Music License Quotes

A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio--he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on--your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone.

I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I’m in favor of the music industry … standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, …we’re not about a coherent set of national ideals, we’re not about wisdom. We’re about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else…. We’re about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes. …We’re about persuading ten-year-old children to spend twenty-five dollars on a cool little silicone iPod case that costs a licensed Apple Computer subsidiary thirty-nine cents to manufacture.

When we are in front of an abstract painting, we have the license to interpret in any way we want. Or music—music is a medium that we might not understand, but that we feel and enjoy. But in the case of cinema many expect to receive a clear and unified message, but what I’m suggesting is that a film could be experienced as a poem, a painting, or a piece of music.

The most dangerous thing of all, and something he wanted to warn me about above all else, the one thing that had consigned whole regiments of unfortunate young people to the twilight world of insanity, was reading books. This objectionable practice had increased among the younger generation, and Dad was more pleased than the could say to not that I had not yet displayed any such tendencies. Lunatic asylums were overflowing with folk who'd been reading too much. Once upon a time they'd been just like you and me, physically strong, straightforward, cheerful, and well balanced. Then they'd started reading. Most often by chance. A bout of flu perhaps, with a few days in bed. An attractive book cover that had aroused some curiosity. And suddenly the bad habit had taken hold. The first book had led to another. Then another, and another, all links in a chain that led straight down into the eternal night of mental illness. It was impossible to stop. It was worse than drugs. It might just be possible, if you were very careful, to look at the occasional book that could teach you something, such as encyclopedias or repair manuals. The most dangerous kind of book was fiction-- that's where all the brooding was sparked and encouraged. Damnit all! Addictive and risky products like that should only be available in state-regulated monopoly stores, rationed and sold only to those with a license, and mature in age.

It’s still unmessed-with country. You like to think it goes on forever, but the colonisers are coming. The suits and tenderfeet. You can hear the blue-eyed-soul music over the ridgeline. There’s already a half dozen well-funded projects for designing software to crawl the Deep Web –” “Is that,” Maxine wonders, “like, ‘Ride the Wild Surf’?” “Except summer will end all too soon, once they get down here, everything’ll be suburbanised faster than you can say ‘late capitalism.’ Then it’ll be just like up there in the shallows. Link by link, they’ll bring it all under control, safe and respectable. Churches on every corner. Licenses in all the saloons. Anybody still wants his freedom’ll have to saddle up and head somewhere else.

Halt glared at his friend as the whistling continued. 'I had hoped that your new sense of responsibly would put an end to that painful shrieking noise you make between your lips' he said. Crowley smiled. It was a beautiful day and he was feeling at peace with the world. And that meant he was more than ready to tease Halt 'It's a jaunty song' 'What's jaunty about it?' Halt asked, grim faced. Crowley made an uncertain gesture as he sought for an answer to that question. 'I suppose it's the subject matter' he said eventually. 'It's a very cheerful song. Would you like me to sing it for you?' 'N-' Halt began but he was too late, as Crowley began to sing. He had a pleasant tenor voice, in fact, and his rendering of the song was quite good. But to Halt it was as attractive as a rusty barn door squeaking. 'A blacksmith from Palladio, he met a lovely lady-o' 'Whoa! Whoa!' Halt said 'He met a lovely lady-o?' Halt repeated sarcastically 'What in the name of all that's holy is a lady-o?' 'It's a lady' Crowley told him patiently. 'Then why not sing 'he met a lovely lady'?' Halt wanted to know. Crowley frowned as if the answer was blatantly obvious. "Because he's from Palladio, as the song says. It's a city on the continent, in the southern part of Toscana.' 'And people there have lady-o's, instead of ladies?' Asked Halt 'No. They have ladies, like everyone else. But 'lady' doesn't rhyme with Palladio, does it? I could hardly sing, 'A blacksmith from Palladio, he met his lovely lady', could I?' 'It would make more sense if you did' Halt insisted 'But it wouldn't rhyme' Crowley told him. 'Would that be so bad?' 'Yes! A song has to rhyme or it isn't a proper song. It has to be lady-o. It's called poetic license.' 'It's poetic license to make up a word that doesn't exist and which, by the way, sound extremely silly?' Halt asked. Crowley shook his head 'No. It's poetic license to make sure that the two lines rhyme with each other' Halt thought for a few seconds, his eyes knitted close together. Then inspiration struck him. 'Well then couldn't you sing 'A blacksmith from Palladio, he met a lovely lady, so...'?' 'So what?' Crowley challenged Halt made and uncertain gesture with his hands as he sought more inspiration. Then he replied. 'He met a lovely lady, so...he asked her for her hand and gave her a leg of lamb.' 'A leg of lamb? Why would she want a leg of lamb?' Crowley demanded Halt shrugged 'Maybe she was hungry

