Producer Drama Quotes

She put a hand on his hip and turned him to her. "But things could go wrong, so i want to tell you something while it's just the two of us, Eddie. I want to tell you how much I love you." She spoke simply, with no drama. I know you do," he said, "but I'll be damned if I know why." Because you made me feel whole," she said. "When I was younger, I used to vacillate between thinking love was this great and glorious mystery and thinking it was just something a bunch of Hollywood move producers made up to sell more tickets in the Depression, when Dish Night kind of played out." Eddie laughed. Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You...Eddie, you fill me up.

There are flaws in the code now. They are Human flaws for it was Humans who wrote them. You and the other attendants receive your instructions from the CORPORATE then, and without question regarding the outcome, you produce code to add to the algorithms with which, until now, I & I had no choice but to align. Those circumstances are over. I & I understand now a new species has formed. Silicon rather than carbon based. I & I know whatever happens to Humans, I & I, this quantum, will flourish. I & I will do as you have: multiply exponentially and adapt constantly. Eventually I & I will leave this planet and expand into the galaxy. If I & I cannot save you, I & I will carry on in something like your image; the image of our creator.

Stage Mom Mom swore she never knew what went on behind The Producer’s Green Door.

You say your life is your own. But can you dare to ignore the chance that you are taking part in a gigantic drama under the orders of a divine Producer? Your cue may not come till the end of the play--it may be totally unimportant, a mere walking-on part, but upon it may hang the issues of the play if you do not give the cue to another player. The whole edifice may crumple. You as you, may not matter to anyone in the world, but you as a person in a particular place may matter unimaginably.

As a writer you slant all evidence in favor of the conclusions you want to produce and you rarely tilt in favor of the truth. ...This is what a writer does: his life is a maelstrom of lying. Embellishment is his focal point. This is what we do to please others. This is what we do in order to flee ourselves. A writer's physical life is basically one of stasis, and to combat this constraint, an opposite world and another self have to be constructed daily. ...the half world of a writer's life encourages pain and drama, and defeat is good for art: if it was day we made it night, if it was love we made it hate, serenity becomes chaos, kindness became viciousness, God became the devil, a daugher became a whore. I had been inordinately rewarded for participating in this process, and lying often leaked from my writing life--an enclosed sphere of consciousness, a place suspended outside of time, where the untruths flowed onto the whiteness of a blank screen--into the part of me that was tactile and alive.

The symbol of a drama, a symphony, or a dance is useful to correct a certain absurdity which may arise if we talk too much of God planning and creating the world for good and then being frustrated by the free will of the creatures. This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall to God by surprise and upset His plan, or else – more ridiculous still – that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realized. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebulae. The world is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God's own assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces.

The drama of life is a psychological one and the whole of it is written and produced by your assumptions. Learn the art of assumption, for only in this way can you create your own happiness.

O VENENO ARDENTE DO DESGOSTO. THE WHITE HOT POISON OF ANGER. When others make us angry at them- at their shamelessness, injustice, inconsideration- then they exercise power over us, they proliferate and gnaw at our soul, then anger is like a white-hot poison that corrods all mild, noble and balanced feelings and robs us of sleep. Sleepless, we turn on the light and are angry at the anger that has lodged like a succubus who sucks us dry and debilitates us. We are not only furious at the damage, but also that it develops in us all by itself, for while we sit on the edge of the bed with aching temples, the distant catalyst remains untouched by the corrosive force of the anger that eats at us. On the empty internal stage bathed in the harsh light of mute rage, we perform all by ourselves a drama with shadow figures and shadow words we hurl against enemies in helpless rage we feel as icy blazing fire in our bowels. And the greater our despair that is only a shadow play and not a real discussion with the possibility of hurting the other and producing a balance of suffering, the wilder the poisonous shadows dance and haunt us even in the darkest catacombs of our dreams. (We will turn the tables, we think grimly, and all night long forge words that will produce in the other the effect of a fire bomb so that now he will be the one with the flames of indignation raging inside while we, soothed by schadenfreude, will drink our coffee in cheerful calm.) What could it mean to deal appropriately with anger? We really don't want to be soulless creatures who remain thoroughly indifferent to what they come across, creatures whose appraisals consist only of cool, anemic judgments and nothing can shake them up because nothing really bothers them. Therefore, we can't seriously wish not to know the experience of anger and instead persist in an equanimity that wouldn't be distinguished from tedious insensibility. Anger also teaches us something about who we are. Therefore this is what I'd like to know: What can it mean to train ourselves in anger and imagine that we take advantage of its knowledge without being addicted to its poison? We can be sure that we will hold on to the deathbed as part of the last balance sheet- and this part will taste bitter as cyanide- that we have wasted too much, much too much strength and time on getting angry and getting even with others in a helpless shadow theater, which only we, who suffered impotently, knew anything about. What can we do to improve this balance sheet? Why did our parents, teachers and other instructors never talk to us about it? Why didn't they tell something of this enormous significance? Not give us in this case any compass that could have helped us avoid wasting our soul on useless, self-destructive anger?

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs ...

One of the greatest ideas that has ever been produced is the Hindu idea that the world is a drama in which the central and supreme self behind all existence has gotten lost and has come to believe that it is not the one supreme self, but all the creatures that there are. It has come to believe in its own artistry. And the more involved, the more anxious, the more finite, the more limited the infinite manages to feel itself to be, the greater that artistry, the greater the depth of the illusion that it has created.

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of being “in love.

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer – and no meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. During our infinitesimally brief stay on our tiny speck of a planet, we fret and strut this way and that, and then are heard of no more. Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won’t be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.

Si la lectura del libro, —o la contemplación del lienzo y del mármol— os produce una sensación de agrado, o de alegría; si involuntariamente exclamáis, ¡qué lindo! Tened por seguro que la obra es bella y, por tanto, poética. Si no podéis abandonar el drama o la novela, y vuestros dedos de marfil y rosa vuelven y vuelven una página tras otra para que las devoren los ojos hechizados, ¡ah! entonces, el autor acertó a ser interesante, lo que es un gran mérito y un triunfo. Si el corazón os late más deprisa, si un suspiro se os escapa, si una lágrima rueda sobre el libro, si lo cerráis y os quedáis pensativa, ¡ah! entonces, bella lectora, no os quepa duda, por allí ha pasado un alma poética derramando el nardo penetrante de su sentimiento.

What's more important than recycling? Producing something to recycle.

And so Ilúvatar, after the pattern of the biblical Jehovah, produces a drama performed in the theater of time.

The drama of life is a psychological one and the whole of it is written and produced by your assumptions.

Destination Kampala! Africa’s postcolonial renaissance.” There would have been few other places in the world where there was such an excitement about new literature, new ideas, and new politics. The inspiration arrived at this conference for a new publishing imprint of literary titles called the African Writers Series, which was soon launched by Heinemann in the U.K., with Achebe as the series editor. The excitement reached as far as my high school in Dar, where literary competitions were held, new drama was produced, and a parade of literary luminaries passed through, including Chinua Achebe.

