Tag: Recommendation

Clyde’s – Lynn Nottage Play

In this feisty new comedy by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Ruined) and directed by Jamil Jude (Choir Boy, DCPA), you’ll become a fly on the wall of Clyde’s, a roadside sandwich shop, in all its gastronomical glory.

At Clyde’s, formerly incarcerated individuals cook up meals that range from sublime to soul-crushing. Even as the surly shop owner tries to keep them under her thumb, their kitchen mentor, Montrellous, guides them on a quest to create the perfect sandwich – and reclaim their lives. Through this shared pursuit, each cook must face their demons on their personal journeys towards purpose, self-worth, and even salvation.

https://www.denvercenter.org/tickets-events/clydes/

Highly recommended.

Some Americans Talking About Their Jobs

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
It is hard to talk about this work. It is hard to do it, too. The best time to work is when it’s quiet, from ten at night till two in the morning. Because sometimes, well, [laughs] almost always, it’s a frustrating job. You know, it’s easy to use finished product, like computer games or Microsoft products, but the process to completing software is very frustrating. It is sometimes even pretty easy to write a program, but to make it so the users who will use the program cannot do anything stupid or cause some problems you have to imagine every single thing the user could do on keyboard. That part takes almost all of time. And it is a very boring time.

GAS STATION ATTENDANT
Out where this place is, it’s just all desert, and there’s a lot of weird people that live out around here. They’re kind of scary. They actually scare me more than the freeway people do because the main reason anybody’d live all the way out here is because of drug problems and problems with the government. Most of them are like that. Not all of them—there’s nice ones, but there’s a lot of weirdos that do weird things, they drive really awful-looking cars. White trucks with blue doors. No teeth. I try not to get involved with them. I’m polite. I smile, take their money, bag what they’re buying, but that’s it. I’m scared so I try not to get personal. That’s probably the worst part about the job. The drive is no fun, but the scary people, they’re the worst.

PERSONAL INJURY TRIAL LAWYER
And by the way, I have never, and I mean this, never met an honest man. I have had rabbis lie. I have had priests lie. I have had witnesses of every color and denomination and persuasion lie. Clients come to me and tell me that they were caused to have an accident and they were injured in a certain way. But the truth is that it usually didn’t happen exactly the way they say it happened. The client may be fundamentally and inherently a good and honest person, but when it comes to their case their theory is, well, it’s a goddamn insurance company, and they’ve got more money than God, and it isn’t right, and it isn’t fair. And so it’s okay if, on the margins, on the fringes, they improve or enhance their story a little bit.

So we have to begin with a premise that it’s not a question of whether someone’s honest, it’s a question of the degree. And lawyers are the most dishonest people of all. A lawyer will prepare his witness in such a way that he, the lawyer, thinks he’s being honest, but in truth and in all candor, he’s really not. Because he’s kind of steering or directing the witness in a certain direction—the direction that says the other party is at fault. And that’s part of our business. A good lawyer has to approach every accident, every case, with the mindset that his client is not at fault. The other party is at fault. And so a good lawyer is often dishonest and so is everyone else.

TEMP
I’m not an actor. I’m not into that. I’m a temp, a forty-year-old temp. Let’s leave it at that, okay? I mean, I know there’s stigma attached to being a forty-year-old temp. At forty, people assume you should have achieved something. And they don’t see this as an achievement. But I don’t care. I’m happy doing this. I’ve never fit in. The more I see what fitting in is, the less I want to. It’s plots that you already know the ending to. Why do you want to live out a story and know that you’re gonna do this or do that, you know? A steady job is a plot. I will stay here and I will do this, then I’ll retire, then I’ll move to Florida. Then I’ll die, you know? You spend your days at work dreaming of the future, you spend your days at work getting ready to get off of work. Me, I don’t know if I’ll make it to my job tomorrow. So it’s the moment, living in the moment.

Like last year, I took a vacation. I’d been at this place a couple of months and it was getting old. I called up and said, “I’m going on a vacation.” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t know if we’ll have a job for you when you get back.” I said, “I know you don’t know if you’ll have a job for me when I get back ’cause I’m not even sure when I’m coming back.” So I went on this bike trip; I took a bunch of time. I love to travel and see things. Two-week vacations just don’t do it for me.

Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs
NOTE – Highly recommended book

5 Short Stories – a Desultory Notes Selection, Quotes from

A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear
All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we—you and I—shall build.

John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever

The Jewbird
“I’m an old radical.”
“You’re sure you’re not some kind of a ghost or dybbuk?”
“Not a dybbuk,” answered the bird, “though one of my relatives had such an experience once. It’s all over now, thanks God. They freed her from a former lover, a crazy jealous man. She’s now the mother of two wonderful children.”
“Birds?” Cohen asked slyly.
“Why not?”
“What kind of birds?”
“Like me. Jewbirds.”
Cohen tipped back in his chair and guffawed. “That’s a big laugh. I heard of a Jewfish but not a Jewbird.”

Bernard Malamud
The Complete Stories

The Fishing-Boat Picture
I’ve been a postman for twenty-eight years. Take that first sentence: because it’s written in a simple way may make the fact of my having been a postman for so long seem important, but I realize that such a fact has no significance whatever. After all, it’s not my fault that it may seem as if it has to some people just because I wrote it down plain; I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way. If I started using long and complicated words that I’d searched for in the dictionary I’d use them too many times, the same ones over and over again, with only a few sentences—if that—between each one; so I’d rather not make what I’m going to write look foolish by using dictionary words.

Alan Sillitoe
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner: Stories

The Man in the Overstuffed Chair
He always enters the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside. That is how he always enters it except when it’s after midnight and liquor has put out the fire in his nerves. Then he enters the house in a strikingly different manner, almost guiltily, coughing a little, sighing louder than he coughs, and sometimes talking to himself as someone talks to someone after a long, fierce argument has exhausted the anger between them but not settled the problem. He takes off his shoes in the living room before he goes upstairs where he has to go past my mother’s closed door, but she never fails to let him know she hears him by clearing her throat very loudly or saying, “Ah, me, ah, me!” Sometimes I hear him say “Ah, me” in response as he goes on down the hall to where he sleeps, an alcove sunroom connected to the bedroom of my young brother, Dakin, who is at this time, the fall and winter of 1943, with the Air Force in Burma.

Tennessee Williams
Collected Stories

Rothschild’s Fiddle
The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying. And in the hospital and jail there was very little demand for coffins. In short, business was bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been a coffin-maker in the provincial capital, he would most likely have had a house of his own and been called Yakov Matveich; but in this wretched little town he was simply called Yakov, his street nickname for some reason was “Bronzy,” and he lived a poor life, like a simple peasant, in a little old cottage with only one room, and that room housed himself, Marfa, the stove, the double bed, the coffins, the workbench, and all his chattels.

Yakov made good, sturdy coffins. For peasants and tradesmen he made them his own size and was never once mistaken, because no one anywhere, not even in the jail, was taller or stronger than he, though he was now seventy years old. For gentlefolk and women he worked to measure, and for that he used an iron ruler. He accepted orders for children’s coffins very reluctantly, and made them straight off without measurements, scornfully, and, taking the money for his work, would say each time:

“I confess, I don’t like messing with trifles.”

Besides his craft, he also earned a little money playing the fiddle.

Anton Chekhov
Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

The Singers Talk – Some Quotes from

Simon LeBon
How are you with hearing your own voice?
I don’t dislike my own voice, but I don’t like watching myself and I don’t like listening to myself because it’s not natural. It doesn’t help. It just makes me feel self-conscious. And I’d rather not. I’d rather be inside the singer, singing out, communicating something than standing outside of the singer, trying to watch myself and see myself as other people see me.

Michael Stipe
It’s pretty amazing how people can connect so deeply to a vocal.
I love the power of music. Singing along to a favorite song, finding harmonies and melodies within it that you love, that’s such a powerful thing. That’s such a powerful community thing. It really helps bring us together in a beautiful way. Singing is one of the most natural and beautiful things we all share. What we don’t share is the ability to hold a note. [Laughter]

Bryan Adams
Yeah. Hitting that note and sustaining it, while staying in pitch? That’s tough!
One thing about my voice: I don’t sing.

