Begin Again (film) Quotes

A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.

And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I'm sucked back between my mother's legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There's a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he's in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we're out of America completely; we're in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on a deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we're up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning...

A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The first bad penny dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode. 'I would love you to do something for me,' I said. 'Anything! Anything!' the boy said rapturously. 'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said. 'Anything, sir, anything!' 'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?' He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.

GONE TO STATIC it sounds better than it is, this business of surviving, making it through the wrong place at the wrong time and living to tell. when the talk shows and movie credits wear off, it's just me and my dumb luck. this morning I had that dream again: the one where I'm dead. I wake up and nothing's much different. everything's gone sepia, a dirty bourbon glass by the bed, you're still dead. I could stumble to the shower, scrub the luck of breath off my skin but it's futile. the killer always wins. it's just a matter of time. and I have time. I have grief and liquor to fill it. tonight, the liquor and I are talking to you. the liquor says, 'remember' and I fill in the rest, your hands, your smile. all those times. remember. tonight the liquor and I are telling you about our day. we made it out of bed. we miss you. we were surprised by the blood between our legs. we miss you. we made it to the video store, missing you. we stopped at the liquor store hoping the bourbon would stop the missing. there's always more bourbon, more missing tonight, when we got home, there was a stray cat at the door. she came in. she screams to be touched. she screams when I touch her. she's right at home. not me. the whisky is open the vcr is on. I'm running the film backwards and one by one you come back to me, all of you. your pulses stutter to a begin your eyes go from fixed to blink the knives come out of your chests, the chainsaws roar out from your legs your wounds seal over your t-cells multiply, your tumors shrink the maniac killer disappears it's just you and me and the bourbon and the movie flickering together and the air breathes us and I am home, I am lucky I am right before everything goes black

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.” The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

When you’re putting a scene together, the three key things you are deciding over and over again are: What shot shall I use? Where shall I begin it? Where shall I end it? An average film may have a thousand edits in it, so: three thousand decisions. But if you can answer those questions in the most interesting, complex, musical, dramatic way, then the film will be as alive as it can be.

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.” The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

I smile at my friends, but Mer and Rashmi and Josh are distracted, arguing about something that happened over dinner. St. Clair sees me and smiles back. "Good?" I nod.He looks pleased and ducks into the row after me. I always sit four rows up from the center, and we have perfectseats tonight.The chairs are classic red. The movie begins,and the title screen flashes up. "Ugh,we have to sit through the credits?" Rashmi asks. They roll first,like in all old films. I read them happily. I love credits. I love everything about movies. The theater is dark except for the flicker of blacks and whites and grays on-screen. Clark Gable pretends to sleep and places his hand in the center of an empty bus seat. After a moment of irritation,Claudette Colbert gingerly plucks it aside and sits down. Gable smiles to himself,and St. Clair laughs. It's odd,but I keep finding myself distracted. By the white of his teeth through the darkness.By a wavy bit of his hair that sticks straight out to the side. By the soft aroma of his laundry detergent. He nudges me to silently offer the armrest,but I decline and he takes it.His arm is close to mine,slightly elevated. I glance at his hands.Mine are tiny compared to his large,knuckly boy hands. And,suddenly,I want to touch him. Not a push,or a shove,or even a friendly hug. I want to feel the creases in his skin,connect his freckles with invisible lines,brush my fingers across the inside of his wrist. He shifts. I have the strangest feeling that he's as aware of me as I am of him. I can't concentrate. The characters on the screen are squabbling, but for the life of me, I don't know what about. How long have I not been paying attention? St. Clair coughs and shifts again. His leg brushes against mine.It stays there. I'm paralyzed. I should move it; it feels too unnatural.How can he not notice his leg is touching my leg? From the corner of my eye,I see the profile of his chin and nose,and-oh,dear God-the curve of his lips. There.He glanced at me. I know he did. I bore my eyes into the screen, trying my best to prove that I am Really Interested in this movie.St. Clair stiffens but doesn't move his leg.Is he holding his breath? I think he is.I'm holding mine. I exhale and cringe-it's so loud and unnatural. Again.Another glance. This time I turn, automatically,just as he's turning away. It's a dance,and now there's a feeling in the air like one of us should say something.Focus,Anna. Focus. "Do you like it?" I whisper. He pauses. "The film?" I'm thankful the shadows hide my blush. "I like it very much," he says. I risk a glance,and St. Clair stares back. Deeply.He has not looked at me like this before.I turn away first, then feel him turn a few beats later. I know he is smiling,and my heart races.

