The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.

(Another view of Elvis, from Billboard magazine in 1958, stated, “In one aspect of America’s cultural life, integration has already taken place.”)

I once read that we crave, contradictorily, both security and adventure, comfort and challenge.

That their desert camouflage only made them stand out and that the threats to the bridge were sketchy and remote, while the men with semiautomatic weapons were evident and unnerving, articulates something about war as a state of being.

The new American cities trade in information, entertainment, tourism, software, finance. They are abstract.

And in a way, they are honorable monuments to the idea that wars would involve direct confrontation and that the United States would face the dangers it imposed on other nations.

What will become of all those photographs? I took them too; it is a reflexive response to something exciting to look at, and sometimes to something not so exciting to look at but full of potential to mutate into a photograph worth looking at. There are problems with this, and pleasures too.

To go to or stay in California had always meant to choose to be outside the mainstream, the orthodoxy, to choose other influences and a less Eurocentric point of view. This could mean cults, but it more often meant a little useful distance, literally and otherwise, from the status quo at the center of cultural power.

The far edge of the world, at the back of the North Wind, east of the sun and west of the moon, as far as far, at the back of beyond, out of reach, out of touch, out of the ordinary, beyond the Arctic Circle, beyond so many things. Far.

Revolution is a phase, a mood—like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.