Familiar Movie Quotes

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

I had a question. 'Why does the name Pearl Harbor sound so familiar?' The lieutenant colonel's eyes narrowed. 'Pearl Harbor is the most famous U.S. military base in the world,' he said crisply. 'It's the only place on U.S. soil that has been attacked in a wars, since the Revolutionary War.' None of this was ringing a bell, but you already know I'm totally uneducated. Gazzy leaned over to whisper, 'It was a movie with Ben Affleck.' Ah. Now I remembered.

I knew him instantly, even though he'd...changed. I think in a crowd of a million people, I would have recognized him. The connection between us would allow nothing else. And after being deprived of him for so long, I drank in every feature. The dark, chin-length hair, worn loose tonight and curling slightly around his face. The familiar set of lips, quirked now in an amused yet chilling smile. He even wore the duster he always wore, the long leather coat that could have come straight out of a cowboy movie. [...] The eyes. Oh God, the eyes. Even with that sickening red ring around his pupils, his eyes still reminded me of the Dimitri I'd known. The look in his eyes—the soulless, malicious gleam—that was nothing like him. But there was just enough resemblance to stir my heart, to overwhelm my senses and feelings. My stake was ready. All I had to do was keep swinging to make the kill. I had momentum on my side... But I couldn't. I just needed a few more seconds, a few more seconds to drink him in before I killed him. And that's when he spoke. "Roza." His voice had the same wonderful lowness, the same accent...it was just colder. "You forgot my first lesson: Don't hesitate.

It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

The mask is ugly and grotesque and familiar, and we cannot stop staring at it because all monsters are mirrors.

She didn't love the movie as a movie, but she appreciated it as a familiar comfort.

Because the next moment, when I was hauled out from under the bed and up to a pair of so-familiar green eyes, I just hung there limply. And stared. At a face that was hard to look at. Not that it was unattractive. There had been a time when I'd thought so-the overlarge nose, the hard-as-glass eyes, the I-couldn't-be-bothered-to-shave-today-and-possibly-not-yesterday-either stubble didn't exactly spell out movie-star good looks. But there was a lot more to John Pritkin than looks, although even there I'd started to come around recently. The strong, stubborn jawline, the rock-hard body, and the flashes of humor behind the taciturn expression-hell, even the rigid blond spikes he called hair might not add up to handsome, but they added up to something. Something that might have been disturbing if I hadn't had plenty of other things to disturb me right now.

I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further — for time is the longest distance between two places. Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. I traveled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass. Perhaps I am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura — and so goodbye. . .

Throughout the movie, we moved to eat popcorn, shifted to get comfortable, only to end up uncomfortable; an awkward dance of keeping my hands and parts from familiar and unfamiliar areas of Echo’s divine body. I was capable of being a gentleman for the length of one movie, at least. The credits roled and my left hand, which I’d placed behind my head to avoid her tempting tummy, tingled with numbness. My patience finaly snapped. “This is ridiculous.” I swept her up and swung her over my shoulder, her bare feet dangling in front of me. Tinkling laughter filed the room. “What are you doing?” I tossed her onto the bed. Her fire-red hair sprawled over the pilow. My siren smiled up at me. “Getting comfortable,” I said. " -Noah's POV

An artist must either give up art or develop. There are, of course, two ways of giving up: stopping altogether or taking the familiar Hollywood course - making tricks out of what was once done for love.

With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise have been faced with Celine Dion singing "My Liver Belongs to You" and movie houses playing The Liver Is a Lonely Hunter. Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazon, which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less lilting higado, and bumper stickers would proclaim, "I [liver symbol] my Pekingese.

Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry.

Then the screen comes on, showing a familiar menu on a blue background and I stare at it, transfixed, like a yokel who’s never seen a television before. Because it’s not a TV. It’s a flat-screen PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition. They can’t be that dumb. It’s got to be a trap, I gibber to myself. Not even the clueless cannon-fodder-in-jumpsuits who staff any one of the movies on the shelf would be that dumb!

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

Apparently, boredom was not even a concept before the word was invented around 1760, along with the word “interesting.”20 The tide of boredom that has risen ever since coincides with the progress of the Industrial Revolution, hinting at a reason why it has, until recently, been an exclusively Western phenomenon. The reality that the factory system created was a mass-produced reality, a generic reality of standardized products, standardized roles, standardized tasks, and standardized lives. The more we came to live in that artificial reality, the more separate we became from the inherently fascinating realm of nature and community. Today, in a familiar pattern, we apply further technology to relieve the boredom that results from our immersion in a world of technology. We call it entertainment. Have you ever thought about that word? To entertain a guest means to bring him into your house; to entertain a thought means to bring it into your mind. To be entertained means to be brought into the television, the game, the movie. It means to be removed from your self and the real world. When a television show does this successfully, we applaud it as entertaining. Our craving for entertainment points to the impoverishment of our reality.

Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I’d become troubled by questions.

Do I remember the movie you made me watch eight thousand times?” I deadpanned. “Yeah, I think it sounds familiar.

And though it has been in no way a romantic evening, she embraces me and this time emanates a warmth I’m not familiar with. I am so used to imagining everything happening the way it occurs in movies, visualizing things falling somehow into the shape of events on a screen, that I almost hear the swelling of an orchestra, can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion overhead, the seventy-millimeter image of her lips parting and the subsequent murmur of “I want you” in Dolby sound. But my embrace is frozen and I realize, at first distantly and they with greater clarity, that the havoc raging inside me is gradually subsiding and she is kissing me on the mouth and this jars me back into some kind of reality and I lightly push her away. She glances up at me fearfully. “Listen, I’ve got to go,” I say, checking my Rolex. “I don’t want to miss… Stupid Pet Tricks.

When live entertainment was not available, women delivered the film and ran the projectors for the hundreds of movies that were shown to the soldiers. Frances witnessed the popularity of movies time after time; they were shown in warehouses, airplane hangars, on battered portable screens, or projected against the wall of a building in the village square where townsfolk crammed in around the soldiers. “Charlie and Doug” were the two favorites, but anything showing familiar sights from home—the Statue of Liberty, a Chicago department store, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—created a sensation and bolstered morale. Toward the end of the war German propaganda films left behind by the retreating army became a prime attraction.30 Frances traveled to and from Paris for a few days at a time, usually arriving on or near the front after a battle to witness doctors and nurses doing what they could for the injured in the shattered villages and burying the dead. She was struck by how thoroughly exhausted the Europeans were after four devastating years of war.

Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut? Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes? Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences. As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Lacking a clear formula for making decisions, we get reactive and fall back on familiar, comfortable ways to decide what to do. Pinballing through our day like a confused character in a B-horror movie, we end up running up the stairs instead of out the front door. The best decision gets traded for any decision.

Now, are you familiar with the Lord of the Rings?” Molech hesitated again, realizing he was playing someone else’s game, but with no idea what else to do. He said, “Yeah, old horror movie about a ghost girl who crawls out of a television?” “No, this is the one with wizards and elves. Ends with the midgets fighting in a volcano? It

Here are some key attributes of the voice in my head. I suspect they will sound familiar. • It’s often fixated on the past and future, at the expense of whatever is happening right now. The voice loves to plan, plot, and scheme. It’s always making lists or rehearsing arguments or drafting tweets. One moment it has you fantasizing about some halcyon past or Elysian future. Another moment you’re ruing old mistakes or catastrophizing about some not-yet-arrived events. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “Some of the worst things in my life never even happened.” • The voice is insatiable. The default mental condition for too many human beings is dissatisfaction. Under the sway of the ego, nothing is good enough. We’re always on the hunt for the next dopamine hit. We hurl ourselves headlong from one cookie, one promotion, one party to the next, and yet a great many of us are never fully sated. How many meals, movies, and vacations have you enjoyed? And are you done yet? Of course not. • The voice is unrelievedly self-involved. We are all the stars of our own movies, whether we cast ourselves as hero, victim, black hat, or all three. True, we can get temporarily sucked into other people’s stories, but often as a means of comparing ourselves to them. Everything ultimately gets subordinated to the one plotline that matters: the Story of Me.

But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain. Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before... Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours... How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case... as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.

Something about the image looked familiar. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I think I saw a movie about her once.” David directed me to a dog-eared copy of The Story of a Soul in the novitiate library. “Read this,” he said. “Then you’ll understand why I like Thérèse so much.” His devotion and my dimly remembered reaction to the movie led me to begin her book that night. And thus began my second introduction to the woman popularly known as the “Little Flower.

Focus on yourself instead. Go see a therapist and dig into your earliest memories, what makes you tick, what you want from your life, and what you expect from love. Dig in and figure out who you are. Keep a journal and write down your thoughts every morning and every night. Listen to music if that helps you to access your emotions more easily. While you’re doing this, train your social energies on enriching your friendships. Think about what it would take to have closer friendships with people. Would you have to see each other more often for camaraderie and familiarity to build? Would you need to have lunch or dinner so you could sit across from each other and talk? What if you hosted a weekly poker game with the same people every week, women and men? What if you tried to go out to a movie with a friend once a month? Casual friendships grow into close friendships with repeated experience, so allow it to happen. Accumulate experience together. As you each open up, trust will build.

