#sm

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades. ↗

— Mark Twain

#critics #drama #literature #writing #music

The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so we can't trust what its light reveals. ↗

— Jonathan Lethem

#music

Children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffein and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hairgel and pimple cream and growth hormone-treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly, fleeting, violent sublimations. It's all part of the conspiracy . . . all of it trying to convince them that they're here to be trained for lives of adventure and glamor and heroism, when in fact they're here only to be trained for more of the same, for lives of plunking in the quarters, paying a premium for the never-ending series of shabby fantasies to come, the whole lifelong laser light show of glamorous degradation and habitual novelty and fun-loving murder and global isolation. ↗

— Alex Shakar

#commerce #love

Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians. ↗

— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

#craters #jesuit #moon #science #science

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian. ↗

— Theodor W. Adorno

#music-criticism #new-music #music

But wouldn't [the Spice Girls] have shown a little bit more solidarity if they had at least called themselves feminists? The feminist activist Jennifer Pozner was more dismissive,writing that it was "probably a fair assumption to say that 'zigazig-ha' is not Spice shorthand for 'subvert the dominant paradigm. ↗

— Marisa Meltzer

#musicians #pop-culture #music

Overhead she [Renée] could smell the palm trees, whose tall leaves shook down their aroma. And more than the stifling heat, more than the brilliant light, more than the great dazzling flowers, like faces laughing or grimacing between the leaves, it was the odours that overwhelmed her. An indescribable perfume, potent, exciting, composed of a thousand different perfumes, hung about her; human exudation, the breath of women, the scent of hair; and breezes sweet and swooningly faint were blended with breezes coarse and pestilential, laden with poison. But amid this strange music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids' pungency was the penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, the smell of lovemaking escaping in the early morning from the bedrooms of newlyweds. ↗

— Émile Zola

#odours #smells #love

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph ↗

— Robert E. Howard

#civilization #nature

I knew it was Peter playing. I fancied he was trying to tell me something - an absurd idea, but it persisted - 'I may not be able to spell, but just you listen to this. ↗

— Jennifer Paynter

#embarrassment #jane-austen #jennifer-paynter #love #mary-bennet

...I don't ever want to feel that way. Feel as if there are no surprises left. The surprises make life worth living. Expecting nothing, accepting it all. Accepting isn't the right word. ACKNOWLEDGING it all. I suppose I'll just try to figure it out as I go or at least try to understand it. Or f***, just think about it. I'll face whatever comes my way... ↗

— John O'Callaghan

#keep-going #life #live #living #love