Whatever Gets You Thru The Night

[Spiro]

This journal is a collection of inspirational snippets, aphorisms, notable quotables, and other interesting writings.


<p>The story Seymour read to Franny that night, by flashlight, was a favorite of his, a Taoist tale. To this day, Franny swears that she remembers Seymour reading it to her:
<p>"Duke Mu Chin said to Po Lo: "You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?" Po Lo replied: "A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse--one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks--is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him."
<p>Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. "It is now in Shach'iu," he added. "What kind of a horse is it?" asked the Duke. "Oh, it is a dun-colored mare," was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. "That friend of yours," he said, "whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why he cannot even distinguish a beast's color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?" Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. "Has he really got as far as that?" he cried. "Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses."
<p>When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.

From <i>Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters</i>, J.D. Salinger, p.4

 

[Spiro]

"The effect of art should be iconoclastic--the motivation should be impulsive, <u>natural</u>."

"The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock--shock is a worn-out word--but astonish. The world has no grounds whatever for complacency. The Titanic couldn't sink, but it did. Where you find smugness, you find something worth blasting. I want to blast it."

Terry Southern, 1964


...


"The sage is full of anxiety and indecision in undertaking anything, and so he is always successful." -- Book XXVI, The Texts of Chuang-tzu.

J.D. Salinger, <i>SEYMOUR -- An Introduction</i>


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Frank Zappa, <i>Guitar World</i>, 1987

<i>Can you give our readers any practical advice?</i>
<p>Give me a field. Help them with what? Getting a job? How's this: You want to get a job? Practice all your licks real fast. Get a good wardrobe. Get a good barber. Want to get a record contract? Get a good wardrobe, get a good barber. Don't even worry about how you play. They're not signing musicians anymore, they're signing models. Make sure you look good.
<p>Look, everybody who buys a record has a right to buy what they like. And obviously, somebody really enjoys what's being produced today, or they wouldn't buy it. However, I think there's more to music than what is being made available by the record companies because they have been completely bamboozled by the video music syndrome. Record companies have made a major mistake. MTV came along and they thought, "Oh! this is it. We're no longer going to make records"--those little plastic things that people listen to?--"What we're going to do, we're going to sign groups that look like models, so that they can have a video on MTV."
<p>The down side of this is the record companies are now totally at the mercy of MTV--that's their main outlet. How many videos can they show on MTV? Not that many. This limits the opportunity for people who actually play music. To play music, because you're not going on MTV unless you belong on MTV; furthermore, you're probably not going to get a record contract unless the guy at the record company thinks you look good.
<p>Now, not all musicians are beautiful people. In fact a lot of 'em would generally qualify as being physically unattractive. But so what? If you like a record, you can listen to that record a hundred times and still get off on it. If you like a video, how many times can you watch it? Six, ten? Thirty, if you're a vegetable. And then it's old.
<p>So the record industry has kind of chosen this one path and I think they made a mistake. Thev have igoored the desires of that segment of the audience that likes to listen to music. They like to hear it. It goes in through your ears. Video music is another thing. It goes in through your eyes. And better than 50 percent of what you experience is visual. The music is secondary to the pictures. So, if musicians who are just beginning think only of how much money they're going to make and whether or not they're going to have that big video career... they have to decide right now whether or not they want to play music or be a model. And if it's the bucks they're after, like I said, "Get yourself a good wardrobe. Get a good barber. Don't worry too much about what you're going to play," because the chances are, if your publicity picture really looks good, the guy at the record company won't even listen to your tape. If you got the look, they'll find a producer to make you sound like something, because all you're ever going to do is lip-sync it anyway. Okay? You're never really gonna have to play it live. Chances are some producer hired by the company will come in and do what you're supposed to be able to do. And if that sounds like science fiction, I bet there's plenty of people right now, readin' the magazine saying, "Yeah, that's what I want to do!" And they should do it. Because there's somebody who wants to buy that. But that's not music as far as I'm concerned.

