cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
PUTIN
This may sound weird, but I actually find Putin rather dull as a character. Hitler was a vegetarian. Stalin was a passable poet. Idi Amin ate people. What does Putin do that’s so surprising? He’s just your standard bully with a bad childhood who’s robbing his country blind. Bo-ring.
–Gary Shteyngart
RINGO
You worked on Ringo’s Stop and Smell the Roses album around then, didn’t you?
He asked me to write a song or two for it. They weren’t very successful. I wish that I’d written a better song for him. You can’t always do it. But anyway, we had a laugh. We went down to Super Bear in the South of France to do it. He was in a particularly crazy stimulant-laden time and he had decided he wanted to do this song called “You Can’t Fight Lighting.” It goes on for about 15 minutes. The lyrics are, “You can’t fight lightning.” It was something to do with freebasing. Lightning, lighting, drugs. So anyway, that was that. It was just a trifle boring, that take. But I didn’t have the guts to say, “We should fix this up.”
–Paul McCartney, interviewed for Uncut magazine
GOD
When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time.
–Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich
WANT
The wasps outside
the kitchen window
are making that
thick, unraveling sound
again, floating in
and out of the bald head
of their nest,
seeming not to move
while moving,
and it has just occurred
to me, standing,
washing the coffeepot,
watching them hang
loosely in the air — thin
wings; thick, elongated
abdomens; sad, down-
pointing antennae —
that this
is the heart’s constant
project: this simple
learning; learning
how to hold
hopelessness
and hope together;
to see on the unharmed
surface of one
the great scar
of the other; to recognize
both and to make
something of both;
to desire everything
and nothing
at once and to desire it
all the time;
and to contain that desire
fleshly, in a body;
to wash it and rest it
and feed it; to learn
its name and from whence
it came; and to speak
to it-oh, most of all
to speak to it —
every day, every day,
saying to one part,
“Well, maybe this is all
you get,” while saying
to the other, “Go on,
break it open, let it go.”
–Carrie Fountain
FEAR
Men fear ridicule the way women fear violence.
–Gloria Steinem, quoted in Jane Kramer’s New Yorker profile (a must-read)
another eye opens 