Beverly Hillbillies."

"The informers about this time began to accuse wealthy men of charging more than the legal interest on loans—one and a half per cent was all that they were allowed to charge. The statute about it had long fallen in abeyance and hardly a single senator was innocent of infringing it. But Tiberius upheld its validity. A deputation went to him and pleaded that everyone should be allowed a year and a half to adjust his private finances to conform with the letter of the law, and Tiberius as a great favour granted the request. The result was that all debts were at once called in, and this caused a great shortage of current coin. Tiberius' great idle hoards of gold and silver in the Treasury had been responsible for forcing up the rate of interest in the first place, and now there was a financial panic and land-values fell to nothing."

— Robert Graves' I, Claudius, page 368-69

"The pay was certainly insufficient: the soliders had to arm and equip themselves out of it and prices had risen. And certainly the exhaustion of military reserves had kept thousands of soliders with the Colours who should have been discharged years before, and veterans were recalled to the Colours who who were quite unfit for service..."

— Robert Graves' I, Claudius, page 199, on a mutiny that broke out among Roman soldiers along the Rhine.

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