DON’T ASK

You Asked For It (according to my previous post) — but this post is a different story, so….

 

By a weird coincidence, ASK ME NO QUESTIONS AND I’LL TELL YOU NO LIES (a quote attributed to 18th century Irish novelist, playwright and poet Oliver Goldsmith) is my springboard for this post of “Don’t Ask” quotes — thus sparing you the fate of my last post, which subjected you to some questionable poems.

Let’s plunge right in with perhaps the most famous DON’T ASK quote (at least in America):

“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” –John F. Kennedy

Here’s another famous one (in jazz circles), leveled at squares:

“If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” –Louis Armstrong

If you have a humorous bone in your body, the next three should bring a smile to your face:

“Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask, Why me? Then a voice answers, Nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.” –Charles M. Schulz

“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people see things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.” –George Carlin

“When your mother asks, “Do you want a piece of advice?’, it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.” –Erma Bombeck

Now for some serious stuff:

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” –Saint Augustine

“If you ask me whether the election of Barack Obama is the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream, I say, ‘No, it’s just a down payment.” –John Lewis

To close, here’s a quote I like which is a stretch to fit the category, but since it’s the birthday of the author, don’t ask me to re-think its inclusion here:

“Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary.” –Francois de La Rochefoucauld (9/15/1613–3/17/1680)

I think that does it for now. How’s that for progress?

 

 

YOU ASKED FOR IT! YOU GOT IT!

My last post featured poetry which one of you commented that you wanted more of. So, it is by popular demand (who am I to deny my adoring readers?) that my Fats friend and I are bound to reply:

The initials of that reader are mm. No, mistermuse isn’t the mm who asked for more. If you must know, it was magicmermaid, who I assume is a real person (not that mistermuse isn’t real — as real, at least, as magicmermaid….or as you, for that matter). You are real, aren’t you? — if not, just pretend you are, because mistermuse can use the reassurance.

THE FAUX PAS OF POSITIVE THINKING

“Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” –Voltaire

I can live with
Uncertainty and doubt —
It’s know-it-alls
I have my doubts about.

THE PETER PRINCIPLE

“I am not young enough to know everything.” –Sir James M. Barrie (author of the play subtitled The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up)

Sorry that things didn’t quite Pan out
(except in Neverland….or thereabout).

HOW TO BETTER CULTIVATE KNOWLEDGE

“Scholars esteem knowledge not for its use in attaining other values, but as a value in itself.” –Max Eastman

Know,
Weigh,

Hoe
Say.

KNOW PROBLEM

“If reality wants to get in touch, it knows where I am.” –Phil Proctor

But if reality says,
“Hello there, it’s me” —
How would you know
Absent a show of real ID?

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOR THE TIME BEING

It’s been some time since I laid some poetry on you, but all good things must end (i.e., your luck has run out). What I’m getting at is, I’ve decided to resurrect a few old poems, as well as come up with a new one or two. If you object, you have the right to remain Soylent* because….

*Soylent: foodstuff made of soybeans and lentils

A POEM OF EXCEPTIONAL TASTE

Soybeans and lentils — what a treat!
I can think of nothing I’d rather eat!*
Just savor the flavor — they can’t be beat*….
But then, I’m a groundhog, so I don’t eat meat.

*except for watermelon: https://riversworld.live/2020/09/04/summer-means-watermelon/

I’LL TAKE A BRAINCHECK

“The difference between intelligence and wisdom is that intelligence is knowing half of what you hear or read is garbage, and wisdom is knowing which half.” –Seymour Fisher

From dilemmas of that class,
You’ll have to exempt me —
I’m still stuck on “Is the glass
Half full or half empty?”

WISE-ASS PLATITUDES

Utmost is the wisdom of the platitude —
But most, sadly, are lacking in latitude.
Is there never need for deviance?
I think I shall file a grieviance!
The grounds? Let’s just say they have an ATTITUDE.

LONG TIME, NO SEE

Youth is the stuff of time and place
The race of years cannot erase,
Seen through eyes too unwise to see
That all was not what it seemed to be.

Age is the stuff of hedging bets,
Of things undone and old regrets,
Seeing ourselves as others do,
Thinking “And so, what else is new?”

 

IT’S ABOUT A QUOTER TO NINE

Several days ago, one of my readers said she’s partial to humorous quotes, so I’ve been thinking about spending a whole lot of time thinking about devoting a post to things others have said which are funnier than what I say….but after searching high (brow) and low (brow), eye gave up. See what I mean?