When you’re putting a scene together, the three key things you are deciding over and over again are: What shot shall I use? Where shall I begin it? Where shall I end it? An average film may have a thousand edits in it, so: three thousand decisions. But if you can answer those questions in the most interesting, complex, musical, dramatic way, then the film will be as alive as it can be.

And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved. Exactly a year from now, I vowed, I would sit outside at night wherever I was, somewhere in Europe, or in America, and turn my face to Egypt, as Moslems do when they pray and face Mecca, and remember this very night, and how I had thought these things and made this vow. You're beginning to sound like Elsa and her silly seders, I said to myself, mimicking my father's humour. On my way home I thought of what the others were doing. I wanted to walk in, find the smaller living room still lit, the Beethoven still playing, with Abdou still cleaning the dining room, and, on closing the front door, suddenly hear someone say, "We were just waiting for you, we're thinking of going to the Royal." "But we've already seen that film," I would say. "What difference does it make. We'll see it again." And before we had time to argue, we would all rush downstairs, where my father would be waiting in a car that was no longer really ours, and, feeling the slight chill of a late April night, would huddle together with the windows shut, bicker as usual about who got to sit where, rub our hands, turn the radio to a French broadcast, and then speed to the Corniche, thinking that all this was as it always was, that nothing ever really changed, that the people enjoying their first stroll on the Corniche after fasting, or the woman selling tickets at the Royal, or the man who would watch our car in the side alley outside the theatre, or our neighbours across the hall, or the drizzle that was sure to greet us after the movie at midnight would never, ever know, nor even guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.

My Mother They are killing her again. She said she did it One year in every ten, But they do it annually, or weekly, Some even do it daily, Carrying her death around in their heads And practicing it. She saves them The trouble of their own; They can die through her Without ever making The decision. My buried mother Is up-dug for repeat performances. Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children. Then It can be rewound So they can watch her die Right from the beginning again. The peanut eaters, entertained At my mother’s death, will go home, Each carrying their memory of her, Lifeless – a souvenir. Maybe they’ll buy the video. Watching someone on TV Means all they have to do Is press ‘pause’ If they want to boil a kettle, While my mother holds her breath on screen To finish dying after tea. The filmmakers have collected The body parts, They want me to see. They require dressings to cover the joins And disguise the prosthetics In their remake of my mother; They want to use her poetry As stitching and sutures To give it credibility. They think I should love it – Having her back again, they think I should give them my mother’s words To fill the mouth of their monster, Their Sylvia Suicide Doll, Who will walk and talk And die at will, And die, and die And forever be dying.

Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment. Now, movies that postdate Hitch: The Vanishing, with its sucker-punch finale. Frantic, Polanski’s ode to the master. Side Effects, which begins as a Big Pharma screed before slithering like an eel into another genre altogether. Okay. Popular film misquotes. “Play it again, Sam”: Casablanca, allegedly, except neither Bogie nor Bergman ever said it. “He’s alive”: Frankenstein doesn’t gender his monster; cruelly, it’s just “It’s alive.” “Elementary, my dear Watson” does crop up in the first Holmes film of the talkie era, but appears nowhere in the Conan Doyle canon.

I see my existence as similar to that of a sundial's when I simply stand, and slowly the notion of movement is suggesting itself to my consciousness and action is also appropriate in the realm of the saint, the character who begins her life in the windows of a church, in the religious air of her own imagination until history lines up with her nature, and the path becomes clear -- the storms of identity erupt and implode and gather again and one of life's soldiers realizes her whole basis for living has changed and now she is impelled forward in a new film.