<i>You've talked about your antecedents, like Johnny Guitar Watson and others you were influenced by. There's no obvious trace of them. It must be less literal.</i>
<p>What I've taken from them is not from their sound it's their attitude. I'm probably stylistically closer to Guitar Slim than anybody else. But since nobody knows what he did... <i>[laughter]</i>. There's a couple of solos he played that I thought were landmarks--but they were very obscure.
<p>Watson, he's the original minimalist guitar player. The solo on "Lonely Nights," the one-note guitar solo? Says it all! Gets the point across. I can remember guitar players in high school learning that solo and just going, "But how does he get it to sound that way?" lt really was one note. If you can play that note against those chord changes and derive the same emotional impact that he got from playing that note, then you're onto something. He can make that one be so nasty. You know, like, "What's behind that note? What is the mode? Why are you continuing to play the tonic when the dominant chord comes around? Are you goin' like this <i>[gestures with his middle finger in the "Fuck You" position]</i> with your playing or what?" You have to learn how to do that.

 

[Spiro]

May Day

I subscribe to Mike Watt's mailing list. He sent this out, at the end of a promotional email, today:

hey all,

<p>today is mayday and I'm going to read a little emma goldman to the folks on stage before I play tonight. here it is:<p>"has not some american ancestor said, many years ago, that resistance to tyranny is obedience to god? and he was not an anarchist even. I would say that resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal. so long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe...<p>"that so few resist is the strongest proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.<p>"high strung, like a violin string, they weep and moan for life, so relentless, so cruel, so terribly inhuman. in a desperate moment the string breaks. untuned ears hear nothing but discord. but those who feel the agonized cry understand its harmony; they hear in it the fulfillment of the most compelling moment of human nature."

Thank you, Ms. Goldman and Mr. Watt. Happy May Day.

 

[Spiro]

"Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat. The Mark Inside."
- William S. Burroughs

 

[Spiro]

"The mark-inside was coming up on the rube... and that's a rumble nobody can cool."

- William S. Burroughs via Terry Southern


"No man's a hero to his valet." - Mike Watt

- <i>Our Band Could Be Your Life</i>, Minutemen: 73


If the projectionist was really on top of it, he or she could focus the heinous imagery on the periodic walls of smoke that would come spilling off the stage. "And it makes this cool effect," says Leary, "Where you can see this image come blasting out at you--<i>in focus</i>."

"The full-on shows would make people puke and scream and run out, that kind of thing," Taylor said. "It was what we'd always wanted."

Actually, not all the films were so shocking--they'd often do a split screen with undersea footage, nature scenes, or even a treasured color negative of a <i>Charlie's Angels</i> episode. The contrast was Haynes's idea. "It was a total mixture of good and bad images coming at you, so it was more of an assault that way, your mind can't quite digest it," says Coffey. "It's not completely good or bad--it's <i>both</i>."

Still, the gross-out footage is what really embodied the band's aesthetic. "Listen, man, one has no choice but to laugh in the face of terror," Haynes explained. "I think probably most airline pilots, when they see the ground coming at them, just before they hit, go, 'Oh my god, we're in trouble! Ha-ha-ha!'"

- <i>Our Band Could Be Your Life</i>, Butthole Surfers: 293-294

 

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1818. "When Dr. Franklin went to France on his revolutionary mission, his eminence as a philosopher, his venerable appearance, and the cause on which he was sent, rendered him extremely popular. For all ranks and conditions of men there, entered warmly into the American interest. He was therefore feasted and invited to all the court parties. At these he sometimes met the old Duchess of Bourbon, who being a chess player of about his force, they very generally played together. Happening once to put her king into prise, the Doctor took it. 'Ah,' says she, 'we do not take kings so.' 'We do in America,' says the Doctor." At one of these parties, the emperor Joseph II, then at Paris, incog. under the title of Count Falkenstein, was overlooking the game, in silence, while the company was engaged in animated conversations on the American question. 'How happens it M. le Compte,' said the Duchess, 'that while we all feel so much interest in the cause of the Americans, you say nothing for them?' 'I am a king by trade,' said he." (TJ to Robert Welsh, enclosure, 4 December, Ford.12.109)