are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Restless sinner, rest in sin
He's got no face to hold him in
He feels his days dark as night
He's been hiding with the blind
Just to find a place to hide his ghost"
--Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, "Restless Sinner"


"Beware of those angels with their wings glued on."
--Billy Corgan


"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
--Philip K. Dick


"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."
--Marilyn Monroe


"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be."
--Socrates


"It's just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we're all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. It's like a kind of poetry."
--Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider


"Everything passes, everything breaks, everything wearies."
--French proverb


"In case you never noticed, the path you never chose has chosen you."
--Jason Mraz


"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."
--Richard Bach


"Tell me what you've come here for
Moving like a hunter through my back door
Leaving the perfume of all you adore
To die nameless on my floor"
--Poe, "Wild"


"Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad."
--Diogenes


"Cast me gently
Into morning
For the night has been unkind
Take me to a
Place so holy
That I can wash this from my mind
The memory of choosing not to fight"
--Sarah McLachlan, "Answer"


"You thought by now you'd be
So much better than you are
You thought by now they'd see
That you have come so far

"And the pride inside their eyes
It's synchronized to a love you'll never know
So much more than you've been shown

"Hold on, one more time with feeling
Try it again, breathing's just a rhythm
Say it in your mind until you know
That the words are right
This is why we fight"
--Regina Spektor, "One More Time with Feeling"


"I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is the land I grew in

"Think of every town you've lived in
Every room you lay your head
And what is it that you remember?

"Do you carry every sadness with you?
Every hour your heart was broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you

"A man is walking on the highway
A woman stares out at the sea
And light is only now just breaking

"So we carry every sadness with us
Every hour our hearts were broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with us

"But I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
I am carrying this scrap of paper

"That can crack the darkest sky wide open
Every burden taken from me
Every night my heart unfolding
My home"
--Hem, "Half Acre"


"We hang our gods from trees."
--Janet Fitch


"I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,--a precious, yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless."
--Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre


"I am not concerned that you have fallen; I am concerned that you arise."
--Abraham Lincoln


"I have no money, no resources, no hope. I am the happiest man alive."
--Henry Miller


"But touch my tears with your lips
Touch my world with your fingertips
And we can have forever"
--Queen, "Who Wants to Live Forever"


"To die will be an awfully big adventure."
--James M. Barrie, Peter Pan


"What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens."
--Ursula K. Le Guin


"Every heart to love will come
But like a refugee"
--Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"


"And all who told it added something new,
And all who heard it made enlargements too."
--Alexander Pope


"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
--Steve Jobs


"There is no eraser on the end of a scalpel."
--Douglas Leonard Martin


"A person could only howl in abandonment so many times. Time didn't age you; memory did."
--Richard Powers


"What is a crow but a dove dipped in pitch? And what is a man but a dog cursed with words?"
--David Benioff


"Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust."
--Emily Dickinson


"The shadow is an archetype, meaning that it exists in all of us. The shadow contains everything denied and despised, everything considered sinful and everything we find awkward or unnerving. Although the shadow is thought of as the dark side of the individual it should be noted that it could also contain undeveloped positive parts."
--Kevin Wilson


"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
--Jonathan Swift


"I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth."
--Janeane Garofalo


"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go."
--William Feather


"Whisper your name in an empty room
You brush past my skin
As soft as fur"
--The Cure, "Other Voices"


"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me, you would make an exception
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said, 'Well, never mind,
We are ugly, but we have the music' "
--Leonard Cohen, "Chelsea Hotel No. 2"


"Asparagus"

This afternoon a man leans over
the hard rolls and the curled
butter, and tells me everything: two
women love him, he loved them, what
should he do?

The sun
sifts down through the imperceptibly
brownish urban air. I'm going to
suffer for this: turn red, get
blisters or else cancer. I eat
asparagus with my fingers, he
plunges into description.
He's at his wit's end, sewed
up in his own frenzy. He has
breadcrumbs in his beard.

I wonder
if I should let my hair go grey
so my advice will be better.
I could wrinkle up my eyelids,
look wise. I could get a pet lizard.
You're not crazy, I tell him.
Others have done this. Me too.
Messy love is better than none,
I guess. I'm no authority
on sane living.

Which is all true
and no help at all, because
this form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards,
or what kind of screams and grimaces
it pushed you into.

The shrimp arrive on their skewers,
the courtyard trees unroll
their yellowy caterpillars,
pollen powders our shoulders.
He wants them both, he relates
tortures, the coffee
arrives, and altogether I am amazed
at his stupidities.

I sit looking at him
with a sort of wonder,
or is it envy?
Listen, I say to him,
you're very lucky.
--Margaret Atwood


"Up in the sky there are a thousand stars we might see in our lifetime. Circuses circling fathoms of infinite seas, in dimensions we will never catch in the corner of our eye, on great caravans of reflected light and hope. I once saw a painting called The Equestrian in the Circus of the Falling Star. That is where I see Laura Nyro now, where I keep her, where she can work and be as wild as she is.