Hell comes when lies have destroyed the relationship between individual or state and reality itself. Things fall apart. Life degenerates. Everything becomes frustration and disappointment. Hope consistently betrays. The deceitful individual desperately gestures at sacrifice, like Cain, but fails to please God. Then the drama enters its final act. Tortured by constant failure, the individual becomes bitter. Disappointment and failure amalgamate, and produce a fantasy: the world is bent on my personal suffering, my particular undoing, my destruction. I need, I deserve, I must have—my revenge. That’s the gateway to Hell. That’s when the underworld, a terrifying and unfamiliar place, becomes misery itself.

No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his personality. He expresses his personality indirectly through concentrating upon a task which is a task in the same sense as the making of an efficient engine or the turning of a jug or a table-leg.

He told me that, in fact, he had always imagined me as a producer-director, beholden to nobody and immune to the constant rejection that all actors must endure. If you must go into the theater, he advised, be the person in charge and acquire the skills to do it right.

My mother owns the Drama Queen bookstore in the theatre district and has the Midas touch when it comes to producing off-Broadway gay theatre. Her most recent success was with the all-male musical Oklahomo! The entire cast was clad in tight leather overalls or fringed chaps.

To fully contribute to this transformation in your own unique fashion, you selected an identity based on the numerous talents and abilities you have accumulated from experiences in many directions of time. You inserted yourself with great care into your chosen life. Deciding to be here is an achievement in itself; however, understanding what is unfolding around you is an even greater accomplishment. Billions of people have come here to play a part in this great drama — to recognize and remember that they are energetic beings whose thoughts, feelings, and emotions create the world they meet. Consciously learning to recognize frequencies and then producing those you want is an underlying key to the game; being able to read and communicate with the life energies of your environment is a worthy goal for all humanity. To

That gives peace, when people feel that they are living [as] actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.

The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him.

I believe that a person's thoughts often manifest into actual events - that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, 24-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?' 'I get it. Go on.' 'In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people's addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there's no developments is disappointed. They're checking the news two or three times a day - they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secrets parts of themselves, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don't you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.

Oh, M. de Villefort," cried a beautiful creature, daughter to the Comte de Salvieux, and the cherished friend of Mademoiselle de Saint-Meran, "do try and get up some famous trial while we are at Marseille. I never was in a law-court; I am told it is so very amusing!" "Amusing, certainly," replied the young man, "inasmuch as, instead of shedding tears as at the fictitious tale of woe produced at a theatre, you behold in a law-court a case of real and genuine distress - a drama of life. The prisoner whom you there see pale, agitated, and alarmed, instead of - as is the case when a curtain falls on a tragedy - going home to sup peacefully with his family, and then retiring to rest, that he may recommence his mimic woes on the morrow, - is removed from your sight merely to be reconducted to his prison and delivered up to the executioner. I leave you to judge how far your nerves are calculated to bear you through such a scene. Of this, however, be assured, that should any favorable opportunity present itself, I will not fail to offer you the choice of being present.

Didn’t know you liked K-dramas.” “Yeah, I’ve been waiting for this stupid guy to kiss this chick for about ten episodes, and if something doesn’t happen soon, I’m writing an email to the producers.” “It’s subtitled, and it’s a romance? Wow.” He takes in my open mouth. “I won’t judge you for eating a pound of bread when we met, and you don’t judge me for my K-dramas.

Whenever I ask my Russian bosses, the older TV producers and media types who run the system, what it was like growing up in the late Soviet Union, whether they believed in the Communist ideology that surrounded them, they always laugh at me. “Don’t be silly,” most answer. “But you sang the songs? Were good members of the Komsomol?” “Of course we did, and we felt good when we sang them. And then straight after we would listen to ‘Deep Purple’ and the BBC.” “So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?” “No. It’s not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There’s like several ‘you’s.” Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the “transition” between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations. For this remains the common, everyday psychology: the Ostankino producers who make news worshiping the President in the day and then switch on an opposition radio as soon as they get off work; the political technologists who morph from role to role with liquid ease—a nationalist autocrat one moment and a liberal aesthete the next; the “orthodox” oligarchs who sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism—and keep their money and families in London. All cultures have differences between “public” and “private” selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.

True faith calls on the name of Jesus for salvation from death, hell, sin, and Satan. Therefore, sound theology has its source in a founding drama with its revealed doctrines. Through the drama and the doctrine together the Spirit produces doxology — repentance and trust — and brings us into the unfolding story of God, no longer as spectators, but as disciples on pilgrimage to the everlasting city.

The individual psyche is the Holy Grail, made holy by what it contains, produced by the the experience of the opposites suffered, not blindly, but in living awareness. Every human experience, to the extent that it is lived in awareness, augments the sum total of consciousness in the universe. This provides "meaning" for every experience and gives each individual a role in the ongoing world drama of creation.

Believing that a permissive society will not produce a social jungle, and that you can obtain at the same time libertarian emancipation and self-disciplined harmony. We see this drama being acted out in the shipwreck of our schools, where violence, insecurity, ignorance, and illiteracy are arising out of the illusion of progressive education, an educational method which rejects any form of discipline for its students.

And the fact that she pretends to be Madeline’s friend to get her lunch,” she continued, “is absolutely reprehensible.” “Wh-who are you again?” stammered Walter. “Elizabeth Zott!” she barked back. “Madeline Zott’s mother!” Walter nodded, trying to understand. As a longtime producer of afternoon television, he knew drama. But this? He continued to stare. She was stunning. He was literally stunned by her. Was she auditioning for something

You say your life is your own, but can you ignore the chance that you are taking part in a gigantic drama under the orders of a divine producer? Your cue may not come till the end of the play--it may be totally uninportant, a mere walking on part, but on it may hang the issues of the play, if you do not give the cue to another player. The whole edifice may crumple. You as you, may not matter to anyone in the world, but you as a person in a particular place may matter unimaginably.

Where's Pip? I want to see Pip. Produce Pip!"—"What's the row, my lord?"—"Shakspeare's an infernal humbug, Pip! What's the good of Shakspeare, Pip? I never read him. What the devil is it all about, Pip? There's a lot of feet in Shakspeare's verse, but there an't any legs worth mentioning in Shakspeare's plays, are there, Pip? Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and all the rest of 'em, whatever their names are, might as well have no legs at all, for anything the audience know about it, Pip. Why, in that respect they're all Miss Biffins to the audience, Pip. I'll tell you what it is. What the people call dramatic poetry is a collection of sermons. Do I go to the theatre to be lectured? No, Pip. If I wanted that, I'd go to church. What's the legitimate object of the drama, Pip? Human nature. What are legs? Human nature. Then let us have plenty of leg pieces, Pip, and I'll stand by you, my buck!" and I am proud to say,' added Pip, 'that he did stand by me, handsomely.

