Quote of the Day posts

How about Steven Seagal, with whom you acted in 1996's The Glimmer Man?

I don't want to damn the guy because everybody's getting damned these days, but I remember we were doing this scene and we did the close-ups, and then the director said, “Steven will not do the offlines with you. Is that OK?” And I said, “Oh, I'm so relieved. That would only be a distraction.”

-- Brian Cox in The Hollywood Reporter. The article is entitled “Brian Cox Unloads on Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Strong and Why the Oscars Are 'Nonsense',” and that's not quite accurate—unless being sympathetic to Spacey and owning up to different acting styles with Strong (and Daniel Day-Lewis) is “unloading.” His lines about Spacey should get more attention, to be honest. But yes, he does unload on Seagal. Beautifully.

“One of the most dread-inducing things for me about the impending Trump presidency is the way he and all the insect people who feed on the shit-crust of need his being continually sheds (like harlequin icthyosis) form a secondary crust that is always, sometimes aggressively more often passive-aggressively, advising anyone who disapproves to be quiet about what's true. I'm thinking of the Horta from the O.G. STAR TREK episode THE DEVIL IN THE DARK — that's how TrumpWorld looks in my head; and TrumpWorld, like the Horta (that's what that fictional space creature ”is“), left to its own devices, can do a lot of damage to soft human beings out there just exploring their galaxy.”

-- Craig Wright, “Dry Turkey,” on his Substack. Craig and I are both fans of Salinger, and when I read this I think of that intro to “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” when Buddy Glass recounts older brother Seymour reading a bedtime story, the one about Po Lo and looking for horses, and seeing the essence of things rather than their coverings, and how Buddy ends the section by writing of Seymour, now deceased, “I haven't been able to think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead.” That's how I often think of Craig, and maybe even more so its martial opposite: I can't think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to do battle with all of the liars and misinformers and yuck of the GOP than him. I see him cutting through their bullshit like a phaser. 

“Please note that the swagger of Trump and those who love and serve him has rarely anything to do with well-earned rights or with having achieved by your own lights anything, it has only to do with privilege. To get your trophy for completing a Trump marathon, you don't have to run 26.2 miles, you don't have to do anything but assert your willingness to trip someone else.”

-- Craig Wright, “When We Fight, We Fight”

“Donald Trump doesn't so much run for something as he runs against somebody. His latest attacks are aimed at Haitian immigrants, but what we're seeing is a playbook previously used to target other ethnic or religious groups, and with a similar goal: to make the MAGA base feel like they're under attack.

”'The followers must feel besieged,' as the late Italian writer Umberto Eco, who grew up in fascist Italy, wrote nearly three decades ago in The New York Review of Books. 'The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.' Indeed, in order to enact much of his radical right-wing agenda, Trump needs his people to think America is on the brink of collapse—and to associate that collapse with an 'other.' The goal is to panic the base, and since there isn't a scary enough truth, lies will do.“

-- Molly Jong-Fast, ”Donald Trump's Springfield Scapegoat: Haitian immigrants in Ohio are just the latest target in Trump's long-running ploy to convince his supporters they're under siege,“ on the Vanity Fair site. Cf., Doctorow's words in ”Ragtime." 

Fowler: You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested.
Pyle: They don't want communism.
Fowler: They want enough rice. 

-- from Graham Greene's “The Quiet American,” published in 1955, about early American involvement in Vietnam. Greene was astonishingly prescient.

“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posting for no reason.

“People ask me, since I am such a strong anti-pacifist, how I can have this admiration for a pacifist [like Martin Luther King, Jr.]? Well, I have a simple answer. ... King's doctrine of nonviolent resistance is not pacificism. Pacificism of really the classical kind is where you are concerned about your own purity and not responsibility. And the great ethical divide is between people who want to be pure and those who want to be responsible. And I think King has shown this difference.”

-- Reinhold Niebhur, as recounted in Taylor Branch's “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,” pg. 830

I wrote this down in a notebook 40 years ago but today it pops for me because purity is the issue I have with so many on the left. They want to be pure. The littlest thing is wrong with the candidate, and “Oh, can't have that,” and out they go. They don't fight for them. Bye, Al Franken. Meanwhile those on the right want power. That is the great political divide of the last 10-20 years: purity by any means vs. power by any means. In that dynamic, particularly with purity shooting its own, power wins. Me, I like the responsible. Joe Biden is responsible, Kamala Harris is responsible, Tim Walz. And Donald Trump is about as irresponsible a person as has ever existed. 

“In fact, Martin, if you have desegregated anything by your efforts, kindly enlighten me.”
“Well,” King replied, “I guess about the only thing I've desegregated so far is a few human hearts.”

-- from a conversation between NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the (I believe) early 1960s, as recounted in Taylor Branch's seminal “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years.” The NAACP, remember, was not initially a fan of King and the SCLC. The former wanted to go through the courts, while King, after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and then after a several-years pause, chose nonviolent direct action. There was probably also jealousy involved. I've always loved this quote because it's such a lovely and true sentiment that is also a lovely and true response to someone obviously trying to provoke him. It's also the underestimated portion of what leaders do. They can make us better or they can make us worse. I came across it in an old notebook and wanted to get it down here, since, unfortunately, we're all here now. 