"The teenaged genius, she runs through subways unharmed by the bad people who hide there, and she never grows old. Eroticism; she's there like Joan of Arc. No pseudo sex queen could even approach the sensuality that Laura brought with a couple chords and a Chinese lamp. Let the boys and girls grow their own new sexuality from the intoxicating leaves of these times, these hippies and greasers and socis."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"I never met [Laura Nyro], except through her music. It's not that I think about her much in these years; I don't. But I don't need to. Mythological creatures are part of us. And I suspect it is the metaphysical clay of her intention that I work with.

"So there she is, horse bound, twirling in the cosmos, made of the purple lipstick that only defiant tenderness can bear. All that color, all that eternal burning, all that practice after school.

"Against the backdrop of time, perhaps nothing less than genius after all--genius being a thing that resonates deeper than its time, that cannot be denied by its creator, that, measured against time, was a courageous and unexpected use of tools; and measured against history, has no relevance to any time but now. The pretty folk singers and the angry acid queens, the guitar slingers and the soul groups, none of it translated with its original power into the coming decades. But this artist is still intact, and when you listen to those old recordings, you cannot help but hear the voice, like any great voice, Miles or Kubrick or Dylan Thomas, not only a great decade, but a great soul. Laura Nyro, singer and songwriter.

"And this is the gift, you know, inspired from within. It is not what she did but what she was. Where I can discern the truly divine among us, those brushed for a moment by God's little watercolor. What they do is amazing, yes, but it is because of what they are that the work is profound.

"Why is 'Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp' such an amazing work? Because it is being generated by a spirit wholly bent on love, on bringing love to the listener. I believe that now. I knew the song; it made me dream and made me hope. But now, growing old, I see that the intention of the writer was the thing that made the song live. In performance, the writer tells us many layers more than the music or the lyric can. If the writer is a performer, a great interpreter, like Laura, the inflection and movement reveal that meaning that cannot be spoken, but is understood by most of the people who witness it."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"We who were a little homely or a little stunningly beautiful for our oddness were proud of our having been cool enough to have heard [Laura Nyro]. Most people did not know who she was, and recognition of this secret in common, this was a bond between strangers."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"I liked [Laura Nyro's] name, and that she came from New York City, that strange other world, where West Side Story came from. Living on a farm in Elma, Washington, a small town where I was outcast absolute, it helped me to survive just knowing that somewhere in the universe there was someone with that beautiful name, Laura Nyro, and people cared about her, and there was a city where she walked and the wind lifted her hair.

"The wind lifted her hair for some magical moment on the cover of New York Tendaberry, my first Laura record, and for me, her greatest work. She was not afraid to show you her strange face, and you could tell she was very comfortable with her body. Something as small as that, something as simple as 'Look at me, I am different, see me' can be ingested instantly and change you in a small way, a way that one day might become very large indeed. All of these simple gestures we do seep into and carve the people we meet. Every photograph, every thing, it is part of telling people who we are, part of the great word of God that we speak."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"There is still a lot to sing and write about, to heal the spirit and encourage the revolution among our people. Poverty in the United States in this new millennium is a sin that more than one President will have to account for when his time is up. Laura Nyro inspires that kind of thinking in me. I want to stand by the people in my nation and help us all rise. I can't say how, I only know that these songs, these songs of freedom, and their writers, are my teachers and companions."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"A great thing, when we used to be on the bus, was [Laura Nyro] would always say, 'Do you think we could live here?' This is how family-oriented she was about the band. It didn't matter--whatever town we were in, it was almost as if she would love it if the whole band just lived in a house and we were a family."
--Jimmy Vivino, guitarist and Laura Nyro bandleader


"I'm going to paraphrase a story that I think is quintessential Laura. Have you come across Roscoe Harring? He was an early member of the Fifth Avenue Band. He went on to be a road manager for John Sebastian, Laura's road manager and Laura's manager. He was even a co-producer on the Smile record. Roscoe told a story at the service for Laura after her death. This is quintessential Laura. Laura played Wolman Skating Rink in Central Park at what was called the Schaeffer Music Festival. She showed up for sound check in the middle of the afternoon. The show was to start at 7:00. She goes up on the stage and goes, 'Oh my goodness, this is way too high. Roscoe, can you have them lower the stage? It's just too far from the people.' Roscoe looks at Laura and in a gentle, managerial way, says, 'Laura, this festival is running all summer. It's taken weeks to create all this. I just don't think there is any way they can lower the stage.' She takes a beat or two and she looks at Roscoe and she says, 'Well, can we bring the people up?' That is Laura all the way."
--Peter Gallway, producer of Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro (Tribute album)