-So, OK, that's part of it, he said: but for me, the more significant thing is that, every time, the Coyote just comes back: the world somehow allows him another chance; he's always given another shot, as if he had not just killed himself; that's what matters in these films;...You see the puff of dust, but he just comes back with another, identical story, and then it all begins again; and that's why I find these films literally miraculous: they're miracle plays, pathologically repeated, in which all the vio­lence and destruction have very little to do with the central premise- this miraculous capacity for coming back;

Nevertheless, he was caught in its magic and he understood, what he had not known before, that much of the magic of a great theatrical moment is created by the audience itself, a magic impalpable but vividly present, and that what begins as trickery of lights and paint is enlarged and made fine by the response of the beholders. There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.

And so now, having been born, I’m going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I’m sucked back between my mother’s legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There’s a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he’s in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we’re out of America completely; we’re in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we’re up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning . . .

somewhere there is a women in China holding a black umbrella so she won’t taste the salt of the rain when the sky begins to weep, there is a 17 year old girl who smells like pomegranates and has summer air tight on her naked skin, wrapping around her scars like veins in a bloody garden, who won’t make it past tomorrow, there is a young man, who buys yellow flowers for the woman in apartment 84B, who learned braille when he realized she couldn’t read his poetry about her white neck and mint eyes there are people watching films, making love for the first time, opening mail with the heading of ‘i miss you’, cooking noodles with organic spices and red sauces, buying lemon detergent, ignoring ‘do not smoke’ signs, painting murals of his lips in abandoned warehouses, chewing the words ‘i love you’ over and over again, swallowing phone numbers and forgotten birthdays, eating strawberry pies, drinking white wine off of each others open mouths, ignoring the telephone, reading this poem somewhere someone is thinking i’m alone somewhere someone finally understands they never really were

In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave, Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall, Carpenters hammered under the shaded window, Wind troubled the window curtains all night long, A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding, Their freights covered, as usual. The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram Slid slowly forth. Hearing the milkman’s chop, His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink, I rose from bed, lit a cigarette, And walked to the window. The stony street Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand, The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience. The winter sky’s pure capital Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes. Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls, Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer. A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair From underseas, kindled the looking-glass, Distinguished the dresser and the white wall. The bird called tentatively, whistled, called, Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so, O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail Of early morning, the mystery of beginning Again and again, while History is unforgiven.

There were years when I went to the movies almost every day, sometimes even twice a day, and they were the years between 1936 and the war, around the time of my adolescence. Those were years in which cinema was my world. It’s been said many times before that cinema is a form of escape, it’s a stock phrase intended to be a condemnation, and cinema certainly served that purpose for me back then. It satisfied a need for disorientation, for shifting my attention to another place, and I believe it’s a need that corresponds to a primary function of integration in the world, an essential phase in any kind of development. Of course there are other more substantial and personal ways of creating a different space for yourself: cinema was the easiest method and it was within reach, but it was also the one that instantly carried me farthest away. I went to the cinema in the afternoon, secretly fleeing from home, or using study with a classmate as an excuse, because my parents left me very little freedom during the months when school was in session. The urge to hide inside the cinema as soon as it opened at two in the afternoon was the proof of true passion. Attending the first screening had a number of advantages: the half-empty theater, it was like I had it all to myself, would allow me to stretch out in the middle of the third row with my legs on the back of the seat in front of me; the hope of returning home without anyone finding out about my escape, in order to receive permission to go out once again later on (and maybe see another film); a light daze for the rest of the afternoon, detrimental to studying but advantageous for daydreaming. And in addition to these explanations that were unmentionable for various reasons, there was another more serious one: entering right when it opened guaranteed the rare privilege of seeing the movie from the beginning and not from a random moment toward the middle or the end, because that was what usually happened when I got to the cinema later in the afternoon or toward the evening.