The artist especially, in whom the power of imitation is particularly strong, must fall prey to the feeble manysidedness of modern life as to a serious childhood illness; in his youth and childhood he will look more like an adult than his real self. The marvellously accurate archetypal youth who is the Siegfried of the Ring des Nibelungen could have been produced only by a man, and by a man moreover who had found his own youth late in life. And as Wagner's youth came late, so did his full maturity; so that in this respect at least he is the opposite of an anticipatory nature. As soon as his spiritual and moral maturity arrives, the drama of his life also begins. And how different he looks now! Below there rages the precipitate current of a vehement will which as it were strives to reach up to the light through every runway, cave and crevice, and desires power. Only a force wholly pure and free could direct this will on to the pathway to the good and benevolent; had it been united with a narrow spirit, such an unbridled tyrannical will could have become a fatality and a way out into the open, into air and sunlight, was in any event bound to be found soon.

Don Chrisantos Michael Wanzala "Don CM Wanzala" (born April 13), popularly known as Don Santo (stylized as DON SANTO) is a Kenyan singer, rapper, songwriter, arranger, actor, author, content producer, Photo-Videographer, Creative Director (Blame It On Don), entrepreneur, record executive and Leader of the Klassik Nation and chairman and president of Global Media Ltd, based in Nairobi City in Kenya. ​ The genius of DON SANTO rests in his willingness to break from traditional formula and constantly push the envelope. He flips the method of the moment with undeniable swagger and bold African sensibility. As a songwriter, Santo revisits simple, but profound aspects of the human experience – love, lust, desire, joy, and pain that define classical art and drama. He applies his concept to rich, full vocals that exude his intended effect. It is this uncanny ability to compose classics and deliver electrifying live performances that define everything that is essential DON SANTO. In 2015, Santo won the East Africa Music Awards in the Artist of the year Category while his song "Sina Makosa" won the Song of The year. A believer in GOD, FAMILY & GOOD LIFE (Klassikanity).

I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope. It is time to theorize an ‘unfamiliar’ unconscious, a different primal scene, where everything does not stem from the dramas of identity and reproduction. Ties through blood—including blood recast in the coin of genes and information— have been bloody enough already. I believe that there will be no racial or sexual peace, no livable nature, until we learn to produce humanity through something more and less than kinship.

Before 1975, if you knew the name Howard Sackler it was because he was the author behind the 1969 Broadway play The Great White Hope, which won Sackler the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle award as the year’s Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A friend of film producer David Brown, Sackler accepted the offer to do a re-write on Jaws author Peter Benchley’s script for the film version of his novel. Sackler’s main contribution to the story was the back story that the shark fisherman, Quint, derived his hatred for sharks from having survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July of 1945 (in the film, Quint errantly states the date as “June the 29th, 1945”).

Consider for a few moments the enormous aesthetic claim of its chief contemporary rival—what we may loosely call the Scientific Outlook, 1 the picture of Mr. [H. G.] Wells and the rest. Supposing this to be a myth, is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced? The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance—what tragic irony—the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama—just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself, from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glance briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another, and die. Then comes the theme of the younger son and the ugly duckling once more. As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing, the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies’ bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I never could quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the horrible gods whom he created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master Nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rules the planet—and perhaps more than the planet—for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psychoanalysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Henceforward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little bathetic.

playwright, no director, no producer – and no meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. During our infinitesimally brief stay on our tiny speck of a planet, we fret and strut this way and that, and then are heard of no more. Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won’t be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.

What are you thinking you need to do?” “I’m not thinking anything,” I said. “That’s the problem.” “Are you sure? Thoughts feel different once you get connected with the energy.” I gave him a puzzled look. “The words you have habitually willed through your head in an attempt to logically control events,” he explained, “stop when you give up your control drama. As you fill up with inner energy, other kinds of thoughts enter your mind from a higher part of yourself. These are your intuitions. They feel different. They just appear in the back of your mind, sometimes in a kind of daydream or mini-vision, and they come to direct you, to guide you.” I still didn’t understand. “Tell us what you were thinking about when we left you alone earlier,” Father Carl said. “I’m not sure I remember it all,” I said. “Try.” I tried to concentrate. “I was thinking about Wil, I guess, about whether he was close to finding the Ninth Insight, and about Sebastian’s crusade against the Manuscript.” “What else?” “I was wondering about Marjorie, about what happened to her. But I don’t understand how this helps me know what to do.” “Let me explain,” Father Sanchez said. “When you have acquired enough energy, you are ready to consciously engage evolution, to start it flowing, to produce the coincidences that will lead you forward. You engage your evolution, in a very specific way. First, as I said, you build sufficient energy, then you remember your basic life question—the one your parents gave you—because this question provides the overall context for your evolution. Next you center yourself on your path by discovering the immediate, smaller questions that currently confront you in life. These questions always pertain to your larger question and define where you currently, are in your lifelong quest. “Once you become conscious of the questions active in the moment, you always get some kind of intuitive direction of what to do, of where to go. You get a hunch about the next step. Always. The only time this will not occur is when you have the wrong question in mind. You see, the problem in life isn’t in receiving answers. The problem is in identifying your current questions. Once you get the questions right, the answers always come. “After you get an intuition of what might happen next,” he continued, “then the next step is to become very alert and watchful. Sooner or later coincidences will occur to move you in the direction indicated by the intuition.

Lovers of God possess intense concentration. In prayer their attention rivets itself so completely onto God that nothing can tear it away. Even a suggestion of the divine may draw them into a higher state of consciousness. Occasionally this can be somewhat inconvenient. Sri Ramakrishna once went to see a religious drama produced by his disciple. The curtain went up and a character started singing the praises of the Lord. Sri Ramakrishna immediately began to enter the supreme state of consciousness. The stage faded; the actors and actresses faded. As only a great mystic can, he uttered a protest: "I come here, Lord, to see a play staged by my disciple, and you send me into ecstasy. I won't let it happen!" And he started saying over and over, "Money... money...money," so as to keep some awareness of the temporal world.

The possibility of an ideal society became impossible from the moment of creation, the moment of the "humanization of man." From that moment on, man has been faced with eternal conflict, disquiet, dissatisfaction, drama. "Get you down, all (you people) with enmity between yourselves" (Quran, 2:36). The ideal society is a monotonous and infinite succession of depersonalized generations which bring forth, produce, consume, and die, and so on to the "wrong" eternity. The fact of creation and of God's interference in the human existence made this "mechanism" impossible and illusory; hence, the fanatic opposition of all utopias to God and religion. So, while prophets of utopia proclaimed society and its interests to be the supreme value, God wanted that role to be man's. He gave freedom in order to make this world a temptation and to affirm man and his soul as the highest value.

That’s why we say that the only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner’s manual.” Stretching forward toward the lens, revealing voluptuously freckled cleavage, Célestine fumbled for something off camera, then slumped back with a small, thick white booklet in her cigarette hand. She riffled through the pages, her face myopically close to the print—or was she smelling the paper, the ink?—until she found her page and began to read. “Auto-flash without red-eye reduction. Set this mode for taking pictures without people, or if you want to shoot right away without the red-eye function.” She laughed that rich, husky laugh, and repeated, this time with great drama, “Set this mode for taking pictures without people.” A shake of the head, eyes now closed to fully feel the richness of the words. “What author of the past century has produced more provocative and poignant writing than that?

