Voices

I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar-that's wonderful.
--Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

I pictured byself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I has was "Wow!"
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Farmer, raise your head...
Direct this stranger
Who will smile
And disappear
--Buson

Well welcome to my basement flat, no windows to see through
With darkness closing in my friend, we both know what to do...
--The Damned, "Wait for the Blackout"

.Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
--Dorothy Parker, "Inventory"

We got a deli, we got a bus
We got a lot of people throwing rocks at us...
--GWAR, "None But the Brave"

The Pranksters were now out among them, and it was exhilarating--look at the mothers staring!--and there was going to be holy terror in the land. But there would also be people who would look up out of their work-a-daddy lives in some town, some old guy, somebody's stenographer, and see this bus and register...delight, or just pure open-invitation wonder. Either way, the Intrepid Travelers figured, there was hope for these people. They weren't totally turned off...the citizens were suitably startled, outraged, delighted, nonplused, and would wheel around and start or else try to keep their cool by sidling glances like they weren't going to be impressed by any weird shit--and a few smiled in a frank way as if to say, I am with you--if only I could be with you!
--Tom Wolfe, The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test

Despite the great duress, always get off 'cause damn it!
It's the sure-fire way to win
Your poison doesn't hurt me, no
Tender wine disguised in a milk-fat fair kiddie show...
I'm here to celebrate the one below
At least I've heard from good God above
As the slap on my ass from a lipstick-kissed elbow glove...
--Maxwell Demon(Shudder to Think), "The Ballad of Maxwell Demon"

...all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

I think it's inspirational is that many of these writers…they're taking their life, or their death - ultimately, their happiness in their own hands. They saying okay, the authorities are not giving us satisfactory answers. And we are going to take control - if our biochemistry is messed up, we're going to fix that gap. If we are in pain, we'll fix that. Your writers are making their own rituals, their own meaning - "I did it my way."
Vial Magazine interviewing Loren Rhoads of Morbid Curiosity

The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway. Kesey decided he was the Non-navigator. Babbs was the Non-doctor. The bus trip was already becoming an allegory of life.
--Tom Wolfe, The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test

…how can you be cruel when gospel house has penetrated you deep and hard and taken over your itty-bitty soul? House music made us all run across the dance floor, doing things that would make a jealous lover turn hot pink in shame - tripped-up vogueing, disconnected twirling, incorrect pop locking, wooden-doll robot marching, Broadway show-tune leaping, crack ballet head-spinning, and samba whore hip-rolling. Hours of profound, emancipating stupidity led us to a stunning revelation, a revelation born of the ancient, universal dance music message, emanating from the smoke, blood, bass, and whiskey of the for-real, science-dropping, headz-only underground…it is what happens when you just don't give a fuck? Yes.
--Amanda Nowinski, last "Electric Habitat" column for SF Weekly

Harold, everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves. You can't let the world judge you too much.
--Maude, Harold and Maude

I'd rather be a silly old fool than a lonely old woman.
--Candy Darling

"There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible."
-- Auberon Waugh

Can't you see how easy it would be, send the public into a panic
And at the drop of a hat in seconds flat you'll be asking yourself what hit me
If you wanna keep up you have to stay down
The either, the or, the past, the now
The past inside you becomes the voice of now...
--Meat Beat Manifesto, "Edge of No Control"

He had discovered that the Pranksters had been able to control the flow of the conference, not by any Machiavellian planning, but by simply drawing the conference into their movie.
--Tom Wolfe, The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test

...They walked up the street until they got to the bend of Carpenter's Road where the boys lounged on a disused well. Spotting their prey, the boys sauntered forward as though there were nothing on their minds but the gray sky. Hardly able to control their grins, they stood like a gate blocking the path. When the girls were three feet in front of the boys, Sula reached into her coat pocket and pulled out Eva's paring knife. The boys stopped short, exchanged looks and dropped all pretense of innocence. This was going to be better than they thought. They were going to try and fight back, and with a knife. Maybe they could get an arm around one of their waists, or tear...
Sula squatted down in the dirt road and put everything down on the ground: her lunchpail, her reader, her mittens, her slate. Holding the knife in her right hand, she pulled the slate toward her and pressed her left forefinger down hard on its edge. Her aim was determined but inaccurate. She slashed off only the tip of her finger. The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, curling in the cherry blood that ran into the corners of the slate.
Sula raised her eyes to them. Her voice was quiet. "If I can do that to myself, what do you suppose I'll do to you?"
--Toni Morrison, Sula

