“In that regard, Bob Brown is what every police official and neighborhood association claims as the solution to the trouble in their streets. He is every bit the old-time beat cop, the retrograde image of walk-the-footpost, know-the-people policing. Get the cops out of the radio cars, runs the latest theory, and you begin to get them back into the neighborhoods. Get the out walking their real estate, and they’ll start to reconnect with the people, learn the neighborhood, prevent crime. Community-oriented policing has become the watchword of the nineties in law enforcement. Houston, New York, Washington, Detroit–everyone is nostalgic for foot patrols and grassroots policing and whatever the hell else kep the streets safe in 1950. That Bob Brown knows his post from one end to the other, that he can recite most of the players and their deeds by name, that he has fought for the same terrain for two decades–all of it seems the textbook model of what the visionaries in law enforcement are promoting. That there are already Bob Browns on the streets, that for all their will and desire and knowledge, they have lost their private wars in hardcore places like West Baltimore–that is somehow beside the point.”
–The Corner, David Simon and Ed Burns, p. 152

“The U.S. government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.”—Ronald Reagan

“A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.”–Aldous Huxley

“The poor will always be with us, declared the biblical sages, and this divided nation seems to go out of its way to prove the point.”–David Simon and Edward Burns, The Corner

I was looking for quotes about the city, when I came across this gem:

“City folk need not feel sorry for themselves or be pessimistic about the soil in which Christianity is planted to live and bear fruit. The Christian faith was made for contest, and its best fruits are always produced out of the harsh soil of difficulty and danger.”–Theodore C. Speers

I like it.

This is from Story Games. Vincent is apologizing for the tardiness with which some of the hard copies of his latest game In a Wicked Age are shipping:

I’m sorry for the wait! I was like, “oh sure, I’ll mail them all bright and early on the first of Feb. After all, how many people will really preorder?” And then I was like, “…crap, that’s, uh, more than I expected.”

(I expected 30-50, feeling optimistic. I got 210. Shows how smart I am.)

I doubt that I could get a preorder of 210 on one of my games. Well, maybe one day. Of course, I’ve never actually done a preorder for one of my games. Maybe I should….

“If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is, that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”—Thomas Jefferson

Made me laugh when I heard this.

“This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!”

–Fort Minor, “Remember the Name”

Particularly that bit about “fifty percent pain”. Yeah, that’s about right.

“I am not as manly as Seth.”–Ralph Mazza

From the same article:

The first [issue] has to do with the difference between musical quality and musical relevance. If someone does not like, say, Western art music, this may not signal the absence of refined taste or the presence of bad taste. If this same person prefers progressive jazz, Islamic maqam, and the music of the gamelan, we can only say that his or her taste is contained within or limited to these musics. The same thing must be said about the person who prefers Western music from 1400 to 1750, John Philip Sousa marches, and bluegrass. It is therefore unwise to say that musical diversity in our present culture is legitimate only if it includes Western art music. Given today”s cultural mixes and options it is entirely possible for a body of great music to be irrelevant for a body of people who otherwise have high aesthetic sensitivities. In other words, there is nothing wrong with someone putting Western art music in a less-than-primary position as long as the entirety of his or her choices is dominated by a quest for quality and perceptual growth.

Emphasis mine.

I haven’t finished the article, but I’m sympathetic to this idea:

And whether we like it or not, all music–good, bad, old, new, simple, complex, loud, soft–is contextually friendly, seemingly bent on soaking up whatever is around it, easily shifting from foreground to background. It takes a special effort of the aesthetic will to keep it in the foreground–to encounter it on its own terms and for its inherent worth–even when we consciously devote ourselves to this task. In this respect and with the possible exception of the visual arts, music is unlike any other form of propositional communication. Everyone except the most stubbornly absolutist thinkers understands this. And if this present culture survives long enough for its history to repeat itself, the musics created for today’s Stratford Malls may well make their way into tomorrow’s quieted and tuxedoed concert halls, just as the Tafelmusik of the past has. Musicologists will pore over their various minutiae, showing how this newly absolutized material should be studied and canonized. Mannerisms and protocols will gradually make their way into performance practices; coughing will be frowned on during performances and, by all means, there will be no waterfalls and the sounds of little children will be unwelcome. Meanwhile, some other kind of new music will be piped into tomorrow’s Stratfords and tomorrow’s music critics may well continue the lament over the ongoing denigration of the art form.

Plus he then goes on to discuss “high” culture vs. “low” culture…or rather how there isn’t really a “versus” at all. Hopefully this will be some solid food for thought.

He called me names on a messageboard!

“The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.”— Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“Life hangs together in one piece. Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections.”– The Far Side of the Dollar, Ross MacDonald

“[M]urder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with softly graying hair.”—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”