It was becoming more and more evident that Salem was a town that celebrated individuality, a real live-and-let-live kind of place. Melody felt a gut punch of regret. Her old nose would have fit in here. "Look!" She pointed at the multicolored car whizzing by. Its black door were from a Mercedes coupe, the white hood from a BMW; the silver trunk was Jaguar, the red convertible top was Lexus, the whitewall tires were Bentley, the sound system was Bose, and the music was classical. A hood ornament from each model dangled from the rear view mirror. Its license plate appropriately read MUTT. "That car looks like a moving Benton ad." "Or a pileup on Rodeo drive." Candace snapped a picture with her iPhone and e-mailed to her friends back home. They responded instantly with a shot of what they were doing. It must have involved the mall because Candace picked up her pace and began asking anyone under the age of fifty where the cool people hung out.

The argument that “people now have more freedom than ever” is based on the fact that we are allowed to do almost anything we please as long as it has no practical consequences. See ISAIF, §72. Where our actions have practical consequences that may be of concern to the system (and few important practical consequences are not of concern to the system), our behavior, generally speaking, is closely regulated. Examples: We can believe in any religion we like, have sex with any consenting adult partner, take a plane to China or Timbuktu, have the shape of our nose changed, choose any from a huge variety of books, movies, musical recordings, etc., etc., etc. But these choices normally have no important practical consequences. Moreover, they do not require any serious effort on our part. We don’t change the shape of our own nose, we pay a surgeon to do it for us. We don’t go to China or Timbuktu under our own power, we pay someone to fly us there. On the other hand, within our own home city we can’t go from point A to point B without our movement being controlled by traffic regulations, we can’t buy a firearm without undergoing a background check, we can’t change jobs without having our background scrutinized by prospective employers, most people’s jobs require them to work according to rules, procedures, and schedules prescribed by their employers, we can’t start a business without getting licenses and permits, observing numerous regulations, and so forth.

From here he went on to play chamber music, write songs with Burt Bacharach, do country records, cover records, soul records, ballet and orchestral music. When you are writing songs with Burt Bacharach, you obviously don’t give a fuck what people think. Elvis blows through all kinds of genres like they are not even there. “Pump It Up” is what gives him a license to do all these things.

Bill Prady: By the way, I have a friend named Howard Wolowitz. When I was in the computer business, Howie was my partner. He’s in his seventies now, living in Connecticut, and nothing like Wolowitz; I just liked his name because there was this musicality to it. I asked him at one point if that was okay if we used his name and he thought it was fun and wouldn’t really affect his life much. Of course, he then spent years putting down a credit card or a driver’s license and people going, “Really? No, really, that’s your name?” [Laughs] Howie and Simon got to meet, actually, and he was also an extra in an episode.

Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

I have again been asked to explain how one can "become a Daoists..." with all of the sad things happening in our world today, Laozi and Zhuangzi give words of advice, tho not necessarily to become a Daoist priest or priestess... " So many foreigners who want to become “Religious Daoists” 道教的道师 （道士） do not realize that they must not only receive a transmission of a Lu 籙 register which identifies their Daoist school, and learn as well how to sing the ritual melodies, play the flute, stringed instruments, drums, and sacred dance steps, required to be an ordained and functioning Daoist priest or priestess. This process usually takes 10 years or more of daily discipleship and practice, to accomplish. There are 86 schools and genre of Daoist rituals listed in the Baiyun Guan Gazeteer, 白雲觀志, which was edited by Oyanagi Sensei, in Tokyo, 1928, and again in 1934, and re-published by Baiyun Guan in Beijing, available in their book shop to purchase. Some of the schools, such as the Quanzhen Longmen 全真龙门orders, allow their rituals and Lu registers to be learned by a number of worthy disciples or monks; others, such as the Zhengyi, Qingwei, Pole Star, and Shangqing 正一，清微，北极，上请 registers may only be taught in their fullness to one son and/or one disciple, each generation. Each of the schools also have an identifying poem, from 20 or 40 character in length, or in the case of monastic orders (who pass on the registers to many disciples), longer poems up to 100 characters, which identify the generation of transmission from master to disciple. The Daoist who receives a Lu register (給籙元科, pronounced "Ji Lu Yuanke"), must use the character from the poem given to him by his or her master, when composing biao 表 memorials, shuwen 梳文 rescripts, and other documents, sent to the spirits of the 3 realms (heaven, earth, water /underworld). The rituals and documents are ineffective unless the correct characters and talismanic signature are used. The registers are not given to those who simply practice martial artists, Chinese medicine, and especially never shown to scholars. The punishment for revealing them to the unworthy is quite severe, for those who take payment for Lu transmission, or teaching how to perform the Jinlu Jiao and Huanglu Zhai 金籙醮，黃籙齋 科儀 keyi rituals, music, drum, sacred dance steps. Tang dynasty Tangwen 唐文 pronunciation must also be used when addressing the highest Daoist spirits, i.e., the 3 Pure Ones and 5 Emperors 三请五帝. In order to learn the rituals and receive a Lu transmission, it requires at least 10 years of daily practice with a master, by taking part in the Jiao and Zhai rituals, as an acolyte, cantor, or procession leader. Note that a proper use of Daoist ritual also includes learning Inner Alchemy, ie inner contemplative Daoist meditation, the visualization of spirits, where to implant them in the body, and how to summon them forth during ritual. The woman Daoist master Wei Huacun’s Huangting Neijing, 黃庭內經 to learn the esoteric names of the internalized Daoist spirits. Readers must be warned never to go to Longhu Shan, where a huge sum is charged to foreigners ($5000 to $9000) to receive a falsified document, called a "license" to be a Daoist! The first steps to true Daoist practice, Daoist Master Zhuang insisted to his disciples, is to read and follow the Laozi Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi Neipian, on a daily basis. Laozi Ch 66, "the ocean is the greatest of all creatures because it is the lowest", and Ch 67, "my 3 most precious things: compassion for all, frugal living for myself, respect all others and never put anyone down" are the basis for all Daoist practice. The words of Zhuangzi, Ch 7, are also deeply meaningful: "Yin and Yang were 2 little children who loved to play inside Hundun (ie Taiji, gestating Dao). They felt sorry because Hundun did not have eyes, or eats, or other senses. So everyday they drilled one hole, ie 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, one mouth; and on the 7th day, Hundun died.

This is why it would be nice to hear more about principles and less about ruffled feelings. What thoughtful person has not felt the hurt expressed by the Jews over some performances of The Merchant of Venice? A whole anthology of black writing exists in the United States, protesting with quite unfeigned horror about the teaching of Huckleberry Finn in the schools, for the good and sufficient reason that the book employs the word ‘nigger’ as natural. A mature and sensitive response to such tenderness of feeling and consciousness of historic wrong would run much like this, and could be uttered by a person of any race or religion ... We know why you feel as you do, but – too bad. Your thinness of skin, however intelligible, will not be healed by the amputation of the literary and theatrical and musical canon. You just have to live with Shakespeare and Dickens and Twain and Wagner, mainly because they are artistically integral but also, as it happens, because they represent certain truths about human nature. Think for a second. Would prejudice diminish with the banning of Shylock? Concern for the emotions of others cannot license a category mistake on this scale.

It was in Oklahoma, within a month of her arrival, that they established the Fuck Yorick School of Forensics. This was not just a principle of necessary levity but the name of their bowling team. Wherever she worked, first in Oklahoma, then in Arizona, her cohorts ended the evenings with beer in one hand, a cheese taco in the other, cheering or insulting teams and scuffing along the edges of the bowling alleys in their shoes from the planet Andromeda. She had loved the Southwest, missed being one of the boys, and was now light-years beyond the character she had been in London. They would go through a heavy day’s work load, then drive to the wild suburban bars and clubs on the outskirts of Tulsa or Norman, with Sam Cooke in their hearts. In the greenroom a list was tacked up of every bowling alley in Oklahoma with a liquor license. They ignored job offers that came from dry counties. They snuffed out death with music and craziness. The warnings of carpe diem were on gurneys in the hall. They heard the rhetoric of death over the intercom; ‘vaporization’ or ‘microfragmentation’ meant the customer in question had been blown to bits. They couldn’t miss death, it was in every texture and cell around them. No one changed the radio dial in a morgue without a glove on.