What do you mean?
Note. Note. Note. Note. I scoop practically every note that I sing. I sing [subtly ramps the note upwards] “ALL FOR ONE” Every single note is a scoop.

But all the music stops and you have to hit that note.
It’s not, [sings, hitting the note dead-on] “Let’s make it ALL.” It’s [runs his voice up to the note] “AAALLL.” So, you scoop up, that’s how you do it. I’ll do it slower for you. [Starts small and eases his voice up into the note] Everything I sing has a scoop to it. I don’t sing any note straight on.

The Singers Talk: The Greatest Singers of Our Time Discuss the One Thing They’re Never Asked About: Their Voices
Jason Thomas Gordon

5 Short Novels

Indian Nocturne – 88 Pages
Antonio Tabucchi
Translated from the Italian, this winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger for 1987 is an enigmatic novel set in modern India. Roux, the narrator, is in pursuit of a mysterious friend named Xavier. His search, which develops into a quest, takes him from town to town across the subcontinent.

Wittgenstein’s Nephew – 114 pages
Thomas Bernhard
It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality—a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and great fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction, Wittgenstein’s Nephew is both a meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and a stunning—if not haunting—eulogy to a real-life friendship.

The Penitent – 114 Pages
Isaac Bashevis Singer
In 1969 I.B. Singer goes to the Wailing Wall for the first time and meets a man wearing ritual garments named Joseph Shapiro. Shapiro survived WWII in Poland and Russia, moved to the US and became a successful business man in New York. Over the next couple of days he tells Singer how he came to renounce his old life, move to Israel, and become an observant Jew.

Prater Violet – 146 Pages
Christopher Isherwood
Prater Violet concerns the filming of an unashamedly romantic and commercial musical about old Vienna. It is a stinging satirical novel about the film industry, trifling studio feuds, and the fatuous movie Prater Violet, which, ironically, counterpoints the tragic events on the world stage as Hitler’s lengthening shadow falls over the real Vienna of the thirties. At its center are vivid portraits of the mocking genius Friedrich Bergmann, the imperious, dazzlingly witty Austrian director, and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter-the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.

The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith – 221 Pages
Thomas Keneally
In Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, Jimmie Blacksmith is desperate to figure out where he belongs. Half-Anglo and half-Aboriginal, he feels out of place in both cultures. Schooled in the ways of white society by a Protestant missionary, Jimmie forsakes tribal customs, adopts the white man’s religion, marries a white woman, and seeks a life of honest labor in a world Aborigines are normally barred from entering. But he will always be seen as less than human by the employers who cheat and exploit him, the fellow workers who deride him, and the wife who betrays him—and a man can only take so much. Driven by hopelessness, rage, and despair, Jimmie commits a series of savage and terrible acts of vengeance and becomes something he never thought he’d be: a murderer, a fugitive, and, ultimately, a legend.

NOTE – Selections mine, description via amazon.

Trumpet Player on the Roof – Flea anecdote.

I spent the most peaceful and light hours practicing trumpet on the roof. Our sweet landlady was a tripper who’d come up there to sit and listen to me play; she told me it was beautiful, and I once saw a soft tear roll down her painted face when she said it. I had two different friends later on, Maggie Ehrig and Ione Skye, both who told me they would hear the trumpet sounds flying through the neighborhood, not knowing the origin, and it brought them joy.

Acid for the Children
Flea

Note – good stuff, recommended.

Ozzy Osbourne vs the Ice Machines

Ozzy’s second Rare Breed gig was at Aston University, where once again we were booed off and the promoter only gave us half our fee. That was the night I learned that Ozzy could defecate at will. As we were loading our gear back into the van, Ozzy pulled down his pants, crouched on the bonnet of the promoter’s Jaguar and left one of his trademark calling cards. To be fair, he refined his talent as the years went by. On future American tours, he’d shit in hotel ice machines, so that anyone who fancied a Scotch on the rocks might get it with a twist.

Into the Void
Geezer Butler

Unbeknownst to Sharon, who as usual was taking care of day-to-day business in her hotel room, Ozzy found his way to the road crew’s hotel where he drank and snorted until Sharon finally tracked him down that evening.