You forgot the straws,” I told him. He ripped the plastic off of the Twizzler box and bit the ends off of two Twizzlers. Then he put them in the cup. He grinned broadly. He looked so proud of himself. I’d forgotten all about our Twizzler straws. We used to do it all the time. We sipped out of the straws at the same time, like in a 1950s Coke commercial—heads bent, foreheads almost touching. I wondered if people thought we were on a date. Jeremiah looked at me, and he smiled in this familiar way, and suddenly I had this crazy thought. I thought, Jeremiah Fisher wants to kiss me. Which, was crazy. This was Jeremiah. He’d never looked at me like that, and as for me, Conrad was the one I liked, even when he was moody and inaccessible the way he was now. It had always been Conrad. I’d never seriously considered Jeremiah, not with Conrad standing there. And of course Jeremiah had never looked at me that way before either. I was his pal. His movie-watching partner, the girl he shared a bathroom with, shared secrets with. I wasn’t the girl he kissed.

There were massive protests in debtor nations such as Greece, and Obama indirectly lectured Merkel that austerity policies might destroy the fragile recovery. Some nations agreed with him, such as France, which went “all in” by electing an outright socialist, François Hollande, as President and giving him a socialist Parliament. Hollande imposed the predictable economic solutions of punishing the successful, including a controversial 75 percent millionaire’s tax. These measures caused capital to flee from France and even led French film icon Gerard Depardieu to give up his French passport and move to Belgium and be granted citizenship by Russia, which charges him a 6 percent income tax rate. (I hear that in exchange, he must appear in every movie made in Russia, the way he did in France.) Panicking at the public revolt, Hollande promised to enact some market-based reforms, such as cutting spending to reduce the deficit, enacting some pro-growth policies, and capping government worker salaries. But it was too little too late. The voters took a sharp right turn in the next election. Sound familiar?

We live in a world that suffers from “status quo bias”. This means that change is resisted just because it’s change. People want to be safe and secure in familiar surroundings, with familiar people and familiar routines. Average people simply don’t like change. They don’t want it. Boredom is supposed to spur people on to change things, to change their life. However, nowadays, we have endless diversion tactics, endless ways of staving off boredom with the TV, movies, music, video games, online gambling and porn, and so on. All this means that it’s harder than ever to bring about real change.

A nice lady opens the door on Peachtree Street and she’s got one of those faces that feels familiar like you’ve known her all her life. She buys a bunch of colored paper for her daughter who likes to draw. You ask how old her daughter is and she is four years younger than you. You ask what school she went to and she says that she kept her at home. You see her daughter peek at you from the hall and you think that maybe she was born wrong too. You figure she has never left this house. And you want to get her out of it. The next week you ask the woman if you can visit with her daughter. She brings you down the hall and into the sun room where her daughter is drawing. She’s quiet for a while and then she looks up and tells you she likes to sit in here and watch the birds outside. The light falls in on her hair like beach sunshine in the movies. There’s plants growing all around her. It’s like a jungle and you sit in the wicker chair across from her and wait for her to talk to you, like she’s a magical animal behind all the vines and leaves. All you can figure is that she’s just very, very shy. You think maybe you would have been this way too if you didn’t grow up in such a loud family.

In the front seats, Eva and Petya argued over the ending of an Australian horror movie. Eva was winning, speaking with more conviction; Petya kept falling silent as he navigated around potholes in the road. The next time he downshifted, Eva turned in her seat to make her case to Marina. “The end of it is a fantasy, like a dream sequence, don’t you agree?” “I didn’t see the movie,” Marina said. Eva pursed her lips. “From what you heard us describe, though. Doesn’t it seem most likely that it’s a fantasy?” Marina shook her head. “I don’t know.” That familiar pressure began to come down on her chest. Petya, bringing the car back up to speed, glanced at his wife. “She hasn’t seen it. Leave her alone.

The language of the Bible regarding principalities – the ruling authorities, the angelic powers, the demons, and the like – sounds, I suppose, strange in modern society, but these words in fact refer to familiar realities in contemporary life. The principalities refer to those entities in creation which nowadays are called institutions, ideologies, and images. Thus a nation is a principality. Or the Communist ideology is a principality. Or the public image of a human being, say a movie star or a politician, is a principality. The image or legend of Marilyn Monroe or Franklin Roosevelt is a reality, distinguishable from the person bearing the same name, which survives and has its own existence apart from the existence of the person.

The glory of Manhattan which Willie had seen from the airplane was nowhere visible at Broadway and Fiftieth Street when he came up out of the subway. It was the same old dirty crowded corner: here a cigar store, there an orange-drink stand, yonder a flickering movie marquee, everywhere people with ugly tired faces hurrying in a bitter wind that whirled flapping newspapers and little spirals of dry snow along the gutters. It was all as familiar to Willie as his hand. The reception room of the Sono-phono Studios, some seven feet square, consisted of plasterboard walls, a plasterboard door in back, a green metal desk, and a very ugly receptionist with a plasterboard complexion, chewing a large wad of pink gum. “Yeah? What can I do for you?

Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers — less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are — to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word. They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know — already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot. Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a million air.” [sic] A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.” Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children and giving up — giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.

I met my wife through Match.com. My profile said, 'I am a medical student with only one eye, an awkward social manner, and $145,000 in student loans.' She wrote back, 'You're just what I've been looking for.' She meant 'honest,' so let me be honest. Making money is not like what I thought it would be. This business kills the part of life that is essential, the part that has nothing to do with business. For the past two years, my insides have felt like they've been eating themselves. All the people that I respected won't talk to me anymore, except through lawyers. People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar. And I am not, nor ever have been, 'familiar.' So...so I have come to the sullen realization that I must close down the fund. Sincerely, Michael J. Burry, M.D.

In a seedy cinema on ru du Temple, watching Disney's Peter Pan with my son, I found that although we were all gazing at the same screen in the flickering dark, I was seeing a different film to the rest of the audience. What seemed fantastical and exotic to the Parisian kids looked like home to me. I knew secret coves and hidey-holes like those of the Lost Boys. I'd grown up in a world of rocky islands, boats and obscuring bush. To my mind the only setting that was alien - even whimsical - was the cold, lonely nursery in the Darling family attic. The wild opportunity of Neverland with its freedom from adult surveillance was deeply, warmly familiar. Watching the movie for the umpteenth time and seeing it anew, forsaking story and focusing greedily on the backdrop, I understood what a complete stranger I was in that hemisphere. But acknowledging my strangeness made those years abroad easier to digest and enjoy.

Althorpe threw open a set of heavy double doors to reveal the spacious in-house movie theater, furnished with about twenty high-end leather couches and captains’ seats that had their own tables for snacks. Lacey and I were agog. The Cubs—my Cubs—were about to play for their lives on the wall of Buckingham Palace. “An immense moment demands an immense screen,” came Eleanor’s voice. When she rose with some effort from her seat, I blinked. It looked familiar. But it couldn’t be. “Eleanor,” I said, dropping all formality. “Is that…?” “A Coucherator,” she said. “Nicholas spoke to your mother and had one flown in. There is a treat in it for you.” She opened the refrigerated compartment of my dad’s life’s work, so roundly mocked by the British press and Eleanor alike. Inside was a perfectly chilled case of Miller Lite. It was only then that I noticed a side table stuffed with Cracker Jack, Doritos, Pop-Tarts, and hot dog condiments. “Althorpe will deliver the tube meat momentarily,” Eleanor said.

I will never forget the sensation that plagued my body as my husband’s business partner told me of Jeff’s fate that day. As his words reached my ears, I found myself in a fog of utter disbelief and paralyzing fear. It was almost as if I was part of a movie. As his business partner was telling me what happened, life began to move in slow motion and I was trying to convince myself that what I was hearing wasn’t true. “Jeff has been in a horrible car accident and has been airlifted to Advocate Christ Hospital,” he said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not my Jeff. There’s no way. The tears came without warning. It was as if a dam broke on a lake I didn’t know existed. This wasn’t really happening. We were a young couple with two small children living the American dream. We had everything going for us. This couldn’t really be happening to me. To us. To him. I had to force myself to focus on his words, “Wait, where was he taken again?” I asked. He repeated the name, but it didn’t sound any more familiar. “Where is that?” I asked. “In Chicago,” he said. Why Chicago? I wondered. I thanked him and somehow managed to end the conversation without completely losing it. God kept me focused and at peace. I still don’t remember how I got everything done that day.

As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances, and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist’s office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them. We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe. Although the Congressman was joking, we probably did know white people better than they knew themselves, and we certainly knew white people better than they ever knew us.

