(3089/898) Culture

377)
VICTOR: Maybe I'm going home.
COLETTE: Don't go home. What's home like?
VICTOR: Well everything's filthy. Maybe I won't go home.

John Patrick Shanley
Four Dogs and A Bone (play, 1993)

378) BRADLEY: You're inexperienced. You're from the theatre. That's like the Outback of entertainment.

John Patrick Shanley
Four Dogs and A Bone (play, 1993)

379) Commit a random act of kindness.

Saying (c. 1994)

380) For me the intentions of background music are openly political, and an example of how political power is constantly shifting from the ballot box into areas where the voter has nowhere to mark his ballot paper. The most important political choices in the future will probably never be consciously exercised. I'm intrigued by the way some background music is surprisingly aggressive, especially that played on consumer complaint phone lines and banks, airplanes and phone companies themselves, with strident non-rhythmic and arms-length sequences that are definitely not user-friendly.

J.G. Ballard
quoted by Joseph Lanza in
Elevator Music (1994)

381) The pure products of America go crazy.

William Carlos Williams
"To Elsie" (poem, 1923)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
Dead Elvis (1991)

382) Culture - as an official sound-and-light show of fear and reassurance, fortune and impoverishment, just-folks mass murderers and happy families - has today so completely replaced government that there are no politics, and culture itself has lost its borders and its domains.

Greil Marcus
Dead Elvis (1991)

383) There are [...] some critics who say that commercials are a new albeit degraded means of religious expression in that most of them take the forms of parables, teaching people what the good life consists of. It is a claim not to be easily dismissed. [...] [T]he average American TV viewer will see about thirty thousand commercials next year. Some of them are quite straightforward and some are funny, some are spoofs of other commercials and some are mysterious and exotic. But many of them [...] will urge the following ideas: Whatever problem you face (lack of self-esteem, lack of good taste, lack of attractiveness, lack of social acceptance), it can be solved, solved fast, and solved through a drug, a detergent, a machine, or a salable technique. You are, in fact, helpless unless you know about the product that can remake you and set you on the road to paradise. You must, in short, become a born-again consumer, redeem yourself, and find peace. [...] Like biblical parables, commercial messages invade our consciousness, seep into our souls. Even if you are half-awake when commercials run, thirty thousand of them will begin to penetrate your indifference. In the end, it is hard not to believe.

Neil Postman & Steve Powers
How To Watch TV News (1992)

384)
The play seems out for an almost infinite run
Don't mind a little thing like the actors fighting
The only thing I worry about is the sun
We'll be all right if nothing goes wrong with the lighting.

Robert Frost
"It Bids Pretty Fair" (poem, 1916)
from Complete Poems of Robert Frost

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 759 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.