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The Coffee Chronicles
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(after discussing how Shichiroji managed to survive the last battle they fought together)
Kambei Shimada: As a matter of fact, I'm preparing for a tough war. It will bring us neither money nor fame. Want to join?
Shichiroji: Yes!
Quote from the Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954 |
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"Now imagine you don’t see the conductor, you can’t see the orchestra, you can’t see the way the bow is moving, and you hear that! And that irritated many commentators, many critics, because what’s going on, there is no pulse, there is no rythme, there is no… EXACTLY! That’s the point! Wagner is trying to create a sense of remoteness, musically, of place, of time, of remoteness that has nothing to do with our everyday world."
Antonio Pappano introduces the music of Parsifal (The Royal Opera), December 2013 |
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Joe: "This is like the anti-ambitious story, it's like the anti-preparation story; super successful nevertheless!" Rob: "Yes, I guess the goal was just being vague with people."
Joe: "Be vague and look cool." Rob: "And act like you don't care!"
Joe Rogan Experience #1353 Rob Zombie, September 2019 |
"I mean that that is the chracteristic of Wagner's men and women - the woman leads the way, the man rhapsodises."
Michael Tanner, Wagner, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996 |
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Arnold (on his wedding day): "The more I got into it the more nervous I got, it was an experience. But it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it very much."
Johny: "I always had"… "One of those things you never forget!"
Arnold Schwarzenegger on Johny Carson, 1986 |
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"We actually explored the idea of doing a comedy film about Jesus, you know, with all the jokes about someone trying to book a table for twelve at the last supper."
Michael Palin, Monthy Python's Life of Brian - BBC Debate, 1979 |
"But as you know, there is so many of our problems today where one side has monopolised the language, so heretical thoughts have become inexpressible; and this was beautifully caricatured by Orwell in 1984; but, you know, I was just reading an article in a French journal about the way in which Macron’s speeches all conform to the syntax of 1984!" Roger Scruton
Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton on the future of Conservatism, May 10, 2019
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"I made a certain amount of mistakes in my first marriage, like showing up..."
Woody Allen describes his ideal partner, The Dick Cavett Show, October 1970 |
The Coffee Chronicles
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"I think the innovation that we are getting is driven in strange ways. I worry that the conformity problem is actually more acute than it was in the '50s or '60s, so that the category of the eccentric scientist, or even the eccentric professor is a species that is steadily going instinct because there is less space for that in our research universities than there used to be."
Peter Thiel, Conversation with Tyler, Mercatus Center, May 2017
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"But his creative process is like almost engineered around being loose; like doing whatever he wants, going where he wants to go."
Joe Rogan Explains Dave Chappelle's Creative Process, JRE Clips, March 5, 2019
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"Let us try for once not to be right."
Samuel Rosenstock, aka Tristan Tzara, a French-Romanian poet and essayist, "Data Manifesto", 1918, translated by Robert Motherwell, in "Dada Painters and Poets".
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"I am not yet tir'd of doing nothing."
David Hume to Adam Smith, January 1766
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"Once again, these are just facts, and facts are never powerful enough vis-à-vis theories about war and what we want to believe."
Stephen Kotkins, Dartmouth, 1917 Centennial Series: War, Revolution, Socialism, War. October 2017 |
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"I have several theories about things and stuff.
My theory about evolution: Darwin was adopted!"
Steven Wright, Wicker Chairs and Gravity, 1990 |
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“In the depth of your ignorance, what is it that you want?"
Orson Welles getting frustrated with some studio personnel as he attempts to narrate some badly written commercials that he clearly finds quite annoying. Obscure Audio 2: Orson Welles Outtakes - Frozen Peas, 1970 |
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“But it was really difficult to explain our needs and for them to get their head around what we are doing, or even have an interest in doing something in low volume. So that meant we had to develop it ourselves.”
Christian Van Koenigsegg, The Drive, November 2016
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"An era does not just create technology. Technology creates the era."
W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology, 2009
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"Villager: How can we find a samurai we can pay with only rice?
Gisaku: Find hungry samurai."
Akira Kurosawa, The Seven Samurai, 1954
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"And the real problem is, in my opinion, that as we move, from the local community to the State, from the State to the Federal Government, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to control the mechanism we have established, and that mechanism tends to control us." Milton Friedman, in 1978, Free To Choose Network, May 22, 2012
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"A couple of geeks who sketched out some software could destroy Sears Roebuck?"
"60 Minutes" episode from 1999, "Jeff Bezos & Amazon - An Inside Look". The late reporter Bob Simon asked (sneering) an analyst about Amazon highflying stock.
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Passive-aggressive Bureaucracies
"Means become ends and ends become means. Consequently, the original goals of such organizations are now considered to be nothing more than obstacles on the way to realizing new aims (...) the collective perpetuates its existence, regardless of whether it has any role left and how well it functions."