When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel and steam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in the back of the mind. My spine is a track with cold black steel racing on it, a trail of steam and dust following behind, ghost like. It feels like my whole life is holding its breath. By the time she leaves the room I am surprised that she can’t see the train. It has jumped the track of my spine and landed in my mothers’ living room. A cold dark thing, black steel and redwood paneling. It is the old type, from the western movies I loved as a kid. He throws open the doors to the outside world, to the dark ocean. I feel a breeze tugging at me, a slender finger of wind that catches at my shirt. Pulling. Grabbing. I can feel the panic build in me, the need to scream or cry rising in my throat. And then I am out the door, running, tumbling down the steps falling out into the darkened world, falling out into the lifeless ocean. Out into the blackness. Out among the stars and shadows. And underneath my skin, in the back of my head and down the back of my spine I can feel the desperation and I can feel the noise. I can feel the deep and ancient ache of loudness that litters across my bones. It’s like an old lover, comfortable and well known, but unwelcome and inappropriate with her stories of our frolicking. And then she’s gone and the Conductor is closing the door. The darkness swells around us, enveloping us in a cocoon, pressing flat against the train like a storm. I wonder, what is this place? Those had been heady days, full and intense. It’s funny. I remember the problems, the confusions and the fears of life we all dealt with. But, that all seems to fade. It all seems to be replaced by images of the days when it was all just okay. We all had plans back then, patterns in which we expected the world to fit, how it was to be deciphered. Eventually you just can’t carry yourself any longer, can’t keep your eyelids open, and can’t focus on anything but the flickering light of the stars. Hours pass, at first slowly like a river and then all in a rush, a climax and I am home in the dorm, waking up to the ringing of the telephone. When she is gone the apartment is silent, empty, almost like a person sleeping, waiting to wake up. When she is gone, and I am alone, I curl up on the bed, wait for the house to eject me from its dying corpse. Crazy thoughts cross through my head, like slants of light in an attic. The Boston 395 rocks a bit, a creaking noise spilling in from the undercarriage. I have decided that whatever this place is, all these noises, sensations - all the train-ness of this place - is a fabrication. It lulls you into a sense of security, allows you to feel as if it’s a familiar place. But whatever it is, it’s not a train, or at least not just a train. The air, heightened, tense against the glass. I can hear the squeak of shoes on linoleum, I can hear the soft rattle of a dying man’s breathing. Men in white uniforms, sharp pressed lines, run past, rolling gurneys down florescent hallways.

I’d better go,” Marlboro Man said, leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I still grasped the diamond ring in my warm, sweaty hand. “I don’t want Mike to burst a blood vessel.” He laughed out loud, clearly enjoying it all. I tried to speak but couldn’t. I’d been rendered totally mute. Nothing could have prepared me for those ten minutes of my life. The last thing I remember, I’d awakened at eleven. Moments later, I was hiding in my bathroom, trying, in all my early-morning ugliness, to avoid being seen by Marlboro Man, who’d dropped by unexpectedly. Now I was standing on the front porch, a diamond ring in my hand. It was all completely surreal. Marlboro Man turned to leave. “You can give me your answer later,” he said, grinning, his Wranglers waving good-bye to me in the bright noonday sun. But then it all came flashing across my line of sight. The boots in the bar, the icy blue-green eyes, the starched shirt, the Wranglers…the first date, the long talks, my breakdown in his kitchen, the movies, the nights on his porch, the kisses, the long drives, the hugs…the all-encompassing, mind-numbing passion I felt. It played frame by frame in my mind in a steady stream. “Hey,” I said, walking toward him and effortlessly sliding the ring on my finger. I wrapped my arms around his neck as his arms, instinctively, wrapped around my waist and raised me off the ground in our all-too-familiar pose. “Yep,” I said effortlessly. He smiled and hugged me tightly. Mike, once again, laid on the horn, oblivious to what had just happened. Marlboro Man said nothing more. He simply kissed me, smiled, then drove my brother to the mall.

Harvard pointed. “You know, right there is when the stuntman catches the sword out of frame.” “I know.” Aiden did know. Harvard always told him this fact at this precise moment. Aiden had watched this movie without Harvard once—on a date. Seeing the sword fly without the familiar murmur had upset Aiden enough to turn off the movie. Tonight, Harvard was here with him. They were both lying on their stomachs with their legs kicked up and their hands cupped in their chins, as though they were six years old. They weren’t. Aiden tangled their legs together slightly, deliberately. It felt far more dangerous than crossing swords. Aiden couldn’t imagine a match with so much at stake. “During a date when you stay in,” Aiden said, teaching, “you should try to see if the other person is receptive to you getting closer.” Harvard gave Aiden a look out of the corner of his eye, and let their legs stay tangled, resting with light pressure against one another. Love was a delusion, nothing but an electrical impulse in the brain, but there were many impulses running electric under Aiden’s skin right now. The man in black smiled beneath his mask and switched his sword to his right hand. The clash of swords rang over the sound of the sea. Aiden sneaked another look at Harvard, the shine of his dark eyes and white teeth in the silvery glow from the screen. Harvard caught him looking, but he returned Aiden’s look with a look of his own, warmly affectionate and never suspicious at all. Harvard never suspected a thing. Because Aiden was his best friend, and Harvard trusted him. And Harvard could trust him. Aiden would never do anything to hurt Harvard, not anything at all. Aiden moved in still closer, his arm set against Harvard’s, solid muscle under the thin material of his shirtsleeve. He could put his arm around Harvard’s shoulders or slip an arm around his waist or lean in. He was allowed, just for tonight.

If we are absorbed in a movie it may seem at first that the screen lies behind the image. Likewise, if we are so captivated by experience that we overlook the simple experience of being aware or awareness itself, we may first locate it in the background of experience. In this first step, being aware or awareness itself is recognised as the subjective witness of all objective experience. Looking more closely we see that the screen is not just in the background of the image but entirely pervades it. Likewise, all experience is permeated with the knowing with which it is known. It is saturated with the experience of being aware or awareness itself. There is no part of a thought, feeling, sensation or perception that is not infused with the knowing of it. This second realisation collapses, at least to a degree, the distinction between awareness and its objects. In the third step, we understand that it is not even legitimate to claim that knowing, being aware or awareness itself pervades all experience, as if experience were one thing and awareness another. Just as the screen is all there is to an image, so pure knowing, being aware or awareness itself is all there is to experience. All there is to a thought is thinking, and all there is to thinking is knowing. All there is to an emotion is feeling, and all there is to feeling is knowing. All there is to a sensation is sensing, and all there is to sensing is knowing. All there is to a perception is perceiving, and all there is to perceiving is knowing. Thus, all there is to experience is knowing, and it is knowing that knows this knowing. Being all alone, with nothing in itself other than itself with which it could be limited or divided, knowing or pure awareness is whole, perfect, complete, indivisible and without limits. This absence of duality, separation or otherness is the experience of love or beauty, in which any distinction between a self and an object, other or world has dissolved. Thus, love and beauty are the nature of awareness. In the familiar experience of love or beauty, awareness is tasting its own eternal, infinite reality. It is in this context that the painter Paul Cézanne said that art gives us the ‘taste of nature’s eternity’.

THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter. An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever. The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants. Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries—it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain—the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan—was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.

We may have to mask your scent.” He looked at her soberly. “Did Olivia tell you anything about scent marking?” “Scent marking?” Sophie wracked her brain, trying to remember. It seemed vaguely familiar though she couldn’t remember exactly what it involved. Still, how bad could it be? “Oh, uh, sure. Scent marking.” She nodded. “Good. Because in the last extremity, if I hear the sniffers around this cabin, I may have to scent mark you—to mask your scent with my own.” “Can you do that? I mean, is your scent that much stronger than mine, especially when they’re focused on me?” Sylvan looked down at his hands. “Normally it isn’t but right now…ever since the trip we took in the transport tube…” Sophie thought of the warm, spicy scent that seemed to go to her head, the way it made her react to him… “It’s your mating scent, isn’t it?” she asked in a low voice, not daring to look at him. “Yes.” He sounded ashamed. “But why…” She risked a sidelong glance at him. “Why is it coming out now? I, uh, thought it only happened during the claiming period. But you’re not, um, claiming me or anything. I mean, we’re not… you know.” “I know.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand what’s going on either. We haven’t even been dream sharing. Well, that is, I mean…” He cleared his throat. “I’ve had a few dreams of you. But nothing out of the ordinary.” He glanced at her. “Have you…had any strange dreams?” “No.” Sophie shook her head and a look of mingled disappointment and relief passed over his stern features. “I have been, uh, having problems with my art, though,” she admitted in a low voice. “Problems with your art?” He frowned. “What do you mean?” “I paint,” Sophie explained. “You know—with a paintbrush and easel?” She made a painting motion in the air and his eyes widened. “That was what I dreamed. That you were painting a picture of…of me.” Sophie nearly choked. “But I have been! You’re all I’ve been able to paint lately. Even when I try not to, you always sneak in there. It’s so annoying.” Then she realized what she’d said. “Uh, I mean—” “It doesn’t matter.” Sylvan cut her off, shaking his head. “So we have been dream sharing, in a way.” Sophie felt herself go cold all over. “Does…does that mean you’re going to try to…to claim me? The way Baird claimed Liv?” Oh my God, if he does, if he claims me, then he’ll want to bite me! That’s the way his people do it. She had horror-movie visions of being held down under his muscular bulk, held down and pierced multiple times and in multiple ways. God, his teeth in my throat at the same time he’s inside me, filling me, holding me down and biting and thrusting. He’s so big, so strong—I’d never be able to get away. The horror she felt must have showed on her face, because Sylvan’s voice was rough when he spoke. “Don’t worry, Sophia. Even if I wanted to claim you, I couldn’t.” “Oh right.” She felt a small measure of relief. “Your vow.” “My vow,” he agreed. “Sylvan,

