Monday, August 17, 2009

Quote/Unquote

(editor's note: Wilson in St. Louis returns with another installment of Quote/Unquote, a semiregular feature of The Brazosport News.)


"It's not that these leaders underestimate citizens' intelligence, it's that the leaders' own intelligence is very low. We should ask how these people got to be public servants in the first place."
         -- Chinese academic quoted on NPR today about internal Chinese strife
 
"Yes, I"ve sinned. I"m a sinner. But I enjoyed it. And I've killed men, but the dirty sons-of-bitches deserved it. Any way I look at it, it's too late for no Bible."
     --- character Pretty Boy Floyd in the 1973 movie "Dillinger" directed by John Milius

"Eighty percent of everything built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading -- the jive plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk-food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call 'growth.' "
                ---- from "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler (1993)
 
"When I grew up, there weren’t many basketball teams or coaches around, and almost everything about sport was unorganized. There was a lot of play, in the strict sense of the word. We tried on our own to find out what was fun and what worked. My own basketball confidence came to me long before I received any serious coaching, and it paid off later when I took up the game as a profession......It’s the players, not the coaches, owners or commentators, who provide the art in sports. Every good player should think that he may be able to change the game, and he should have the craftsman’s pride and joy in what he does. In most professional sports the best players are unorthodox.”
                       -- Bill Russell in his book "Second Wind" (1979)
 

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like Leon Spinks, D.J. Wilson is on familiar terms with the weird.

radioisfree said...

we caught dylan looking for a melody in each of the songs he sang at his recent woodlands show. my wife recognized none of the songs he sang. willie's short set was made even shorter (vocally) by his hurried pace and ADD delivery - leaving his poor band to play out each phrase as originally written/recorded. maybe i'm just tired of national treasures taking so many liberties. no more concerts please.

Anonymous said...

I had no idea that Kunstler has been milking his schtick for 15 years. I'm particularly fond of "jive" used as an adjective in 1993...gonna use that tomorrow.

TFG

Anonymous said...

These fading rock stars are milking the Nostalgia Tour bit. Gets old fast, especially when they look like cadavers on stage, i.e. Dylan, david Allan Coe, peter & Gordon, Keefe Richards, and all those oldies. Get off, dude! Once, i paid to see Steppenwolf, and it turned out it wasn't even Steppenwolf. Travis Co. D.A. went after those lyin' cats. Madonna's getting there. Look at the skin under her upper arms, although her Ass still looks huntable, edible, etal. Stop writing about these has-beens, Jonesey. Shit, it hurts, man.

Banjo Jones said...

One half of Peter and Gordon died recently. Try to keep up.

And I'll probably keep writing a bit off and on about the geezer set, as I am one their geezer fans. You may want to follow a more contemporary blog. It's up to you, though, as I value each and every one of my readers, especially the ones in Eastern Europe.

My next blog post about the dinosaur set will be on McCartney. Saw him last night in Tulsa. He opened with "Drive My Car." That was on a Beatles LP a long time ago. It may be awhile before I post that as I'll be on special assignment beginning tomorrow.

Check my Twitter posts for updates (see sidebar column on right side of The B'port News.)