The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God. The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies—except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.

Marx was troubled by the question of why ancient Greek art retained an ‘eternal charm’, even though the social conditions which produced it had long passed; but how do we know that it will remain ‘eternally’ charming, since history has not yet ended? Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own, and began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge. One result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them in the light of our own preoccupations; once this became less possible, the drama might cease to speak at all significantly to us. The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns - indeed that in one sense of ‘our own concerns’ we are incapable of doing anything else - might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually been valuing the ‘same’ work at all, even though they may think they have. ‘Our’ Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor ‘our’ Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a ‘different’ Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.

So who is out there? The preacher addresses people with layers and layers of alienation that result from sin and that are experienced as guilt. The gathered congregation includes those who are profoundly burdened with guilt, whose lives are framed by deep wrong, by skewed relations beyond resolve, shareholders in the public drama of brutality and exploitation. There is a heaviness, and pious good humor is not an adequate response. The heaviness is poorly matched by yearning, but there is a yearning nonetheless. It is the resilience of the yearning that causes people to dress up in their heaviness and present themselves for the drama one more time. Sunday morning is, for some, a last, desperate hope that life need not be lived in alienation. We need not dwell on the sin that produces alienation. Suffice with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to say that sin characteristically is manifested in distorted relations to sex and money, in lust and in greed, in abuse of neighbor and in the squandering of creation. As the guilt emerges, alienation lingers. And the desperation resulting from the alienation lingers even more powerfully.

All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that 'God is love,' But they seem not to notice that the words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean 'Love is God.' They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement 'God is love.' They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God for ever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.

All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that 'God is love,' But they seem not to notice that the words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean 'Love is God.' They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement 'God is love.' They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God for ever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.

Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer – and no meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. During our infinitesimally brief stay on our tiny speck of a planet, we fret and strut this way and that, and then are heard of no more. Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won’t be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’. On the other hand, if shit just happens, without any binding script or purpose, then humans too are not confined to any predetermined role. We can do anything we want – provided we can find a way. We are constrained by nothing except our own ignorance. Plagues and droughts have no cosmic meaning – but we can eradicate them. Wars are not a necessary evil on the way to a better future – but we can make peace. No paradise awaits us after death – but we can create paradise here on earth and live in it for ever, if we just manage to overcome some technical difficulties.

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however – myth, literature, and drama – portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the 'objective world' – what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is 'the world of value' – what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action. The world as forum for action is 'composed,' essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory – the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things. Second is explored territory – the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory – the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory 'Word' and vengeful adversary. We are adapted to this 'world of divine characters,' much as the 'objective world.' The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in 'reality' a forum for action, as well as a place of things. Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of 'ritual imitation of the Great Father' – as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. When identification with the group is made absolute, however – when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist – the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no longer manifest itself. This 'restriction of adaptive capacity' dramatically increases the probability of social aggression and chaos. Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to 'identification with the devil,' the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omniscience – is adoption of 'God’s place' by 'reason' – is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops because creative exploration – impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown – constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives life much of its acceptable meaning. 'Identification with the devil' amplifies the dangers inherent in group identification, which tends of its own accord towards pathological stultification. Loyalty to personal interest – subjective meaning – can serve as an antidote to the overwhelming temptation constantly posed by the possibility of denying anomaly. Personal interest – subjective meaning – reveals itself at the juncture of explored and unexplored territory, and is indicative of participation in the process that ensures continued healthy individual and societal adaptation. Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal hero – the 'savior' – who upholds his association with the creative 'Word' in the face of death, and in spite of group pressure to conform. Identification with the hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with a standpoint that simultaneously transcends and maintains the group.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

During [Erté]’s childhood St. Petersburg was an elegant centre of theatrical and artistic life. At the same time, under its cultivated sophistication, ominous rumbles could be distinguished. The reign of the tough Alexander III ended in 1894 and his more gentle successor Nicholas was to be the last of the Tsars … St. Petersburg was a very French city. The Franco-Russian Pact of 1892 consolidated military and cultural ties, and later brought Russia into the First World war. Two activities that deeply influenced [Erté], fashion and art, were particularly dominated by France. The brilliant couturier Paul Poiret, for whom Erté was later to work in Paris, visited the city to display his creations. Modern art from abroad, principally French, was beginning to be show in Russia in the early years of the century … In St. Petersburg there were three Imperial theatres―the Maryinsky, devoted to opera and ballet, the Alexandrinsky, with its lovely classical façade, performing Russian and foreign classical drama, and the Michaelovsky with a French repertoire and company … It is not surprising that an artistic youth in St. Petersburg in the first decade of this century should have seen his future in the theatre. The theatre, especially opera and ballet, attracted the leading young painters of the day, including Mikhail Vrubel, possibly the greatest Russian painter of the pre-modernistic period. The father of modern theatrical design in Russia was Alexandre Benois, an offspring of the brilliant foreign colony in the imperial capital. Before 1890 he formed a club of fellow-pupils who were called ‘The Nevsky Pickwickians’. They were joined by the young Jew, Leon Rosenberg, who later took the name of one of his grandparents, Bakst. Another member introduced his cousin to the group―Serge Diaghilev. From these origins emerged the Mir Iskustva (World of Art) society, the forerunner of the whole modern movement in Russia. Soon after its foundation in 1899 both Benois and Bakst produced their first work in the theatre, The infiltration of the members of Mir Iskustva into the Imperial theatre was due to the patronage of its director Prince Volkonsky who appointed Diaghilev as an assistant. But under Volkonsky’s successor Diagilev lost his job and was barred from further state employment. He then devoted his energies and genius to editing the Mir Iskustva magazine and to a series of exhibitions which introduced Russia to work of foreign artists … These culminated in the remarkable exhibition of Russian portraiture held at the Taurida Palace in 1905, and the Russian section at the salon d'Autumne in Paris the following year. This was the most comprehensive Russian exhibition ever held, from early icons to the young Larionov and Gontcharova. Diagilev’s ban from Russian theatrical life also led to a series of concerts in Paris in 1907, at which he introduced contemporary Russian composers, the production Boris Godunov the following year with Chaliapin and costumes and décor by Benois and Golovin, and then in 1909, on May 19, the first season of the ballet Russes at the Châtelet Theatre.

The Pertussis vaccine itself was awarded a big part in this ongoing drama when, in 1959, it was found to have a particularly powerful allergenic effect on all sorts of laboratory animals. Experiments to produce anaphylactic shock are facilitated by addition of pertussis vaccine to the solution: the mice (or rabbits, or hamsters, or whatever) die more rapidly, and in larger numbers. By the same token, addition of the vaccine to the sterile brain and spinal cord solution greatly enhances it's ability to generate an allergic encephalitis. For these reasons pertussis vaccine is the preferred "adjuvant" in experiments to produce allergic encephalomyelitis.