He removed his hand from his worn, pleasantly snug jeans…and it held something small. Holy Lord, I said to myself. What in the name of kingdom come is going on here? His face wore a sweet, sweet smile. I stood there completely frozen. “Um…what?” I asked. I could formulate no words but these. He didn’t respond immediately. Instead he took my left hand in his, opened up my fingers, and placed a diamond ring onto my palm, which was, by now, beginning to sweat. “I said,” he closed my hand tightly around the ring. “I want you to marry me.” He paused for a moment. “If you need time to think about it, I’ll understand.” His hands were still wrapped around my knuckles. He touched his forehead to mine, and the ligaments of my knees turned to spaghetti. Marry you? My mind raced a mile a minute. Ten miles a second. I had three million thoughts all at once, and my heart thumped wildly in my chest. Marry you? But then I’d have to cut my hair short. Married women have short hair, and they get it fixed at the beauty shop. Marry you? But then I’d have to make casseroles. Marry you? But then I’d have to wear yellow rubber gloves to do the dishes. Marry you? As in, move out to the country and actually live with you? In your house? In the country? But I…I…I don’t live in the country. I don’t know how. I can’t ride a horse. I’m scared of spiders. I forced myself to speak again. “Um…what?” I repeated, a touch of frantic urgency to my voice. “You heard me,” Marlboro Man said, still smiling. He knew this would catch me by surprise. Just then my brother Mike laid on the horn again. He leaned out of the window and yelled at the top of his lungs, “C’mon! I am gonna b-b-be late for lunch!” Mike didn’t like being late. Marlboro Man laughed. “Be right there, Mike!” I would have laughed, too, at the hilarious scene playing out before my eyes. A ring. A proposal. My developmentally disabled and highly impatient brother Mike, waiting for Marlboro Man to drive him to the mall. The horn of the diesel pickup. Normally, I would have laughed. But this time I was way, way too stunned. “I’d better go,” Marlboro Man said, leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I still grasped the diamond ring in my warm, sweaty hand. “I don’t want Mike to burst a blood vessel.” He laughed out loud, clearly enjoying it all. I tried to speak but couldn’t. I’d been rendered totally mute. Nothing could have prepared me for those ten minutes of my life. The last thing I remember, I’d awakened at eleven. Moments later, I was hiding in my bathroom, trying, in all my early-morning ugliness, to avoid being seen by Marlboro Man, who’d dropped by unexpectedly. Now I was standing on the front porch, a diamond ring in my hand. It was all completely surreal. Marlboro Man turned to leave. “You can give me your answer later,” he said, grinning, his Wranglers waving good-bye to me in the bright noonday sun. But then it all came flashing across my line of sight. The boots in the bar, the icy blue-green eyes, the starched shirt, the Wranglers…the first date, the long talks, my breakdown in his kitchen, the movies, the nights on his porch, the kisses, the long drives, the hugs…the all-encompassing, mind-numbing passion I felt. It played frame by frame in my mind in a steady stream. “Hey,” I said, walking toward him and effortlessly sliding the ring on my finger. I wrapped my arms around his neck as his arms, instinctively, wrapped around my waist and raised me off the ground in our all-too-familiar pose. “Yep,” I said effortlessly. He smiled and hugged me tightly. Mike, once again, laid on the horn, oblivious to what had just happened. Marlboro Man said nothing more. He simply kissed me, smiled, then drove my brother to the mall.

I climbed under the covers and shone the flashlight on Mason's gift: a roll of something or somethings, bound in string. I unfurled it to reveal an 8x10 black-and-white photograph. The girl in the picture was me. Me in the Mystery Machine, eyes locked with the eye of Mason's camera, mouth tilted in an incredulous smirk. It was the girl from the mirror, it was the girl from the wall in McGrath's tomb, it was the girl from the moon, as far away as that. A familiar girl with a faraway look in her eye. I'd know her anywhere; I didn't know her at all. Over her eyes Mason had outlined a pair of 3-D movie glasses–a nod to Weegee's 3-D-movie lovers, no doubt, although this girl–me, I– was alone, not locked in some passionate embrace. Underneath her/my face, Mason had taped a fortune cookie message: One who admires you greatlyis hidden before your eyes. God! He almost had me. So if I was the 3-D girl with hidden eyes, did he think I was his admirer? Oh, Mr. Mad Hatter, I thought. How fearfully wrong thou art.

The sentimental story says that culture is a meritocracy in which the creative spark is king, and originality conquers all. The sentimental story says that audiences are open-minded and eager to discover challenging new ideas, whether in music, movies, or politics. The sentimental story says that because there is a formula for virality, the best ideas need no marketing—they distribute themselves, like little contagions of wonder. One of my chief goals was to explode the sentimental story. There are certain rules governing cultural markets, I found. But they rarely guarantee that the most sophisticated or morally pristine ideas become the most popular. Instead, the history of cultural sensations shows that sneakily familiar ideas have far more immediate appeal than novel ones and that the battle for cultural power is principally a battle over distribution and discovery, precisely because there is no formula for virality or easy popularity.

Almost every piece of media people consume, every purchase they make, every design they confront lives on a continuum between fluency and disfluency - ease of thinking and difficulty of thinking. Most people lead lives of quiet fluency. They listen to music that sounds like the music they've already heard. They look forward to movies with characters, actors, and plot that they recognize. they don't heed ideas from opposing parties, particularly if these ideas seem painfully complicated. (...) the greatest joys often come from discovering fluency in places you didn't expect.

As much as we try to corral it via rigorous religious tradition (for good and faithful reasons), prayer also takes place beyond the boundary waters, in places and ways we might not expect. This human instinct to reach out in praise or lament or supplication or confession to the divine does not take place only in church, guided by liturgy and pastors. It isn't limited to early morning devotions, in that serene space before silence gives way to the day. It isn't strictly the domain of dinner tables, where families gather to recite familiar words. And it isn't an instinct shared only by Christians. Prayer can be expressed by anyone and can take place anywhere.

The focus of that week was “learning how to listen to the voice of God” in what was dubbed “My Quiet Time with God.” You have to admire the camp leaders’ intent, but let’s be honest. Most pre-adolescents are clueless about such deeply spiritual goals, let alone the discipline to follow through on a daily basis. Still, good little camperettes that we were, we trekked across the campground after our counselors told us to find our “special place” to meet with God each day. My special place was beneath a big tree. Like the infamous land-run settlers of Oklahoma’s colorful history, I staked out the perfect location. I busily cleared the dirt beneath my tree and lined it with little rocks, fashioned a cross out of two twigs, stuck it in the ground near the tree, and declared that it was good. I wiped my hands on my madras Bermudas, then plopped down, cross-legged on the dirt, ready to meet God. For an hour. One very long hour. Just me and God. God and me. Every single day of camp. Did I mention these quiet times were supposed to last an entire hour? I tried. Really I did. “Now I lay me down to sleep . . . ” No. Wait. That’s a prayer for babies. I can surely do better than that. Ah! I’ve got it! The Lord’s Prayer! Much more grown-up. So I closed my eyes and recited the familiar words. “Our Father, Who art in heaven . . .” Art? I like art. I hope we get to paint this week. Maybe some watercolor . . . “Hallowed by Thy name.” I’ve never liked my name. Diane. It’s just so plain. Why couldn’t Mom and Dad have named me Veronica? Or Tabitha? Or Maria—like Maria Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Oh my gosh, I love that movie! “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done . . . ” Be done, be done, be done . . . will this Quiet Time ever BE DONE? I’m sooooo bored! B-O-R-E-D. BORED! BORED! BORED! “On earth as it is in Heaven.” I wonder if Julie Andrews and I will be friends in heaven. I loved her in Mary Poppins. I really liked that bag of hers. All that stuff just kept coming out. “Give us this day, our daily bread . . . ” I’m so hungry, I could puke. I sure hope they don’t have Sloppy Joes today. Those were gross. Maybe we’ll have hot dogs. I’ll take mine with ketchup, no mustard. I hate mustard. “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” What the heck is a trespass anyway? And why should I care if someone tresses past me? “And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil . . . ” I am so tempted to short-sheet Sally’s bed. That would serve her right for stealing the top bunk. “For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” This hour feels like forever. FOR-E-VERRRR. Amen. There. I prayed. Now what?

What made the movie business unique in the history of corporate capitalism is captured in the screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim, true for many decades: “nobody knows anything.” No other industry pumped out so many products so frequently with so little foreknowledge of whether they would be any good. The only feasible business strategy, it appeared, was to sign up the best creative talent, trust your strongest hunches about what looked likely to appeal to millions of people, and hope you ended up with Back to the Future instead of Ishtar. Over the past few years, however, something big has happened: finally, people in Hollywood do know something. What they know is that branded franchises work. People say they want new ideas and fresh concepts, but in reality they most often go to the multiplex for familiar characters and concepts that remind them of what they already know they like. Big name brands like Marvel, Harry Potter, Fast & Furious, and Despicable Me consistently gross more than $1 billion at the global box office, not only raking in huge profits, but justifying studios’ very existence and the jobs of everyone who works on their glamorous lots. This change has happened slowly over about a decade in Hollywood, making it hard to appreciate its magnitude. But now it is undeniable that the dawn of the franchise film era is the most meaningful revolution in the movie business since the studio system ended, in the 1950s.