She did not answer. Or, rather, she answered by sliding long fingers across Kassad’s chest, ripping away the leather thongs which bound the rough vest. Her hands found his shirt. It was soaked with blood and ripped halfway down the front. The woman ripped it open the rest of the way. She moved against him now, her fingers and lips on his chest, hips already beginning to move. Her right hand found the cords to his trouser front, ripped them free. Kassad helped her pull off the rest of his clothes, removed hers with three fluid movements. She wore nothing under her shirt and coarse-cloth trousers. Kassad’s hand slid between her thighs, behind her, cupped her moving buttocks, pulled her closer, and slid to the moist roughness in front. She opened to him, her mouth closing on his. Somehow, with all of their motion and disrobing, their skin never lost contact. Kassad felt his own excitement rubbing against the cusp of her belly. She rolled above him then, her thighs astride his hips, her gaze still locked with his. Kassad had never been so excited. He gasped as her right hand went behind her, found him, guided him into her. When he opened his eyes again she was moving slowly, her head back, eyes closed. Kassad’s hands moved up her sides to cup her perfect breasts. Nipples hardened against his palms. They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would never experience anything that could not be so described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never adequately share the sense of the next few minutes with anyone else. He would never try. They made love in a sudden shaft of late October light with a carpet of leaves and clothes beneath them and a film of blood and sweat oiling the sweet friction between them. Her green eyes stared down at Kassad, widening slightly when he began moving quickly, closing at the same second he closed his. They moved together then in the sudden tide of sensation as old and inevitable as the movement of worlds: pulses racing, flesh quickening with its own moist purposes, a further, final rising together, the world receding to nothing at all—and then, still joined by touch and heartbeat and the fading thrill of passion, allowing consciousness to slide back to separate flesh while the world flowed in through forgotten senses. They lay next to each other.

Crocodiles have been on the planet for some sixty-five million years, looking just about like this one. They’ve evolved to be the most complex apex predator in their environment. They have a life expectancy similar to ours, and their physiology is surprisingly similar to ours as well: the same basic type of four-chambered heart, and a cerebral cortex. I marveled at the sixty-four long, very sharp, peg-like teeth. Here was an animal able to capture and kill animals much larger than itself. How ironic, I thought, that this-top-of-the-food-chain animal needs our help. As we motored up the river, I restrained the croc on the floor of the boat. I could feel Steve’s reverence for her. He didn’t just like crocodiles. He loved them. We finally came to a good release location. We got the crocodile out onto a sandbar and slipped the ropes and blindfolds and trappings off her. She scuttled back into the water. “She’ll be afraid of boats from now on,” Steve said. “She’ll never get caught again. She’ll have a good, healthy fear of humans, too. It’ll help keep her alive.” Forever afterward, Steve and I referred to the Cattle Creek rescue as our honeymoon trip. It also marked the beginning of Steve’s filming career. He was gifted with the ability to hunt down wildlife. But he hunted animals to save them, not kill them. That’s how the Crocodile Hunter was born.

In the end, Penny and Leonard decided to put the incident behind them and go through with their Vegas nuptials, but there’s one major reason Cuoco says she’ll never forget the episode: her wig. By that point, Cuoco’s pixie cut had started to grow out, but in four months’ time when season nine would begin filming, she knew it would be a lot longer, and therefore wouldn’t match how it looked in the finale. Kaley Cuoco: I said to the producers, “Please tell me you’re not going to write a ‘To Be Continued…’ episode for the season eight finale.” And sure enough, they said, “We are.” I was so angry I had brought it up because that meant we had to get a fucking wig, and I was livid! [Laughs] I didn’t want to wear a wig. And bless my hairdresser Faye Woods’s heart, because she knows how much I hate wigs, but the wig that was made was exceptional. Still, I was so hateful toward this wig and everyone knew it. I was just being bratty. But I had to wear that wig in the season nine premiere. Then in the next episode we cheated a bit and it was back in a little bun so you couldn’t see the length. Then slowly over the next few episodes we started to let it down. Oh, and I still have that fucking wig. Faye gave it to me! It’s a joke now, just to sit there and remind me not to make bad choices with hair again. [Laughs] There were very few moments of anger for me on Big Bang, but that wig, to this day, creams my corn, as Penny would say. I hated it! I was so mad!

