“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.