It was during the early summer of 1952 that I found myself in the small community park next to Stevens Institute of Technology. Although I had a job, I had only worked as a “soda jerk” for a little over a week before I started looking for something else. The Hoboken waterfront was still familiar to me from earlier years when I walked this way to catch the trolley or the electrified Public Service bus home from the Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. Remembering the gray-hulled Liberty Ships being fitted out for the war at these dilapidated piers, was still very much embedded in my memory. Things had not changed all that much, except that the ships that were once here were now at the bottom of the ocean, sold, or nested at one of the “National Defense Reserve Fleets.” The iconic movie On the Waterfront had not yet been filmed, and it would take another two years before Marlon Brando would stand on the same pier I was now looking down upon, from the higher level of Stevens Park. Labor problems were common during this era, but it was all new to me. I was only 17 years old, but would later remember how Marlon Brando got the stuffing kicked out of him for being a union malcontent. When they filmed the famous fight scene in On the Waterfront, it took place on a barge, tied up in the very same location that I was looking upon.

have heard of these alleged creatures, and many have gone to the trouble of learning about them. The extraordinary popularity of these mystery creatures –often termed cryptids –is obvious from the huge number of books, magazine articles, TV shows and movies devoted to them. These superstar cryptids are so popular, so familiar, that a major portion of interest in world mysteries,

More than anything, Trump was a demagogue—a thoroughly American type, familiar to us from novels like All the King’s Men and movies like Citizen Kane. “Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil.” A demagogue can become a tyrant, but the people put him there—the people who want to be fed fantasies and lies, the people who set themselves apart from and above their compatriots. So the question isn’t who Trump was, but who we are.

I’d never been broken up with before but the scene was so familiar that I knew my lines. Do scenes like this happen so often in real life that they end up in the movies, or are the movies giving us a convenient script for inconvenient conversations?

When he came back, he had a large soda and a pack of Twizzlers. I reached for the soda to take a sip, but there were no straws. “You forgot the straws,” I told him. He ripped the plastic off of the Twizzler box and bit the ends off of two Twizzlers. Then he put them in the cup. He grinned broadly. He looked so proud of himself. I’d forgotten all about our Twizzler straws. We used to do it all the time. We sipped out of the straws at the same time, like in a 1950s Coke commercial—heads bent, foreheads almost touching. I wondered if people thought we were on a date. Jeremiah looked at me, and he smiled in this familiar way, and suddenly I had this crazy thought. I thought, Jeremiah Fisher wants to kiss me. Which, was crazy. This was Jeremiah. He’d never looked at me like that, and as for me, Conrad was the one I liked, even when he was moody and inaccessible the way he was now. It had always been Conrad. I’d never seriously considered Jeremiah, not with Conrad standing there. And of course Jeremiah had never looked at me that way before either. I was his pal. His movie-watching partner, the girl he shared a bathroom with, shared secrets with. I wasn’t the girl he kissed.

Kim Dokja x Hansooyoung PART 1 [I shall kill you, Yoo Joonghyuk.] ~ Kim Dokja pg 4110 46. ⸢(Looks like you still don't know how it works. The heroine loses her consciousness, her hand falling away. And the male hero awakens! You see, in all the movies I've seen so far…) pg 4112 47. These idiots, I even died so that you two could talk to each other, but this…' She figured that she really needed to give these two men a harsh earful when she arrived there. But, when she pushed past the bushes and stepped forward, the ensuing spectacle freaked her out in a rather grand manner. Kwa-aaang!! Bang!!! Yoo Joonghyuk was mercilessly slamming his sword down on Kim Dokja, currently sprawled out on the ground. "Hey!! You crazy son of a bitch!!" pg 4125 48. There were plenty of things she wanted to ask, but she chose not to. Instead, she poked Kim Dokja's cheek and spoke up. "Still, this guy looks like he got completely fooled, doesn't he." "Looks that way." "How did it go?" "He went crazy and attacked me." Han Sooyoung smirked and lightly pinched Kim Dokja's cheek as if she was proud of him. pg 4127 49. the events of her dying at Yoo Joonghyuk's sword, me fighting against him, and then, passing out from his attack, and finally, sharing a conversation with Yoo Sangah inside the Library… Han Sooyoung approached the bed before I noticed it and pinched my cheek. "In any case, Kim Dokja. You can be really adorable sometimes." pg 4144 50. The moment Han Sooyoung's fist bumped into mine, she was completely enveloped in bright light. As I watched her figure disappear, I became aware once more that she had become my companion for real. pg 4165 51. ⸢And…⸥ My heart began powerfully pounding away. ⸢The woman that I used to love.⸥ pg 4189 52. Her emotionless eyes; the beauty spot just below one of them; and her lips that always mocked me for fun, now arching up in a smooth line. "Proceed with the execution pg 4191 53. "But, should you be doing something like that? She's originally your bride, isn't she?" "Correction. She was supposed to be one. The throne was usurped on the first day of the wedding, however." Oh, I see. So, it's that sort of development? I felt just a bit relieved now. Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk as a couple? hadn't allowed any dating at the workplace yet, so hell no. pg 4202 54. ⸢By the time you're reading this book, I…⸥ I steeled my heart and read the next line of the text. ⸢…I'd still be living a pretty good life, I guess. Hahah, were you scared?⸥ This idiot… pg 4212 55. The following words were eerily similar to a certain body of text that I was familiar with. ⸢The you reading this story will definitely make it out of here alive.⸥ Han Sooyoung's afterwords came to an end there. For the longest time, I couldn't tear my eyes away from the full-stop at the end of the sentencepg4216 56. "Looks like the company's internal rules need to be changed somewhat…" pg 4234 57. She spoke in a fed-up tone of voice. And then, issued an order to me. "Marry me, Ricardo Von Kaizenix." pg 4244 58. "I didn't want to extend her 50 years by even one minute if I could help it." I was being serious here. The moment I arrived in this world and realized that Han Sooyoung had to spend 50 years here, I just couldn't escape from this one overwhelming emotion. Someone was sacrificed again because of me. Han Sooyoung who had to endure the time frame of 50 years – could she still maintain a normal, functioning mind? Was she able to maintain the ego of the Han Sooyoung that I know of?pg4254 59. Her palm smacked me in the back of the head again. God damn it, this punk… "The third method, 'Romance'." "And its contents are?" "Marry Yuri di Aristel." "And just what did you choose?" "The third method?" "And are we currently married?" "Nope." "And why the hell not?!" pg 4256

Yes, Russian movies best.” Jason snorted, relaxing a little at the familiar joke. “Yeah, the best at being long and boring. Congratulations.” “You American, have no taste. All you want is burger movie.” Jason, who had been friends with Sasha long enough—fuck, had it really been three years already?—to translate his weird phrases, rolled his eyes. “You were laughing your ass off at Zombieland like, yesterday.” “That is not fast burger movie—” “Fast food,” Jason corrected. “That is good movie. No taste.” “I’m not saying I didn’t like it, I’m just saying—” “You always ‘just saying’. I’m not listen to American anymore.

Watching a new movie is like rolling the dice, you don’t know if you’re going to love it or hate it, if you’re going to laugh or cry, if a dog is going to die and ruin the whole thing! So we reach for our old favourites for the comfort of the familiar, because you can always count on your favourite movies to make you feel better.

There’d been so many dynamic films in 1999 that viewers would need time to fully absorb what had happened, and many of the year’s commercial letdowns enjoyed remarkable afterlives. The exploding DVD and cable TV markets that revived Office Space and Fight Club would resuscitate many of the year’s commercial failures. They’d also ensure that hits such as The Matrix and The Sixth Sense would appear on late-night TV for years on end, their various body bends and plot twists becoming familiar to even the most casual film viewers.

Our ability to make sense of movie plots, to navigate novel situations, or even to form first impressions of the people we meet is greatly aided by what we psychologists call schemas. Packets of knowledge that provide expectations about the activities we do, schemas help us comprehend new situations with familiar details.

The plot is so familiar the end credits should have issued a blanket thank-you to a century of Hollywood lovecoms. Through a tortuous series of contrived misunderstandings, the boy and girl avoid happiness for most of the movie, although not as successfully as we do.