That was one of the hardest things about breaking up. It's not a pair of bookends, the beginning and the end. It's the unravelling of the future. The flat we would never move into together, the cat we would never pick up from the shelter. It was all the times I wouldn't hear her go on and on about some boring film I couldn't sit through, or the way I wouldn't see her do that silly tap dance she does when she's trying on new shoes. It's all the things we used to do that we'd never do again and all the things we'd never do for the first time together.

In the beginning, there was a rapid expansion of a Singularity. Around 380,000 years later, there was light. There was also hydrogen and helium and four stable, fundamental forces of physics. Atoms and those forces worked together to birth the first stars from massive clouds of gas, and those stars lived for hundreds of millions of years before they died in explosions that spread their matter across the sky in clouds of gas and dust—now with heavier elements than what existed before. The forces of physics worked together once again to craft new stars now tightly packed into the first galaxies. As the cycle repeated, heavier elements formed planets orbiting those stars, emerging from disks of gas and dust like dust bunnies under your bed. In our universe, planets can exist only because a few generations of stars died and were reborn. The rebirth of stellar matter into planets is how our Earth came to be. This planet, our home, is covered with a film of life unlike any we’ve yet seen anywhere else in the universe. As far as we know today, it is unique. A blue marble floating in the dark. Earth’s life is fed by a process in which carbon from the air and minerals in the soil are attached together by the energy of photons via photosynthesis in plants. In this process, everything on this planet lives by the constant sacrifice of the nearest star. Every blade of grass, every tree, every bush, every microscopic algae on this planet is a resurrected form of the Sun’s energy. I capture that energy by consuming other things that have died. Every time I eat a meal, the dead matter that made those plants and animals literally gives life to my body through digestion and my metabolism. One day, I will die, and in time my atoms will go back to giving life to something else. Much farther along the arrow of time, our own Sun will explode and spread its essence across the sky. Our Sun’s dust will meet with other stars’ remnants and form new stars and planets of their own. The universe itself exists in an eternal pattern of life, death, and resurrection.

Brennan’s contribution to The Wedding Night (March 8, 1935), starring Gary Cooper and Anna Sten—the Russian beauty Samuel Goldwyn was promoting as the next European import to rival Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich—was of a different order. The anxious producer, worried about Sten’s accent (even though she was playing a Polish American), began to take notice of Brennan in a seemingly forgettable role he nevertheless freshened with his rapid-fire delivery. Brennan is Bill Jenkins, a cackling Connecticut cab driver, spitting tobacco juice (actually licorice) and showing the tobacco fields to Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper), an alcoholic writer modeled on F. Scott Fitzgerald and trying to dry out in a country hideaway. Goldwyn had been much impressed with the velocity of dialogue in It Happened One Night (February 23, 1934) and wanted his actors to perform at the same screwball speed. Brennan manages this feat more deftly than the picture’s ostensible stars, although Cooper perks up when doing scenes with Brennan. Unfortunately Sten did not the have the same opportunity. “I never even met Anna Sten,” Brennan told biographer Carol Easton. When Jenkins drives up to deliver a telegram to Barrett, walking along the road, neither the writer nor Jenkins has a pencil to use to reply to Barrett’s wife, who wants him to return to the city. So Barrett simply gives a verbal response: “My work won’t let me. Love Tony.” Jenkins repeats the message twice to fix it in his mind, but as soon as he drives off the message gets garbled: “My love won’t work me.” He tries again: “My work won’t love me.” Not satisfied, he begins again: “My work won’t love me.” In frustration, he spits, and says, “Gosh, I’m losin’ my memory.” His role is inconsequential, and yet so necessary to the local color that director King Vidor works Brennan into a scene whenever he can. Brennan would have made his character even more authentic if Goldwyn had not complied with a request from the Breen Office, the enforcers of the Production Code, that Brennan’s use of “damn” and “hell” be cut from the film.

