things I like more than people

[T]here was a stack of like 300 kids’ headshots, just these little kids, like 5 years old. I started looking at it, and I started laughing so hard. Because when you see the headshot of a child, they’re so filled with wonder and joy and optimism; they have no idea of the shame and humiliation that awaits them in life. And it just made me laugh so hard.

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—	Rob Huebel

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Charles Fleischer—comedian, voice artist, character actor, multimedia artist, writer, musician, theoretical mathematician. etc.

You can kind of tell he’s crazy genius. Well kind of. If you look at him with other people he looks unassuming—oldish, smallish, homelyish. But if you look at HIM, him ALONE, I think you can see it. If you focus, you can capture it—a glint in the eyes, a curve in those lips, especially that bottom one—that says—I’m kind of an übermensch. I’m kind of a Renaissance man. Or more—a master of all trades. Or—not all. But a lot of really cool and random and seemingly unconnected ones. Like a lot of left-brained stuff but some right-brained stuff too, just for good measure. The right-brained stuff that helps me to better express the left-brained stuff to right-brained people. He puts it all out there, in his various forms, so much so that you know he might be holding back, there is quite probably even more; we haven’t even scratched him.

“The universe is either a dodecahedron or a cheeseburger. And for me, it’s a win win! Everybody goes home happy!”

Interviewer: “You’ve been described as being brilliant. Let me ask you a question: as a comedian do you sometimes find that the audience doesn’t always get everything you do?”
CF: “I try and work on many levels, so that I can have an obscure reference to a Thomas Pynchon character and at the same time make a funny toilet sound. At the same time, use a little French haiku feng shui bonsai plant manipulation and like four people laugh for different reasons.” (from previous Tumblr post)

See also:

another Moleeds/stand-up video from 1990ish
his myspace
his facebook (check out photos for artwork)
I’m very sad that his old http://www.monkeydog.com which I spent way too much time at as a teenager is no longer… here’s to hoping he’ll archive it somewhere.

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[E]ducation is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible. This is particularly true of elementary and secondary education, of course…. I began to remember what it had been like: the tremendous excitement of the first couple of years, when kids imagine that great secrets are going to be unfolding before them, then the disappointment that gradually sets in when you begin to realize the truth: There’s plenty of learning to do, but it’s not the learning you wanted. It’s learning to keep your mouth shut, learning how to avoid attracting the teacher’s attention when you don’t want it, learning not to ask questions, learning how to pretend to understand, learning how to tell teachers what they want to hear, learning to keep your own ideas and opinions to yourself, learning how to look as if you’re paying attention, learning how to endure the endless boredom.

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—	Daniel Quinn, Providence

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quotes from ‘House of Yes’

Mom: “A person offers a little constructive criticism and a person gets lectured on the nature of things.”

Mom: “Let’s stick to the subject.”
Marty: “I have no idea what the subject is.”
Mom: “I’ll tell you what the subject is not.”
Marty: “No, Mama, that’s too broad a category; tell me what the subject is.”

Leslie: “I can’t talk like that about your brother.”
Jackie: “Pretend he’s not my brother; I do.”

Anthony: “I’ve never been to a hurricane before.”

Jackie: “Were you poor? Did you eat chicken pot pie?”
Leslie: “Pancakes. A lot of pancakes.”

Mom: “You look tired, why don’t you go to bed?”
Jackie: “I get bored in bed.”

Mom: “There’s no television and there’s no food. What else is there to stay up for?”

Anthony: “I hear you crying at night alone in your room. I hear her crying at night alone in her room.”
Marty: “You cry at night alone in your room?”
Anthony: “Don’t make fun of her; I won’t let you make fun of her.”
Marty: “I wasn’t going to make fun of her; I was going to ask her what she cries about.”

Jackie: “I don’t recognize the past tense.”

Mom: “A mother doesn’t spy; a mother pays attention.”

Mom: “People raise cattle; children just happen.”

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We don’t need to have all six billion of us living like environmental saints tomorrow—or ever, for that matter. To take such a thing as our objective would merely assure failure…. We simply can’t, as Gorbachev suggests, wait for ‘all members of the world community’ to ‘resolutely discard old stereotypes.’… These are will-o-the-wisps, vain expectations that keep us rooted in hopelessness, year after year, decade after decade….

Because we don’t expected to overthrow governments, abolish world capitalism, make civilization vanish, or turn everyone in the world into walking buddhas, we don’t have to wait for ANYTHING. But I have to warn you that many people will tell you the opposite, that we have to wait until we have a world that is ALREADY perfect. They feel absolutely nothing should happen until we’ve banished social inequality, racism, sexism, poverty, and every other bad thing you can think of….

People who think like this would wait for the cut to heal before applying a bandage, would wait till daybreak to light a candle, would wait for the sinking ship to rise before getting in the lifeboat.

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—	Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization

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You MUST have a revolution if you’re going to survive, Julie. If you go on the way you’re presently going, it’s hard to imagine your living through another century. But you can’t have a negative revolution. Any revolution that thinks of ‘going back’ to some ‘good old days’ of imagined simplicity… is founded on dreams. Any revolution that depends on people voluntarily giving up things they want for things they don’t want is mere utopianism and will fail. You must have a positive revolution, a revolution that brings people MORE of what they REALLY want, not LESS of what they DON’T really want. They don’t really want sixteen-bit electronic games, but if that’s the best they can get, they’ll take it…. If you want them to lose interest in toys, then you must give them something EVEN BETTER than toys.

That must be the watchword of your revolution, Julie—not voluntary poverty, but rather voluntary wealth. But REAL wealth this time. Not toys, not gadgets, not ‘amenities.’ Not stuff you can put in bank vaults. Real wealth of the kind that humans were born with. Real wealth of the kind that humans enjoyed here for hundreds of thousands of years…. And this is wealth you can enjoy without feeling guilty, Julie, because it isn’t something stolen from the world.

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—	Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael

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There is nothing you must be, and there is nothing you must do. There is nothing you must have, and there is nothing you must know. There is nothing you must become. However, it helps to understand fire burns, and when it rains, the earth gets wet.

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—	Japanese proverb

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oldhollywood:

“You’re looking at a species of flimsy little two-legged animals with extremely small heads whose name is Man…Very tiny undeveloped brain; comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself ‘Samuel Conrad’. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat- as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found the Twilight Zone.”

-Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, “People Are Alike All Over” (online here)

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oldhollywood:

Greta Garbo (1925, photo by Arnold Genthe) (via)

“I asked Garbo if she and [Gloria] Swanson had been friends.

‘Yes. When we both lived in Hollywood, I used to know Miss Swanson. But it has been years since I talked to her. Three years ago, though, she wrote me a letter. It said, ‘Dear G., we both live in New York, near each other, we are both alone, we have similar lives. Why don’t we have dinner sometime? Please come over and have dinner with me.’

‘Did you?’ I asked.

‘No. I didn’t even answer her letter.’

‘Why?’

She paused and thought deeply. A hint of sadness crossed her face. Her answer to my simple question spoke volumes about Greta Garbo. ‘There was no one to make me.’”

-excerpted from William Frye’s Vanity Fair profile The Garbo Next Door

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