Ha ha! Just kidding. Believe it or not, I was able to find nine selections funnier-than-mine (well, maybe somewhat funnier), though I’m sure I would’ve said them first if I’d thought of them first. Some of the nine guys & gals I’m about to quote said what they said before I was even born, thus taking unfair advantage of circumstances beyond my control. But this is my blog, so as a quoter of quotes, I at least get to determine the subject matter of the quotes I quote, and the quotes I’ve chosen to quote are quotes about quotes….and I quote:

“A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself – always a laborious business.” –A. A. Milne

“I googled the quote ‘Power means not having to respond.’ Nothing happened.” –John Alejandro King [what “Power means” sounds like something Trump might say, except nothing Trump says is worth quoting]

“Quotation: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.” –Ambrose Bierce

“There are two kinds of marriages: where a husband quotes the wife, and where the wife quotes the husband.” –Clifford Odets

“You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it’s attributed to a whole raft of wits.” –Anna Quindlen

“I have made it a rule that whenever I say something stupid, I immediately attribute it to Dr. Johnson, Marcus Aurelius or Dorothy Parker.” –George Mikes

“That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.” –Dorothy Parker

“You can always depend on children to quote you correctly, especially when it’s something you shouldn’t have said.” –Evan Esar

“I can’t see what Jack Warner [Warner Bros. movie mogul] can do with an Oscar – it can’t say Yes.” –Al Jolson

:

RELAX REDUX / IN THE LAP OF LUX

After my last post (“RELAX”), the title of a possible sequel (“RELAX REDUX”) came to me….however, further inspiration waned, leaving me a title in search of a post. But fear not. We artistes are too artiste-tic to give up a half-asinine idea without a fight….and, in time, a way forward hit me: if RELAX REDUX became the asinine half of a whole post, the whole post would be half-asinine if the second half of the whole were also half-asinine. In other words, the second half of the whole must be better than half-asinine, or the whole post is half-asinine.

In short, to half or not to half — that was the question. The answer came to me when I asked myself what can be logically paired with relaxation to buttress a less asinine whole, and I answered myself: luxury, that’s what. Hence I appoint IN THE LAP OF LUX to serve as my better half….whether my wife likes it or not.

So, Weather* you’re weady or not, it’s time to welax — er, RELAX. That’s half the battle.

*LAZY WEATHER was one of a number of songs written by white composer Peter DeRose and black lyricist Jo Trent in the late 1920s (a time when such bi-racial collaboration was almost unheard of)

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Now on to IN THE LAP OF LUX:

“Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad, except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.” –Orson Welles

“If your neighbor has it, a luxury immediately becomes a necessity.” –Evan Esar

“The older I get, the more I realize that the ultimate luxury is time.” –Michael Kars

“Someone loving you back with all they’ve got is perhaps the greatest luxury of this rotten modern times, when lovers are easy but love is rare.” –Nitya Prakash

“Contentment is natural wealth; luxury [is] artificial poverty.” –Socrates

“Authentic luxury flourishes in the untying of self-worth from popular opinion.” –Ann Brasco

“Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three — and paradise is when you have none.” –Doug Larson

“It is only to the happy that tears are a luxury.” –Thomas More

So….

 

 

 

 

 

THE TREASURE OF JOHN HUSTON

Huston would have agreed with [Orson] Welles, who declared, “I’m awfully tired of old men saying they have no regrets. We’re loaded with, burdened with, staggering under, regrets.” –Jeffrey Meyers, from his biography JOHN HUSTON: COURAGE AND ART

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I must admit that JOHN HUSTON (born August 5, 1906) is not the kind of human being I admire — however, he IS the kind of film maker I admire. Yes, he made his share of clunkers, but few directors made more of my all-time favorite films than he: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, Beat The Devil — and yet, he had more than his share of things to regret, as he himself admitted (more on that shortly).

But first, here are two classic scenes from THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE:

The second scene features the great actor Walter Huston (father of John) doing his incomparable dance in the gold-flecked dirt of the Sierra Madre mountains:

Getting back to John Huston’s regrettable qualities, Jeffrey Meyers (in his excellent bio) compares Huston to Ernest Hemingway: “Hemingway had four wives, Huston had five (and all of his marriages ended badly). Each married increasingly younger women and, while married, fell in love with a series of women even younger than their wives. Huston, however, [unlike Hemingway] was unashamedly promiscuous. Both had three children and were difficult, demanding and frequently absent fathers.”

“In the last paragraph of his autobiography, Huston brooded over his guilty regrets about family, finances, alcohol, tobacco and matrimony. Huston could be noble, generous and kind, as well as selfish, callous and cruel. But he should be remembered for his intellect, his imagination and his charm.”

