Rhythm Movie Quotes

In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal [...] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

What do you know about bipolar disorder?” I almost say, What do you know about it? But I make myself breathe and smile. “Is that the Jekyll-Hyde thing?” My voice sounds flat and even. Maybe a little bored, even though my mind and body are on alert. “Some people call it manic depression. It’s a brain disorder that causes extreme shifts in mood and energy. It runs in families, but it can be treated.” I continue to breathe, even if I’m not smiling anymore, but here is what is happening: my brain and my heart are pounding out different rhythms; my hands are turning cold and the back of my neck is turning hot; my throat has gone completely dry. The thing I know about bipolar disorder is that it’s a label. One you give crazy people. I know this because I’ve taken junior-year psychology and I’ve seen movies and I’ve watched my father in action for almost eighteen years, even though you could never slap a label on him because he would kill you. Labels like “bipolar” say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses.

The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our “inner eye” as such.

The scene reminded Lita of a Marvel Comics movie where the hero tries to blend in among mortals, but is so obviously everyone’s savior. Her savior. If he would only allow himself to be.

Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older;

The two of them had easily slipped back into the rhythms of their friendship, and they saw each other several times a week for movies, meals, games. He felt fortified in her presence. His arguments and observations were sharper.

For now, the Simple Daily Practice means doing ONE thing every day. Try any one of these things each day: A) Sleep eight hours. B) Eat two meals instead of three. C) No TV. D) No junk food. E) No complaining for one whole day. F) No gossip. G) Return an e-mail from five years ago. H) Express thanks to a friend. I) Watch a funny movie or a stand-up comic. J) Write down a list of ideas. The ideas can be about anything. K) Read a spiritual text. Any one that is inspirational to you. The Bible, The Tao te Ching, anything you want. L) Say to yourself when you wake up, “I’m going to save a life today.” Keep an eye out for that life you can save. M) Take up a hobby. Don’t say you don’t have time. Learn the piano. Take chess lessons. Do stand-up comedy. Write a novel. Do something that takes you out of your current rhythm. N) Write down your entire schedule. The schedule you do every day. Cross out one item and don’t do that anymore. O) Surprise someone. P) Think of ten people you are grateful for. Q) Forgive someone. You don’t have to tell them. Just write it down on a piece of paper and burn the paper. It turns out this has the same effect in terms of releasing oxytocin in the brain as actually forgiving them in person. R) Take the stairs instead of the elevator. S) I’m going to steal this next one from the 1970s pop psychology book Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: when you find yourself thinking of that special someone who is causing you grief, think very quietly, “No.” If you think of him and (or?) her again, think loudly, “No!” Again? Whisper, “No!” Again, say it. Louder. Yell it. Louder. And so on. T) Tell someone every day that you love them. U) Don’t have sex with someone you don’t love. V) Shower. Scrub. Clean the toxins off your body. W) Read a chapter in a biography about someone who is an inspiration to you. X) Make plans to spend time with a friend. Y) If you think, “Everything would be better off if I were dead,” then think, “That’s really cool. Now I can do anything I want and I can postpone this thought for a while, maybe even a few months.” Because what does it matter now? The planet might not even be around in a few months. Who knows what could happen with all these solar flares. You know the ones I’m talking about. Z) Deep breathing. When the vagus nerve is inflamed, your breathing becomes shallower. Your breath becomes quick. It’s fight-or-flight time! You are panicking. Stop it! Breathe deep. Let me tell you something: most people think “yoga” is all those exercises where people are standing upside down and doing weird things. In the Yoga Sutras, written in 300 B.C., there are 196 lines divided into four chapters. In all those lines, ONLY THREE OF THEM refer to physical exercise. It basically reads, “Be able to sit up straight.” That’s it. That’s the only reference in the Yoga Sutras to physical exercise. Claudia always tells me that yogis measure their lives in breaths, not years. Deep breathing is what keeps those breaths going.