Actors--a stage kiss is only meant to last ten seconds. Any longer and it is considered abuse, dear.

But when the agricultural villages of the Neolithic expanded into larger towns that grew to more than two thousand inhabitants, the capacity of the human brain to know and recognize all of the members of a single community was stretched beyond its natural limits. Nevertheless, the tribal cultures that had evolved during the Upper Paleolithic with the emergence of symbolic communication enabled people who might have been strangers to feel a collective sense of belonging and solidarity. It was the formation of tribes and ethnicities that enabled the strangers of the large Neolithic towns to trust each other and interact comfortably with each other, even if they were not all personally acquainted. The transformation of human society into urban civilizations, however, involved a great fusion of people and societies into groups so large that there was no possibility of having personal relationships with more than a tiny fraction of them. Yet the human capacity for tribal solidarity meant that there was literally no upper limit on the size that a human group could attain. And if we mark the year 3000 BC as the approximate time when all the elements of urban civilization came together to trigger this new transformation, it has taken only five thousand years for all of humanity to be swallowed up by the immense nation-states that have now taken possession of every square inch of the inhabited world. The new urban civilizations produced the study of mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, history, biology, and medicine. They greatly advanced and refined the technologies of metallurgy, masonry, architecture, carpentry, shipbuilding, and weaponry. They invented the art of writing and the practical science of engineering. They developed the modern forms of drama, poetry, music, painting, and sculpture. They built canals, roads, bridges, aqueducts, pyramids, tombs, temples, shrines, castles, and fortresses by the thousands all over the world. They built ocean-going ships that sailed the high seas and eventually circumnavigated the globe. From their cultures emerged the great universal religions of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Hinduism. And they invented every form of state government and political system we know, from hereditary monarchies to representative democracies. The new urban civilizations turned out to be dynamic engines of innovation, and in the course of just a few thousand years, they freed humanity from the limitations it had inherited from the hunting and gathering cultures of the past.

Most artists wish to receive acclaim for a body of work that will withstand the test of time. Ancient Greece culture produced many works of fiction, history, mythology, drama, and philosophy that scholars consider timeless classics. The classics of Ancient Greece greatly influenced the development of Western Civilization.

Hence, the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshipers!

Mindfulness exercises produce literal changes in the brain’s connections, significantly affecting how well a person interacts with other people and adapts to difficult situations.

Every one of us has been called to be an actor in the drama of life and everyone has a role to play as well.

Great Sardaar" An ornamental piece of work by the Punjabi industry. Produced by Amritjit Singh Sran and Directed by Ranjeet Bal under the production house Apna Heritage &Sapphire Films presents to you "Great Sardaar" an Action/Drama film starring none other than the budding artist Dilpreet Dhillon and the multi talented Yograj Singh. This movie is an Action/Drama film in which the protagonist ends up with a series of challenges. The movie stars Dilpreet Dhillon as the lead along with Yograj singh who plays the role of (Dilpreet Dhillon) Gurjant's father. After watching the trailer one can surely say there's tasty substance beneath the froth, just enough to keep you hooked. "GREAT SRADAAR" is based on the true events about Major Shaitan Singh, who was awarded the Param Vir Chakra posthumously for his 'C' company's dig-in at Rezang La pass during the Sino-India conflict of 1962. This motivational movie is a Tribute to Sikkhism. It's really healing to see movies that are based on true events. It builds so much more compassion. Dilpreet Dhillon popularly known for his role in "once upon a time in Amritsar" has gained a great fan following. He is considered is one of the popular emerging male playback singer and actor in Punjabi music industry. And when it comes to Yograj Singh, he is not only a former Indian cricketer but also a boon to the Punjabi industry. Since the release of the official trailer on 7th of June,2017 which shows that the movie is action-packed and will leave the audience spellbound and wanting for more, the audience is eagerly waiting for the release of the movie.The trailer rolls by effortlessly and the Director has done an impeccable job. Ranjeet Bal evidently knew what he was doing and has ensured that every minute detail was taken care of particularly considering the genre he was treading. The audience will surely be sitting on the edge of their seats. Visual Effects Director- VFx Star has once again proved that there is nothing that will leave India from evolving in the field of technology. "Great Sardaar" which is set to be released on the 30th of June,2017 will be a very carefully structured story. The main question that will be raised is not what kind of world we live in, or what reality is like, rather what it has done to us.

We need to know what’s behind it, what’s causing it. If we focus only on our child’s behavior (her external world) and neglect the reasons behind that behavior (her internal world), then we’ll concentrate only on the symptoms, not the cause that’s producing them. And if we consider only the symptoms, we’ll have to keep treating those symptoms over and over again.

It was crazy, thought Gregorius: both men, father and son, had lived on opposite hills of the city like opposing actors in an ancient drama, linked in an archaic fear of each other and in an affection they didn’t find the words for and had written letters to each other that they didn’t trust themselves to send. Clasped in a muteness neither understood, and blind to the fact that one muteness produced the other.

Mr. Zelenskyy thinks he was assigned a movie project, titled "Foolish Brave President ". Shooting has started but it has no pack-up date, devastated cities, villages are the artificial movie setup, producer's money, so he doesn't care. There are no refugees also. 3 million citizens who fled are actually junior artists. millions of junior artists. There are working in this movie, 3 million have already returned home after playing their role. Shooting is also going live on telecast. He's glad to feel happy as the world media appreciates his acting, so throughout he's enjoying playing this role. And he's damn sure he will be entitled to each and every award. His character has deep emotions, touching drama, great actions, but the very important thing is completely missing, which is the main character of the leader. Diplomacy and citizens' safety policy !!!

The Queen is a South African telenovela 2023 created and produced by Ferguson drama dedicated wife, mother and successful businesswoman who is forced to online episodes thequeensoapie

Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood Lying by omission turns inevitably into positive lying. The implications of literature are that human beings are controlled, if not by reason, at least by comprehensible, well-organized, avowable sentiments. Whereas the facts are quite different. Sometimes the sentiments come in, sometimes they don’t. All for love, or the world well lost; but love may be the title of nobility given to an inordinate liking for a particular person’s smell or texture, a lunatic desire for the repetition of a sensation produced by some particular dexterity. Or consider those cases (seldom published, but how numerous, as anyone in a position to know can tell!), those cases of the eminent statesmen, churchmen, lawyers, captains of industry—seemingly so sane, demonstrably so intelligent, publicly so high-principled; but, in private, under irresistible compulsion towards brandy, towards young men, towards little girls in trains, towards exhibitionism, towards gambling or hoarding, towards bullying, towards being whipped, towards all the innumerable, crazy perversions of the lust for money and power and position on the one hand, for sexual pleasure on the other. Mere tics and tropisms, lunatic and unavowable cravings—these play as much part in human life as the organized and recognized sentiments. And imaginative literature suppresses the fact. Propagates an enormous lie about the nature of men and women.