Upon his arrival back at the hotel, Ozzy continued his rampage by defecating in the ice machines before retiring from another full day of mischief. Due to countless incidents of day off shenanigans, I truly believe that Ozzy is responsible for the modifications that have been made to the design of today’s hotel ice machines.

Off the Rails: Aboard the Crazy Train in the Blizzard of Ozz
Rudy Sarzo

Note – both books recommended.

Whitney Plantation Tour, Pics of

Whitney Plantation
Whitney Plantation educates the public about the history and legacies of slavery in the United States. Visitors to the museum will learn about the history of slavery through exhibits, an hour and 15-minute tour, and conversations with our staff.


Booked tour via: Cajun Encounters – Whitney Plantation
Paying homage to slaves of Whitney and across the South. Step back in time and explore the history of this famous plantation.

NOTES – The plantation is about an hour outside of New Orleans. On the way the tour guide gave us some history of the area and we got to see some Louisiana countryside. Highly recommeneded.

Rikers – Quotes from Oral History

TAMI LEE, retired correction officer, 1989 to 2020: I never smiled for thirty years. I never smiled at that job one time. Sometimes I’d have to think about it—like, “Smile.” I didn’t want to smile so they could think I was playing with them because I was not playing with them.

CASIMIRO TORRES, detained various stints, 1980s to 2000s: I had a girl one time, I used to go to this twenty-four-hour store after I came out of prison, late at night, and after a few times she started calling me Smiley. I said, “Why do you call me that?” And she said, “Because you’ve never smiled.” And it had never occurred to me that I hadn’t smiled in years and years. I had my prison face on wherever I went. It’s something that clings to you, like the smell of shit. You have to really wash it off.

ANNA GRISTINA, detained 2012: I was in the bullpen, waiting at the processing area. There was a woman. These girls were going, “She needs to get to the doctor. She’s shaking on the floor.” A couple minutes later, everyone is screaming. The guards, they are having their lunch. This sergeant with braids, she says, “Shut the fuck up! Mind your own business!”

We were looking and we saw this woman from across the pen, froth coming out of her mouth. She’s having a seizure. She’s vomiting foam. The guard says, “Mind your business. You’re in enough trouble. Keep your mouth shut.” We came back from a lawyer visit, and they had taken her out on a gurney, dead. The guards had denied her medical, and she died. I don’t know her name or her age.

She [the woman who died] had covers over her body when they took her out. She had been screaming for hours for help. She had been half the day in the holding pen with no water, no nothing, having seizures. I’ll never forget the feeling of telling my lawyers a woman died in there and they shrugged their shoulders.

JERRY DEAN, detained 1987, 2003: The last day I was leaving Rikers when I was sixteen, I sat in the corner, they drive me upstate [to the Goshen Secure Center], and I remember somebody said, when you leave Rikers, don’t ever look back, don’t look back in the car or the bus, or else you’ll come back. So I didn’t want to look back.

Rikers: An Oral History
Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

ChatGpt – If I like these books what else would I like

If I like these books what else would I like:
The Exorcist
Rule of the Bone
The Beginning of Spring
Watership Down
The Penitent

Based on the books you listed, here are some recommendations for similar books:
  1. “The Shining” by Stephen King – Like “The Exorcist,” this is a classic horror novel that explores the darker aspects of human nature.
  2. “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger – Like “Rule of the Bone,” this is a coming-of-age novel about a young protagonist who is trying to find his place in the world.
  3. “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov – Like “The Beginning of Spring,” this is a literary novel set in early 20th-century Russia that explores the themes of love, art, and revolution.
  4. “Animal Farm” by George Orwell – Like “Watership Down,” this is an allegorical novel that uses animals to explore human society and politics.
  5. “The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene – Like “The Penitent,” this is a novel that explores themes of sin, redemption, and faith, set against the backdrop of political turmoil.

Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

Turn Every Page explores the remarkable fifty-year relationship between two literary legends, writer Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb. Now 86, Caro is working to complete the final volume of his masterwork, The Years of Lyndon Johnson; Gottlieb, 91, waits to edit it. The task of finishing their life’s work looms before them. With humor and insight, this unique double portrait reveals the work habits, peculiarities and professional joys of these two ferocious intellects at the culmination of a journey that has consumed both their lives and impacted generations of politicians, activists, writers, and readers.