Meditation is food for our inner being. We can live without it, but not well. As we deepen our breath and still our body, our thoughts follow into stillness. As we listen to the beating of our heart, and place it in rhythm with our breath, our emotions come alive, like a black-and-white movie suddenly exploding into colour

She was coming over to my place and instead of us hanging with my knucklehead boys—me smoking, her bored out of her skull—we were seeing movies. Driving out to different places to eat. Even caught a play at the Crossroads and I took her picture with some bigwig black playwrights, pictures where she’s smiling so much you’d think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge. We were a couple again. Visiting each other’s family on the weekends. Eating breakfast at diners hours before anybody else was up, rummaging through the New Brunswick library together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money. A nice rhythm we had going.

I try hard to give rhythm to the changes of pace in a film so that the directing is full of contrast: moments when the direction is reserved and academic, and then suddenly there’s a change in tone. Here’s what I dream of: that the viewer in the movie theater says to himself, ‘yeah, okay, it’s filmed theater,’ and then suddenly changes his mind: ‘yes, but in theater you can’t do that…’ And it goes back and forth from theater to film, and sometimes over to comic strips with Blutch‘s input. I’d like to try to achieve what Raymond Queneau called in  Saint-Glinglin  ‘la brouchecoutaille,’ a sort of ratatouille, by breaking down the walls between film and theater and thus ending up totally free.

The Routine… ...is not a scene from Alfonso Cuarón’s movie nor a part in Roger Waters “The Wall” Orson Welles might have come close with Kafkaesque nightmares But I beg to differ Routine is ungraspable, unexplainable It is more than just a row of robotic, faceless humanoid figures and less Panem-like It is the tick of an imaginary clock the unprecedented passing time The lure behind the lore Gravitational, earthquake-ish and magnanimous I look at the world and there it is going around in constant rhythms But here I am trapped in the tiniest corner of the tightest corners working my brains out, my fingers, my nimble soul Each to his own Each to his back David and Goliath style How do you wait when the wait is the fate of the unsure? How do you pretend to dream? How do you live in the now when the NOW is all there is to live

I saw a guy the other day at a wedding, and I told him my theory on why we’ve seen this explosion in comedies in the past fifteen years. Number one, America is tacking hard to the right. That sort of extremism always kind of kicks up the need to create comedy. But the second thing is Avid. What’s Avid? It’s a digital movie-editing program that directors use, and it’s incredibly helpful. I think Avid is hugely responsible for this boom in comedy. In the past, one would have to shoot the film and edit it, which was a big deal. Now, filmmakers can record the laughs from a test audience at a screening, and we can then cut to the rhythm of those laughs, the rhythm of the audience. We synchronize the laughs with the film. We can really get our timing down to a hundredth of a second. You can decide where you want your story to kick in, where you want a little bit of mood, where you want a hard laugh line. All of this can really be calibrated to these test screenings that we do. It doesn’t mean that it becomes mathematical. It still ultimately means that you have to make creative choices, but you can just really get a lot out of it. Sort of like surgery with a laser compared with a regular scalpel. We’re able to download a movie onto the computer and literally do all our edits in minutes. The precision is incredible. You play back the audio of the test screening and get everything timed just right. Like, “This laugh is losing this next line; let’s split the difference here.” You’re able to achieve this rolling energy. You can try experimental edits, and do multiple test screenings, and it’s all because you can move so fast with this program. Comedy is the one genre that I think has just really benefited from this more than any other.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

I do not at all have a sense of luring anyone into the poetic by catching hold of them through my subject matter. The idea appalls me in fact. Some events — whether a tree in a certain light, a Mexican family looking at the movie stills outside the cinema, a dream, my own condition of being in or out of love, of some epiphany relating to husband, child, friend, cat or dog, street or painting, cloud or stone, a book read, a story heard, a life thought about, a demonstration lived through, a situation, historical and/or topical, (that’s to say known in the moment of its passing into history) — it doesn’t matter, the list is endless, but some events (selected by some interior mysterious process out of all the other minutes and hours of my life) begin to form themselves in my understanding as phrases, images, rhythms of language, demand to be further formed, demand midwifery is one way to put it. Not all that one feels most strongly makes this verbal demand, even if one is a poet — by poet here I mean prose writer too — … but whatever experiences do demand it are always strongly felt ones. That is my testimony.

