Spaghetti Western Quotes

I like some of the old spaghetti westerns because the Navajo extras they hired spent the entire time talking smack about the actors in the Diné language. With proper translation, it’s incredibly entertaining.

It would be hard to find a more evil villain than Carl Mørck in a spaghetti Western.

We’re not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours and we’re going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog.

Yōshoku is the Japanese take on Western foods; much of it was created during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when, after centuries of isolation, Japan began importing goods and ideas from the outside world, including food. Yōshoku dishes such as hambaagu (salisbury steak in brown sauce), curry rice, potato croquettes, and "spaghetti naporitan" are now much-loved comfort food. They're also so unlike the dishes that inspired them that they tend to be really hard for Westerners to appreciate.

Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas. Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor. Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt. Withfinocchioin fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot. In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.

We still talk a lot about ‘authentic’ cultures, but if by ‘authentic’ we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences. One of the most interesting examples of this globalisation is ‘ethnic’ cuisine. In an Italian restaurant we expect to find spaghetti in tomato sauce; in Polish and Irish restaurants lots of potatoes; in an Argentinian restaurant we can choose between dozens of kinds of beefsteaks; in an Indian restaurant hot chillies are incorporated into just about everything; and the highlight at any Swiss café is thick hot chocolate under an alp of whipped cream. But none of these foods is native to those nations. Tomatoes, chilli peppers and cocoa are all Mexican in origin; they reached Europe and Asia only after the Spaniards conquered Mexico. Julius Caesar and Dante Alighieri never twirled tomato-drenched spaghetti on their forks (even forks hadn’t been invented yet), William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli. Potatoes reached Poland and Ireland no more than 400 years ago. The only steak you could obtain in Argentina in 1492 was from a llama. Hollywood films have perpetuated an image of the Plains Indians as brave horsemen, courageously charging the wagons of European pioneers to protect the customs of their ancestors. However, these Native American horsemen were not the defenders of some ancient, authentic culture. Instead, they were the product of a major military and political revolution that swept the plains of western North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a consequence of the arrival of European horses. In 1492 there were no horses in America. The culture of the nineteenth-century Sioux and Apache has many appealing features, but it was a modern culture – a result of global forces – much more than ‘authentic’.

Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas. Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor. Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt. With finocchio in fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot. In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.

A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly from that of a lobster winner. This is reflected in their relative postures. Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter. A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. When a lobster that has just lost a battle is exposed to serotonin, it will stretch itself out, advance even on former victors, and fight longer and harder.9 The drugs prescribed to depressed human beings, which are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have much the same chemical and behavioural effect. In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.10 High serotonin/low octopamine characterizes the victor. The opposite neurochemical configuration, a high ratio of octopamine to serotonin, produces a defeated-looking, scrunched-up, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely to hang around street corners, and to vanish at the first hint of trouble. Serotonin and octopamine also regulate the tail-flick reflex, which serves to propel a lobster rapidly backwards when it needs to escape. Less provocation is necessary to trigger that reflex in a defeated lobster. You can see an echo of that in the heightened startle reflex characteristic of the soldier or battered child with post-traumatic stress disorder.

While this signifier can be difficult to pin down with precision, it can clearly be heard in the records of Duane Eddy and many other guitarists of the period. It usually involves a relatively nondistorted electric guitar timbre articulated with a strong attack and a melody played on the lower strings. Reverberation is ubiquitous, and almost equally common were echo, amplifier tremolo, and use of the guitar’s vibrato bar. This overall guitar sound is often called a Fender sound, but that is a bit misleading, since Gretsch guitars were equally specialized for the purpose, and many other brands were also used. What makes the twang guitar interesting in topical terms is that it not only signified the western topic but also was key to a linked set of genres that intersect one another in complex ways: western, spy, and surf. Because these were all signified by overlapping musical features and in turn resemble one another in some of their broader connotations, we could speak of a twang guitar continuum: a range of topics that coalesced only shortly before psychedelia and were cognate with it in a variety of ways. Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida point out that the twang guitar, often in a minor mode with a flat seventh, was a common factor between spaghetti western and Bond/spy scores in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I would add surf guitar to the list, with its sonic experimentation and general relationship to fun, escape, and exoticism: “[The twang guitar] probably owes some of its immediate success as a spy sound to its similarity with various pre-rock ‘Viennese intrigue’ sounds like Anton Karas’s Third Man zither licks (1949). But in the 1962–64 period that produced The Virginian (1962), Dr. No (1963) and Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), steely Fender guitar was well on its way to becoming an all-purpose excitement/adventure timbre” (Tagg and Clarida 2003, 367).

spaghetti westerns

Now I was lying in my white stall, chained and smiling nearly hysterical. For what would my own life have become had I not been lactose intolerant? I sweated and trembled with relief at my luck. For, after starving us all for the first three days of the kidnap, some very tall and rank-smelling long-haired cunt in an apron had walked in nonchalant-like and asked us all in splendid pseudo-Sard if we ‘required spaghetti?’ As all of us were Westerners unused to three days of enforcèd fasting, we leapt at the chance and all but me accepted the lanky twat’s offer of ‘Pecorina’. A good cheese, explained Mick from his Sardu vantage point, and Brent and Dean concurred. Not me, sorry, says I. I’m lactose intolerant. How’s your tomato sauce? Only then did we discover how royally that long-haired cunt had set us up. The Sardu cheese ends in an ‘o’ – Pecorino. End it in an ‘a’ – Pecorina – and those three had all just agreed to anal sex. Thereafter, Mick, Brent and Dean got bummed every third day in the white stalls. Bummed and never fed.

Well, most places leave a mint on your pillow, but I think I like the way they do things out West a whole lot better.

This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western.

When deciding whether we prefer French or Italian films, for example, we must first determine exactly what the terms French and Italian films mean. The precise way that we interpret these two categories will not only decide our own preference, but will exert a parallel influence on our estimates of the preferences of others. If we think of The Bicycle Thief and La Strada when we think of Italian films, for instance, we may be more likely to prefer Italian films ourselves and to estimate that a larger percentage of the general population would have the same preference than if we construe Italian films to mean spaghetti Westerns. Note that this interpretation of the false consensus effect rests on two assumptions: a) different people construe the same choices quite differently, and b) people generally fail to recognize this fact and thus fail to make adequate allowance for it when making consensus estimates. It seems that the process of interpretation is so reflexive and immediate that we often overlook it. This, combined with the widespread assumption that there is but one objective reality, is what may lead people to overlook the possibility that others may be responding to a very different situation.