In 1991, a college sophomore studying music in the American Midwest made the mistake of selling some drugs to the wrong person. Until then, he hadn’t done much more than smoke pot and sell some of it to his friends. Petty vandalism at his high school was as high stakes as his criminal career had been. Then, as these things tend to go when you’re just 18 years old, he tried to push the envelope and test his boundaries. He started experimenting with hard drugs like LSD. But he was naive, and the brashness of youth got the best of him. He sold some of that LSD outside his circle—to an undercover policeman. And as if his luck couldn’t get worse, like a scene out of a TV movie of the week, the judge, under pressure to make an example out of this young man, sentenced him to 6 to 25 years in prison. It’s a faceless, timeless story that transcends race, class, and region. A young kid makes a mistake that forever changes their lives and their family’s lives as well. We are all too familiar with how stories like this usually end: The kid spends their most impressionable years behind bars and comes out worse than when they went in. Life on the outside is too difficult to contend with; habits learned on the inside are too difficult to shed. They reoffend; their crimes escalate. The cycle continues. This story, however, is a little different. Because this young man didn’t go back to jail. In fact, after being released in less than 5 years on good behavior, he went on to become one of the best jazz violinists in the world. He left prison with a fire lit underneath him—to practice, to repent, to humble himself, to hustle, and to do whatever it took to make something of his life. No task was too small, no gig was too tiny, no potential fan was too disinterested for him not to give it everything he had. And he did. The story is a little different for another reason, too. That young man’s name is Christian Howes. He is my older brother.

home only to pine over an ex-girlfriend, so he stopped. He apologized, saying a few more things that Catherine once again just nodded her head to, smiling, and before she knew it, she had plans to go see a movie with Dickie the following Friday. It was a date, the first of many. It went like this for two months: Friday night dates. Rides home from school while other girls looked on in jealousy. Long nights parked up at The Point, the low rumble of his car idling away while they made out with the heat blowing on her legs. Him sliding his hands up her skirt. Under her shirt. Her moaning. Her face flushing red. Her toes curling. The Rolling Stones on the radio. Why did he taste so good? Never sex, though. Even when he begged for it, she would refuse. She knew what their relationship really was. It was great and fun and wild and exciting, but she knew it wouldn’t last; he was off to college soon, and she remembered how he felt about being tethered to something familiar. That conversation never left her mind for the duration of their relationship, always reminding her to be ready to lose him. At the time, she was still a virgin, and as much as she loved Dickie she did not wish to give herself fully to someone who would more than likely forget about her within months, if not weeks, of leaving. Catherine was young, but never stupid or naive. She knew how the world worked… even Dickie’s world. What she felt and experienced with him may have been real by her definition, but she understood that that did not make the relationship everlasting or meant-to-be. Their time together had been great and fun and had changed her in ways she would never be able to put into words. She would forever cherish their moments together. Or at least, that’s what she’d thought at the time, before these cherished memories soured. Everything changed the night of the dance. The night he changed. The night she changed, too. It was Dickie’s senior prom. He invited her to go and she happily accepted. She even bought a new dress with the money she’d saved working shifts down at Woolworth’s. The dance was fine and good. They had a blast. They’d even kissed in the middle of the gymnasium during the last slow dance. It had been so romantic. But afterward was a different sort of time. Dickie and some of his friends rented a few rooms at the Heartsridge Motel for a place to hang out after the dance. But it was more than just a place to hang out. It was a place to party, a place to drink alcohol purchased illegally, a place for some of the looser girls to sleep with their dates. She had been to parties with Dickie before, parties with drinking and drugs and where there were rooms dedicated to fooling around. She wasn’t a square. But this was different. This place made her skin crawl. There was a raw energy in the air. She remembered feeling it on her skin. And the fact that it was a motel made the whole scene seem depraved. It just felt off, and she wanted to beg him to go somewhere else. But instead she held her tongue and went along with Dickie. He was leaving soon, after all. Why not appease him? He seemed excited about going. A few of them—all friends of Dickie’s—ended up together in one room, drinking Schnapps, smoking cigarettes, having

Sometimes I wish I'd never left Newburyport, or at least that I'd stayed a little longer. Certainly it was the last time I'd feel at home in the way I'd first known, where every familiar teacup and chair triggered the ongoing conversation that had been my relationship with my mother, which would soon fade to a whisper and then threaten to vanish outright. The literary critic in me resents her role in this book the way I would a sentimental plot twist in a movie. We all have had mothers; few among us want to lose them. I wish my experience had transcended such an obvious bid for your sympathy, and I could have become a different writer. But I can't erase the fact that the first day of my adult life was that morning in May my mother took her last breath.

We stalked carefully through the park in best paramilitary fashion, the lost patrol on its mission into the land of the B movie. To Deborah’s credit, she was very careful. She moved stealthily from one piece of cover to the next, frequently looking right to Chutsky and then left at me. It was getting harder to see her, since the sun had now definitely set, but at least that meant it was harder for them to see us, too—whoever them might turn out to be. We leapfrogged through the first part of the park like this, past the ancient souvenir stand, and then I came up to the first of the rides, an old merry-go-round. It had fallen off its spindle and lay there leaning to one side. It was battered and faded and somebody had chopped the heads off the horses and spray-painted the whole thing in Day-Glo green and orange, and it was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. I circled around it carefully, holding my gun ready, and peering behind everything large enough to hide a cannibal. At the far side of the merry-go-round I looked to my right. In the growing darkness I could barely make out Debs. She had moved up into the shadow of one of the large posts that held up the cable car line that ran from one side of the park to the other. I couldn’t see Chutsky at all; where he should have been there was a row of crumbling playhouses that fringed a go-kart track. I hoped he was there, being watchful and dangerous. If anything did jump out and yell boo at us, I wanted him ready with his assault rifle. But there was no sign of him, and even as I watched, Deborah began to move forward again, deeper into the dark park. A warm, light wind blew over me and I smelled the Miami night: a distant tang of salt on the edge of rotting vegetation and automobile exhaust. But even as I inhaled the familiar smell, I felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck and a soft whisper came up at me from the lowest dungeon of Castle Dexter, and a rustle of leather wings rattled softly on the ramparts. It was a very clear notice that something was not right here and this would be a great time to be somewhere else; I froze there by the headless horses, looking for whatever had set off the Passenger’s alarm. I saw and heard nothing. Deborah had vanished into the darkness and nothing moved anywhere, except a plastic shopping bag blowing by in the gentle wind. My stomach turned over, and for once it was not from hunger. My

novelty. I’m definitely in the familiarity camp. I love to reread my favorite books and to watch movies over and over. I eat the same foods, more or less, every day. I like returning to places I’ve visited before. Other people thrive on doing new things. For familiarity lovers, a habit becomes easier as it becomes familiar. When I felt intimidated by the library when I started law school, I made myself walk through it a few times each day until I felt comfortable enough to work there. When I started blogging, my unfamiliarity with the mechanics of posting made me dread it. But I forced myself to post every day so that the foreign became familiar, and the difficult became automatic. Novelty lovers may embrace habits more readily when they seem less … habit-like. A guy told me, “I feel stale when I go to work every day and see the same faces all the time, so once a week I work in a different satellite office, to shake thing up.” In

There’s nothing quite as compelling as a really good romance, is there? We’re all familiar with the storyline. The dashing hero fights to rescue the lovely princess from evil. She falls head over heels in love with him. He proposes. Then they ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after. Have you ever wondered why so many stories follow this basic plot? Or why participating in a real-life version is the dream of so many women? It’s not because Hollywood came up with such a fantastic script, or because movie stars make romance so attractive. No. It’s because God wanted people to know and participate in the greatest love story of all time—the amazing, pursuing love of Christ for undeserving sinners.

Rakesh Roshan Rakesh Roshan is a producer, director, and actor in Bollywood films. A member of the successful Roshan film family, Mr. Roshan opened his own production company in 1982 and has been producing Hindi movies ever since. His film Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai won nine Filmfare awards, including those for best movie and best director. When I remember Diana and her activities in the last years of her life, I strongly feel that God sends some special people into this world to perform some special duties. Diana was one of these special people. Advancing on this godly path of love and goodness, Diana was blossoming like a flower, and with her captivating fragrance she started infusing new life in our dangerously sick garden--which was apparently at the brink of a precipice. The irony is that the cruel winds of autumn ruthlessly blew away this rare flower and deprived the world of its soothing fragrance. Diana, Princess of Wales, is no longer present in this world, but Diana, the queen of millions of hearts, is immortal and will live forever. My heart breaks when I think of her last journey, her funeral, which was brilliantly covered all over the world. One could see the whole of England in tears, and the eyes of all the television viewers were also flooded. Thousands of men, women, and children had lined up along the entire route from the palace to the church where the services were held. All the fresh flowers available in the United Kingdom were there on the passage. All eyes were tearful, and one could clearly hear the sobs of people. There were heartrending scenes of people paying tribute to their departed darling. Last, I would like to write here a translation in English of a poem written in Urdu. We hope you will come back…dear friend But why this pervading sadness…dear friend The familiar flavor in the atmosphere is singing… You are somewhere around…dear friend Please come back, Diana; this sinking world desperately needs a savior.

The minute he arrived at his own parents' house and was confronted by the smallness of the rooms, the old walls covered with dusty calendars, and passepartout pictures of animals, the electrical wires snaking and dangling loosely from the ceiling, the buzzing fluorescent lamp that never lit properly, transforming the house into a gloomy, dusty cubicle, he wanted to return to the city. He could not properly splice in movie landscapes here, because everything was too familiar, and because he was too connected with the droning quarrels.

Do you fancy catching a movie at the Sturbridge Theater tonight? That new Robert Pattinson movie is showing,” I ask her, the phone cradled against my chest. “Definitely sign me up for that!” Ari replies, chuckling as I mock scowl. Her easy laugh warms my soul. “We’re in,” I tell Gil, arranging to meet him and his date in the diner later. “So, who is it this time?” Ari asks, resting her chin in her hands. “Anyone we know?” Considering I can count the girls on one hand who have enjoyed more than one date with Gil, I doubt it’ll be someone familiar. “I didn’t ask; guess we’ll find out soon enough.” “Five bucks says it’s a blonde,” Ari quips. “That’s one bet I’m not taking,” I admit, twirling a lock of her hair around my finger. “Gil’s penchant for blondes is world-renowned.