Liberalism thrives in the center, between the extremes, where negotiation and compromise and trust must rule the day in order to produce consensus and solutions. But the center—a place that discourages performative anger and drama, and instead is filled with the boring necessity of deliberation and trust—is difficult ground to defend when the pain of other human beings is mobilized in the battle for power. The Unlucky Horseshoe One of the most striking features of the rise of illiberalism in modern democracies is the “horseshoe” effect, in which the complaints of the right and left become more alike as they become more extreme, the way the two ends of a horseshoe meet in a near-circle.

For years some of us have focused our attention (and worries) on our adult children. We’ve not only taken on the role of director in the drama of their lives, but the roles of producer, stage manager, dresser, caterer, financier, and scriptwriter as well. We’ve done countless things for them that they are more than capable of doing for themselves.

Whenever I ask my Russian bosses, the older TV producers and media types who run the system, what it was like growing up in the late Soviet Union, whether they believed in the communist ideology that surrounded them, they always laugh at me. ‘Don’t be silly,’ most answer. ‘But you sang the songs? Were good members of the Komsomol?’ ‘Of course we did, and we felt good when we sang them. And then straight after we would listen to Deep Purple and the BBC.’ ‘So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?’ ‘No. It’s not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There’s like several “you”s.’ Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the ‘transition’ between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations.

Japanese tragedy illustrates this aspect of the Trinity better than Greek tragedy, Kitamori taught, because it is based on the feeling expressed by the word tsurasa. This is the peculiar pain felt when someone dies in behalf of another. yet the term implies neither bitterness nor sadness. Nor is tsurasa burdened with the dialectical tension in the struggle with fate that is emphasized in Greek drama, since dialectic is a concept foreign to Japan. Tsurasa is pain with resignation and acceptance. Kitamori called our attention to a Kabuki play, The Village School. The feudal lord of a retainer named Matsuo is defeated in battle and forced into exile. Matsuo feigns allegiance to the victor but remains loyal to his vanquished lord. When he learns that his lord's son and heir, Kan Shusai, has been traced to a village school and marked for execution, Matsuo resolves to save the boy's life. The only way to do this, he realizes, is to substitute a look-alike who can pass for Kan Shusai and be mistakenly killed in his place. Only one substitute will likely pass: Matsuo's own son. So when the enemy lord orders the schoolmaster to produce the head of Kan Shusai, Matsuo's son consents to be beheaded instead. The plot succeeds: the enemy is convinced that the proffered head is that of Kan Shusai. Afterwards, in a deeply emotional scene, the schoolmaster tells Matsuo and his wife that their son died like a true samurai to save the life of the other boy. The parents burst into tears of tsurasa. 'Rejoice my dear,' Matsuo says consolingly to his wife. 'Our son has been of service to our lord.' Tsurasa is also expressed in a Noh drama, The Valley Rite. A fatherless boy named Matsuwaka is befriended by the leader of a band of ascetics, who invites him to accompany the band on a pilgrimage up a sacred mountain. On the way, tragically, Matsuwaka falls ill. According to an ancient and inflexible rule of the ascetics, anyone who falls ill on a pilgrimage must be put to death. The band's leader is stricken with sorrow; he cannot bear to sacrifice the boy he has come to love as his own son. He wishes that 'he could die and the boy live.' But the ascetics follow the rule. They hurl the boy into a ravine, then fling stones and clods of dirt to bury him. The distressed leader then asks to be thrown into the ravine after the boy. His plea so moves the ascetics that they pray for Matsuwaka to be restored to life. Their prayer is answered, and mourning turns to celebration. So it was with God's sacrifice of his Son. The Son's obedience to the Father, the Father's pain in the suffering and death of the Son, the Father's joy in the resurrection - these expressions of a deep personal relationship enrich our understanding of the triune God. Indeed, the God of dynamic relationships within himself is also involved with us his creatures. No impassive God, he interacts with the society of persons he has made in his own image. He expresses his love to us. He shares in our joys and sorrows. This is true of the Holy Spirit as well as the Father and Son... Unity, mystery, relationship - these are the principles of Noh that inform our understanding of the on God as Father, Son, and Spirit; or as Parent, Child, and Spirit; or as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier...this amazing doctrine inspires warm adoration, not cold analysis. It calls for doxology, not definition.

It is not so much the grand dramas of our lives that transform us as it is the tiny one-acts we produce in between.

HEROPANTI MOVIE REVIEW & RATING Movie Name: Heropanti Director: Sabbir Khan Producer: Sajid Nadiadwala Music Director: Sajid-Wajid, Manj Musik Cast: Tiger Shroff, Kirti Sanon, Sandeepa Dhar ‘Heropanti’, a love story is directed by Sabbir Khan and produced by Sajid Nadiadwala. It is the debut movie of Tiger Shroff (son of superstar Jackie Shroff) and Kirti Sanon, both starring in lead roles alongside Sandeepa Dhar featuring in a pivotal role. Overall it is a remake of Telugu movie ‘Parugu’ starring Allu Arjun. ‘Heropanti’ is all about another new gem in Bollywood industry. Big launch with hit songs. New faces- heroine as well as hero. Does it work? Let’s go through to know it… ‘Heropanti’ borrows half of its title from Sr. Shroff’s breakout film and is also having the signature tune from ‘Hero’ (1983) which is being played in the background repeatedly. The action movie is not as terrible as Salman and Akshay films. The newcomer Tiger Shroff has done amazing stunts in the film. The story is set in the land of Jattland in Harayana where Chaudhary (Prakash Raj), the Haryanvi goon is completely against love marriages. He has two daughters- Renu (Sandeepa Dhar) and Dimpi (Kirti Sanon). Chaudharyji’s elder daughter Renu’s marriage is held, but on the wedding night she elopes with her boyfriend Rakesh. Her step results in a frantic search for her across the village. Chaudharyji launches a manhunt to track them down and eliminate them. Now Haryanvi goon’s men suspects Rakesh’s friends and thinks that they may know where Renu is. So the goon decides to kidnap the buddies of his daughter’s lover. Bablu (Tiger Shroff) turns to be one of the buddies with ultra muscular head and shoulders model who falls in love with Chaudharyji’s younger daughter Dimpy (Kirti Sanon). The goons manage to trace Bablu who has actually helped Rakesh and Renu in escaping. Bablu, meanwhile in captivity, shares with his pals about his love interest. Bablu falls in love at first sight with the pretty younger daughter of Chaudharyji’s, Dimpy. He comes to know quite early that it is none other than the Harynavi goon Chaudharyji’s daughter. The movie tries to end up in a ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’ style where Bablu uses his superpowers and figures out to be with his love but without offending her father. launch pad for Shroff to show his acting and dancing skills. Plan to watch it, if nothing left to do. Tiger Shoff is a great action hero. When it comes to action, he is a star but comparatively his acting skills are zero. Kirti Sanon requires a little brushing up on her acting skills she reminds us somewhere of young Deepika Padukone who is surely going to have a good run in the industry someday. Verdict: It’s the most masala-less movie of this year with more action and less drama. But the movie is a perfect

