 20 May 2004 @ 17:27
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
---Oscar Wilde
And a man shall be free, and as pure as the day prior
to his conception in his mother's womb,
when he has nothing, wants nothing and knows nothing.
---Meister Eckhart
I would believe only in a god who could dance.
---Friedrich Nietzsche
Paul Quintanilla and Frederik Rusch, standing 2nd and 3rd from left, in Maine, September 1958
In the Fall of 1958 I took my cool self on the road. I had worked increasingly hard to get cool. True, I lived in a small city in western New York, but I'd listened to and collected lots of jazz, tuned in Jean Shepherd most nights on WOR-AM (all 365 miles from Manhattan), and had subscribed to The Village Voice for 5 years. I had taken to our Senior Prom a sorta former girl friend who had gone off to Chatham in Pittsburgh the year before, and she remarked I was "so cool." And now I was going to a small, unknown college in Maine, which had to be one of the more uncool places on earth. So I figured I'd come on pretty strong at that campus.
What I hadn't counted on at Bates College in Lewiston, was meeting a small contingent of fellow freshmen who'd been raised in New York City. Well---I was from the same state at least, so I figured I'd fit right in with them. Most of the students at Bates were from Massachusetts and Maine and New Hampshire---you know, rustic sorts of places. But to my astonishment the New Yorkers thought I was kind of a hick. John Tagliabue wrote of me at the time that I was a "vague boy from the weeds"~~~ More >
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