People From San Francisco

"I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America."

"On the other hand I tell my true intimates that what I write is not intended for them. In fact I'd prefer they never read it. When I write, I'm talking to somebody I intend to never meet."

"Rodriguez:I get letters especially from older readers who are working class, and who know what that is like. That's why I take it that the energies of the book are mainly class and not ethnic."

"Maybe knowledge doesn't accrue, maybe it doesn't happen sequentially. Maybe I need to go back and read Hunger of Memory again. Maybe there's a wisdom that I had in those years that I need to learn from now. And maybe there will be a year when I will have the courage to read that book. When I think about it or when I hear other people talk about it, it strikes me as very naked prose, and I'm embarrassed by it. I'm embarrassed by how much I told you. And people say, "Well you didn't tell us you were gay." Or "You didn't tell us you had all these friends or that you were student body president. You never said that." I think to myself, "My God, but what I told you I've never told anybody. And I'll never tell anybody again.""

"Rodriguez: When my mother read Hunger of Memory, she was horrified by it and she asked me, as an accusation, "Why did you hold these things in all of your years against me, why didn't you tell me? If I offended you by talking about how dark you were in the summer why didn't you tell me that? And tell me to stop? Why do you hold that for another 25 years and then spill it all out?" Good question, Mama. Good question."

"But it's a very interesting part of my life. It really is a much more sexual book than I have ever tried before. It's also about Hollywood. What I did in those years was I saw the world. And I literally traveled all over the world because I was kept, and I knew five star hotels. I know where to stay in Geneva, and I know where to stay in Bangkok, and I know that because I sat at swimming pools and read the fashion magazines for hours in Geneva. I know what to do in Buenos Aires, what restaurants to go to, where the pretty people go for lunch."

"I would meet screenwriters in L.A. who would write these very complicated sitcoms like Cheers and who'd have the most extraordinary sense of plot of anybody I've ever met. I saw the insides of lots of great houses. And I met people who you and I would regard as famous, and then realized some very interesting things about them, like how lonely they are. It was those years I was least a minority. In a sense, I owned the world. I owned it because I had certain charms that allowed me to insinuate myself into the world. Intellectually, it was very satisfying to be at the edge of this world. But when it became clear to me that I wanted to write this book, I had to divorce myself from that world and move to San Francisco."

"It's the technology. There is this thing between you and the viewer. The viewer is watching this magnifying glass, and technology exaggerates you. You are left with the sense of how small you are, not with the sense of how big you are—if you're smart. If you're dumb you begin to believe that you are the image—that you cannot be replaced. But you can be replaced in a minute. For every Madonna there's another. For every Dan Rather there's another."

"I take great pride in my literary works. Journalism is much faster. I'm not embarrassed by my journalism. I consider it to be like sketches, like an artist's sketch. I use it later in other writing. But I don't pretend that it has high literary merit either. I can do an essay pretty fast. I do them on airplanes, I do them at hotels, I do them at bus stops sometimes. I've written very good things on the go."

"A friend of mine in Brooklyn was talking about ethnic writers, and he was using Amy Tan as an example. And he said, "You know, the really interesting thing about ethnic writers in America right now is that the women sit down and tell these sets of interesting stories. Asian girl meets blonde boy and they go to Harvard together—they're dopey stories, but everybody loves them, and they're best sellers. That's what the women write, whereas the guys struggle and try to find these new literary forms—writing these intricate parables that nobody quite follows and so forth." **And he said, "Isn't it interesting that women have always had this kind of genius for telling stories in the kitchen."**"

"In some way the Chicano movement strikes me as being revolutionary, but only in a pathetic way, because the genius of Mexico has always been assimilation. I tell Mexican American kids all the time—if I get a chance to talk to them without their teachers—that they come from a culture that violates borders. Kids are coming up every night across the border in violation of Protestant lines. These kids represent a force of anarchy in the world. We are not people of pure race. We are people of mixed race. We have violated those borders already. We are people whose identity assumes the continuousness of experience rather than the segregation of experience. I tell them to be proud of that experience. Don't say to the United States, "I want a separate math class in Spanish." That's not going to scare them. Instead, terrify America by saying, "I'm going to marry your daughter." Or see what happens to the Chicano movement when you announce to the blonde people next door, "I'm going to start dating your son," or "You're going to be my best friend," that "We're neighbors.""

"The Chicano student movement at UC Santa Barbara didn't want me there. These are the same people that sit on a multicultural committee. But they don't want me there because for them I represent a cultural perspective that they do not accept. Their version of multiculturalism is that it all be left wing, that it all be formed by a quasi-Marxist voodooism. And if anybody comes into their world that is any different from that, they can't deal with it. Because they are not multiculturalist at all. They're the most sectarian people I know."

"I did a piece about four years ago about coming out. Telling my parents that I'm gay. It occurred to me that my parents have known for years that I'm gay. I'm sure of it. They have never told me; they have never needed to tell me. In some ways I will never be gay to them. And they would prefer that I never use that word with them. They know the man that I have been closest to. They also know that he's godfather to two of my nephews. They invite him to Christmas dinner. They know he's part of my life. When he had the flu this Christmas they knew I had to leave early, and no one protested. Will he ever be introduced as my lover? No"

"Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one’s family language."

"Courses were offered in such fields as nineteenth-century black history and Hispanic-American folk art. The activists made a peculiar claim for these classes. They insisted that the courses would alleviate the cultural anxiety of nonwhite students by permitting them to stay in touch with their home culture. The perspective gained in the classroom or the library does indeed permit an academic to draw nearer to and understand better the culture of the alien poor. But the academic is brought closer to lower-class culture because of his very distance from it. Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly."