The music still came from the house. It was past midnight. What kind of old lady plays rock music after midnight? One who still plays old vinyl records. One who keeps a weird tombstone in her wooded backyard. One who has strange visitors in a black car with a license plate number engraved on that same weird tombstone. One who told a teenage boy that his dead father was still alive. “What’s this?” Ema asked. I snapped back to the present. “What?” “Behind here.” She was pointing to the back of the tombstone. “There’s something carved into the back.” I walked over slowly, but I knew. I just knew. And when I reached the back of the tombstone and shined the light on it, I was barely surprised. A butterfly with animal eyes on its wings. Ema gasped. The music in the house stopped. Just like that. Like someone had flicked the off switch the moment my eyes found that dang symbol. Ema looked up at my face and saw something troubling. “Mickey?” Nope, there was no surprise. Not anymore. There was rage now. I wanted answers. I was going to get them, no matter what. I wasn’t going to wait for Mr. Shaved Head with the British accent to contact me. I wasn’t going to wait for Bat Lady to fly down and leave me another cryptic clue. Heck, I wasn’t even going to wait until tomorrow. I was going to find out now. “Mickey?

The heart of rock will always remain a primal world of action. The music revives itself over and over again in that form, primitive rockabilly, punk, hard soul and early rap. Integrating the world of thought and reflection with the world of primitive action is *not* a necessary skill for making great rock 'n' roll. Many of the music's most glorious moments feel as though they were birthed in an explosion of raw talent and creative instinct (some of them even were!). But ... if you want to burn bright, hard *and* long, you will need to depend on more than your initial instincts. You will need to develop some craft and a creative intelligence that will lead you *farther* when things get dicey. That's what'll help you make crucial sense and powerful music as time passes, giving you the skills that may also keep you alive, creatively and physically. The failure of so many of rock's artists to outlive their expiration date of a few years, make more than a few great albums and avoid treading water, or worse, I felt was due to the misfit nature of those drawn to the profession. These were strong, addictive personalities, fired by compulsion, narcissism, license, passion and an inbred entitlement, all slammed over a world of fear, hunger and insecurity. That's a Molotov cocktail of confusion that can leave you unable to make, or resistant to making, the lead of consciousness a life in the field demands. After first contact knocks you on your ass, you'd better have a plan, for some preparedness and personal development will be required if you expect to hang around any longer than your fifteen minutes. Now, some guys' five minutes are worth other guys' fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there *is* something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and *here*. I'll take Dylan; the pirate raiding party of the Stones; the hope-I-get-very-old-before-I-die, present live power of the Who; a fat, still-mesmerizing-until-his-death Brando—they all suit me over the alternative. I would've liked to have seen that last Michael Jackson show, a seventy-year-old Elvis reinventing and relishing in his talents, where Jimi Hendrix might've next taken the electric guitar, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and all the others whose untimely deaths and lost talents stole something from the music I love, living on, enjoying the blessings of their gifts and their audience's regard. Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways. Plus, to those you've received so much from, so much joy, knowledge and inspiration, you wish life, happiness and peace. These aren't easy to come by.