5 Best Books of 2022

Selections mine, blurbs via Amazon.
See also: 5 Best Books of 2021

Scenes from My Life
Michael K Williams
When Michael K. Williams died on September 6, 2021, he left behind a career as one of the most electrifying actors of his generation. From his star turn as Omar Little in The Wire to Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire to Emmy-nominated roles in HBO’s The Night Of and Lovecraft Country, Williams inhabited a slew of indelible roles that he portrayed with a rawness and vulnerability that leapt off the screen. Beyond the nominations and acclaim, Williams played characters who connected, whose humanity couldn’t be denied, whose stories were too often left out of the main narrative.

At the time of his death, Williams had nearly finished a memoir that tells the story of his past while looking to the future, a book that merges his life and his life’s work. Mike, as his friends knew him, was so much more than an actor. In Scenes from My Life, he traces his life in whole, from his childhood in East Flatbush and his early years as a dancer to his battles with addiction and the bar fight that left his face with his distinguishing scar. He was a committed Brooklyn resident and activist who dedicated his life to working with social justice organizations and his community, especially in helping at-risk youth find their voice and carve out their future. Williams worked to keep the spotlight on those he fought for and with, whom he believed in with his whole heart.

No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy
Mark Hodkinson
Mark Hodkinson grew up among dark satanic mills in a house with just one book: Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. His dad kept it on top of a wardrobe with other items of great worth – wedding photographs and Mark’s National Cycling Proficiency certificate. If Mark wanted to read it, he was warned not to crease the pages or slam shut the covers.

Fast forward to today, and Mark still lives in Rochdale snugly ensconced (or is that buried?) in a ‘book cave’ surrounded by 3,500 titles – at the last count. He is an author, journalist and publisher.

So this is his story of growing up a working-class lad during the 1970s and 1980s. It’s about schools (bad), music (good) and the people (some mad, a few sane), and pre-eminently and profoundly the books and authors (some bad, mostly good) that led the way, shaped a life. If only coincidentally, it relates how writing and reading has changed, as the Manor House novel gave way to the kitchen sink drama and working-class writers found the spotlight (if only briefly).

Fiona and Jane
Jean Chen Ho
Best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen explore the lonely freeways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying with them the scars of their families’ tumultuous pasts. Fiona was always destined to leave, her effortless beauty burnished by fierce ambition—qualities that Jane admired and feared in equal measure. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California and grieves her estranged father’s sudden death, in the process alienating an overzealous girlfriend. Strained by distance and unintended betrayals, the women float in and out of each other’s lives, their friendship both a beacon of home and a reminder of all they’ve lost.

In stories told in alternating voices, Jean Chen Ho’s debut collection peels back the layers of female friendship—the intensity, resentment, and boundless love—to probe the beating hearts of young women coming to terms with themselves, and each other, in light of the insecurities and shame that holds them back.

Spanning countries and selves, Fiona and Jane is an intimate portrait of a friendship, a deep dive into the universal perplexities of being young and alive, and a bracingly honest account of two Asian women who dare to stake a claim on joy in a changing, contemporary America.

Longshot
David Heath
In Longshot, investigative journalist David Heath takes readers inside the small group of scientists whose groundbreaking work was once largely dismissed but whose feat will now eclipse the importance of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in medical history. With never-before-reported details, Heath reveals how these scientists overcame countless obstacles to give the world an unprecedented head start when we needed a COVID-19 vaccine.

The story really begins in the 1990s, with a series of discoveries that were timed perfectly to prepare us for the worst pandemic since 1918. Readers will meet Katalin Karikó, who made it possible to use messenger RNA in vaccines but struggled for years just to hang on to her job. There’s also Derrick Rossi, who leveraged Karikó’s work to found Moderna but was eventually expelled from his company. And then there’s Barney Graham at the National Institutes of Health, who had a career-long obsession with solving the riddle of why two toddlers died in a vaccine trial in 1966, a tragedy that ultimately led to a critical breakthrough in vaccine science.
With both foresight and luck, Graham and these other crucial scientists set the course for a coronavirus vaccine years before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. The author draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with key players to tell the definitive story about how the race to create the vaccine sparked a revolution in medical science.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism
David Gelles
In 1981, Jack Welch took over General Electric and quickly rose to fame as the first celebrity CEO. He golfed with presidents, mingled with movie stars, and was idolized for growing GE into the most valuable company in the world. But Welch’s achievements didn’t stem from some greater intelligence or business prowess. Rather, they were the result of a sustained effort to push GE’s stock price ever higher, often at the expense of workers, consumers, and innovation. In this captivating, revelatory book, David Gelles argues that Welch single-handedly ushered in a new, cutthroat era of American capitalism that continues to this day.