Teachers Who Purport to Believe That Writing Can't Be Taught. When you hear a teacher say that writing can't be taught, run to another workshop. Again, the craft of writing — just like the crafts of music, dance, painting, film, theater, etc. — can be taught. Have you ever heard someone say, “Why on earth are you taking piano instruction? Music can't be taught”? Of course not, but you hear this nonsense all the time about writing. What is especially pernicious about this pervasive idiocy is that many of the teachers hired (often by the most high-profile institutions) purport to believe this. Why do I say purport to believe? Because the idea is something that only stupid people would actually believe, and none of these writers is stupid. But if you believe that writing can be taught, then you have to figure out a way to teach it, and that requires work — and a lot of it — even before the workshops begin.

When she can’t sleep at night, she tries to remember the details of all the rooms where she has slept…The objects that appear are always linked to gestures and singular facts…In those rooms, she never sees herself with the clarity of photos, but blurred as in a film on an encrypted TV channel…She doesn’t know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects, to again become the person she was at such and such a time. She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History, the self of suspended moments transformed into the poems she wrote at twenty (“Solitude,” etc.)? Her main concern is the choice between “I” and “she.” There is something too permanent about “I,” something shrunken and stifling, whereas “she” is too exterior and remote. The image she has of her book in its nonexistent form, of the impression it should leave, is…an image of light and shadow streaming over faces. But she hasn’t yet discovered how to do this. She awaits if not a revelation, then a sign, a happenstance, as the madeleine dipped in tea was for Marcel Proust. Even more than this book, the future is the next man who will make her dream, buy new clothes, and wait: for a letter, a phone call, a message on the answering machine.

My parents offered to drive me back to the apartment I had shared with the man who almost tried to kill me. The man who was now dead and buried himself. It was a terrible accident. I had repeated that line so many times to myself, like a mantra. If you say something enough times, it becomes true. Or at least that was the plan. I turned the key in the lock, but as soon as I stepped inside, I knew I could never stay there again. Everywhere I looked, I could see all the times he threatened me, yelled at me, hit me. Short films, with no beginning and no end. I never knew where the arguments began. I would try to trace them back to some logical starting point, but there wasn’t one. Anything could spark his anger and the more and more I tried to cut off the parts of me that seemed to annoy him, the less and less there was of me. I was only existing in his world, on his terms, just trying to survive this ‘love at first sight’.

But who could yearn to be on the wrong end of the knife and fork? That’s his real interest here. They’re out there…and dear god, he finds them. “I’ve always lost myself in other people,” says a nervous young woman in an empty room with peeling windowsills. “It’s never enough. Why not carry it all the way?” A middle-aged man on a park bench leers into the camera, something lascivious in his gaze, as if he’s filming for a dating profile. He squeezes his thigh. “I’m thick. I’m meaty. Juicy. Who wouldn’t want me?” A couple, too. The man looks smaller than the Amazonian woman to begin with, the contrast exaggerated by the way he hunches on the floor beside her wrought iron chair. He strokes the leather of her knee-high boots. She stokes his hair the way she would a favored pet. “I want to be in her belly,” he whispers. “I want to pass through her. I want to become a part of her. Then neither of us will ever have to be lonely again.

Don Sturkey’s images of Dorothy Counts find their inheritors in pictures and videos we see today of the suffering of black people at the hands of police forces. We have become a world of people using their cellphone cameras to bear witness, filming the brutality of police or recording the callousness of white people who feel threatened

That was one f the hardest things about breaking up. It's not a pair of bookends, the beginning and the end. It's the unravelling of the future. The flat we would never move into together, the cat we would never pick up from the shelter. It was all the times I wouldn't hear her go on about some boring film I couldn't sit through, or the way I wouldn't see her do that silly tap dance she does when she is trying on new shoes. It's all the things we used to do we'd never do again and all the things we'd never do for the first time together.