"my name came up in a conversation. Someone at the sherry party had wondered if the professor had seen my latest article on affirmative action. The professor replied with arch politeness, ‘And what does Mr. Rodriguez have to complain about?’ You who read this act of contrition should know that by writing it I seek a kind of forgiveness—not yours. The forgiveness, rather, of those many persons whose absence from higher education permitted me to be classed a minority student. I wish that they would read this. I doubt they ever will."

"The policy of affirmative action, however, was never able to distinguish someone like me (a graduate student of English, ambitious for a college teaching career) from a slightly educated Mexican-American who lived in a barrio and worked as a menial laborer, never expecting a future improved. Worse, affirmative action made me the beneficiary of his conditions."

"But the bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation. They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality. Supporters of bilingual education thus want it both ways. They propose bilingual schooling as a way of helping students acquire the skills of the classroom crucial for public success. But they likewise insist that bilingual instruction will give students a sense of their identity apart from the public. Behind this screen there gleams an astonishing promise: One can become a public person while still remaining a private person. At the very same time one can be both! There need be no tension between the self in the crowd and the self apart from the crowd! Who would not want to believe such an idea?"

"All this work I'm doing, it don't mean shit."

"People thought I was a charlatan and a nut, [he remembered]. The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive."

"When I first started out, I was considered a crackpot, [he said]. The doctors used to say, 'Don't go to that Jack LaLanne, you'll get hemorrhoids, you won't get an erection, you women will look like men, you athletes will get muscle-bound — this is what I had to go through."

"I was a whole new human being, he said of this transformation. I liked people, they liked me. It was like an exorcism, kicking the devil outta me!"

"If men are from Mars and women from Venus, what planet did Jack come from? Jack insists he is from planet earth."

"At age 70 the guy towed 70 boats carrying 70 people across the Long Beach harbor, with both arms and feet shackled."

"Jack from whom the term “Jumping jack” and description of a muscular person as “jacked” are both derived, is well known for his birthday feats."

"He also encouraged the disabled and elderly to exercise for health, a bizarre concept at the time."

"I was the worst, most sickly kid of all – 30 pounds underweight. The girls used to beat me up. Actually I was a mean kid, early on because I had no self-esteem."

"He was the first to have women work out with weights - a radical idea."

"At 21 years of age Jack developed the first models of exercise equipment, and these are standards in gyms today."

"At 21 years of age he opened North America’s first modern gym."

"But Bragg offered salvation to LaLanne: He could be "born again" and be the healthful and strong person he wanted to be — if he changed his ways."

"When he was 15, his distressed mother dragged him to a lecture on healthful living being given by nutritionist Paul Bragg."

"I hate to work out. [...] I’d rather take a beating. To leave a hot bed and a hot woman to go into a cold gym at five in the morning—that takes discipline. But I like the results. Results, results, results."

"Anything in life is possible and YOU make it happen!"

"I can’t die, [he most famously liked to say]. It would ruin my image."

"It would wreck my image."

"It tasted terrible, so I mixed it with prune juice and fruits. Nobody thought about it until then. We made the guy a millionaire."

"Mr. LaLanne said he performed his exercises until he experienced “muscle fatigue,” lifting weights until it was impossible for him to continue. It produced results and, as he put it, “the ego in me” made the effort worthwhile."

"Jesus, when he was on Earth, he was out there helping people, right? Why did he perform those miracles? To call attention to his profession. Why do you think I do these incredible feats? To call attention to my profession!"

"I care more than — you cannot believe how much I care! I want to help somebody!"

"The crusade is never off my mind — the exercise I do, the food I eat, the thought I think — all this and how I can help make my profession better-respected. To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America."

"Well it is. It is a religion with me. It's a way of life. A religion is a way of life, isn't it?"

"God gives us the power to act for ourselves, but let me tell you something. At five in the morning I have never heard this [he says mimicking a knock on the door]. Hello Jack, this is Jesus. I will work out today."

"There is no fountain for youth. What you put in your body is what you get out of it. You would not feed your dog a coffee and doughnut for breakfast followed by a cigarette you will kill the damn dog."

"That's what I wanted! I wanted to be an athlete, I wanted the girls to like me, and I wanted to be able to get good grades in school, and this man said I could do all that."

"My show was so personal, I made it feel like you and I were the only ones there. And I’d say: Boys and girls, come here. Uncle Jack wants to tell you something. You go get Mother or Daddy, Grandmother, Grandfather, whoever is in the house. You go get them, and you make sure they exercise with me."

"Cliff was a very smart guy, a reader, very eloquent. I just don't understand why he went, and not one of us."

"Basically I just had to say, "Screw everyone around me - from now on I'm just gonna play what I think is important to me and our music." So I gave the big finger to all the current trends in technical wizardry, and just went off and did what I felt was best for the songs."

"I think heavy metal is therapeutic - it's music that blows the tension away. I think that's why people who have had really bad childhoods are attracted to heavy metal. It allows people to release aggression and tension in a nonviolent way. Also, heavy metal seems to attract all sorts of scruffy, lost animals, strays no one wants."

"Although I’m a lead guitarist, I’d say that a good 95 percent of my time onstage is spent playing rhythm. Consequently, it doesn’t matter how great your lead playing is—if your rhythm work sucks, you’re not gonna go very far. When you’re playing rhythm in a band like Metallica, what your right [picking] hand does is really important. Obviously, what your left hand is doing is pretty darned crucial too, but, as a lot of our riffs involve syncopated open-string notes and relatively simple-to-finger power chords, it’s often the right-hand picking and muting techniques that can make or break a song."