Sam Vaknin, Lidija Rangelovska, Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited, 10th edition, 2015 |
"It’s amazing how quickly I have already sort of become accustomed to it and how quickly I feel confident in what I can do when I am in it. It’s sort of like "I HAVE BECOME THE CAR"!".
Doug DeMuro, Here's Why the Lamborghini Huracan Is Worth $250,000, December 20, 2016
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"You know, good things seem to happen when I leave. No matter where I am, wonderful things take place, after I’m gone."
Larry David on Late Night with Seth Meyers, September 27, 2017
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"What production would you absolutely not like to participate in? Oh, accounting, or anything with numbers, anything where you can't lie...you know what I mean, you can't lie, the figures don't lie!"
Inside the Actors Studio with Jay Leno, March 19, 2015
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"What does space smell like?
Astronaut Chris Hadfield answers your questions"
PBS NewsHour, 13.11.2013
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"In the past quarter-century liberalism has had it too easy. Its dominance following Soviet communism's collapse decayed into laziness and complacency. (...) The experts recruited to help run large parts of the economy marveled at their own brilliance."
The Economist, December 24th 2016 |
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NASA’s interest in documenting its missions was not always so strong; Mercury astronaut John Glenn, for example, was forced to buy a cheap 35mm camera at a Cocoa Beach drugstore in 1962 because he alone felt that America’s first orbital spaceflight merited some historical snapshots.
Jonathan Cape, Full Moon, 1999 |
""Being wrapped up in breakfast, lunch, dinner came from an agricultural society and the industrial revolution. We don't work on farms, we don't work on assembly lines and I don't think we should eat like we do. I tink people will switch to eating when hungry rather than eating on schedule.""
Lunch with the FT: Rob Rhinehart, July 2016 |
"You know what, it’s rare when you get to see somebody get stupider before your eyes, but he’s really working at it. So you’ve got to give him credit, it’s not an easy thing to do, but he’s accomplished it!"
Mark Cuban on Donald Trump, Extra TV, June 21st 2016 |
Did you ever notice how sometimes all day Wednesday, you keep thinking it's Thursday? And it happens over and over all day long. And then the next day, you're all right again..
....
Do you ever find yourself standing in one of the room in your house, and you can’t remember why you went in there?
George Carlin, Little Moments
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"Did you have to audition for those guys? Did you come with your bass and started playing for them, is that how it works?
No, I started the band. If you can't play it's the only way to do it, trust me!"
Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, reply to Howard Stern, Howard Stern Show, July 2015 |
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"If Donald Trump is the world’s most colourful politician, Angela Merkel is probably the least. She is resolutely tedious even by the standards of German politics. (…) She never talks about a “German dream”, and you will not see her campaign under the slogan, “Make Germany great again”."
Simon Kuper,Why Merkel dreams in black and white, FT Magazine, March 18th 2016 |
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"…we live in a world of happy endings, with audiences which make every show, no matter how doomed it is, and ready to be canceled, sound like a smash hit. If it doesn’t have a smash hit (...) they have a little black box, full of laughter, and they add that to the jokes...and you know that most of the people laughing on that box died long ago!"Orson Welles on performers working an audience (1979) |
"…so now, here I am, I’m hosting, and it’s all very well and good, but, honestly, I can’t wait to leave! In fact, I would say that one of the great pleasure in my life is leaving anywhere I am. Wherever I am, I want to get the hell out of there!"
Larry David Monologue, SNL, February 2016 |
"We always hired for intensity. Because our products were bizarre-enough, different enough, that we could train almost everything else."
Nolan Bushnell (Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's) on hiring Steve Jobs at Atari in 1974, Startup Grind, Jun 29, 2013 |
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“Do you enjoy being stupid? Oh yeah, I love being stupid. When we were writing Python that was the word we always used: SILLY! We loved it when it was silly, sometime when it was naughty, but when it was silly! And it was always best when it meant nothing!"
John Cleese on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, November 2015
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“Culturally, the Austro-German world of late nineteenth century was one of iconoclasts who became icons: Nietzsche in philosophy, Sigmund Freud in psychology, Albert Einstein in science, Richard Wagner in music, Mann in literature, and Max Weber in sociology."
A Mighty Fortress, Steven Ozment, Granta Publications, 2004
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“I guess that everyone was offered The Godfather,” he recalls. “The only reason I got to do it was that I was cheap, I was young, I was Italian and I was a screenwriter. It was a total stroke of luck. I had no business having such an important movie. I was always on the verge of getting fired. They didn’t like my ideas.” Breakfast with the FT: Francis Ford Coppola, February 13, 2015
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