Michael Ventura Quotes

Be careful how you choose your enemy, for you will come to resemble him. The moment you adapt your enemy's methods your enemy has won. The rest is suffering and historical opera.

Good is not the opposite of evil, joy is the opposite of evil.

All paths cause pain, so to chose the safe over the audacious will not give you less pain, only less beauty.

Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew.

Our choices are truncated in evil's presence.

That's what America's all about, man, if it's about anything. You can choose your own name.

To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind--is to be crazy, not healthy.

It may be that it is not given to us to know when we are angels. We may only be given to know when others are. This may be one of the reasons we need each other so.

The people that you have to lie to, own you. The things you have to lie about, own you. When your children see you owned, they are not your children any more, they are the children of what owns you. If money owns you, they are the children of money. If your need for pretense and illusion owns you, they are the children of pretense and illusion. If your fear of loneliness owns you, they are the children of loneliness. If your fear of the truth owns you, they are the children of fear of the truth.

It's as absurd to expect a life to have meaning, in contrast to the vastness of the Universe, as it is absurd to take off your shoe and hang it from a tree, but both are wonderful in their way—for I assure you, if you could see that tree, you’d think it wonderful, you’d approve, you’d think that in a wacko way something had been done, something worth doing.

Work is a sacrament. Don't despise anyone's.

In joy, our choices may appear to be few, but one's responses are anything but confined, they're inspired, expanded.

They think I may be dangerous, and I am, but not in the way they fear. I have tasted of Paradise. Not because I wanted to. I didn't want to. But it has borne down upon me and there is no escaping it any more. All Things Are Possible. It bears down upon everyone and we run from it as hard as we can and many manage to keep it at bay, but I have not, I am condemned, now, never.... to settle... for the lesser.... ever... again. And yes, that makes me a dangerous man. They think I have become one of the wild animals at the zoo, and I have become one of the wild animals at the zoo. This is a great day.

He became a surgeon because he was afraid of knives. He got married because he was afraid of women. He had a child because he was afraid of responsibility. Now, his marriage over and his child no longer speaking to him, he turned off all the lights in the house because he was afraid of the dark

Lions and tigers have almost identical skeletons.

Much of the terror of death is terror of dying without having given. Without even finding what one has to give.

She would never feel conspiratorial with a male in authority, and there were moments when therapist and client needed to feel they were sharing a conspiracy.

A hundred years ago behavior was explained by one shelf of books, now it's explained by a different shelf of books, and in a hundred years they'll explain it differently again.

My experience of a relationship is two people more or less compulsively playing musical chairs with each other's selected inner archetypes. My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel. I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother. I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter. I am your worshiper and you are my goddess. I am your god and you are my priestess. I am your client and you are my analyst. I am your intensity and you are my ground. These are some of the more garish of the patterns. Animus, anima, bopping on a seesaw.

There's a strangeness in these hills that tells you not to pray to Jesus, he's not lord of this ground; drive on down to Blythe if that how you pray, Jesus and McDonald's have franchises down there.

I was heading to L.A. Which is my way of saying nowhere.

Old tricky tequila, which tastes to me like a mix of tears and spit.

One reason you get groggy, long-distance driving, is that you don't move your face.

Tuned pianos are pretty much alike, but no pianos are out of tune the same.

It was the best juke in Austin, had everything, old and new, black, white and brown, urban and country — It's the Great American Novel of Jukeboxes.

Your body knows in all its parts, when 'used to' starts, when nothing will ever be the way it's been. Your body knows first. Takes your 'you' weeks to catch up.

Oxnard was the biggest city in Ventura County. Its unattractive name was that of a sugar beet farmer who built a processing plant in the settlement in the late nineteenth century. The city totally surrounded Port Hueneme, where there was a small U.S. Navy base.