Daoist Ordination – Receiving a valid “Lu” 收录 Register Since returning to the US, and living in Los Angeles, many (ie, truly many) people have come to visit my office and library, asking about Daoist "Lu" 录registers, and whether or not they can be purchased from self declared “Daoist Masters” in the United States. The Daoist Lu register and ordination ritual can only be transmitted in Chinese, after 10+ years of study with a master, learning how to chant Zhengyi or Quanzhen music and liturgy, including the Daoist drum, flute, stringed instruments, and mudra, mantra, and visualization of spirits, where they are stored in the body, how they are summoned forth, for which one must be able to use Tang dynasty pronunciation of classical Chinese texts, ie “Tang wen” 唐文, to be effective and truly transmitted. Daoist meditation and ritual 金录醮，黄录斋 must all be a part of one's daily practice before going to Mt Longhu Shan and passing the test, which qualifies a person for one of the 9 grades of ordination (九品) the lowest of which is 9, highest is 1; grades 6 and above are never taught at Longhu Shan, only recognized in a "test", and awarded an appropriate grade ie rank, or title. Orthodox Longhu Shan Daoists may only pass on this knowledge to one offspring, and one chosen disciple, once in a lifetime, after which they must "pass on" (die) or be "wafted to heaven." Longmen Quanzhen Daoists, on the other hand, allow their knowledge to be transmitted and practiced, in classical Chinese, after living in a monastery and daily practice as a monk or nun. “Dao for $$$” low ranking Daoists at Longhu Shan accept money from foreign (mostly USA) commercial groups, and award illegitimate "licenses" for a large fee. Many (ie truly many) who have suffered from the huge price, and wrongful giving of "documents" have asked me this question, and shown me the documents they received. In all such cases, it is best to observe the warning of Confucius, "respect demonic spirits but keep a distance" 敬鬼神而遠之. One can study from holy nuns at Qingcheng shan, and Wudangshan, but it is best to keep safely away from “for profit” people who ask fees for going to Longhu Shan and receiving poorly translated English documents. It is a rule of Daoism, Laozi Ch 67, to respect all, with compassion, and never put oneself above others. The reason why so many Daoist and Buddhist masters do not come to the US is because of this commercial ie “for profit” instead of spiritual use, made from Daoist practices which must never be sold, or money taken for teaching / practicing, in which case true spiritual systems become ineffective. The ordination manual itself states the strict rule that the highly secret talisman, drawn with the tongue on the hard palate of the true Daoist, must never be drawn out in visible writing, or shown to anyone. Many of the phony Longhu Shan documents shown to me break this rule, and are therefore ineffective as well as law breaking. Respectfully submitted, 敬上 3-28-2015

I remember when I bought Dear Rose,. I was sixteen and ran upstairs and closed the door and listened to it on repeat for hours. It was the first album I listened to in my car when I got my license—I loved it—and everything ever since. Your music is sort of my soundtrack.” He puts down his knife and fork as our eyes lock. “Thank you.” The words hang in the air and the tension mounts. Awe that I’m sitting here with him washes over me in waves as I realize I’ve admitted too much. Afraid I sound like a stalker superfan, I close my eyes, breaking the connection. When I reopen them, he’s still staring at me.

Laugh with fake id's but i have permanent license of pain in eyes

music licensing is an arcane thicket of ambiguity, overlapping jurisdictions, and litigation. This

In the well reported Kubizek period from late 1904 through mid-1908, with its additiona data from the circumstances of failure at school, lung ailment, and tragic episode of his mother’s death, the picture remains the same. Hitler’s character is one of bold license for a youngster, but not directed toward dissolute behavior or activity that gives a hint of evil. Hitler devoured grand opera and classical music, painted, sketched, planned a great new Linz; he wrote sonnets, communed with nature, and exuded politeness and reserve. These are activities and qualities that suggest potential, although overblown, aspirations to artistic genius. What we see, like it or not, is morally laudable behavior and aspiration on the part of a young man in his teens. But is there a dark side somewhere in this picture? If there were a dark side, it probably would have been the light gray of the contempt that he had for many of his school teachers and his resistance to formal education. Hitler’s comments in Mein Kampf support such contempt and are buoyed by his indelible comment, about his tour of the customs office where his father worked, that the clerks and officials squatted about as monkeys in cages. -- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 101

Southern Literary Messenger, that old Village denizen Edgar Allan Poe had made a different kind of prophetic guess. As an attempt pre-emptively to render redundant most of the nonsense that would be written about Dylan and poetry, it has not been bettered. There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few. In speaking of song-writing, I mean, of course, the composition of brief poems with an eye to their adaptation for music in the vulgar sense. In this ultimate destination of the song proper, lies its essence — its genius. It is the strict reference to music — it is the dependence upon modulated expression — which gives to this branch of letters a character altogether unique, and separates it, in great measure and in a manner not sufficiently considered, from ordinary literature; rendering it independent of merely ordinary proprieties; allowing it, and in fact demanding for it, a wide latitude of Law; absolutely insisting upon a certain wild license and indefinitiveness — an indefinitiveness recognized by every musician who is not a mere fiddler, as an important point in the philosophy of his science — as the soul, indeed, of the sensations derivable from its practice — sensations which bewilder while they enthral — and which would not so enthral if they did not so bewilder.

