Bodies Tv Series Quotes

Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn't ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it's going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It's both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter.

Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire. For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays—to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles, glossier magazines, and better television sets, all of which will somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more.

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message. How else do we employ our radio than to transmit patterns of sound, and our television set than to transmit patterns of light? It is amusing as well as instructive to consider what would happen if we were to transmit the whole pattern of the human body, of the human brain with its memories and cross connections, so that a hypothetical receiving instrument could re-embody these messages in appropriate matter,

Suppose that humanity flourishes thanks to the enslaved-god AI. Would this be ethical? If the AI has subjective conscious experiences, then would it feel that “life is suffering,” as Buddha put it, and it was doomed to a frustrating eternity of obeying the whims of inferior intellects? After all, the AI “boxing” we explored in the previous chapter could also be called “imprisonment in solitary confinement.” Nick Bostrom terms it mind crime to make a conscious AI suffer.4 The “White Christmas” episode of the Black Mirror TV series gives a great example. Indeed, the TV series Westworld features humans torturing and murdering AIs without moral qualms even when they inhabit human-like bodies.

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs, and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news, and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to despair.

Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings.

Precisely how the electrical signals and chemical reactions occurring second by second in the human body make the leap to thought, motivation, impulse—where the physical machinery of man stops and the ghost in the machine, consciousness, begins—is not truly a scientific question, for the simple reason that we cannot design an experiment to capture, measure or duplicate it. For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will.

Where is the freedom in all this? Nowhere! There is no choice here, no final decision. All decisions concerning networks, screens, information or communication are serial in character, partial, fragmentary, fractal. A mere succession of partial decisions, a microscopic series of partial sequences and objectives, constitute as much the photographer's way of proceeding as that of Telecomputer Man in general, or even that called for by our own most trivial television viewing. All such behaviour is structured in quantum fashion, composed of haphazard sequences of discrete decisions. The fascination derives from the pull of the black box, the appeal of an uncertainty which puts paid to our freedom. Am I a man or a machine? This anthropological question no longer has an answer. We are thus in some sense witness to the end of anthropology, now being conjured away by the most recent machines and technologies. The uncertainty here is born of the perfecting of machine networks, just as sexual uncertainty (Am I a man or a woman? What has the difference between the sexes become?) is born of increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the unconscious and of the body, and just as science's uncertainty about the status of its object is born of the sophistication of analysis in the microsciences.

(Notably, temporary loss of blood or oxygen or excess carbon dioxide in the blood can also cause a disruption in the temporoparietal region and induce out-of-body experiences, which may explain the prevalence of these sensations during accidents, emergencies, heart attacks, etc.) NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES But perhaps the most dramatic category of out-of-body experiences are the near-death stories of individuals who have been declared dead but then mysteriously regained consciousness. In fact, 6 to 12 percent of survivors of cardiac arrest report having near-death experiences. It’s as though they have cheated death itself. When interviewed, they have dramatic tales of the same experience: they left their body and drifted toward a bright light at the end of a long tunnel. The media have seized upon this, with numerous best sellers and TV documentaries devoted to these theatrical stories. Many bizarre theories have been proposed to explain near-death experiences. In a poll of two thousand people, fully 42 percent believed that near-death experiences were proof of contact with the spiritual world that lies beyond death. (Some believe that the body releases endorphins—natural narcotics—before death. This may explain the euphoria that people feel, but not the tunnel and the bright lights.) Carl Sagan even speculated that near-death experiences were a reliving of the trauma of birth. The fact that these individuals recount very similar experiences doesn’t necessarily corroborate their glimpses into the afterlife; in fact, it seems to indicate that there is some deep neurological event happening. Neurologists have looked into this phenomenon seriously and suspect that the key may be the decrease of blood flow to the brain that often accompanies near-death cases, and which also occurs in fainting. Dr. Thomas Lempert, a neurologist at the Castle Park Clinic in Berlin, conducted a series of experiments on forty-two healthy individuals, causing them to faint under controlled laboratory conditions. Sixty percent of them had visual hallucinations (e.g., bright lights and colored patches). Forty-seven percent of them felt that they were entering another world. Twenty percent claimed to have encountered a supernatural being. Seventeen percent saw a bright light. Eight percent saw a tunnel. So fainting can mimic all the sensations people have in near-death experiences