Try any one of these things each day: A) Sleep eight hours. B) Eat two meals instead of three. C) No TV. D) No junk food. E) No complaining for one whole day. F) No gossip. G) Return an e-mail from five years ago. H) Express thanks to a friend. I) Watch a funny movie or a stand-up comic. J) Write down a list of ideas. The ideas can be about anything. K) Read a spiritual text. Any one that is inspirational to you. The Bible, The Tao te Ching, anything you want. L) Say to yourself when you wake up, “I’m going to save a life today.” Keep an eye out for that life you can save. M) Take up a hobby. Don’t say you don’t have time. Learn the piano. Take chess lessons. Do stand-up comedy. Write a novel. Do something that takes you out of your current rhythm. N) Write down your entire schedule. The schedule you do every day. Cross out one item and don’t do that anymore. O) Surprise someone. P) Think of ten people you are grateful for. Q) Forgive someone. You don’t have to tell them. Just write it down on a piece of paper and burn the paper. It turns out this has the same effect in terms of releasing oxytocin in the brain as actually forgiving them in person. R) Take the stairs instead of the elevator. S) I’m going to steal this next one from the 1970s pop psychology book Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: when you find yourself thinking of that special someone who is causing you grief, think very quietly, “No.” If you think of him and (or?) her again, think loudly, “No!” Again? Whisper, “No!” Again, say it. Louder. Yell it. Louder. And so on. T) Tell someone every day that you love them. U) Don’t have sex with someone you don’t love. V) Shower. Scrub. Clean the toxins off your body. W) Read a chapter in a biography about someone who is an inspiration to you. X) Make plans to spend time with a friend. Y) If you think, “Everything would be better off if I were dead,” then think, “That’s really cool. Now I can do anything I want and I can postpone this thought for a while, maybe even a few months.” Because what does it matter now? The planet might not even be around in a few months. Who knows what could happen with all these solar flares. You know the ones I’m talking about. Z) Deep breathing. When the vagus nerve is inflamed, your breathing becomes shallower. Your breath becomes quick. It’s fight-or-flight time! You are panicking. Stop it! Breathe deep. Let me tell you something: most people think “yoga” is all those exercises where people are standing upside down and doing weird things. In the Yoga Sutras, written in 300 B.C., there are 196 lines divided into four chapters. In all those lines, ONLY THREE OF THEM refer to physical exercise. It basically reads, “Be able to sit up straight.” That’s it. That’s the only reference in the Yoga Sutras to physical exercise. Claudia always tells me that yogis measure their lives in breaths, not years. Deep breathing is what keeps those breaths going.

