“When you are concerned with aesthetics, with images of beauty, you are always exploring. You’re always remaking them, adding to them. They are basically slow-growing things, like plants, and the explosions are rare, but so far as man’s mind is concerned, this is all part of the system.”
— Alan Lomax, 1975 — from the Cultural Equity research pages.
Hofstadter reminisces.
“We live in a time I think not of mainstream, but of many streams, or even, if you insist upon a river of time, that we have come to delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies.”
— John Cage, KPFA Radio, 1992 — from “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” by Alex Ross, page 371.
“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.”
— Duke Ellington — from Discogs
“These days we have attention deficit disorder. Even I’ve fallen victim to these traits where, even if we haven’t had them diagnosed, the world around us passes down to us, you know, with the remote control and your computer and your iPhone. You go crazy if your computer doesn’t load up to the homepage fast enough.”
“Everything’s just fast, fast, fast. For people coming up now, especially the kids, a two-minute track to them is pure genius. All they need is a two-minute beat and they think they’re geniuses. I like to listen to something that’s a bit longer than two minutes, you know. That’s just my taste. You don’t have to be into that, but I am man. I’m of that generation. I grew up on songs that were long, you know, listening to a lot of double albums and stuff like that.”
— DãM-Funk — from Cyclic Defrost
Some quotes I posted on a previous incarnation of this blog.
“The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.”
— Desmond Morris — “The Human Zoo”, 1969
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”
— Robert Hughes — from Art Quotes
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
— Woody Guthrie — found here
“I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”
— Jean Michel Basquiat —
“Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity.”
— Paul Gauguin — from Art Quotes
From this article on the Music Institute glory days, 313 Detroit techno mailinglist:
“A no-liquor (pop and juice only) policy kept the (Music Institute) open without incident to all comers. The older kids, the Cass Tech and Renaissance high school kids, the gay crowd and girls girls girls. All in one house; pre-rave, pre-drugs. One strobe light and House Music All Night Long.”
“(…) in those days, the only white faces in the crowd would be the more-adventurous House-loving gay kids and their fag-hags.”
— Alan D. Oldham — 1997
“The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it’s much more exciting.”
— Andy Warhol —
“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager’.”
“I have had prayers answered… most strangely so sometimes… but I think our heavenly Father’s loving-kindness has been even more evident in what He has refused me.”
— Lewis Carroll — from Art Quotes
“What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization.”
— Roy Lichtenstein — from Art Quotes
“There is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it: I know few impressions. Stronger or more harsh.”
— J.P. Sartre — “Nausea”, from Lumpenproletariat
“The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”
— Alvin Toffler —
“Precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.”
— Slavoj Zizek — from www.cut-up.com
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
— Oscar Wilde —
“An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.”
— Vincent van Gogh — from Art Quotes
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
— Lau Tsu —
“I must create my own system or be enslaved by another mans.”
— William Blake — (found here)
Twitter
Flickr
SoundCloud
MixCloud
Discogs
Github
Vimeo
LinkedIn
Slideshare