Donald Fagen Quotes

The milk of the sacred cows has a way of turning sour.

I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn’t quite happen. I guess I’m someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see.

One of the Count’s most quoted sentences is “The map is not the territory.” In other words, don’t confuse the word with the object, the description with the thing itself.

I started a lyric for this song “Godwhacker,” which Walter and I completed and recorded for a Steely Dan CD. It’s about an elite squad of assassins whose sole assignment is to find a way into heaven and take out God. If the Deity actually existed, what sane person wouldn’t consider this to be justifiable homicide?

In 1964, long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH, and so on. All the telephones worked, and they sounded good, too. Rarely did anyone ever lose a call, and that was usually on an overseas line. Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. By then, just about everyone had an aerial on the roof, and the signal was strong: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties, all day and most of the night. No soul-deadening porn or violence. Decent news programs and casual entertainment featuring intelligent, charming celebrities like Steve Allen, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, Jack Benny, Rod Serling, and Ernie Kovacs. Yeah, call me old Uncle Fuckwad, I don’t care. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindfuck. The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People. For example, those people in the audience who can’t experience the performance unless they’re sending instant videos to their friends: Look at me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I’m filming this shit. You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say. Wake up, ya dope! Outside

Rather than employ Aristotelian logic—that is, the binary, yes/no, black versus white type of thinking—the Count favored multivalued, pluralistic thought that was modulated by—but not ruled by—subjective feeling. Basically, Korzybski was saying, Hey, be cool: “Don’t get mad—get Null-A!

The Count, though, saw all problems in human relations as problems in semantics, that is, the fact that words mean different things to different people. Moreover, General Semantics, his own invention, would also take into account neurological events: the ways in which people reacted to new words, new information and new situations. Confronted with a stressful stimulus, one’s reflexes and/or conditioned behavior often preempted the appropriate measured response.

The Horn Bus, which I call the Nerd Bus, is dominated by the more neurasthenic, introspective types—you know, the Jewish people:

In the evening, having zero interest in the town fireworks display, Vince and I saw a film at the cute little movie theater, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which was intelligent and carefully made, as his films always are. Walter and I once had a bizarre interaction with Anderson’s fans over the Internet, which started when we posted a couple of humorous letters (we thought) on the Steely Dan website.

I think one of the reasons we’re intrigued by Anderson is that he seems to be fixated on the sort of geekish, early-sixties adolescent experience that he’s too young to have had but that Walter and I actually lived through. And yet he nails the mood precisely, using comic exaggeration and fantasy to do the job. Although it was no picnic, it’s too bad everyone’s coming-of-age can’t take place in the early sixties.

I started going to jazz clubs in New York when I was twelve or thirteen, first with my older cousins Mike and Jack, and then later on my own. I remember seeing the mighty Count Basie band at a matinee at Birdland, with the great Sonny Payne on drums. When the whole band pumped out one of those thirteenth chords, you could feel the breeze on your face.

I’m back from the show. The house was a legion of TV Babies, maybe tourists from Arizona. I don’t know. Probably right-wingers, too, the victims of an epidemic mental illness that a British study has proven to be the result of having an inordinately large amygdala, a part of the primitive brain that causes them to be fearful way past the point of delusion, which explains why their philosophy, their syntax and their manner of thought don’t seem to be reality based. That’s why, when you hear a Republican speak, it’s like listening to somebody recount a particularly boring dream. In the sixties, during the war between the generations, I always figured that all we had to do was wait until the old, paranoid, myth-bound, sexually twisted Hobbesian geezers died out. But I was wrong. They just keep coming back, these moldering, bloodless vampires, no matter how many times you hammer in the stake. It’s got to be the amygdala thing. Period, end of story.

Georgia on My Mind”—square-ass backup singers and all—just may have been the most beautiful three minutes and thirty-nine seconds in all of twentieth-century music.

In the seventies, Walter and I wrote a tune, “Deacon Blues,” that toyed with the cliché of the jazz musician as antihero. It was kind of a takeoff on that old essay by Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” not to mention our lives up to that point.