. . .

Eugene Mirman.

'Reality television is a great replacement for attempted suicide to show them.'

Pork-Flight Zoo Watcher, Page 88.

'It is classical music, and is considered the best and most puzzling ever manufactured. You're supposed to like it, whether you do or not, and if you don't, the proper thing is to look as if you did. Understand?'

Pork-Flight Zoo Watcher, Page 61.

'I'm glad you have decent brains. Mine are exceptionally good. You can see 'em work; they're pink.'

Simon Reynolds : Loyalists.

I think I've met them all now. For me, there are no more heroes left. And no new ones coming along, by the look of it. It could be that this is a time marked by a dearth of characters, or that the smart people in rock aren't interested in self-projection but in obliterating noise. But really, I think, it's the case that, in this job, you don't have the time to develop obsessions, what with the insane turnover, and all the incentives to pluralism.

The heroes you have kind of linger on from a prior period when only a few records passed through your life, when you had time to get fixated, spend days living inside a record. It's a real effort to click back to that frame of mind, which is bad because fanaticism is the true experience of pop -- I think of the splendid devotion of all those bright girls who, as soon as they've got hold of the new Cure or New Order or Bunnymen record, immediately set to learning the lyrics by heart then spend days exhaustively interpreting the Tablets From On High, struggling to establish some fit between their experience and what is actually some drunken doggerel cobbled together in a studio off-moment.

Seriously, I approve. I approve the deadly seriousness, the piety, the need for something sacred in your life. However deluded.

It's become a reflex for critics to castigate the readers for being partisan, for being sluggish and single-minded in their choices. We exhort you to disconnect, discard, and move on, acquire a certain agility as consumers. But maybe this ideal state of inconstancy we advocate only makes for fitter participants in capitalism. For the one thing that makes rock more than simply an industry, the one thing that transcends the commodity relation, is fidelity, the idea of a relationship. There are voices that you turn to as a friend, and you don't just turn your back on your friends if they go off the rails. You hang around. You give them the time of day. So -- in the year in which we've forced the text-centered discipline that is rock writing to incorporate everything it has excluded for so long (the relationship between the star's body and the fan's, the Voice, the materiality of music) -- maybe it's time to make criticism grapple with what undoes it, 'the uncritical'.
Melody Maker, 1988

. . .

Illuminatus, Too.

'Cowardice is a defense against suicide.'

Catered Floozie Myth, Page 280 + 281.

'Yet I do not aspire to being very wise, for I have noticed that the happiest people are those who do not let their brains oppress them.'

. . .

Illuminatus.

'Serious people have never discovered anything of any real importance.'

Sweet Tooth.

Sometimes at night, when I wake up real late, I can hear my dad talking to God. He whispers, but I still hear him.

I even hear him crying sometimes, when God says something sad.

Catered Floozie Myth, Page 39.

The reason most people are bad is because they do not try to be good.