A school bus is many things. A school bus is a substitute for a limousine. More class. A school bus is a classroom with a substitute teacher. A school bus is the students' version of a teachers' lounge. A school bus is the principal's desk. A school bus is the nurse's cot. A school bus is an office with all the phones ringing. A school bus is a command center. A school bus is a pillow fort that rolls. A school bus is a tank reshaped- hot dogs and baloney are the same meat. A school bus is a science lab- hot dogs and baloney are the same meat. A school bus is a safe zone. A school bus is a war zone. A school bus is a concert hall. A school bus is a food court. A school bus is a court of law, all judges, all jury. A school bus is a magic show full of disappearing acts. Saw someone in half. Pick a card, any card. Pass it on to the person next to you. He like you. She like you. K-i-s-s-i . . . s-s-i-p-p-i is only funny on a school bus. A school bus is a stage. A school bus is a stage play. A school bus is a spelling bee. A speaking bee. A get your hand out of my face bee. A your breath smell like sour turnips bee. A you don't even know what a turnip bee is. A maybe not, but I know what a turn up is and your breath smell all the way turnt up bee. A school bus is a bumblebee, buzzing around with a bunch of stingers on the inside of it. Windows for wings that flutter up and down like the windows inside Chinese restaurants and post offices in neighborhoods where school bus is a book of stamps. Passing mail through windows. Notes in the form of candy wrappers telling the street something sweet came by. Notes in the form of sneaky middle fingers. Notes in the form of fingers pointing at the world zooming by. A school bus is a paintbrush painting the world a blurry brushstroke. A school bus is also wet paint. Good for adding an extra coat, but it will dirty you if you lean against it, if you get too comfortable. A school bus is a reclining chair. In the kitchen. Nothing cool about it but makes perfect sense. A school bus is a dirty fridge. A school bus is cheese. A school bus is a ketchup packet with a tiny hole in it. Left on the seat. A plastic fork-knife-spoon. A paper tube around a straw. That straw will puncture the lid on things, make the world drink something with some fizz and fight. Something delightful and uncomfortable. Something that will stain. And cause gas. A school bus is a fast food joint with extra value and no food. Order taken. Take a number. Send a text to the person sitting next to you. There is so much trouble to get into. Have you ever thought about opening the back door? My mother not home till five thirty. I can't. I got dance practice at four. A school bus is a talent show. I got dance practice right now. On this bus. A school bus is a microphone. A beat machine. A recording booth. A school bus is a horn section. A rhythm section. An orchestra pit. A balcony to shot paper ball three-pointers from. A school bus is a basketball court. A football stadium. A soccer field. Sometimes a boxing ring. A school bus is a movie set. Actors, directors, producers, script. Scenes. Settings. Motivations. Action! Cut. Your fake tears look real. These are real tears. But I thought we were making a comedy. A school bus is a misunderstanding. A school bus is a masterpiece that everyone pretends to understand. A school bus is the mountain range behind Mona Lisa. The Sphinx's nose. An unknown wonder of the world. An unknown wonder to Canton Post, who heard bus riders talk about their journeys to and from school. But to Canton, a school bus is also a cannonball. A thing that almost destroyed him. Almost made him motherless.

The narrative rigor of writing screenplays to a precise length, with story beats at all the right places has, I believe, made me a better novel writer. I feel very comfortable with the rhythms of the modern Hollywood movie, a sequence of storytelling expectations so many of us have internalized to the point that they can be deemed presumed knowledge in one's reader. It makes world building so much easier than it must have been for, say, Ray Bradbury, or even P K Dick. I feel quite comfortable straying from the narrative melody in my work, now, confident I can find my way home again, or can make my hat my home, story-wise, and that's something I tie in large measure to my screenwriting experience.

They thought they’d completed their assignment when the studio asked for one more, something punchy for a big production number. So they returned to the piano in their office on the Paramount lot. Several unproductive hours later, they gave up and took a drive in the Los Angeles hills, each of them in an irritable mood. Mercer, trying to think of something cheerful, remembered an “offbeat little rhythm tune”8 he’d heard Arlen humming a few days earlier, one that brought to mind a three-word phrase that had long intrigued him, “Accentuate the Positive.” Later, he gave differing accounts of where he’d first heard that phrase. One was that he’d been in an African American church in Savannah when the preacher, Bishop Grace—called Daddy Grace by his congregation—used it in a sermon. The other was that he’d been told that Father Divine—a Harlem preacher who claimed to be God—had used it. Either way, it was perfect for a song, which he and Arlen created by singing to each other as they continued their drive. Given the source of its lyric and the music’s gospel feel, it’s ironic that it was used in a racially offensive way. In the movie, Bing Crosby and Sonny Tufts performed it in blackface. But “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” became a jukebox hit and an enduring pop classic.

Bo put a record on the stereo and the speakers crackled, that moment of anticipation before the needle found its way to the first song. An organ, in rhythm. A chord. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Mum cheered. It was her favorite, the soundtrack to a movie called The Big Chill.

