Jim > Recent Status Updates

We don't need no steenking baches (potholes, in Argentina)

In all these ways, the stars in front of the curtain were slowly evolving to reflect a more diverse America. Still, behind the curtain, power in all the entertainment industries remained exclusively in the hands of white men.

Even as [Robert] Altman's generation of directors reached the pinnacle of their influence in the film industry, the next wave of change was gathering at the studio gates, and it sweep Hollywood in a very different direction—beginning, fittingly enough, with a movie that forever changed how its audiences looked at the ocean.

Wherever he turned it was the same—the winner must feign humility, thank fools for praise, maintain a sweet temper in the face of bores and insult, expect the brick in the bouquet as his just desert, struggle to conceal his natural shyness and undemocratic tastes.

For Lyle's sake, he must forage around trying to borrow money enough to visit or sup at some rich man's home, be prepared for the little accepted duties of Extra Man. "Be good to the rich." Why couldn't the rich mind their own business, divide expenses with each other, invite each other to dinner and feast on each other's fruity conversation?

Usually if we say someone is brave, we mean that he is not afraid of any enemy or he is willing to die for a cause or he is never intimidated. The Shambhala understanding of bravery is quite different. Here bravery is the courage to be—to live in the world without any deception and with tremendous kindness and caring for others.

When we are afraid of ourselves and afraid of the seeming threat the world presents, then we become incredibly selfish. We want to build our own little nests, our own cocoons, so that we can live by ourselves in a secure way.

Michael Ovitz: It was an extraordinarily creative period. The birth of phenomenal music artists, the birthing of Spielberg and of Lucas and Coppola and Scorsese—all these filmmakers came out of nowhere.

Walden imagines life lit by passion and pain into a single, many-faceted diamond. Robert Frost was impressed by this: 'Think of the success of a man's pulling himself together all under one one-word title.'

It was not lost on Thoreau that, though the work suited him, surveying made him complicit in destroying the forests he loved.

The railroad whistle across Walden Pond sounded the death knell of an old world and the birth o something new. What it would be, no one yet knew; today, geologists call this epoch, when fossil fuels put global economies into hyperdrive, the Anthropocene. Thoreau thus saw the end of one geological epoch and the beginning of the next....

I don't know. I'm only certain that nothing is forever: No matter how carefully you design a system, it will go bad and die.

It is that [the colonial politician's] situation satirizes itself, turns satire inside out, takes satire to a point where it touches pathos if not tragedy.

I wished to go back as whole as I had come. But though a fresh start is seldom possible and the world continues our private fabrication, departure is departure. It fractures; the bone has to be set anew each time.

Intimacy: the word holds the horror. I could have stayed forever at a woman's breasts, if they were full and had a hint of a weight that required support. But there was the skin, there was the smell of skin. There were bumps and scratches, there were a dozen little things that could positively enrage me.

But, O thou tyrant,
Do not repent these things, for they are heavier
Than all thy woes can stir. Therefore betake thee
To nothing but despair. A thousand knees
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert.

I went back inside the building, the residue of a burned-out, bad day like a visceral presence on my skin.

When she awoke he was standing over her, his form-fitting T-shirt molded wetly against his torso. His body had a fecund odor, like water in the bottom of a coulee; a nickle-plated revolver, the handles wrapped with electrician's tape, hung from his gloved right hand.

The Palace was sinking, and we all felt it, we veterans in the service of His Venerable Majesty [Haile Selassie], we whom fate had saved from the purge. We could feel the temperature falling, life becoming more and more precisely framed by ritual but more and more cut-and-dried, banal, negative.

It was difficult not to be gripped by a feeling of awe at the sight of hundreds of petrified gray giants emerging from the pale rose-colored mist, of waterbucks, their motionless antlers rising above the water like the masts of some scuttled fleet, of gazelles, oryx and buffalo packed so close together that sometimes they looked like solid land....

Certainly you know the legend according to which there were several white men with the Mau-Mau, and that one of them went by the name of General France. Nothing's known about it for certain -- merely a few rumors from captured Kikuyus -- and nothing will be known until they're duly killed -- and even then it'll be necessary to look sharp and get there before the ants.

I defy anyone to look at elephants without a sense of wonder. Their very enormity, their clumsiness, their giant stature, represent a mass of liberty that sets you dreaming. They're ... yes, they're the last individuals.

The Pacific always strikes me as a pallid, unlovable sort of ocean, and when it is associated with cold, dank and unpainted wood it seems a thing of empty disenchantment, not worth trying to understand, like one of those spurious mysteries that are really not mysteries at all.

The favorite epithet of Istanbul seems to be yok, which appears to be a sort of general purpose discouragement, to imply that it can't be done, she isn't home, the shop's shut, the train's left, take it or leave it, you can't come this way or there's no good making a fuss about it, that's the way it is.

Regret always, for Beirut is a prodigy of the second class -- a sideline city, never (as the literary critics like to say) very deeply engagé. It stands on the rim of the Arab world, peering inside with a wry and skeptical detachment, and its conscience is rudimentary.

"The Nobel committee are doing it again," [Naipaul] said, striding down the sidewalk.
"Doing what?"
"Pissing on literature, as they do every year."
I started to laugh.
"Pissing from a great height," he said. "On books."