Is this where they will be when they are no more among us? On this savannah in the sleep of men and women? Will children, in a thousands years, dream of the cheetah, of the elephant, as children now dream of dragons? Mammals began in the time of the dinosaurs. That's why the dragon is so strong an image to us: the first mammals, the first warm blooded creatures, the first capable of love as we know it, as we and the chimpanzee and the tiger know it, those first mammals' brains were seared so deeply by the image of the enormous dinosaurs that even millions of years of evolution later that image lived in the human dream as dragons - lived thus before archeologists began to unearth the fossils. So one day we will find the giraffe on the savannah of dream.

The most odious aspect of goody-goody, I'm-okay-you're-okay dialogues is their failure to recognize that sometimes you have to scream, slam doors, break furniture, run red lights, and ride the wind even to begin to have the words to describe what is eating you. Sometimes meditation and dialogue just can't cut it. Sometimes "it" just plain needs "cutting" —or at least a whole lotta shakin. Anyone afraid of breaking, within and without, is in the wrong marriage. Let it all go. Let the winds blow. Let's see what's left in the morning.

My experience of a relationship is two people more or less compulsively playing musical chairs with each other's selected inner archetypes. My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel. I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother. I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter. I am your worshiper and you are my goddess. I am your god and you are my priestess. I am your client and you are my analyst. I am your intensity and you are my ground. These are some of the more garish of the patterns. Animus, anima, bopping on a seesaw. These hold up well enough while the archetypal pairings behave. But when the little boy inside him is looking for the mommy inside her and finds instead on this particular night a sharp-toothed analyst dissecting his guts. When the little girl inside her is looking for the daddy inside him, and finds instead a pagan worshiper who wants a goddess to lay with, which induces her to become a little girl playacting a goddess to please the daddy who's really a lecherous worshiper... Or [like when] a woman is attracted to a macho-man who is secretly looking to be mothered.

My experience of a marriage is that all these same modes are present, but instinctively or consciously it becomes a case of two people running down each other's inner archetypes, tackling them, seducing them, cajoling them, waiting them out, making them talk, 'fessing up to them, running from them, raping them, falling in love with some, hating others, getting to know some, making friends with some, hanging some in the closet on each other's hooks— hooks on which hang fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, other loves, idols, fantasies, maybe even past lives, and true mythological consciousnesses that sometimes come to life within one with such force that we feel a thread that goes back thousands of years, even to other realms of being.

That’s it for today.

Physically, he’s changed again. The face more drawn, the skin more wan, and he’s gained weight in the oddest way. His face, arms, legs, and butt are skinny, but his stomach – his stomach has ballooned. He looks three months’ pregnant. His belly is huge and tight as a drum, as though his shirt has been buttoned with difficulty over a basketball. Cassavetes is a man of immense ego but little vanity. He either won’t or can’t get that stomach down, but he does nothing (like wear looser shirts) to hide it. He intends to play the belly as part of his Love Streams costume. The film’s Robert Harmon will be weighed down with Cassavetes’ belly, and on Robert Harmon it will be an emblem of the dead weight of his life. Cassavetes

months of this, he said, ‘Okay, enough.’ I said, ‘Enough what? What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I’ve heard enough.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you’ve heard enough?’ He said, ‘For six to seven months now, I’ve been hearing you tell me how much you love Gena, and – enough!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, what! Enough.’ He thought I was talking about GENA! Loving Gena, being in love with Gena, and missing Gena. He never once mentioned it to Gena. And he never once mentioned it to me, and accepted it totally – that if I was in love with Gena, all right, I was in love with Gena.

Be careful how you choose your enemy, for you will come to resemble him. The moment you adapt your enemy's methods your enemy has won.

Todos, cada uno de nosotros, estamos llenos de horror. Si te casas para espantar tu horror, sólo lograrás casar tu horror con el de otra persona; los dos horrores tendrá el matrimonio, tú sangrarás y llamarás a eso amor. Michael Ventura,

the way as the performances enhance and even change the original idea. This is not “improvisation,” this is like jazz: composition-in-the-moment.