Some of my friends sit around every evening
And they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
And the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut up, they don't wanna hear about it
It's only inches on the reel-to-reel
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel


"Radio, Radio", Elvis Costello

"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it or who says it."

—Malcolm X

"My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from other dads. 'Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?' they asked me the other day. I told them this story:  In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, 'Look at me... I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you... you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.' And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day, the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, 'Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.' So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day."

—Tom Waits

"I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be." 

—Studs Terkel

"You've gotta be slightly stupid."

—Joe Strummer

"Artists, to my mind, are the real architects of change ... not the political legislators who implement change after the fact."

—William S. Burroughs

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
— Frank Zappa