Regular Show Pops Quotes

If you went twenty-four hours without cigarettes, I'd drink a can of pop. Regular pop. The whole can." Isaw the glimmer of Adrian's earlier smile returning. "You would not." "I totally would." "Half a can would put you into a coma." Sonya frowned. "Are you diabetic?" she asked me. "No," said Adrian, "but Sage is convinced one extraneous calorie will make her go from super skinny to just regular skinny. Tragedy." "Hey," I said. "You think it’d be a tragedy to go an hour without a cigarette." "Don’t question my steel resolve, Sage. I went without one for two hours today." "Show me twenty-four, and then I’ll be impressed." He gave me a look of mock surprise. "You mean you aren’t already? And here I thought you were dazzled from the moment you met me.

These days MTV is known for…I actually don’t know what MTV is known for now. I haven’t watched MTV regularly in at least fifteen years. I assume MTV’s programming consists of reality shows in which twenty-one-year-olds flash their junk in exchange for Skrillex tickets, but don’t quote me on that.

Art is the one place we all turn to for solace. We turn to it constantly, whether you are listening to music, or pop in a film; you want to escape reality, and if you thinking deeply, you want to engage in art in a complex way. Art allows us to navigate the more complicated parts of our lives in a way that is more palpable. We don’t go to the movies just to see a movie; we go for the experience. I’m very interested in the experience. Art has saved my life on a regular basis. I wanted to offer that experience to children, to enlist them, to show them the possibilities that are in the arts, to persuade them to pursue it for both their own personal salvation and for changing the way we are understood.

Life, in short, just wants to be. But—and here’s an interesting point—for the most part it doesn’t want to be much. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long. Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, “and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.” Fortunately, that moment hasn’t happened, but the chances are good that it will. I don’t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn’t terribly ambitious.

No direct evidence yet documents Earth’s tidal cycles more than a billion years ago, but we can be confident that 4.5 billion years ago things were a lot wilder. Not only did Earth have five-hour days, but the nearby Moon was much, much faster in its close orbit, as well. The Moon took only eighty-four hours—three and a half modern days—to go around Earth. With Earth spinning so fast and the Moon orbiting so fast, the familiar cycle of new Moon, waxing Moon, full Moon, and waning Moon played out in frenetic fast-forward: every few five-hour days saw a new lunar phase. Lots of consequences follow from this truth, some less benign than others. With such a big lunar obstruction in the sky and such rapid orbital motions, eclipses would have been frequent events. A total solar eclipse would have occurred every eighty-four hours at virtually every new Moon, when the Moon was positioned between Earth and the Sun. For some few minutes, sunlight would have been completely blocked, while the stars and planets suddenly popped out against a black sky, and the Moon’s fiery volcanoes and magma oceans stood out starkly red against the black lunar disk. Total lunar eclipses occurred regularly as well, almost every forty-two hours later, like clockwork. During every full Moon, when Earth lies right between the Sun and the Moon, Earth’s big shadow would have completely obscured the giant face of the bright shining Moon. Once again the stars and planets would have suddenly popped out against a black sky, as the Moon’s volcanoes put on their ruddy show. Monster tides were a far more violent consequence of the Moon’s initial proximity. Had both Earth and the Moon been perfectly rigid solid bodies, they would appear today much as they did 4.5 billion years ago: 15,000 miles apart with rapid rotational and orbital motions and frequent eclipses. But Earth and the Moon are not rigid. Their rocks can flex and bend; especially when molten, they swell and recede with the tides. The young Moon, at a distance of 15,000 miles, exerted tremendous tidal forces on Earth’s rocks, even as Earth exerted an equal and opposite gravitational force on the largely molten lunar landscape. It’s difficult to imagine the immense magma tides that resulted. Every few hours Earth’s largely molten rocky surface may have bulged a mile or more outward toward the Moon, generating tremendous internal friction, adding more heat and thus keeping the surface molten far longer than on an isolated planet. And Earth’s gravity returned the favor, bulging the Earth-facing side of the Moon outward, deforming our satellite out of perfect roundness.

Jamie guessed he wasn’t sure if calling it a homeless shelter when it was filled with homeless people was somehow offensive. He’d had two complaints lodged against him in the last twelve months alone for the use of ‘inappropriate’ language. Roper was a fossil, stuck in a by-gone age, struggling to stay afloat. He of course wouldn’t have this problem if he bothered to read any of the sensitivity emails HR pinged out. But he didn’t. And now he was on his final warning. Jamie left him to flounder and scanned the crowd and the room for anything amiss.  People were watching them. But not maliciously. Mostly out of a lack of anything else to do. They’d been there overnight by the look of it. Places like this popped up all over the city to let them stay inside on cold nights. The problem was finding a space that would house them. ‘No, not the owner,’ Mary said, sighing. ‘I just rent the space from the council. The ceiling is asbestos, and they can’t use it for anything, won’t get it replaced.’ She shrugged her shoulders so high that they touched the earrings. ‘But these people don’t mind. We’re not eating the stuff, so…’ She laughed a little. Jamie thought it sounded sad. It sort of was. The council wouldn’t let children play in there, wouldn’t let groups rent it, but they were happy to take payment and let the homeless in. It was safe enough for them. She pushed her teeth together and started studying the faded posters on the walls that encouraged conversations about domestic abuse, about drug addiction. From when this place was used. They looked like they were at least a decade old, maybe two. Bits of tape clung to the paint around them, scraps of coloured paper frozen in time, preserving images of long-past birthday parties. There was a meagre stage behind the coffee dispenser, and to the right, a door led into another room. ‘Do you know this boy?’ Roper asked, holding up his phone, showing Mary a photo of Oliver Hammond taken that morning. The officers who arrived on scene had taken it and attached it to the central case file. Roper was just accessing it from there. It showed Oliver’s face at an angle, greyed and bloated from the water.  ‘My God,’ Mary said, throwing a weathered hand to her mouth. It wasn’t easy for people who weren’t exposed to death regularly to stomach seeing something like that.  ‘Ms Cartwright,’ Roper said, leaning a little to his left to look in her eyes as she turned away. ‘Can you identify this person? I know it’s hard—’ ‘Oliver — Ollie, he preferred. Hammond, I think. I can check my files…’ She turned and pointed towards the back room Jamie had spotted. ‘If you want—’ Roper put the phone away.

One of the shortfalls of representation rhetoric is that it advertises a simplistic blueprint for racial equality in which people of color are visually “included” in spaces regularly reserved for white people. The dominant thought is: If we just show more minoritized faces in the white marketplace, then progress is being made.

So Clarke was in her Vauxhall Astra, on her way to the Royal Infirmary. The hospital sat on the southern edge of the city, plenty of space in the car park at this hour. She showed her ID at the Accident and Emergency desk and was shown where to go. She passed cubicle after cubicle, and if the curtains were closed, she popped her head around each. An old woman, her skin almost translucent, gave a beaming smile from her trolley. There were hopeful looks from others, too – patients and family members. A drunk youth, blood still dripping from his head, was being calmed by a couple of male nurses. A middle-aged woman was retching into a cardboard bowl. A teenage girl moaned softly and regularly, knees drawn up to her chest

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.