I looked at the actors with whom I’d grown so familiar over the last few months: Scott Holmes (who was playing Mike—and who was eventually credited as “Mike Holmes” because Tommy forgot his real name),

It’s funny how reassuring that was, to see him doing something so simple and familiar. I mean, I knew this man. I knew him inside and out. I knew his every facial expression, knew what his heartbeat sounded like under my ear. I knew how he played, and I knew how he lounged. Recalling the small pieces of the Trip that I knew brought me a bit of nostalgic comfort while dealing with the body of this famous movie star lying next to me.

Every now and then we find ourselves living through moments that make no sense at all. It’s almost as if some omnipotent film editor has snipped us out of our familiar everyday movie and spliced us into something completely random, from a different time and genre and even from a foreign country and partially animated, because suddenly you look around you and the language is unknown and nothing that happens has any relationship to what you think of as reality. This

The first time Halley set eyes on Howard was at a showing of The Towering Inferno. When she heard about him, her sister had wondered aloud how much of a future you could have with someone you’d met at a disaster movie. But at that point Halley wasn’t feeling picky. She had been in Dublin just over three weeks – not so long that she didn’t still get lost all the time on the infuriating streets that kept changing their names, but enough to disabuse her of most of her illusions about the place; enough too, with the deposit and first month’s rent for her new apartment, to separate her from most of the money she’d brought, and cut the time available for soul-searching and self-finding quite drastically. That afternoon she’d spent in an Internet café, reluctantly updating her résumé; she hadn’t had a conversation since the night before, a stilted exchange with the Chinese pizza delivery boy about his native Yunan province. When she spotted the poster for The Towering Inferno, which she and Zephyr must have watched twenty times together, it was like catching sight of an old friend. She went in and for three hours warmed herself in the familiar blaze of collapsing architecture and suffocating hotel guests; she stayed in her seat until the ushers started sweeping round her feet.

He grimaced when he saw the familiar face of one of the zombies in the movie chewing on the sheriff’s neck,

Soon after joining the agency, Marks set out to lessen the danger. His first step was to get rid of the codes that the agency had been using to communicate with its people in the field. They had come from MI6, which, for the first two years of SOE’s existence, had controlled its wireless circuits and provided its sets and coding. Marks was dismayed by the simplicity of the codes, which were based on classic English poems by Shakespeare and others that were “so familiar that an educated German was quite capable of recognizing them and guessing the cipher.” To replace them, he wrote poems of his own, ranging from ribald verses to tender love poems. He gave one of the latter, entitled “The Life That I Have,” to a twenty-one-year-old agent named Violette Szabo, who, after being parachuted into France in 1942, was eventually captured, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo. It read: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours. The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours. Since then, the poem has developed a life of its own. It has been used in a movie about Szabo’s life, found in poetry anthologies, reprinted on a 9/11 victims’ website, and recited by Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky at their wedding in 2010. “Every code,” Marks would later say, “has a human face.

Hannah wanted to take things slowly and not to rush into a relationship again. She wanted to restore the trust between them. Ryan understood. And deep down, he couldn’t deny he felt a little relieved. * * * They didn’t have sex. They didn’t kiss. They went on friendly dates. More often than not, they watched movies. They sat next to each other, their eyes glued to the TV screen, their bodies inches apart. It should have felt familiar, but it didn’t. A month ago, he would have taken her hand. A month ago, she would have put her head on his shoulder. Now there was something awkward in the air, something hard and broken. One evening, he tried, anyway. He took her hand. Her fingers were slim and dainty. Four minutes later, he let go and curled his hand by his thigh. He cleared his throat and said, “You want a drink?” “No,” Hannah said, her tone very neutral. “And you shouldn’t either.” His jaw tightened. He said nothing. They barely looked at each other for the rest of the evening. After she finally left, he grabbed a beer out of the fridge, threw himself on the couch and brought the bottle to his lips.

His heart rate quickened as he read aloud. “System uptime… 42 days, 42 hours, 42 minutes.” “There aren’t forty-two hours in a day,” he pondered. “There is no way that is a system glitch. The internal clock is controlled by the Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock in Boulder. This is an impossible error.” Forty-two echoed in his mind. It was a familiar number. As the reference came into focus, Thomas grinned. “The answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything is 42,” he quoted from the movie.

The smell of paper is comforting and the books absorb the sound of the traffic outside. I feel like I'm back in the school library, taking refuge from the popular girls who'd tease me about how pale and strange I was. Familiar friends sit on these shelves, many boasting new jackets in the latest styles. I say hello and silently apologise to the few that are now wearing movie poster covers. No book deserves that.

While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person. In previous epochs of our own culture, or in China and India, the man most highly valued was the person with outstanding spiritual qualities. Even the teacher was not only, or even primarily, a source of information, but his function was to convey certain human attitudes. In contemporary capitalistic society -and the same holds true for Russian Communism- the men suggested for admiration and emulation are everything but bearers of significant spiritual qualities. Those are essentially in the public eye who give the average man a sense of vicarious satisfaction. Movie stars, radio entertainers, columnists, important business or government figures -these are the models for emulation. Their main qualification for this function is often that they have succeeded in making the news. Yet, the situation does not seem to be altogether hopeless. If one considers the fact that a man like Albert Schweitzer could become famous in the United States, if one visualizes the many possibilities to make our youth familiar with living and historical personalities who show what human beings can achieve as human beings, and not as entertainers (in the broad sense of the word), if one thinks of the great works of literature and art of all ages, there seems to be a chance of creating a vision of good human functioning, and hence of sensitivity to malfunctioning. If we should not succeed in keeping alive a vision of mature life, then indeed we are confronted with the probability that our whole cultural tradition will break down. This tradition is not primarily based on the transmission of certain kinds of knowledge, but of certain kinds of human traits. If the coming generations will not see these traits any more, a five-thousand-year-old culture will break down, even if its knowledge is transmitted and further developed.

think of the impact young people can have. Especially these days, too; look at Greta Thunberg.” She pauses and I nod slowly. “You’re familiar with Greta Thunberg?” “Sure,” I say. “She’s the director of the Barbie movie.

The locations’ familiar white-tiled neutrality was like the blank slate of a movie screen, a backdrop against which all sorts of urban encounters might happen.

Fred Claus, a movie that came out a few years ago, is the story of Santa’s long-lost brother. Fred is in trouble and needs financial help, so he calls his brother Nick at the North Pole. Nick says, “Well, I’ll give you the help you need if you’ll come and work with me this Christmas.” Fred, who is desperate, agrees. Santa puts him to work at a specific task: determining whether children have been naughty or nice. We’re familiar with the routine, right? The naughty children don’t receive

I call them “the movies.” Never indefinite — “I’m going to a movie” — but instead, a stipulated and familiar certainty: the movies. I do it, perhaps, as a nod to my childhood; to preserve my capacity for dupable wonder. Or possibly, to modify with the slightest article shift, the casual nature of going to a Cineplex, buying my ticket, a soda, some snacks maybe, riding the escalator, and invariably forgetting what theater I’m looking for — was it 9 or 6? I choose to observe these steps as more than just a series of small, unremarkable transactions.

I have it under pretty good authority that Peter Jackson is familiar with this book, and is currently preparing not one, not two, not three, not four, but over a hundred separate movies based on the characters in the Silmarillion

Because of the picture's constant theatrical circulation all during the forties, two presentations on the Lux Radio Theatre, and finally as a staple of early television, the tale was familiar to almost two generations of moviegoers. Hart's task was to preserve the potent appeal of this Hollywood myth while making it viable for a modern-day audience. The problem was complicated by the necessity of rewriting the part of Esther/Vicki to suit Judy Garland. The original film had walked a delicate dramatic path in interweaving the lives and careers of Vicki and Norman Maine. In emphasizing the "star power" of Lester/Garland, more screen time would have to be devoted to her, thus altering the careful balance of the original. Hart later recalled: "It was a difficult story to do because the original was so famous and when you tamper with the original, you're inviting all sorts of unfavorable criticism. It had to be changed because I had to say new things about Hollywood-which is quite a feat in itself as the subject has been worn pretty thin. The attitude of the original was more naive because it was made in the days when there was a more wide-eyed feeling about the movies ... (and) the emphasis had to be shifted to the woman, rather than the original emphasis on the Fredric March character. Add to that the necessity of making this a musical drama, and you'll understand the immediate problems." To make sure that his retelling accurately reflected the Garland persona, Hart had a series of informal conversations with her and Luft regarding experiences of hers that he might be able to incorporate into the script. Luft recalls: "We were having dinner with Moss and Kitty [Carlisle], and Judy was throwing ideas at Moss, cautiously, and so was I. I remember Judy telling the story of when she was a kid, she was on tour with a band and they were in Kansas City at the Mulebach Hotel-all the singers and performers stayed there. And I think her mother ran into a big producer who was traveling through and she invited him to come and see the act, and supposedly afterward he was very interested in Judy's career. Nothing happened, though. Judy thought it would be a kind of a cute idea to lay onto Moss-that maybe it might be something he could use in his writing.

