l∅ckedinab∅x: Jokes my Father Never Told Me: a biography of Richard Pryor by his daughter

27 April 2007

Jokes my Father Never Told Me: a biography of Richard Pryor by his daughter

I seem to be waking up around 10 am these days, just in time to watch Quantum Leap on ITV2, to the sound of radio4 slowly fading in. I've noticed it quite alot recently, my eyes are open and I am seeing things before I can hear anything, resulting in a strange delay in the two senses, the overly english voices of the radio fading into my conciousness slowly and smoothly. It certainly is an interesting effect.

I listen to the radio alot when I'm drifting off, it gives me something other than the thoughts in my head to focus on. This is a good thing. Sometimes when all I have are my thoughts and memories they take on behomothic proportions, my brain kicks over into 6th gear, and before I realise it I'm spinning on a carosel of cognition I cannot for the life of me stop. Sometimes its good and I end up writing a poem, or making a note of something, but other times I end up scraping the bucket of my emotions and generally feeling like shit. Either way, it means sleep ain't coming soon.

When my hearing came around this morning a woman was intereviewing another woman concerning a book she had written about her father. The interview sounded interesting and as I lay there, with my faculties filtering back to the forefront of my mind, I tried to figure out who it was they were talking about. A gathered little tidbits of clues from their discussion. Black... 60s... Hendrix? Jewish heritiage... Hendrix was part cherokee, not part Jew, so he's out... How about Dylan? Dylan was white but maybe... maybe the mother of the child in question was black? The title was the big give away: The Jokes my father never told me... Jokes... black... Richard Pryor? Maybe. The interview finished and I was still none the wiser, but then all I had to do was remember the title and look it up on online.

Which is what I did. It was Richard Pryor, the woman being interviewed Rain Pryor, his daughter. I got alot of respect for Pryor's art: He gets labelled the funniest black commedian that ever lived, but that's a terrible condecending title to hold. Richard Pryor was one of the funniest commedians who ever lived FULL STOP-black, white, or aqua marine. He sure did lead a fucked up life though....

( review ) ( excerpt ) ( Richard Pryor Homepage ) ( mp3 of 'That Nigger's Crazy' over at Odeo ) ( Richard Pryor stuff on youtube )

[qu∅tes]

"one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight." Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

[on cinematography] "After you have done a picture you forget everything you have ever known, so that you become a child again, or an infant or a void into which the new picture creates a whole new evolvement... So that you do not have to keep doing the same thing all over again. In other words you take what yourself back to ground zero. Of course you cannot unlearn what your brain knowns. But I mean it emotionally. I mean you just become scared again, as if you do not know anything... I never felt on top of it. I neverfelt that I knew so much that I could sit back with a cup of coffee and it would all turn out wonderful." - Conrad Hall

[on cinematography] "When the budget is minimal you are forced to look at light as you find it, and to make it look good." - Haskell Wexler

"Rock 'n' roll is like an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Like anything can be rock 'n' roll." - Lester Bangs

"The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long-term consequences." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head

"In shamanic cultures, synchronicities are recognised as signs that you are on the right path." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head (excerpt), Book of Lies

"...reality is up for grabs, so learn the codes through which the narrative is crafted and participate in its unfolding." - Douglas Rushkoff

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. The American leaders were acting with almost inconceivable treachery by denying that they had received requests for peace…The bombs were exploded on congested cities filled with civilians. There was not even the slightest military justification, because the military outcome of the war had been decided months earlier." - Dave Dellinger

"We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on." - Tilda Swinton

"Pursue the small utopias: nature, music, friendship, intimate love." -The Fugs

"We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna: a thousand voices producing a daily parody of democracy, in which everyone's opinion is afforded equal weight regardless of substance or merit." - Ted Koppel

"There are alot of things you have to sacrfice. It all depends on how deep you want to get into whatever your gig is. Whatever you're there for. So like the deeper you get into it the more sacrifices you have to do, maybe even on your personality or your outward this and that. I just dedicate my life to this whole art. You have to forget about what people say. If it's art or anything else, whatever you really, really dig doing, you have to forget about what people say about you sometimes. Forget about this or that-when you're supposed to die or when you're supposed to be living. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven. Once you reach that point of where you don't give a damn about what everybody else is saying you're going towards heaven. The more you get into it, they're goin' to say "Damn, that cat's really flipped out. Oh, he's gone now". But if you're producin' and creatin', you know, you're getting closer to your own heaven. That's what man's tryin' to get to, anyway." - James Marshall Hendrix

"With its totalizing claim, the system created the conditions for this horrible retaliation. The immanent mania of globalization generates madness, just as an unstable society produces delinquents and psychopaths. In truth, these are only symptoms of the sickness." - Jean Baudrillard

"If poetry is what you can't translate, as Robert Frost once suggested, then art is what you cannot define. Nevertheless, it's fun to try." - james monaco, 'how to read a film'

"This spectacle of banality is todays true pornography..." - Jean Baudrillard

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms." - Philip K. Dick

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose ideas, shining in his head, frighted people and for whom delirium is the only solution to the strangulation that life has prepared for him." - Antonin Artaud

"The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out from the heart." - Charles Bukowski

"Tea heads are a sociable lot. Too sociable for my liking." - William S. Burroughs

l∅ckedinab∅x

27 April 2007

Jokes my Father Never Told Me: a biography of Richard Pryor by his daughter

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