I, of course, cannot remember him thusly because I did not know him. But I can remember him for his films, and so I do. Who could forget the black bird….

….or The African Queen:

One of those clunkers I mentioned was THE BIBLE (1966), an ungodly bad epic which he both directed and starred in. But those can be forgiven in light of the above trinity of masterpieces. If that doesn’t Beat The Devil….

 

 

 

I COULD HAVE ROMANCED ALL NIGHT….

I could have….that is, if I were fifty years younger. But why bemoan it if Mother Nature no longer shores up the animal in me? Still, she’s no spring chicken herself, so you’d think she’d cut old geezers like me some slack.

Moving on from my love life of fond memory: Wouldn’t it be loverly if I instead celebrated the 164th birthday of my near-contemporary George Bernard Shaw with a selection of songs from MY FAIR LADY (based on his play PYGMALION), followed by a bit of biography, a serving of Shaw quotes, and a nightcap of Shavian brew-haha.

From “Wouldn’t It Be” to “I Could Have”….

In this scene, Stanley Holloway is seen lifting his spirits on his last night of ‘freedom’:

Next in line, the bit of bio:

https://www.biography.com/writer/george-bernard-shaw

Now sink your teeth into the quotes:

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

There is only one sort of genuine Socialism, the democratic sort, by which I mean the organization of society for the benefit of the whole people.

We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists.

….which leads us to the brew-haha / brouhaha between Shaw and fellow socialist H.G. Wells (click on the title below the cartoon caricature):

….which takes us at a social difference to

THE END

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

lie, n. a false statement known to be false by the person who makes it.
lie, v. to be in a horizontal or flat position; to exist; have its place.  –World Book Dictionary

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So, where does the truth lie? Attempts to address that question, it seems to me, lie in the assumption that we know objectively what truth is. Should we settle for the negative defining of truth as being the opposite of “lie, n“? I don’t know that most of us want to — or need to — go deeper into the jungle of truth than that, but if you’re of a mind to take the path of beast resistance, you can start here:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201808/what-is-truth

In our dystopian sub-culture of “fake news,” half-truths, whole-cloth fabrications and false narratives in which truth is what President Trump says it is and science is fiction, it isn’t always simple to disentangle truth from the deluge of prevarication and misrepresentations which is Trump’s stock in trade  — and he knows it. Who can fact check it all fast enough? The old saying remains relevant: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

And speaking of quotes which remain relevant, try these on for wise:

Carlyle said, “A lie cannot live.” It shows he did not know how to tell them. –Mark Twain

If at first you’re not believed, lie, lie again.–Evan Esar (not Trump, believe it or not)

The pursuit of truth shall set you free, even if you never catch up with it. –Clarence Darrow

It is twice as hard to crush a half-truth as a whole lie. –Austin O’Malley

Truth is more important than facts. –Frank Lloyd Wright

All men are born truthful and die liars. –Marquis de Vauvenargues

And so it goes. Would I lie to you?

 

PIED FEIFFER

pied, adj.  of two or more colors in blotches — Merriam-Webster Dictionary

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Another post, another autobiography (or memoir, going by the book) to review — this one titled BACKING INTO FORWARD, by Jules Feiffer. But I am not so much going to review this 2010 book as pass along some thoughts from it, which, I think, are worth thinking about — relevant, at least in part, to current backward, black and white, regressive times.

First, a brief introduction: FEIFFER (born Jan. 26, 1929), is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer who was born and grew up ‘between a blotch (of angsts) and a hard place’ in the Bronx. Having a controlling mother, little interest in school and no athletic ability whatsoever, “Fear was the principal emotion of my childhood. I hid in my sleep. I hid in my dreams. I revealed myself only in comics, which were the embodiment of my dreams.”

In his teens, he was influenced by his older sister, whose “crowd was fast-talking, fast-quipping, mischievous, left, meaning far left in their politics, their taste in books, art, movies, and just about everything else.” Marry this influence with his passion for cartoons, and you have the seeds of the man and cartoonist he was to become (the engrossing details of which you will have to read in the book).

Now for some of those thoughts I previously mentioned and now quote:

Over the years I have been asked how I came to make certain choices. How did I know? This choice as opposed to that, this direction or that? Much of my life as a young man was spent ignoring or delaying choices. The choices I made were due to running out of time. Backed into a corner, a choice was made because I no longer had a choice not to. Having nowhere to go, I spot the one open window and jump through. Choice to me is much like Butch Cassidy and Sundance escaping a posse by jumping off a cliff. They jumped. And survived. It was the right choice. But when it’s not, you’re dead.

