A Quote by John Ridley
When I was young and I look at the things that I wrote - I don't think that was the word they used back then, but they had a hipster sensibility. They were a little irreverent.
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I have problems with the word lo-fi, because it's sort of like the term "hipster" in the way that it's used to describe things. It's kind of almost always used as a derogatory term, in the same way that "hipster" is.
Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.
For the first few years I wrote jokes and performed them word for word and then wrote tags for them and did that word for word and that worked pretty well. Now, I do almost all of my writing on stage and then record and listen for any new things and then I write those down.
Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.
It doesn't seem that long ago to me that the word 'irreverent' seemed affixed to my name. 'Irreverent newcomer.' I went from irreverent to venerable in what seems to me like the blink of an eye.
I've always found that word ["hipster"] is used with such disdain, like it's always used by chubby bloggers who aren't getting laid anymore and are bored, and they're just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable.
I always had long legs. When I was young, I used to think, 'Why do I look like a little pony?'
It's more in retrospect as I've thought about it over the years and look back at what I wrote, how I wrote things - like there's a song that Ralph Stanley later recorded with me that he had guested on my record what was called "Travelers Lantern" that I wrote as basically, you know, a hymn.
And again, we're kind of trying to be in that place, that's just so absurd and irreverent and hysterical and it's something that at our company we're kind of, we're so irreverent about everything, we're sort of irreverent about the establishment, we're irreverent about civilization, we're irreverent about philosophy, we're irreverent about religion.
We live in the least ugly time in history. If you look at back when Beethoven was writing, half the kids were dying, mothers were dying at childbirth, there were more wars going on then than there are now. People wrote the most beautiful things during the ugliest times.
There were choices that we've made as a Little Dragon, that we had to make at the time because we needed the money. I think everything has its context. It is way easier to say no to things now then it was five years ago, for sure. Back then we were grabbing at every opportunity we could just to sustain a name and let people know, "Hello, hello! We're here! Look at us!" It's really sort of taken its time and grown, and it's been a very step-by-step process.
I love a statement by the apostle Paul, in the Book of Philippians in the Bible. I think the Corinthians had been writing to Paul, telling him that old men were chasing young women, nobody was tithing - and all that must have run Paul crazy. He wrote back and said, "If there be anything of good report, speak of these things." That's one of my principles.It's another discipline that I encourage myself to employ - to, as much as possible, say the courteous thing, and then be it.
I remember I grew up in Pasadena in a very, kind of, homogeneous, kind of, suburban existence and then I went to college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And there were all these, kind of, hipster New York kids who were so-called 'cultured' and had so much, you know, like knew all the references and, like, already had their look down.
When I started doing my act, I wasn't married and didn't have kids. I was probably 29 years old. Some people say that's not a kid, but when you're 50, and you look back to when you were 30, you were a kid. You look back on your 30s and think, "I was an idiot!" But I would just do things then I thought were funny. I couldn't have cared less who thought anything about it.
Every two to three weeks, I was changing around my room. My room was made out of nothing, basically - a magazine, a little radio, a little bed - and I had the sensibility to put things together and match things in a certain way so that they were very special.
If you have only a little capital and are young today, there are fewer opportunities than when I was young. Back then, we had just come out of a depression. Capitalism was a bad word. There had been abuses in the 1920s. A joke going around then was the guy who said, 'I bought stock for my old age and it worked - in six months, I feel like an old man!' "It's tougher for you, but that doesn't mean you won't do well - it just may take more time. But what the heck, you may live longer."
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