He took a stool two away from Enid. She didn’t look up from her drink or glance his way. On the other side of him a guy wearing a porkpie hat was bouncing his head up and down as though to music but no music was playing and he wasn’t wearing earphones. A rainbow of rusted license plates took up most of the back wall—probably plates representing all fifty states, but Simon wasn’t really up for checking. There were neon signs for Miller High Life and Schlitz. An oddly ornate chandelier hung from the ceiling. This place, like the inn, was all dark wood, but that was the only similarity, like this was the poorest of poor cousins of the inn’s rich dark wood. “What’ll you have?” The barmaid’s hair was the color and texture of the hay on that hayride and done in a quasi mullet that reminded Simon of an ’80s hockey player. She was either a hard forty-five or a soft sixty-five, and there was little question she had seen it all at least twice. “What kind of beer do you have?” he asked. “We have Pabst. And Pabst.” “You choose for me.

What we gave mostly was wine. Especially after we made this legal(!) by acquiring that Master Wine Grower’s license in 1973. Most requests were made by women (not men) who had been drafted by their respective organizations to somehow get wine for an event. We made a specialty of giving them a warm welcome from the first call. All we wanted was the organization’s 501c3 number, and from which store they wanted to pick it up. We wanted to make that woman, and her friends, our customers. But we didn’t want credit in the program, as we knew the word would get out from that oh-so-grateful woman who had probably been turned down by six markets before she called us. Everybody wanted champagne. We firmly refused to donate it, because the federal excise tax on sparkling wine is so great compared with the tax on still wine. To relieve pressure on our managers, we finally centralized giving into the office. When I left Trader Joe’s, Pat St. John had set up a special Macintosh file just to handle the three hundred organizations to which we would donate in the course of a year. I charged all this to advertising. That’s what it was, and it was advertising of the most productive sort. Giving Space on Shopping Bags One of the most productive ways into the hearts of nonprofits was to print their programs on our shopping bags. Thus, each year, we printed the upcoming season for the Los Angeles Opera Co., or an upcoming exhibition at the Huntington Library, or the season for the San Diego Symphony, etc. Just printing this advertising material won us the support of all the members of the organization, and often made the season or the event a success. Our biggest problem was rationing the space on the shopping bags. All we wanted was camera-ready copy from the opera, symphony, museum, etc. This was a very effective way to build the core customers of Trader Joe’s. We even localized the bags, customizing them for the San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco market areas. Several years after I left, Trader Joe’s abandoned the practice because it was just too complicated to administer after they expanded into Arizona, Washington, etc., and they no longer had my wife, Alice, running interference with the music and arts groups. This left an opportunity for small retailers in local areas, and I strongly recommended it to them. In 1994, while running the troubled Petrini’s Markets in San Francisco, I tried the same thing, again with success, for the San Francisco Ballet and a couple of museums.

Here are many of the most common default signs sent by the Other Side: Birds and butterflies Deer Electrical events (often with cellphones) Coins appearing in our path Rainbows Pictures Slogans Billboards Magazines License plates Street signs Music/songs Feathers Ladybugs Numerical sequences There is a reason the Other Side uses these things as signs: They tend to be easier for us to recognize—and easier for them to manipulate and put in our path.

Dewey Finn (played by Jack Black), the main character in the movie School of Rock, is a nameless musician under false pretenses gets a job at an elementary school in place of a friend who is a licensed teacher. When he realizes how talented the students are, he tries to put them together into a rock band. The students, however, know nothing of rock music, and Dewey ends up teaching them the history of rock-and-roll during class instead of the usual curriculum.

These boozy and licentious variety halls thrived on the patronage of civil War soldiers on furlough, prompting moralists to persuade the city to require in 1862 that all theatrical and musical performing spaces be licensed and that the sale of liquor and employment of “waitresses” be banned wherever a curtain separated performers from customers. Entrepreneurs of leisure promptly dove through this loophole by inaugurating nightspots that featured a raised platform in the rear, a piano, and an open dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs.