Gelles chronicles Welch’s campaign to vaporize hundreds of thousands of jobs in a bid to boost profits, eviscerating the country’s manufacturing base and destabilizing the middle class. Welch’s obsession with downsizing—he eliminated 10% of employees every year—fundamentally altered GE and inspired generations of imitators who have employed his strategies at other companies around the globe. In his day, Welch was corporate America’s leading proponent of mergers and acquisitions, using deals to gobble up competitors and giving rise to an economy that is more concentrated and less dynamic. And Welch pioneered the dark arts of “financialization,” transforming GE from an admired industrial manufacturer into what was effectively an unregulated bank. The finance business was hugely profitable in the short term and helped Welch keep GE’s stock price ticking up. But ultimately, financialization undermined GE and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies.

Gelles shows how Welch’s celebrated emphasis on increasing shareholder value by any means necessary (layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, acquisitions, and buybacks, to name but a few tactics) became the norm in American business generally. He demonstrates how that approach has led to the greatest socioeconomic inequality since the Great Depression and harmed many of the very companies that have embraced it. And he shows how a generation of Welch acolytes radically transformed companies like Boeing, Home Depot, Kraft Heinz, and more. Finally, Gelles chronicles the change that is now afoot in corporate America, highlighting companies and leaders who have abandoned Welchism and are proving that it is still possible to excel in the business world without destroying livelihoods, gutting communities, and spurning regulation.

Sometimes Like is Better than Love, Drugs Aren’t What They Used to be – Couple Keith Richards Observations

I’ve been saved by chicks more times than by guys. Sometimes just that little hug and kiss and nothing else happens. Just keep me warm for the night, just hold on to each other when times are hard, times are rough.
And I’d say, “Fuck, why are you bothering with me when you know I’m an asshole and I’ll be gone tomorrow?” “I don’t know. I guess you’re worth it.” “Well, I’m not going to argue.” The first time I encountered that was with these little English chicks up in the north, on that first tour. You end up, after the show, at a pub or the bar of the hotel, and suddenly you’re in the room with some very sweet chick who’s going to Sheffield University and studying sociology who decides to be really nice to you. “I thought you were a smart chick. I’m a guitar player. I’m just going through town.” “Yeah, but I like you.” Liking is sometimes better than loving.

Richards, Keith. Life (p. 130). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Don’t try this at home. Even I can’t do it anymore; they don’t make them the same. They suddenly decided in the mid-’70s that they would make downers that would put you to sleep without the high. I would raid the lockers of the world to find some more barbiturates. No doubt somewhere in the Middle East, in Europe, I could find some. I love my downers. I was so hyper all the time that I needed to suppress myself. If you didn’t want to go to sleep and just enjoy the buzz, you just stood up for a little bit and listened to some music. It had character. That’s what I would say about barbiturates. Character. Every man who is worth his salt in downers knows what I’m talking about. And even that wouldn’t put me down; that would keep me on a level. To me, the sensible drugs in the world are the pure ones. Tuinals, Seconals, Nembutals. Desbutal was probably one of the best that there ever was, a capsule in a weird red and cream color. They were better than later versions, which acted on the central nervous system. You could piss them out in twenty-four hours; they didn’t hang on to your nerve endings.

Richards, Keith. Life (p. 249). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Highly recommended

The Summer of a Dormouse – Byron quote

When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation) – sleep, eating and swilling – buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse…

Quote found in Kenneth Tynan’s Diaries, 16 November, 1972

Byron has given me the perfect title for an autobiography if I ever write one: The Summer of a Dormouse. It’s from a letter:
When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation) – sleep, eating and swilling – buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse…

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan

(Highly recommended book)