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A review by roam_roam
Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
“I'm the only one besides my man who knows how he felt—cheap, low, still in love with a woman yet hating her for giving in to his cautious turning out. So ashamed he couldn't even look at her as he folded the money in his shirt pocket as Timmy i tongue had taught him to do. Was this the way a pimp felt, turning out his first girl and finding out he loved her? It couldn't be. Pimps are usually pretty calm people, cool but lively, full of laughs and jokes and some are even intellectuals. Surely they could never time she had feel like this. To be pimp, one would have to lose all feelings, all sensitivity, all love. One would have to die! Kill himself! Kill all feeling for others in order to live with himself. Not to think. To keep going because you're already going. Mingus couldn't be this... a pimp.” -p.154
“‘Every generation keeps discovering something left over on the top shelf and thinks they come up with something new!’” -p.169
“‘New York's cold, like a dying animal with nowhere to go but Central Park where the outdoors helps it remember New York isn't the only place in the world. The animal drinks that green into his soul, then goes back to the streets again and the tombstones with пеоn epitaphs flashing his life before him, as cold as the stone around him. He's aware he's no longer dying, he's long been dead. New York's his graveyard. He's a walking shadow of a man, lonely and tall as those windowpaned tombstones that haunt him into leaving his bed on Harlem's skid row, the lure that leads him downtown to see if it too has fallen with his dreams, the impulse impossible to resist, to look up and see if it is all still there, higher than any mountain with its sudden daring sweep into the sky. How else should a city with the standards of hell be built? With grass and trees, on the ground, where heaven can be seen by a small child just learning to walk or by a man six feet tall? No, New York is an ideal built high into the sky by those who own and run it, so they can look down and not see its filth and look out and see only space between the skyscrapers at eye's level with heaven. If a man can accept that city for the hell it is and still go on about his duties, it's truly God he's found.’” -p.173
“‘The real dangerous people are those who never came up from the streets 'cause they're basically cowards, they pay for everything—from good clean fucking to dirty killing. I'm sure killing themselves would be more preferable to them than braving the morn of that awakening day when they have to go to work and fight their own wars, cook their own food or fuck their own horrible women. Right now they buy all that from you and me.'” -p.196
“‘Every generation keeps discovering something left over on the top shelf and thinks they come up with something new!’” -p.169
“‘New York's cold, like a dying animal with nowhere to go but Central Park where the outdoors helps it remember New York isn't the only place in the world. The animal drinks that green into his soul, then goes back to the streets again and the tombstones with пеоn epitaphs flashing his life before him, as cold as the stone around him. He's aware he's no longer dying, he's long been dead. New York's his graveyard. He's a walking shadow of a man, lonely and tall as those windowpaned tombstones that haunt him into leaving his bed on Harlem's skid row, the lure that leads him downtown to see if it too has fallen with his dreams, the impulse impossible to resist, to look up and see if it is all still there, higher than any mountain with its sudden daring sweep into the sky. How else should a city with the standards of hell be built? With grass and trees, on the ground, where heaven can be seen by a small child just learning to walk or by a man six feet tall? No, New York is an ideal built high into the sky by those who own and run it, so they can look down and not see its filth and look out and see only space between the skyscrapers at eye's level with heaven. If a man can accept that city for the hell it is and still go on about his duties, it's truly God he's found.’” -p.173
“‘The real dangerous people are those who never came up from the streets 'cause they're basically cowards, they pay for everything—from good clean fucking to dirty killing. I'm sure killing themselves would be more preferable to them than braving the morn of that awakening day when they have to go to work and fight their own wars, cook their own food or fuck their own horrible women. Right now they buy all that from you and me.'” -p.196