Let’s call it the theory of receptivity. It’s the idea, often cited by young people in their case against the relevance of even marginally older people, that one’s taste—in music or film, literature or fine cuisine—petrifies during life’s peak of happiness or nadir of misery. Or maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe a subtler spike on the charts—upward, downward, anomalous points in between—might qualify, so long as it’s formative. Let’s say that receptivity, anyway, can be tied to the moments when, for whatever reason, a person opens herself to the things we can all agree make life worth living in a new and definitive way, whether curiosity has her chasing down the world’s pleasures, or the world has torn a strip from her, exposing raw surface area to the winds. During these moments—sleepaway camp right before your bar mitzvah; the year you were captain of the hockey team and the baseball team; the time after you got your license and before you totaled the Volvo—you are closely attuned to your culture, reaching out and in to consume it in vast quantities. When this period ends, your senses seal off what they have absorbed and build a sensibility that becomes, for better or worse, definitive: This is the stuff I like. These films/books/artists tell the story of who I am. There is no better-suited hairstyle. This is as good/bad as it gets for me. The theory suggests that we only get a couple of these moments in life, a couple of sound tracks, and that timing is paramount. If you came of age in the early eighties, for instance, you may hold a relatively shitty cultural moment to be the last time anything was any good simply because that was the last time you were open and engaged with what was happening around you, the last time you felt anything really—appallingly—deeply. I worry about this theory. I worry because it suggests that receptivity is tied closely to youth, and firsts, and also because as with many otherwise highly rejectable theories—Reaganomics and communism come to mind—there is that insolent nub of truth in it.

decade was over For Dummies books had been published in over 30 languages, from Albanian to Turkish. In the early years, many publishers questioned whether the series would work in their language market. The answer today is a global phenomenon. Our reach also expanded beyond books. In 1996 a license agreement with EMI brought Classical Music For Dummies enhanced CDs to market. Critically and commercially successful, the series initiated the For Dummies licensing program of products and services that has included software, consumer electronics, instructional DVDs, DIY home improvement kits, online support services, beginner musical instruments, and more. Today, as books themselves have reached beyond traditional print formats to digital platforms, For Dummies continues to expand, into e-books, enhanced e-books, and mobile applications. And again, this too is happening globally, as Wiley editors in Australia, Canada, Germany, the U.K., and U.S. work together to grow our print and electronic publishing program, which is further enhanced by contributions from licensee publishers in France, the Netherlands, Spain, and elsewhere. It is remarkable to think that one book

The games industry calls this “first-party content,” and it can be a serious investment. Over the years, Microsoft Xbox has taken this strategy to an extreme, buying a large number of studios and bringing them in-house. This isn’t a small outlay of cash—Microsoft now owns nearly a dozen video game studios, including Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, which they bought for $2.5 billion in 2014. It might seem expensive, but this is what’s needed to win in the video game console market. Sometimes, you just have to do it yourself. Reddit didn’t pursue this type of strategy, but it could have. There could have been a world where Reddit built many internal studios—one for their “cute” sub-Reddit community, another for sports, yet another for music—and hired full-time moderators as employees of those studios to create the necessary content. While this isn’t a common strategy for social networks, it’s also not crazy. In recent years, we’ve seen players like YouTube in video and Spotify in podcasts begin to license and create more first-party content to accelerate their services.

Anyone comparing photos of Glenn Frey and Don Henley in 1972 and, say, 1977 could track the price of the years of drugs and high living. Julia Phillips's drug addiction incinerated her Hollywood career. Martin Scorsese barely survived his own cocaine addiction in the mid-seventies. Since the days of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, Los Angeles had sold a vision of personal liberation. A decade later, liberation had curdled into license. The theme song for Los Angeles in the buoyant early 1970s could have been "Take It Easy" or "Rock Me on the Water." But by 1976, when the Eagles released Hotel California, the mood of lengthening shadows was more precisely captured by their rueful "Life in the Fast Lane.