Hypnotherapy You may have seen scenes on television in which hypnotists make people act like chickens or take off their clothes. In reality, hypnotherapy is nothing like that. You actually might experience a hypnotic state many times every week, or possibly every day. It is essentially no different than being engrossed in a book or movie, or being in the meditative state you may reach while exercising. During hypnosis you are highly focused and are not distracted by random thoughts. At the same time, you are aware of outside events, such as the telephone ringing or a door slamming. When you see a hypnotherapist, he or she is simply a guide helping you reach a deeply relaxed state. The therapist may begin by having you picture a pleasant and safe environment. Or, he or she might ask you to focus on an object in your line of vision until your eyes become heavy. Once you are in the hypnotized state, it is easier to focus on your anxiety. You can talk about past experiences, can work on your self-esteem, and can prepare for upcoming social events. You won’t have distracting thoughts or be monitoring everything you say. You may remember events you had forgotten, or may come up with new ways to help yourself cope with the symptoms of anxiety. Adriana was really nervous when her therapist suggested they use hypnosis to work on her fear of meeting new people, but she decided to try it. First, the therapist asked her to visualize a quiet place where she felt completely relaxed and comfortable. When Adriana’s body felt heavy and warm, the therapist asked her to describe how she feels when she speaks with strangers. Adriana discussed how she feels embarrassed and worried, how her face gets red and hot, and how her mind is distracted by negative thoughts. Next, the therapist asked Adriana to visualize being introduced to a stranger. She imagined herself feeling calm and relaxed and looking the person in the eyes. She rehearsed what she would say about herself and said it over and over, sounding more confident each time. The therapist then asked her to think of three things that could help her in those situations. Adriana decided to try relaxing, making sure she is breathing properly, and focusing on the other person instead of on her negative thoughts. Later that week, she dined with a friend and his cousin, whom she had never met before. She was able to take deep breaths and remain relaxed. Once initial introductions went well, Adriana felt more confident and was able to maintain conversations for the entire evening.

When DC Comics was trying to figure out how to retool Wonder Woman’s image to make her cooler, they looked at another Diana—Diana Rigg. Rigg had caused a stir as Mrs. Emma Peel when the British TV series The Avengers was imported to the US in 1966. Mrs. Peel defined the heroine of the mod ’60s—brilliant as she was beautiful, witty, champion fencer, martial arts ex-pert, modern artist, crack shot with a pistol, and fearless secret agent. Attired in sleek black leather catsuits or mod body stockings, Emma Peel was a true force to be reckoned with, combining beauty, brains, and power.

In the 1960s, the rise of "flower power" brought yoga to the attention of a generation of young Americans and Europeans. The wholesale embrace of Indian metaphysics and yoga by many countercultural icons (such as The Beatles' spiritual romance with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) reinforced the position of yoga in the popular psyche and inspired many to join the "hippy trail" to India in pursuit of alternative philosophies and lifestyles. Increased media attention brought yoga closer to the mainstream, and printed primers and television series throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such as Richard Hittleman's Yoga for Health (first broadcast in 1961), encouraged many to take up posture-based yoga in the comfort of their own homes.

It’s hard to explain how important Star Trek is to me. I think I went to my first Star Trek convention when I was fifteen. So to hear that Leonard Nimoy—Mr. Spock—was on the phone, I was not processing what he was saying. I could only focus on his amazing voice. I thought this was a phone call to see if he’d agree to do the part, but in his mind, he had already agreed to do it! He had one specific note on the script, which is that Mr. Spock doesn’t use contractions when he speaks. He says “cannot;” he doesn’t say “can’t.” And I remember just being chagrined that I hadn’t intervened and had allowed this to go on. I loved Spock so much, I used to sneak lines of Mr. Spock dialogue from the movies and TV shows into Big Bang Theory and give them to Sheldon. There’s an episode early on where Sheldon and Leonard are having a fight, and Penny asks, “Well, how do you feel?” And Sheldon replies, “I don’t understand the question.” That’s from the beginning of Star Trek IV where Spock has reunited with his mind and his body, and is being quizzed by a computer about his status. So Leonard Nimoy was just one of many fanboy moments. I once said to LeVar Burton, “If I could go back in time and tell my teenage self there would be a day where I would eventually talk to three crew members of the USS Enterprise, I’d fall over and die.

No, read it now, Tom.” The article was titled “Magnum, the Champagne of TV?” In a typical television series, the professor wrote, “Each episode stands by itself. Characters and situations develop only slightly, if at all.” But Magnum was different. “Its creators have established and refined a new television form that stands between the traditional self-contained episodic forms and the open-ended serials. Call it the ‘cumulative narrative.’ One episode’s events can greatly affect later events, but they’re seldom directly tied together. Each week’s program is distinct, yet each is grafted onto the body of the series, its characters’ pasts.” Magnum was all about memory and storytelling, according to Newcomb. He singled out the show’s voice-over narration, which he said provided “a central perspective and permit[ted] Magnum’s ongoing moral dialogue with himself.” And all of it, the professor said, was true to the post-Vietnam world that Americans found themselves living in.

No evidence, no trace, nothing?’ ‘No, Detective, because you’re not making a TV show. If we had an hour of titillating entertainment to make I may suddenly find that Teresa Wyatt had swallowed a carpet fibre that can be matched to the home of your suspect. I might even find a stray hair on the body of Tom Curtis that miraculously fell from the killer with the root attached. But I am not a mini-series made for television.

