Scarlet Letter cover by Ruben Toledo
Burning draft cards isn’t going to end any war. It’s not even going to save any lives. If someone can be more honest with himself by burning his draft card, then that’s great; but if he’s just going to feel more important because he does it, then that’s a drag.
—from an interview with Bob Dylan
Alice in Wonderland
I don’t know if Bob Dylan and Tom Waits are as authentic as I think they are. Perhaps they’re not. Sometimes you start thinking that maybe Britney Spears or someone like that who’s doing exactly what they want to do in the way that they best know how is more authentic than any of those people you could mention.
—Jack White speaking at Trinity College (via NME)
Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren’t diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.
—Kurt Vonnegut in Galápagos
There’s nothing wrong with being interested in stuff thats interesting and attractive [i.e., television and mass culture]. What most of us have in common are our very most base, uninteresting, selfish, stupid interests: physical attractiveness, sex, a certain kind of easy humor, vivid spectacle — I mean that stuff that I will immediately look at and so will you. The things that make us interesting and unique and human — those interests tend to be wildly different between different people.
—David Foster Wallace on what makes television so broadly appealing
the gimmicks of american apparel vs. the gimmicks of urban outfitters
by Brandon Scott Gorrell (via his tumblr)
[W]hile you are free to stare at a blank ream of paper for 1000 hours, your publisher will only laugh [if you do]. Jeff Koons can have his interns paint his ideas, John Cage can sit in front of a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, but writers lack the auspices of conceptual absence. Even conceptual writing requires that slow painful aggregate of words, one at a time, making something from nothing. Every word is work. There is no short cut.
—Jimmy Chen on the difference between conceptual writing and other types of conceptual art