Up until I was drafted, I had found that I could survive under any circumstance, no matter how unnerving, degrading, humiliating, or demoralizing, if I could understand the unwritten rules, i.e., the culture that was beating up on me. Whether it was family, school, sports, work, sex, I was accustomed to getting knocked down, picking myself up, and starting all over again. But in the army I was on unknown ground. After five months something went terribly wrong. They transferred me to train me to operate and repair radios on the [Korean] front line–in other words, to be killed. Radio repair was indecipherable to me. I saw no good reason [for] this assignment. As Vice President Dick Cheney explained when asked by the press why he hadn’t fought in the Vietnam War, “I had other priorities.” Yes! Yes! Me too!

It was heartbreaking to watch [Jerome] Robbins go into his HUAC dance. The acting chair of the House Un-American Activites Committee, a somber, ministerial-looking fake, asked Robbins at the start of his sworn testimony what he did for a living. Robbins stated that he was a choreographer. The chair did not understand the unfamiliar word. “A chori–chori–chori–what exactly is that, Mr. Robbins.?” Robbins explained that it was something like a dance director and named shows he had choreographed, from On The Town, his first musical, to The King And I. The members of the committee seemed delighted to have this fancy new word to play with. As each one took his turn questioning Robbins, he took a crack at pronouncing “choreographer.” The point, made to the cameras for the heartland, was that loyal American don’t need highfalutinn words. No! Loyal Americans needed but one thing, fealty to God and country. Loyal Americans wrapped themselves in the flag.

Called soft on Communism, liberals quieted down about witch hunts and loyalty oaths. Called eggheads, they dumbed themselves down. Displays of wit were repressed as too highbrow. Accused of cowardice in the Cold War, liberals began appraising countries to invade. Vietnam was a liberal war. The Republican Dwight Eisenhower refused to be sucked in. But Eisenhower was a general, a war hero, he didn’t have to prove his manhood. John F. Kennedy, although a war hero, was a liberal Democrat. He had to prove his manhood. Kennedy couldn’t afford to let the Russians think he was incompetent and inconsequential, which they might well have concluded after the Bay of Pigs. The Soviets might move on Berlin because of Kennedy’s perceived weakness. Before they could make such a move, Kennedy moved on Vietnam. As much of a disaster as the war proved itself to be, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, after him, could not get out. To cut and run was not an option for Democrats because it would make them open to attacks from Republicans.

Enough. Or was/is it? Politics being politics and the American electorate being the American electorate, we now have the grotesquely cartoonish Donald Trump….so let us close with this (for what it’s worth):

WAR GAMES

“War is nothing more than a catalogue of mistakes and misfortunes.” –Winston Churchill

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It’s funny– well, not literally funny — how one thing can lead unexpectedly to another. I’m half-way through another biography….but, unlike the others I’ve been reading recently, this one has led to the sort of post I didn’t anticipate writing when I began reading it.

Its title is THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON (A BIOGRAPHY OF DAVID NIVEN) by Sheridan Morley. NIVEN (1910-83), as you may know, was an American actor who was born/raised in England and came to the U.S. in 1932. When WW II broke out in Europe, he returned to England to serve in the military. In 1941 he wrote a letter to a fellow British-born actor friend back in Hollywood, part of which I quote here from the book:

Thank God we have now got a real government and in Churchill a real leader at last, but there is going to be a little scalp-hunting when the smoke has cleared off the battlefields. I am unimportant, but besides cousins and relations, I have now lost practically all my old friends, and all in the past few weeks….they need never have been sacrificed if the people then at the top had been doing their jobs as well as they said they were doing them [emphasis mine].

Sound familiar? Today, with the corona virus, we have a different kind of world war, but the same (and even more lame) kind of sophistry, gas-baggery, and incompetence resulting in unnecessary casualties:

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=trump+coronavirus+down+to+zero&docid=607986001098770809&mid=730D607688499A94FB45730D607688499A94FB45&view=detail&FORM=VIRE

And so I ask you: How on earth does the most morally corrupt President in U.S. history not belong behind bars or in a mental institution rather than in the White House? How is it, after 3 1/2 years of reigning the swamp, that roughly 40% of the American people either cannot, or will not, see through this pathetic con man of a President — a President who thinks he is not only above the law, but thinks he IS the law, who tries to subvert the law to his own ends? Are his supporters deaf, dumb and blind….or simply incapable/too much in denial to look behind the curtain and see that the mighty Oz is the very hoax he labels all that exposes him?

Come November 3, we must turn from the dark side to the other side of the moon, or America will have surrendered all claim to being the “beacon of hope” for the world.