FAVOR FAMILIARITY. You might think that people love to hear and talk about things that are new and unfamiliar. In fact, people love to talk about the movie they have already seen, the game they already watched.

Children in our culture are familiar with transformation of identity from comics, movies, television, and books. Who has not watched a child zooming around on the sidewalk or in the backyard, pretending to be a superhero or some other figure? Who can doubt the child's intensity of imaginative involvement in this transformation? I think it is reasonable to say that the normal child partly believes in this transformation on a transient basis. It is not necessary to wonder where the MPD child gets the idea of creating someone else inside to cope with the abuse. The strategy of transformation of identity to gain strength, coping power, even and vulnerability is readily available in the child's environment.

An occupation numbs a city’s vitality, the vitality that makes urban life attractive. Soon the citizen begins to feel alienated, disconnected from a familiar environment; though he is still physically engaged with the city, his emotional attachment to it weakens. Previously confident of his urban sophistication, which had allowed him to navigate a complex environment, he becomes tentative, anxious, angry, and impatient as he wonders how long before “his” city returns to him. One of the ironies is that an occupied city brings its citizens closer together physically—in lines, in movie houses, in cafés for warmth, in smaller living spaces, in crowded buses and trains—but separates them emotionally and sentimentally.

Try to imagine or recall each of the following items: SIGHT Visualize the largest drinking glass in your kitchen cupboard. Recall the interior of the last car you rode in. See your favorite flower in bloom. Visualize the spots on a leopard. Which of your friends wears the brightest-colored clothes? See your favorite actor on a movie screen wearing a very revealing bathing suit. SOUND Hear a dog barking in the distance. Hear a car alarm right outside your door. Recall the voice of your favorite grade-school teacher. Listen to a familiar melody.

Similarity. Analogy is one of the most powerful creative tools. We’ll dig deeper into the power of analogy in the next chapter. Here, consider parallel contexts at one end of the dial and completely unrelated ones at the other. To think of good analogies to try, start with the intended outcome. Want to make ice cream faster? “Who or what is built for speed?” Want to delight your customers? “Who or what delights people?” The brain solves new problems in this way, using its understanding of a familiar topic to grapple with one that appears very different on the surface. You might apply the lessons of high school football to your first job managing a team, or transplant one of Napoleon’s battlefield strategies to a product launch. Consciously or unconsciously, we distill principles from observations and then see where else they might fit. How might we make ice cream like a therapy session? How might an Olympic sprinter serve up an ice cream cone? How might Apple design a container for ice cream sprinkles? How might eating ice cream feel like a roller coaster? Like a magic show? Like a horror movie? HMW questions can be silly or serious.

Yes, I'm familiar with the bookcases in your bedroom. I don't remember seeing any pornography." Feather just stares for a moment. "That's because I don't read pornography...unless Twilight counts." "Which it does. In the sense that it appeals to—" "I get it. Do you think that Pattinson guy is cute?" Jessica stares. "What?" "Twilight you've seen? But not Ginger Snaps. You are such an idiot. And the answer is no. But Kristin Stewart is pretty hot in a movie about Lizzie Borden that I know you've never seen if you missed Ginger.

The General furrowed his brow just a bit to show his concern and understanding. As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances, and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist’s office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them. We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe.

In a well-wrought Hollywood film, what can seem like an effortless shift in the narrative point of view from third to first person, signified by an apparently familiar form of camera movement, may in fact involve far more sophisticated cinematic technique than an uncritical viewer is at first able to appreciate. After the shift is accomplished, the viewer, if asked, may say that the point of view from which he sees the world of the movie perfectly coincides with that of the first-person point of view of a female character in the movie onto that same world. But careful examination will reveal that the viewer's ability to follow the visual narration depends on a form of understanding of what he sees that is considerably more logically sophisticated that he takes it to be. For the viewer actually understands that he sees what happens in that fictional world from a point of view that somehow succeeds in folding her first-person point of view (through whose perceptual consciousness the world of the movie is disclosed to him) into a further first-person perspective (namely his - the viewer's). The manner in which the one is enfolded in the other needs to permit the viewer's point of view fully to subtend her perceptual first-person present point of view onto the world of the movie without his thereby coinciding with hers. The two forms of subjectivity (that of the viewer and that of the character) must manage to be perfectly aligned along one logical dimension, while along another remaining perfectly distinct. An ordinary viewer of an ordinary (so-called) point-of-view shot in a Hollywood movie achieves a remarkably logically complex form of point of view onto the world of the movie - one that requires its own cinematically specific mode of logical alienation.

As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist’s office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them. We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe. Although the Congressman was joking, we probably did know white people better than they knew themselves, and we certainly knew white people better than they ever knew us.

Miss Knight.” She paused, her hand on the doorknob. She didn’t turn to face him, merely waited for him to say whatever was left to say. “I would prefer someone older. Someone less like you.” Now what the hell did that mean? Someone less like her? “You know,” he said lamely when she turned to face him quizzically. To his credit he looked as confused as she felt. “Nope. Don’t have a clue.” Her voice was so icy that her words practically froze as they left her lips. “Someone with more experience. With less personality.” “What?” “You talk too much,” he said pointedly. “Your attitude is too familiar and too sarcastic.” She opened her mouth to say something, and he held up a finger to stop her. “And that was before everything that happened in Tokyo. You’re completely irreverent and have a bizarre sense of humor. I also have no wish to hear about reality television shows, pop music, manicures, Brangelina, Star Trek, or anything that’s trending on Twitter—not even secondhand through whispered telephone conversations when my assistant thinks I’m not paying attention.” Well, he’d certainly been a lot more attentive during those half hours in the mornings than she’d given him credit for. But one thing struck her as odd. “Star Trek?” she repeated. She loved the new movies but hardly ever publicly discussed them. “You’re constantly talking about how sick you are of the Cardassians,” he elaborated uncomfortably. Her eyes widened and she stifled a laugh. “Different kind of Kardashian,” she corrected. It would be hopeless to explain it to a man who clearly had no interest in pop culture—even while every model or actress he was publicly photographed with inserted him into the very scene he was so scornful of. Quite frankly, she was impressed that he even knew about the Cardassians in Star Trek, which attested to a level of geekdom that she would never have suspected of him. “So you’re looking for the anti-me?” “It shouldn’t be so hard to find the complete opposite of you. You are quite . . .” His brow lowered as he tried to find the correct word. “Singular.” “Thank you,” she said, ridiculously flattered until a closer glance at his straight face told her that it hadn’t been a compliment. Her fledgling smile died, and she once again—as she often did in his presence—fought the urge to roll her eyes. “Okay, so you’re looking for an old, boring, and competent assistant,” she itemized, and his lips thinned but he said nothing. “I’ll get on that right away, sir.

There is a scene in the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. At the beginning, in the woods, Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, illustrates this phenomenon. He thinks the outlaw Jesse James is a great man. He thinks that he, himself, is a great man, too. He wants someone to recognize that in him. He wants someone to give him an opportunity—a project through which he can prove his worth. It just happens that Frank James would size the delusional, awkward boy up in the woods outside Blue Cut, Missouri: “You don’t have the ingredients, son.” In contrast, Mr. A is ambitious, but it’s paired with self-confidence, social adeptness, and a clear sense of what Thiel wanted. Even so, the prospect of meeting with Thiel is intimidating: his stomach churning, every nerve and synapse alive and flowing. He’s twenty-six years old. He’s sitting down for a one-on-one evening with a man worth, by 2011, some $ 1.5 billion and who owns a significant chunk of the biggest social network in the world, on whose board of directors he also sits. Even if Thiel were just an ordinary investor, dinner with him would make anyone nervous. One quickly finds that he is a man notoriously averse to small talk, or what a friend once deemed “casual bar talk.” Even the most perfunctory comment to Thiel can elicit long, deep pauses of consideration in response—so long you wonder if you’ve said something monumentally stupid. The tiny assumptions that grease the wheels of conversation find no quarter with Thiel. There is no chatting with Peter about the weather or about politics in general. It’s got to be, “I’ve been studying opening moves in chess, and I think king’s pawn might be the best one.” Or, “What do you think of the bubble in higher education?” And then you have to be prepared to talk about it at the expert level for hours on end. You can’t talk about television or music or pop culture because the person you’re sitting across from doesn’t care about these things and he couldn’t pretend to be familiar with them if he wanted to.

These were the horror stories I’d heard from job candidates coming from other companies. I interviewed veterans who’d worked for eight years in top studios and never shipped a game because of cancellations and changes from marketing. Some publishers didn’t allow their developers to play games, even after-hours (this was especially strange to us, since Blizzard encouraged this, stocking its hallway game cabinets with free copies of games for people to check out on a first-come, first-served basis). Yet some studios considered familiarity with other games bad for morale and prevented their employees from hanging posters from other projects or properties (including movies) because they didn’t reinforce “team spirit.” Many studios were highly structured, politically driven machines where argument was frowned upon and decisions were made by a small number of people. But the most common flaw in the industry at the time was its shortsighted nature—treating employees as temporary or easily replaced assets. Dev teams were often rebooted between projects, wiped before they ever established a rhythm or voice of their own. It was no wonder Blizzard retained its employees longer than other companies.