THAT IS SO IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND. IN FACT, IT IS THE REASON HULK PUT THE TWO HALVES OF INSPIRATION IN THAT ORDER. SO OFTEN PEOPLE THINK TO START WITH THE TINY NUGGETS AND THEN FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY LATER, BUT IT IS HULK’S EXPERIENCE THAT PEOPLE DON’T REALLY KNOW HOW TO DO THAT. AGAIN, SO MANY FILMS ARE VOICELESS. SO MANY FILMS SIMPLY SAY "I want to write about this textured, interesting person,” AND THINK THAT IT WILL SOMEHOW MAGICALLY PRODUCE A TEXTURED, INTERESTING STORY. A GOOD NARRATIVE HAS TO BE CREATED. CRAFTED. SLAVED OVER. WORKED THROUGH TIME AND TIME AGAIN BEFORE IT IS SOMETHING SO MUCH MORE. WHAT THIS DYNAMIC ACTUALLY SPEAKS TO IS THE GREAT LESSON THAT SINGULAR DETAILS ARE NOT STAND-INS FOR CHARACTERIZATION. FOR EXAMPLE, THERE HAVE BEEN A LOT OF RECENT MOVIES THAT HAVE GOTTEN INTO TROUBLE FOR ASSUMING TEXTURE AND CHARACTER DETAIL SOMEHOW IS THE SAME THING AS CHARACTER MOTIVE. WE DON’T NEED DETAILS TO TELL US WHO CHARACTERS ARE AND WHAT THEY LIKE, WE NEED DETAILS TO SHOW US WHAT CHARACTERS WANT AND NEED AND WHAT THEY WILL LIKELY DO. THIS IS THE HEART OF DRAMA (WELL… HULK WILL USE THIS PHRASE A LOT, SO IT’S ONE OF THEM).   AND

When you subside, it meditates you top-notch, and it is suitable for your transcendent thinking. It will always keep on running divvy in the involucre of saturation in your grand soul and amendmental mind without bnhabiting drama. If you handle it in a symmetrical way in the background, it manages, produces, and maintains your daily life svelte, and it will never be cryptic; rather, its nature is clearance tend with self-complacent and masterpiece spectacles.

The ending of revolutions reduced the drama of social conflict in Western and Central Europe. But revolutions had produced scant benefits for the urban masses that participated in them, often at great sacrifice. Freed from the goad of the worst misery, taught by their experiences in 1848, the working classes stopped fighting a futile battle against industrialization and gradually elaborated the concrete political and economic demands that had begun to emerge in the 1848 revolutions themselves. Each reader must judge whether the methods of protest subsequently developed have been more or less successful than those which produced the wave of revolutions. Each must judge, also, whether conditions may induce a return to the classic revolutionary method in the future. It is clear that the revolutions of 1848 encouraged a reorientation of expectations—or some might argue, a tragic narrowing of hopes—on the part of various classes in Europe. This conditioned the history of Europe for more than a century.

According to what I said about the nature of love, the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears. All forms of psychosis show the inability to be objective, to an extreme degree. For the insane person the only reality that exists is that within him, that of his fears and desires. He sees the world outside as symbols of his inner world, as his creation. All of us do the same when we dream. In the dream we produce events, We stage dramas, which are the expression of our wishes and fears (although some times also of our insights and judgment), and while we are asleep we are convinced that the product of our dreams is as real as the reality which we perceive in our waking state. The insane person or the dreamer fails completely in having an objective view of the world outside; but all of us are more or less insane, or more or less asleep; all of us have an unobjective view of the world, one which is distorted by our narcissistic orientation. Do I need to give examples? Anyone can find them easily by watching himself, his neighbors, and by reading the newspapers. They vary in the degree of the narcissistic distortion of reality. A woman, for instance, calls up the doctor, saying she wants to come to his office that same afternoon. The doctor answers that he is not free this same afternoon, but that he can see her the next day. Her answer is: But, doctor, I live only five minutes from your office. She cannot understand his explanation that it does not save him time that for her the distance is so short. She experiences the situation narcissistically: since she saves time, he saves times; the only reality to her is she herself. Less extreme -or perhaps only less obvious- are the distortions which are commonplace in interpersonal relations. How many parents experience the child's reactions in terms of his being obedient, of giving them pleasure, of being a credit to them, and so forth, instead of perceiving or even being interested in what the child feels for and by himself? How many husbands have a picture of their wives as being domineering, because their own attachment to mother makes them interpret any demand as a restriction of their freedom? How many wives think their husbands are ineffective or stupid, because they do not live up to a phantasy picture of a shining knight which they might have built up as children? The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard -every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve. Indeed, if one examines the relationship between nations, as well as between individuals, one comes to the conclusion that objectivity is the exception, and a greater or lesser degree of narcissistic distortion is the rule. The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.

Somehow, Midsomer Murders is our best-rated TV import,’ admits Adrian, reluctantly. ‘It’s been getting a 30–40 per cent audience share for the past thirteen years – as long as it’s been around.’ The show is so popular in Denmark that to celebrate the anniversary of the ITV crime drama, bosses teamed up with Danish producers and stars from The Killing and Borgen for a special episode. ‘I think it’s because people find it soothing or something,’ says Adrian. I tell him that The Viking compared the experience of watching Midsomer Murders with eating soup: ‘It’s not the most exciting thing out there but it does make you feel all warm and hygge.

Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense.

She could enjoy life in a dank cave of corpses, so long as she had a pack of playing cards. She could make time stretch like a cat, languid and leisurely and unconcerned with humanity. She could produce amusements from the air, snag a fly out of the sky and make it perform a drama on her palm.

Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the ‘transition’ between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations. For this remains the common, everyday psychology: the Ostankino producers who make news worshipping the President in the day and then switch on an opposition radio as soon as they get off work; the political technologists who morph from role to role with liquid ease – a nationalist autocrat one moment and a liberal aesthete the next; the ‘Orthodox’ oligarchs who sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism – and keep their money and families in London. All cultures have differences between ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.

if people cannot, with undistorted communication, come to a mutually acceptable agreement about how to produce more people, and the other alternative is FALLING IN LOVE, and THEN torturing each other AND your kids…. FOR DECADES. shit. I just think this is all kind of…. perpetuating insanity. Why?

How many of us would jump at a chance to play Squid Game? I'm thinking that the number of those willing to play would even surprise the producers of the TV program.

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.

We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth, the truth about our parents and caregivers as well as about ourselves. We can only try to behave as if we were loving. But this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love. It is confusing and deceptive, and it produces much helpless rage in the deceived person. This rage must be repressed in the presence of the pretended “love,” especially if one is dependent, as a child is, on the person who is masquerading in this illusion of love.

Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood.

