A Quote by Paul Laffoley

Long John I think went off the air in about '79 or something, so there was a hiatus. That's why I think Art Bell thought there was a spot to be filled. He was doing exactly the same thing.
When I was in New York working for [Frederick] Kiesler, at night I listened to Jean Shephard who lasted from 1957 until 1976 and then went off the air. But also I was listening to Long John Nebel. Now, Long John was what Art Bell and George Noory do now.
If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.
I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.
Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.
The thing about writing or making art is that I'm not thinking about that stuff while I'm doing it. Like the driver's ed kid, in retrospect I see that that was meaningful, and I felt close to him in that way, but at the time I just thought it was fun to draw, and that's all it was. I think that's what's weird about life and about making art. You have to talk about it later. I guess I should be prepared to talk about it now. That is why I'm here. But again, pass.
When I grew up I saw females doing certain things, and I thought I had to do that exactly. The female rappers of my day spoke about sex a lot . . . and I thought that to have the success they got, I would have to represent the same thing. When in fact I didn’t have to represent the same thing.
There are people at the extremes who aren't able to do anything musically, and then others sort of fall in the middle. And the same thing with math, and the same thing with art. You'll find people who are geniuses, or prodigies at the far end of the bell shaped curve, and I think you will find some of the acquired savants in that category who happened to have been endowed with that kind of talent, which explains why not everyone becomes an acquired savant.
I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it.
John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.
I think it's quite a big decision for women to have children. In our time, I don't think we thought so much about it. We just went and had them and of course, life is not fun-filled and not complete if you don't have them. It's a wonderful thing when you think about it.
And so, Thanksgiving. Its the most amazing holiday. Just think about it — it's a miracle that once a year so many millions of Americans sit down to exactly the same meal as one another, exactly the same meal they grew up eating, and exactly the same meal they ate a year earlier. The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Is there anything else we all can agree so vehemently about? I don't think so.
Basically, I thought for a very long time that making music and art projects, that that was just something that I did, and real life was separate. And I'm starting to realize that the things that I do, making music and art and photography and all that, it's not just something that I do. It's who I am. So I don't think I'll ever be able to stop. It's like that curse that you live with, this thing that you love but you also hate it at the same time. It brings you a lot of joy but also a lot of heartbreak.
If something appeals, something appeals. I don't think I'm particularly calculated about it. I know I have an alarm bell that goes off in my head where something feels like it has no creative integrity to it at all, and it's just about making money.
When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.
I think a lot of superheroes seem to have the same value system; they just have a different costume. They're all doing exactly the same thing.
So when one thought goes into your mind, it’s not just one thought, it has to bounce off both hemispheres of the brain. When you’re thinking about something happy, you’re thinking about something sad. When you think about an apple, you also think about the opposite of an apple.
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