Where Jolson conquered, Bing Crosby convinced and charmed, and like Astaire, Jolson too for that matter, he did not possess the physical gifts of a standard leading man (angles and ears and hair, yet again). Also like Astaire, he made it all seem easy, with the laid-back acting and the unforced way that devastating baritone could pour out and swing out. In one crucial sense he was more beholden to Jolson than Astaire, being primarily a solo performer who sang to people more than he sang with them. Recall: who was Crosby’s only steady partner on film? Bob Hope, in a partnership based in jokey rivalry. Other singers in Crosby films, besides Hope and Dorothy Lamour, seldom counted. Nor did most of Crosby’s films. Paramount, his home studio, was a formula-bound factory for most of the 1930s and ’40s, and the golden goose of the Crosby films did not countenance feather-ruffling. One after another, they were amiable time-passers, relaxed escapism that made a mint and sold tons of records and sheet music. For many then and some now, these vehicles offered unthreatening comfort—few chances taken, little deviation from formula, a likable guy ambling through some minor plot and singing mostly great songs. On occasion there was something as glaring as the ridiculous Dixie: as composer Dan Emmett, Crosby speeds up the title song into an uptempo hit only because the theater’s caught on fire. Generally, his films lacked even that cuckoo invigoration, which is why posterity dotes on Holiday Inn and its splashy, inferior semi-remake, White Christmas, and few of the others. While it would not be accurate to view Crosby as another megalomaniacal Jolson type, he lacked Astaire’s forceful imagination. Greater professional curiosity might have made his films—not simply his singing—transcend time and circumstance.

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.

This was inevitable, and another unmistakable inkling tells me that I knew it well before now. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. It’s Cecelia’s call that stops me from embracing the dark snaking its way into me. Focusing on her, I allow myself the chance to tell her that briefly, she gave me a glimpse of a happiness I hadn’t thought I was capable of. “Cecelia,” I address firmly, my heart lurching into the rhythm she created. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Tobias attempts to cut in, calling my name, but I refuse him. “I’m talking to Cecelia.” “Yes?” she replies, voice shaking with fear. “After this, want to watch a movie?” Ignoring any outside noise beyond our exchange, I tell her of the memory that kept me going in France. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Of a time I felt complete and whole. “You can make that cheddar popcorn I love, and we can crowd under that blanket that smells like . . . what’s that smell?” “Lavender,” she releases in a shaky rush. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Of a life we might have had . . . if I didn’t have so many fucking monsters to slay. “Yeah, and I’ll watch a chick movie because all I really want to do is watch you watch it. Your face gets all dopey when you get love drunk.” Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. “We love rainy days, don’t we, baby?” “We do,” she croaks, voice breaking. Tilting my head at Matteo in challenge, I make my declaration clear to Tobias to ready himself. “We don’t fucking negotiate with terrorists.” Taking another step toward Matteo, Cecelia’s voice reaches me in elevated panic. “Dominic.” “What is it, baby?” “S’il te plaît, ne fais rien de stupide. Je t’aime.” Please don’t do anything stupid. I love you. “Je sais.” I know. Her declaration fuels me as I stand between her and the monster I swore to protect her from while her love sets me free. For a brief time, she was my solace—my reprieve. The only dream of a future I allowed myself to have, but she can’t be. Not anymore. Too many monsters. “Dominic,” Tobias orders gruffly. “Stand down, right fucking now. We’re still talking.” I feel the desperation in his order, in him, as he rattles behind me to stop and think it through. But I have, for far too long, and I’m finally ten steps ahead. Sorry brother.