Well I never pray but tonight I'm on my knees, yeah
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah,
I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind I feel free, now,
But the airwaves are clean and there's nobody singing to me, now...
--The Verve, "Bittersweet Symphony"

...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Listen here, he is inside
One who lives while others lie
I close my eyes and walk a thousand years
A thousand years that aren't mine
It seems he's near me as I walk
One who loved what love denied
He lives these years that I walk blind
All these years cannot be mine...
--Soundgarden, "Room 1000 Years Wide"

In the day we are social creatures, but at night we descend to the dream world where nature reigns, where there i s no law but sex, cruelty, and metamorphosis. Day itself is invaded by daemonic night. Moment by moment, night flickers in the imagination, in eroticism, subverting our strivings for virtue and order, giving an uncanny aura to objects and persons, revealed to us through the eyes of the artist.
--Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

I saw Miss Hate
Assisting a suicide in fate-colored glasses
She thirsts for beauty, teeth to the wind
I ran for my life, Lilith my sweet...
--My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, "Electrical Soul Wish"

Girls have to go somewhere dangerous every now and then just so they know they can find their way home.
-- Nicole Blackman, The God of Sleep

Stain on drain on procreate, fascinate me, instigate...
--Skinny Puppy, "Glass Houses"

The storm starts, when the drops start dropping
When the drops stop dropping then the storm starts stopping.
--Dr. Seuss

...A Frenchwoman likes possibilities almost more than perfection. They give her the chance to arrange things, and arrangements, of all sorts, are a Gallic passion. Arranger, s'arranger, verbs used in France to include the successful disposition of anything from a complicated legal problem to a worn-out love affair, from the resolution of a change in government to the choice of the right button... the promise kept, the assurances given, the obligations met. No people on earth, except, perhaps, the Japanese, arrange matters as well. Difficult circumstances are merely a question of more complicated arrangements."
--Judith Krantz, Scruples

Well, this is such a sad affair
I've opened up my heart so many times
But now it's closed...
Oh, my dear
Every salted tear
It wrings bitter-sweet applause...
But when the show's in full swing, every once in awhile
High-stepping chorus lines mean I'm forgetting
Mein lullaby...liebchen...
--The Venus in Furs, "Bitter's End"

This is my barbed wire dress. It protects the property but doesn't hide the view.
--Candy Darling

No crime if there ain't no law
No more cops to mess you around
No more dreams of mystery chords
No more sight to bring you down
I got a crazy, got a thought in my mind
My mind's on when she falls asleep
Feeling fine in her restless time
When these words upon me creep...
--The Damned, "Neat Neat Neat"

And all hell breaks loose
Yeah evil is as evil does and who
Oh, who but me could write this book of cruel...
--The Misfits, "Earth A.D."

Your pointed leather shoes!
Your tattered rubber stockings!
Your mini skirt of shopping-net!
Your knickers with the Queen Of London on it!
Silver Jubilee! Hee-hee!
--Nina Hagen, Auf'm Bahnhof Zoo

This is the traffic I've always dreamed of! Everybody goes!
--Neal Cassidy, On the Road

WHEN I DIE, PLEASE BURY ME IN THIS DRESS. THANK YOU.
--note on bedroom wall, Ginger Snaps

Oh, both my shoes are shiny new,
And pristine is my hat
My dress is 1922…
My life is all like that.
--Dorothy Parker, "Autobiography"

"Now all of you out there in the audience, if you believe in fairies, clap your hands and my gun will magically refill with bullets."
"I don't believe in fairies, boss."
"Then don't clap, idiot."
--Wing Fat, and his lackey, What's Up Tiger Lily