“But no one gets everything wrong. I made three huge mistakes early on in my trip around this love shack that radically shaped my life. I see myself (when I look at myself this way) as a just-under-mid-size sea cucumber of clay left behind by a quitter on a wheel in a friendly neighborhood pottery studio, drying to crumbling uselessness in the dark, never to be finished, fired and glazed. But even just going THAT far with it, sparing us all the paralyzing embarrassment of cataloging my three fatal mistakes, even just going so far as to NUMBER them the problem becomes apparent, namely: Wherever the searchlight goes, the prisoner is. By which I mean: ”If you look for the causes of your despair, you'll find them (nevermind that there's only one); and if you go looking for reasons to persevere, you'll find those too! Wherever the searchlight goes, the prisoner is.“ 

-- Craig Wright, ”The Worst Postivie Record Review" on his Substack

“Although he has long enjoyed the sleazy glamour and cynical counsel supplied by Mob-adjacent figures like Roy Cohn, his mentor in matters of conscience and the law, Trump has no code and shows no loyalty. Despite his mobster cosplay, in short, he lacks even a gangster's sense of dignity. Carmine (the Snake) Persico, for all his many sins, would have found Trump unworthy of the Cosa Nostra. Before the Mafia's disintegration, a boss was obliged to help a fallen or legally entangled soldier. And yet Trump won't even pay the legal bills of Giuliani, his loyal sidekick.”

-- David Reminck, “The Mobster Cosplay of Donald Trump,” The New Yorker

“The Republican nomination contest is accelerating, as is Ukraine's counteroffensive, the latter underscoring the stakes of the former. During Spain's civil war, a rebel general boasted that he had four columns marching on Madrid and ”a fifth column“ in Madrid, meaning supporters of the army's insurgency. Vladimir Putin's fifth column is not in Kyiv but in the Trump-DeSantis faction of the Republican Party.

”Putin has two hopes for a less than completely mortifying rescue from his Ukraine blunder. One is the election of Trump, whose frivolousness about national security complements his weakling's admiration for a bully. Putin's other hope is the election of DeSantis, who says (or said, before retreating when criticized) Russia's attempt to erase a European nation is a “territorial dispute.” And whose pandering to Trumpkins prevents him from denouncing House Republicans who are as eager to abandon Ukraine as they would have been to abandon Czechoslovakia in 1938.“

-- George Will, ”Neither Trump nor DeSantis will get the GOP nomination," The Washington Post. I hope he's right. I hope he's prophetic. It'll make things tougher for the Democrats but it'll be much, much better for the nation. (Well, depending on who winds up with it.)

“DeSantis's whole deal is that he's supposed to be super-competent. 'I'm better at being a fascist fuck than Donald Trump is.' that's it, that's his whole ballgame.

”there's just one tiny problem with that: it's complete bullshit. ... 

“I'll go on record right now: Ron DeSantis is never going to be president. he's awkward. he's unpleasant. he's not funny. he's not entertaining. he has negative charisma. he's clumsy. he carries himself like a lizard-creature from outer space wearing an ill-fitting human skin suit. he laughs like a braying hyena.”

-- Jeff Tiedrich, “Meatball Ron can't stop fucking the chicken,” written in the wake of DeSantis' presidential campaign launch with Elon Musk on Twitter that went horribly, beautifully, disastrously wrong. BTW: I've been saying the above for a few months now—once I saw DeSantis interact, or try to interact, with potential voters. “Negative charisma” is exactly right. I'll go further. He's not going to be the GOP nominee. It'll just have to be some other asshole. Yes, probably the same asshole.

“An artist has got to be careful never to really arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming, and as long as you can stay in that realm, you'd sort of be all right.”

-- Bob Dylan, “No Direction Home.” Did any artist do a better job of this—of sticking with not-sticking—than Dylan? He pissed off his entire fan base for not remaining what they wanted him to be. There's supposed to be an entire movie about it, “Going Electric,” directed by James Mangold, starring Timothée Chalamet. If it's made, I hope this is the kind of thing they tap into. 

“Being judged by your ability to self-promote is a time-honored American mistake.”

-- Greg LaVallee, “You Can't Code Your Way Out of the Culture Problem,” Slate. LaVallee, the VP of tech at Slate, is reacting to Elon Musk's demand that Twitter employees who “actually write software”  send him “a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.” LaVallee goes into why this is idiotic and a waste of time—code tends to be written by teams, it has its own story, and Twitter has a culture problem not a code problem—but the above gets at the heart of it. For all American business. 

“When I was a boy, I had a religious-school teacher named Mr. Spector, whose job was to confront us with the peril we presented to ourselves. ... He seemed to take our moral failings for granted and, perhaps as a result, favored lively argument over reproach or condemnation.”

-- from Michael Chabon's essay “Secret Skin,” from 2008, on The New Yorker site