Lucy is no longer embarrassed, can talk about anything with him. In the beginning, it was a different story, a horror and humiliation that a benign pituitary macroadenoma—a brain tumor-was causing an over production of the hormone prolactin that fooled her body into thinking she was pregnant. Her periods stopped. She gained weight. She didn't have galactorrhea, or begin produce milk, but had she not discovered what was wrong when she did, that would have been next. "Sounds like you're not seeing anyone." He slides her MR films out of their envelopes, reaches up, and attaches them to light boxes. "Nope." "How's your libido?" He dims the lights in the office and flips on the light boxes, illuminating films of Lucy's brain. "Dostinex is sometimes called the sex drug, you know. Well, if you can get it." She moves close to him and looks at her films. "I'm not having sur gery, Nate." She stares dismally at the somewhat rectangular-shaped region of hy pointensity at the base of the hypothalamus. Every time she looks at one of her scans, she feels there must be a mistake. That can't be her brain. A young brain, as Nate calls it. Anatomically, a great brain, he says, t cept for one little glitch, a tumor about half the size of a penny I don't care what the journal articles say. No one's cutting on me How do I look? Please tell me okay," she says. Nate compares the earlier film to the new one, studies them side by side. "Not dramatically different. Still seven to eight millimeters. Nothing in the suprasellar cistern. A little shift left to right from the infundibu lum of the pituitary stalk." He points with a pen. "Optic chiasm is clea Points again. "Which is great." He puts down the pen and holds up two fingers, starts with them together, then moves them apart to check her peripheral vision. "Great," he says again. "So almost identical. The lesion isn't growing." "It isn't shrinking." "Have a seat.

As I gazed at the blank screen, I remembered a photograph I once saw. It was a picture of the inside of a movie theater. The photo was taken from the projection room and showed the seats and the screen. The photograph had captured one entire film and was taken by opening the shutter at the beginning of the film and then not closing it again until the film ended. In other words, the photograph recorded an entire two-hour-long film. The end result of absorbing the light from every scene in the movie was that the screen in the photo showed nothing but a white rectangle.

This session showed intriguing objective evidence for a mind-matter interaction effect, but an unusual subjective event also happened that is worth mentioning. For this session, knowing that the planned participant was a highly experienced meditator, I decided to have it filmed for future reference. I asked two videographers to shoot the session as it unfolded. They set up their cameras and started filming, the meditator prepared himself mentally for about ten minutes, then signaled that he was ready to begin. I started the experiment and it proceeded without incident until about halfway through the session. Then for a few seconds I felt strangely disoriented, as though all my mental activity suddenly stopped. I shook off this odd sensation, and the disorientation soon passed. The session ended, I thanked the meditator, and he left. Then I spent a few minutes discussing the session with the two videographers as they gathered up their gear. I didn’t attribute much meaning to that moment when my mind was strangely suspended, but I’ve learned that when studying effects that span the subjective-objective gap, it’s important to pay attention to internal states. So I mentioned it to the videographers, and they were both taken aback. It turns out that they had independently experienced the same phenomenon. We had all shared a moment when our minds seemed to go blank. At this point I didn’t know yet whether the objective evidence collected during that session was significant or not. When I found that it was, I contacted the meditator, who by then was back at his ashram in India. I asked if he felt that he was being successful in doing something during the session. He said yes, but that it took until about halfway through the session before he figured out how to do it. As an anecdote, this episode doesn’t count as scientific evidence. But it’s still interesting that the experiment obtained objective evidence of a mind-matter interaction effect at precisely the same time that three people unexpectedly felt something strange occur. The Michelson interferometer experiment suggested that an observed optical system does behave differently than an unobserved system, and in a way that’s suggestive of the quantum observer effect. In other words, we—like others before us—had once again found evidence for a direct mind-matter interaction. This was interesting, but it wasn’t enough. What we wanted to know was whether mind-matter interaction effects were consistent with the notion that consciousness “collapses” the quantum wave function. If it turned out that this was the case, then the most successful physical theory in history might contain the seeds of psychokinesis within it.

They also threw in something they called a Death Cam. After the final enemy, known as "the boss" of an episode, got killed, a message would appear on the screen saying, "Let's see that again!" Then a de tailed animation would slowly play, showing the big, bad boss meeting his grisly demise. This Death Cam was id's version of a snuff film. They decided to include a screen at the beginning of the game that would say, 'This game is voluntarily rated PC-13: Profound Carnage.' Though tongue-in-cheek, it was the first voluntary rating of a video game.