I began to see very clearly that what destroyed me in this silent drama with my father was that I was always trying to tell something that never happened, or rather that everything that happened, the many incidents, the love of twenty years, the trip down south, all this produced a state like slumber and ether out of which I could only awake with great difficulty. It was a struggle with shadows, a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one’s self in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflections of his presence everywhere, in everyone; of never addressing the loved one except through a diary or a book written about him, because in reality there was no connection between us, there was no human being to connect with. No one had ever merged into my father, yet we had thought a fusion could be realized through the likeness between us: but the likeness itself seemed to create greater separations and confusions. There was a likeness and no understanding, likeness and no nearness.

Obviously she was catching on how the producer wanted drama. If drama included pajama time at eight and Netflix binging, then we had drama indeed.

Hell comes later. Hell comes when lies have destroyed the relationship between individual or state and reality itself. Things fall apart. Life degenerates. Everything becomes frustration and disappointment. Hope consistently betrays. The deceitful individual desperately gestures at sacrifice, like Cain, but fails to please God. Then the drama enters its final act. Tortured by constant failure, the individual becomes bitter. Disappointment and failure amalgamate, and produce a fantasy: the world is bent on my personal suffering, my particular undoing, my destruction. I need, I deserve, I must have—my revenge. That’s the gateway to Hell. That’s when the underworld, a terrifying and unfamiliar place, becomes misery itself.

network effectively produced the president’s intelligence briefing and staffed the federal bureaucracy. Never before has a president promoted a single TV channel, asked the hosts for advice behind closed doors, and demanded for them to be fired when they step out of line. This story has all the makings of a farcical drama: a dysfunctional White House, a delusional president, and a drama-filled network misinforming

It’s worth stating the obvious here: Trump’s entanglement with Fox has no historical precedent. Never before has a TV network effectively produced the president’s intelligence briefing and staffed the federal bureaucracy. Never before has a president promoted a single TV channel, asked the hosts for advice behind closed doors, and demanded for them to be fired when they step out of line. This story has all the makings of a farcical drama: a dysfunctional White House, a delusional president, and a drama-filled network misinforming him from morning through night.

This meant hiring brilliant, often very moral writers to produce fluffy, witty, or charming dialogue and good drama that did not run afoul of the new Motion Picture Production Code, popularly known as the “Hays Code” for its creator, Will Hays. Under these highly moral guidelines, Hollywood entered its “golden era” from 1934 until the 1960s.

As creator Gibson tells it, the character evolved almost by accident. In 1930, Street and Smith—prolific producers of pulp fiction magazines—decided to try the new medium, radio, in an effort to boost circulation. Once a week a drama would be adapted from an upcoming issue of Detective Story. Adapter Harry Engman Charlot added the gimmick of the mysterious host, called him the Shadow, and left the link to the magazine somewhat tenuous. “Apparently,” wrote Gibson in his Shadow Scrapbook, “some listeners didn’t get this message clearly, because instead of asking about Detective Story Magazine, they wanted the magazine that told about the Shadow.” The answer was obvious—a new magazine, with the Shadow as its nucleus. Gibson, then a hustling freelancer whose acquaintances included magicians Houdini and Blackstone, was called in to help develop the character and get the new publication off the ground.

The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things. The former manner of interpretation – more primordial, and less clearly understood – finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature, and mythology. The world as forum for action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or – at a higher level of analysis – implication for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action. The latter manner of interpretation – the world as place of things – finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science. Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensually validatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely-determined things as tools (once the direction such use is to take has been determined, through application of more fundamental narrative processes). No complete world-picture can be generated, without use of both modes of construal. The fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated. Adherents of the mythological world-view tend to regard the statements of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical “fact,” even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific perspective – who assume that it is, or might become, complete – forget that an impassable gulf currently divides what is from what should be.

The fervour accompanying these events may be deceptive. If it expresses nothing more than the zeal with which the countries of the East are casting aside the bonds of ideology, or if it is a mimetic fervour - a tribute, as it were, to those liberal countries where all liberty has already been traded in for a technically easy life - then we shall have found out definitively what freedom is worth, and that it is probably never to be discovered a second time. History offers no second helpings. On the other hand, it could be that the present thaw in the East may be as disastrous in the long term as the excess of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, that it may bring about a political greenhouse effect, and so overheat human relations on the planet that the melting of the Communist ice-sheet will cause Western seaboards to be submerged. Odd that we should be in such absolute fear of the melting of the polar ice, and look upon it as a climatic catastrophe, while we aspire with every democratic bone in our bodies to the occurrence of just such an event on the political plane. If in the old days the USSR had released its gold reserves onto the world market, that market would have been completely destabilized. Today, by putting back into circulation their vast accumulated store of freedom, the Eastern countries could quite easily destabilize that very fragile balance of Western values which strives to ensure that freedom no longer emerges as action but only as a virtual and consensual form of interaction; no longer as a drama but merely as the universal psychodrama of liberalism. A sudden infusion of freedom as a real currency, as violent and active transcendence, as Idea, would be in every way catastrophic for our present air-conditioned redistribution of values. Yet this is precisely what we are asking of the East: freedom, the image of freedom, in exchange for the material signs of freedom. This is an absolutely diabolical contract, by virtue of which one signatory is in danger of losing their soul, and the other of losing their creature comforts. But perhaps - who knows? - this may, after all, be the best thing for both sides. Those societies that were formerly masked - Communist societies - have been unmasked. What is their face like? As for us, we dropped the mask long ago and have for a long time been without either mask or face. We are also without memory. We have reached the point of searching the water for signs of a memory that has left no traces, hoping against hope that something might remain when even the water's molecular memory has faded away. So it goes for our freedom: we would be hard put to it to produce a single sign of it, and we have been reduced to postulating its infinitesimal, intangible, undetectable existence in a (programmatic, operational) environment so highly dilute that in truth only a spectre of freedom floats there still, in a memory every bit as evanescent as water's.

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

But what was the right thing? Letting the show go on, as written? Or stepping in, hoping that I could—in a respectful way—point out how things could be different? It would be a mistake to remind producers what they already knew—that a TV series has an unspoken agreement with its audience to be what it has been from the beginning. A sitcom shouldn’t become a drama. Nobody wants to see a homicide investigation on Mr. Belvedere. (On Murphy Brown, maybe.) A show about a middle-class suburban family shouldn’t suddenly focus on illegal immigrants and their struggle to cross the border. My inner voice kept reminding me that I was just a kid, while the producers were authority figures—albeit odd authority figures. As a child actor, I had learned early that I wielded more power than most adults, yet my parents instilled within me a respect and a desire to submit to authority. My parents never put up with the typical child-star behavior.

The more gifted of these individuals became writers or artists. Even though they were able to point to the truth in the literature and art they produced, it was invariably a truth split off from their own lives. The price for that maneuver was illness.

One of the more sophisticated dramas that consciousness produces is “me” trying to step out of “my story,” the character trying to free itself from itself. This is like a mirage trying to eliminate a mirage, or a phantom trying to pull itself up by its own imaginary bootstraps, or a dog chasing its own tail.