At some point I must have fallen asleep on the couch I’d been sharing with Chase because an explosion on the TV jerked me awake. “It’s just the movie,” he whispered in my direction and ran his fingers over my cheek, “don’t move yet Princess.” “Don’t move? Why?” “I’m almost done, give me another minute or two.” I heard his hand moving back and forth across the paper slowly and waited until he kneeled down in front of the couch so his face was directly in front of mine. My breath caught and his electric blue eyes glanced down to my barely parted lips. His tongue absently wetted his lips and his teeth lightly bit down on his bottom one as his gaze roamed my face. “Why couldn’t I move?” I managed to ask when he started closing the distance between us. He abruptly stopped and blinked a few times, “Oh, um. Well … here. Just don’t freak out, okay? I wasn’t trying to be creepy.” “You’re not supposed to tell someone not to freak out, those words alone cause them to freak out.” Chase smirked, “Okay, well then don’t hit me or use your pressure point training on me again.” Before I could roll my eyes at him, he brought his sketch pad up in front of me and my jaw dropped. I felt my cheeks burn and he took that the wrong way. Snatching the pad of paper back up, he cursed softly. “I knew it was creepy.” “Chase,” I breathed and shook my head in an attempt to clear my thoughts, “that wasn’t creepy. Can I see it again?” When he didn’t make an attempt to move I reached my arm toward the book, “Please.” He handed it over with a sigh and looked at me with a sad smile, “I’m sorry, but you looked too perfect. I couldn’t let that opportunity pass.” My stupid blush came back with force when he said that and I focused at his drawing. It was amazing, somewhat embarrassing, but remarkable none the less. With the shading and the detail he’d captured of my upper body and face, it almost looked like a black and white photo. It was perfect. From my chest, throat and slightly open mouth to the way my hair fell around my face and my eyelashes rested against my cheeks, it was one hundred percent me. He even had my hand clutching the pillow under my head that was resting on his leg, as well as the blanket that had been pulled up to the swell of my breasts. Goose bumps covered my body as I realized he’d spent however long staring at, and replicating, every part of me while I’d been completely unaware. He was wrong, it wasn’t creepy, it was beautiful and strangely intimate. “Chase, it–” I cleared my throat and tried again, “It’s incredible.” Incredible didn’t cover it. “Yeah?” I looked up into his eyes and smiled, “Yeah.” We stayed there staring at each other, my mind and heart completely torn in two. One half desperately wanted to act on the feelings his drawing had stirred up in me, and the other was screaming at me to sit up and scoot away from him. Before I could try to make a decision, another series of explosions came from the TV and we both jolted away from each other. My

Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire. For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays—to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles, glossier magazines, and better television sets, all of which will somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more. Despite the immense hubbub and nervous strain, we are convinced that sleep is a waste of valuable time and continue to chase these fantasies far into the night. Animals spend much of their time dozing and idling pleasantly, but, because life is short, human beings must cram into the years the highest possible amount of consciousness, alertness, and chronic insomnia so as to be sure not to miss the last fragment of startling pleasure. It isn’t that the people who submit to this kind of thing are immoral. It isn’t that the people who provide it are wicked exploiters; most of them are of the same mind as the exploited, if only on a more expensive horse in this sorry-go-round. The real trouble is that they are all totally frustrated, for trying to please the brain is like trying to drink through your ears. Thus they are increasingly incapable of real pleasure, insensitive to the most acute and subtle joys of life which are in fact extremely common and simple.

Note how you feel when relaxed. The part of your subconscious that you notice — that is consciousness. There is nothing remarkable about that. You don't have to find it. You really don't need to do it. There is always sensitivity in here. Settle in for a few minutes; just continue with your breathing. Trust that there will be a natural rhythm in your breath. That there's always sensitivity here. Breathing back, thinking you're there. Breathing out and realizing that you are breathing well. If your mind gets busy, don’t worry, that’s what it’s designed to do.  Say "in" as you breathe in, quietly say "out" as you breathe out, to keep your attention steady. Thoughts, pictures, and emotions will come and go. The goal is to consider them without having to think about them. Don’t make an effort to stop them. Don't try and get them to go. Don't try to change them; they are going to change themselves. No need to talk about them now. There is plenty of time for this to be done later. There's no need to add anything to the picture. Just stick with it, sense them when sounds appear, feel them as feelings come up, when ideas and memories come to mind, remember them. And we sit down and know we're there. Watch what’s happening in your mind and body the way you’d watch a movie or a TV show.  The storyline is going to twist and transform, plot threads are going to pass, and something different is going to emerge. You don't have to look for this series, just settle down, relax and it's going to come to you. Remember how those feelings and perceptions and pictures don't have much heaviness, like the story in a movie they don't have any real substance. Nothing to dive into or hook on, nothing to shut down, push away, or alter. You don’t need to do anything at all.  Let go, calm down, ease your mind, smile a little, look down and know you're sitting down. Take a moment before we close and consider the ever-changing, constantly connected network of causes and conditions that contribute to this and every single moment. If someone who has been supportive comes to mind, say thanks in silence.

The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.