Jeremy Maddux > Recent Status Updates

'I threaded my way into the kitchen through the women’s conversations: kids, politics, TV. When we first started coming to parties with this crowd, I swear the women and men talked to each other, or at least played games together. We’re all college educated, liberal people, but now when we hit some critical mass we split into two cultures, just like our parents did.'

'The pier was different then, he said, all elegance and romance. When he talked I saw this long California sunset out over the water, heard a big band play “Moonlight Serenade,” heavy on the clarinets. The air was clean and smelled of orange blossoms and the railings were lined with beautiful women in dresses that came just past their knees, their long hair piled high with silver combs.'

'My father had come here in the summers before the war, before he married, and he used to talk about those years as the best of his life, dancing on the pier every night, playing tennis every day. There were tennis courts down the street and he said that for the rest of his life just the sound of tennis, that distant clop of a well-hit ball, filled him with unbearable longing.'

'three kids cut through the woods behind the furniture store on their way home from school. They spot what looks like a discarded shop mannequin, half-in and half-out of the river. The body is posed in a crucifixion.
It wasn’t a mannequin at all; it was Kurt’s body. He was dressed, but both of his shoes were missing. Eventually, the right shoe would be found positioned in a pile of rocks nearby.'

'From the early 1940s onward, the FBI picked up on numerous attempts by the Communist Party and Soviet agents to infiltrate official agencies and programs, there to engage in theft of secrets, policy sabotage, and pro-Red propaganda.'

'This was the same Jimmy Cannon who once said about black heavyweight champion Joe Louis, “He’s a credit to his race – the human race.” So, it’s clear Cannon’s problem with Ali was not the color of his skin. But rather Ali’s constant race-dividing public statements that separated the country into two camps: Those who wanted to see Ali win, and, Those who wanted to see Ali destroyed in the ring.'

'Cannon once wrote of the young Ali: “He fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms and the revolt of students who get a check from Dad and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered cult of the bored young.'"