TV Quote of the Day (Jordan Peele, on Blacks in the ‘Star Wars’ Saga)

“Then they had Samuel L. Jackson….My man had the first purple lightsaber. Yeah. How you gonna give Mace Windu a grape-flavored lightsaber?”—Jordan Peele, on the lack of black characters in the Star Wars saga, in Key and Peele, Season 3, Episode 10, “Black Ice,” original air date Nov. 20, 2013, directed by Peter Atencio

This comment came a couple of years before John Boyega and Lupita Nyong'o were cast in Star Wars: The Force Awakens—but it’s still largely white “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

As for Mr. Peele, congratulations on those three Oscar nominations for Get Out. Clearly, this is a fellow who not only can make fun of genre cinema, but make it work for him…

Quote of the Day (Poet Kenneth Koch, Addressing His Love)

“I love you as the sunlight leads the prow

Of a ship which sails

From Hartford to Miami, and I love you

Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun

Receives me in the questions which you always pose.”—American poet and longtime Columbia University professor Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), “To You,” from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (2012)

Quote of the Day (Randy Newman, on Humor in His Songs)

“I think I mean to make people laugh more than most people do who use the form of songs. My narrator is usually not so much unreliable as insensitive; he often doesn't exactly know what it is that he's telling you about himself. I'm not sure it's the best way to use the form — people love love songs, so I should probably write more of them.”—Singer-songwriter Randy Newman quoted in Alan Light, “You Think ‘Short People’ Was Controversial?”, The New York Times, Aug. 6, 2017

(Photo of Randy Newman at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, May 2008, taken by Masahiro Sumori)

 

Quote of the Day (Adlai Stevenson, on a Wise Man and History)

“A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience, and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.”—Adlai Stevenson, Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952)

Both Stevenson and the man who defeated him twice for the Presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, were sober statesmen who, whatever their failings, exhibited caution near the start of the perilous Cold War. 

The same cannot be said for the current occupant of the Oval Office, who, over the past year, has escalated an already fraught situation with North Korea into one more reminiscent of schoolyard taunting and sessions on a psychiatrist’s couch.

This President knows neither patience nor history. His office and his country have already suffered for this knowledge and character deficit. The question now is whether the world will.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roethke, on Madness)

“What's madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance?"—American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), “In a Dark Time,” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1963)