Michael > Recent Status Updates

“I felt it was a good thing. It was good to be connected by blood like that. That a family wasn’t just a social thing. It was an animal thing. It was a reason of nature that we were all together under the same roof. Not that we had to be but that we were supposed to be. And I started feeling glad about it. I started feeling full of hope.”

“I saw him dead and alive at the same time. In the same breath. In the windshield, I watched him breathe as though he was frozen in time. And every breath marked him. Marked him forever without him knowing. And then his face changed. His face became him father’s face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same breath. And his father’s face changed to his Grandfather’s face. And it went on like that.”

“It was a time where if one were young and rather beautiful one could survive in limbo for awhile…”

“This is the story of the lives and loves of Timothy Hazard, and so, indirectly, a token biography of Reno, Nevada, as well. Now, whatever else Reno may be, and it is many things, it is the city of trembling leaves.”

“We spend our days sitting behind piles of books in the back office of his bookshop, listening as he brings 1925 to life for us. In a voice made gravelly by alcohol, Maurice talks about Gide, Cocteau, Coco Chanel. The adolescent of the Roaring Twenties is now a fat old man gesticulating wildly at the memory of Hispano-Suiza automobiles and Le Boeuf sur le Toit.”

“When the angels saw how unfortunate men could not pass those abysses and ravines to finish the work they had to do, but tormented themselves and looked in vain and shouted from one side to the other, they spread their wings above thise places and men were able to cross. So men learned from the angels of God how to build bridges, and therefore, after fountains, the greatest blessing is to build a bridge[.]”

“[B]y the next summer the recollection of the great flood had begun to pass into the memory of the older men, … , while the younger people sat singing and talking on the smooth stone ‘kapia’ over the water which flowed far below them and accompanied their songs with its murmurings. Forgetfulness heals everything and somg is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.”

“[The bridge] too grew old naturally, but on a scale of time that was much greater not only than the span of human existence but also than the passing of a whole series of generations, so that its ageing could not be seen by human eye. Its life, though mortal in itself, resembled eternity for its end could not be perceived.”

“I suppose I think as much about God as the next man who isn’t in the business. I spend a lot of time alone. But I’d seen, yes and done, some things that made me feel that if God was worried about man it was only in large numbers and in the course of time.”

“Because of the closeness to New York, the New Haven concert attracts some of the bigwigs like Albert Grossman, Bill Graham, and Patti Smith, who shows up looking like a samurai warrior on welfare. Joni Mitchell flies in and tunes up in the bathroom. Dylan is a magnet. He pulls not only crowds but superstars. Who wouldn’t play with Dylan if he asked them?”

“I wanted to feel the way the others did about this, but you can feel awful guilty about nothing when the men you’re with don’t trust you.”

“… but think about it, che, Silvio, you always have to make yourself over again; that’s life, the struggle for life that Darwin talks about…”

“It’s not just another concert tour but more like a pilgrimage. We’re looking for ourselves in everything. Everywhere we stop. Even when we’re moving. Trying to locate ourselves on the map. In time and space.”

“They gave me a bell, a cowbell. How funny it was — praise be! — to see a lummox of my size performing such a menial task. They set me at the door to the cavern during the hours when there were most people in the street and I rang the cowbell to call people’s attention, to make people turn their heads and look at me, to make people know that this was a place that sold books, beautiful books…”

“I found myself in the midst of all these traveling people as a collaborator in a whirlpool of images and shifting ideas. All of us working together for the same purpose — to try to live in constant movement on the road for six weeks, traveling by land, putting on music, filming this music in the surroundings of broken American history in small New England towns in the dead of winter.”

“I don’t remember how, by what subtleties and casuistry, we managed to convince ourselves that robbery was a meritorious and beautiful act; but I do know that it was by mutual agreement that we decided to organise a gang of thieves, whose initial membership was ourselves alone.”

“Now there’s a gun to take care of anything. They look good too. Make you feel good to hold one. Like a cowboy again. Somebody was asking him to wash the dishes. He got up and broke the chair over their back. Somebody else wanted to know why he did that. He said he was dreaming of guns.”

“Was she seeing him for the first time? No, not really. But who hasn’t experienced how hard it is to really see the person they love? In those few seconds Manfred moved out of the blur of proximity into a distance that allowed her to examine, measure and judge him. They say this inevitable moment is the end of love. But it is just the end of a spell. One of the many moments love has to withstand.”

“I’ll tell you what’s going on. Exactly what you can expect, exactly what had to happen. When nobody feels responsible and everybody just fusses in their little corner, and it’s that way right up the line, right up to the director’s office — then all the dirty little tricks one day add up to one great big mess.”

“Keith and Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. The left and right hand. A two-headed beast. The music and the words. The background and the foreground. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good.”

“He got to the bar and sat down next to a man who’d had his voice larynx thing removed so he had to talk through a plastic tube which made him sound like a transistor radio. The baseball game was on and the Spanish waiters were complaining about the Espresso machine and how the steam burned them all the time. He watched the game for a while but baseball always bored him.”