Through Thomas, William met John Newton, nearly 70, a well-known Anglican churchman once from Olney. Newton had been a slave runner, his soul redeemed during a violent storm at sea. About God’s saving grace he had written a poem, later set to music and sung widely as a hymn called ‘Amazing Grace’. After being introduced to John Newton, William had a momentary lapse of confidence in his mission. “But what if we are turned back because we have no licenses?” he asked Newton. The crusty Newton seemed surprised at the timidity in the question. “Why, conclude that your Lord has nothing for you to accomplish there.” He gave William a stern look. “But if he has something there for you to do, no power on earth can stop you!” He quickly dismissed William’s worry. “Say, I know you good men surely must oppose the abomination of slavery. I want you to meet the man who will champion its abolition to a conclusion.” So

answers) 8.There is no crosswalk and you see a pedestrian crossing your lane ahead. You should: Stop and let him/her finish crossing the street. 9.It is illegal to listen to: Listening to music through headphones that cover both ears. 10.Always stop before you cross railroad tracks when: You don't have room on the other side to completely cross the tracks. 11.When you tailgate other drivers (drive close to their rear bumper): You can frustrate the other drivers and make them angry. 12.Should you always drive slower than other traffic? No, you can block traffic when you drive too slowly. 13.You see a signal person at a road construction site ahead. You should obey his or her instructions: At all times. 14.If you plan to pass another vehicle, you should: Not assume the other driver will make space for you to return to your lane  

Just take me home,” Furi mumbled and moved to the passenger side of the truck. The drive home was deathly quiet. Syn wasn’t sure if Furi was going to forgive him or not, he was certainly hoping he would. Syn really did like Furi. He was the type of man he’d want to spend hours talking to because the deep sexiness of his voice did funny things to Syn’s groin, listening to him laugh was like the sweetest music to his ears. He wanted to see Furi's gorgeous face when he came home from working a shitty case, knowing he would make it better. He wanted to get into bed with him after a hot shower and bury his face in Furi’s soft hair and just lose himself in the erotic scent that lingered in those gorgeous locks. Syn fought the urge to apologize again; he’d done it at least five times now. He looked over at Furi, wishing he would turn and look at him. “Are you going to say anything?” Furi did look at him then, but what he said wasn’t exactly what Syn wanted to hear, “Your truck needs a tune-up.” Then he turned his head back toward the window. Syn pulled up to the curb opposite Furi’s apartment and shut off the engine. Furi didn’t say anything; he just opened the door, got out of the truck and walked across the street. Syn jumped out calling to him, “Furi, please wait.” Furi stopped in the middle of the street and turned to face him, looking completely exasperated. “What?” Syn was just making his way around the truck when he heard tires screeching and bright headlights headed directly at Furi. “Furious!” Syn yelled, but he saw there was no time. He ran at full speed, leaping and slamming his body into Furi's, the car’s front end just missing them. Syn rolled with Furi, a messy tangle of long limbs, hitting the curb hard. Syn kept one arm around Furi while craning his neck to try to see where the car was. All he could see was the make of the dark vehicle and two letters of the license plate. Syn pulled his S&W from behind his back just in case they circled back around. Syn jumped up and pulled Furi up with him. “Inside, now.” Furi moved quickly, Syn right behind him. As soon as they got inside the apartment, Syn turned Furi to face him. He looked him over and determined that he was okay for the most part. Furi looked like he was in shock, and rightfully so, someone had just tried to kill him. Syn put both his hands on Furi’s flushed cheeks. “Furious look at me.” Syn waited for those now haunted eyes to look at his. When Furi finally focused on his face, he had to slip into cop mode and ask his questions while the details were fresh in his mind.

She shielded her eyes with a salute to the afternoon sun. “Right there, where the ground is blackened, just to the left of that cloud, that’s where the Presidential Palace stood.” Rotating in a slow circle, her index finger pressed the past into the empty panorama. The market selling Levi’s two decades before any licensed clothing store. The music college, where some years earlier a prodigy had learned to play the viola by listening to the two-hundred-year history of chamber music lilting through those open windows. She reconstructed the square for Akhmed—her voice raised every edifice from the dust, replanted every linden tree—because that was easier than apology.

It was three-quarters of the way into the hour of the sheep, after lunch but well before dinner, naturally a fine time for business in the brothels of Xuanren Ward. Powder and perfume steamed in the sun; gaudy kerchiefs dazzled the eyes of passersby. Snatches of music drifted through two sets of walls from Pingkang Ward, on the opposite side of West Street, where the licensed courtesans of the Imperial Academy entertained blue bloods and VIPs. But the sisters of Xuanren Ward held their neighboring colleagues in contempt. They thought all that training as unnecessary as pulling down your pants to fart—the end result, after all, was still the same creak-creak-creak of a bed frame.