These conditions commonly coexist with ADHD: Obstructive sleep apnea: This sleep disorder, characterized by snoring and pauses in breathing during sleep, is more common among adults, but it does occur in children, especially children with ADHD. Restless leg syndrome: This condition causes an intense, often irresistible urge to move your legs, particularly when sitting or lying down. Unlike ADHD-related hyperactivity, it happens mostly at night and often gets worse with age. Periodic limb movement syndrome: You know how your leg kicks or your arm flops all of a sudden when you’re falling asleep? It has a name. At least, it does when it keeps happening every twenty to forty seconds and long enough to interfere with sleep.[*3] Sleepwalking and night terrors: These sleep disorders occur when the lines between awake and asleep are blurred. They are often first observed in childhood by parents. Insomnia: You’ve probably heard of this one. Insomnia occurs whenever you want to sleep but can’t sleep, due to difficulties falling asleep or staying asleep, and it is also one of the criteria for delayed sleep phase syndrome. Delayed sleep phase syndrome: This syndrome occurs when your body’s internal clock, or its circadian rhythm, is delayed by two or more hours. For example, you might naturally want to sleep from three a.m. to noon. Excessive daytime sleepiness: This condition is exactly what it sounds like. If you’re falling asleep in the middle of a movie at your friend’s house or missing a shift because you can’t stay awake, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad friend or a lazy employee. It could be a sign that something is wrong.

The Rhythm of Relationships It’s not a mystery that there are certain people with whom we "click" and others with whom we don’t. In the movie, Forrest Gump, Forrest proclaimed that he and Jenny got along like "peas and carrots." I once heard Tony Robbins say that if you are with the right person, a relationship does not take a lot of work. When relationships are in rhythm, everything is made easier.

I’ve learned a lot watching Eleanor Powell movies. A lot about finding my own rhythm. A lot about staying plucky and trusting that I’ll get my One Big Break in time for the finale. But I think there’s something more to learn. Something about how she danced. It wasn’t as if no one was watching. No self-help adages for her. She knew everyone was watching. They had no choice. She demanded them to watch, she demanded them to marvel, because she was up there on that stage and she was doing something extraordinary. I want to be more like Eleanor Powell. She danced unpartnered. And she danced with joy.

While timing was only part of the issue with Doris Day, it would be a key reason why, from the mid-1950s onward, good people were unable to appear in good musicals. An original like Never Steal Anything Small was unsuccessful on every level—and heinous in its waste of Jimmy Cagney’s talent—while skillful adaptations like Silk Stockings and Bells Are Ringing flopped resoundingly. As fewer opportunities arose, they were sometimes attended by the questionable notion that dubbing solves all problems. This is why Rossano Brazzi and Sidney Poitier could look great, in South Pacific and Porgy and Bess, and sound ostensibly like the opera singers who were doing the actual vocalizing. While dubbing had been present from the very beginning, it achieved some kind of pinnacle from the mid-fifties to the late sixties. Hiring nonsinging names like Deborah Kerr and Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn, even nonsinging non-names like Richard Beymer, was viewed as a form of insurance, conviction be damned.8 Casting for name recognition instead of experience has long been part of the film equation, and it cuts both ways. It may, for example, have seemed more astute than desperate to put Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood into Paint Your Wagon, despite the equivocal results. Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge! was far less a musical player than a photogenic, aurally enhanced artifact, and many people left Mamma Mia! wondering if Pierce Brosnan’s execrable singing was intended as a deliberate joke. In contrast with these are the film people who take the plunge with surprising ease.

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

Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)—This New York-set thriller operates on mood and atmosphere and moves so fast, with such delicate changes of rhythm, that its excitement has a subterranean sexiness. Faye Dunaway, with long, thick, dark-red hair, is Laura Mars, a celebrity fashion photographer who specializes in the chic and pungency of sadism; the pictures she shoots have a furtive charge—we can see why they sell. Directed by Irvin Kershner, the film has a few shocking fast cuts, but it also has scabrous elegance and a surprising amount of humor. Laura’s scruffy, wild-eyed driver (Brad Dourif) epitomizes New York’s crazed, hostile flunkies; he’s so wound up he seems to have the tensions of the whole city in his gut. Her manager (René Auberjonois) is tense and ambivalent about Laura—about everything. Her models (Lisa Taylor and Dar-lanne Fluegel), who in their poses look wickedly decadent, are really just fun-loving dingalings.

Anything I learned about Real Acting I learned from watching Alec Baldwin. By Real Acting I mean “an imitation of human behavior that is both emotionally natural and mechanically precise enough as to elicit tears or laughter from humans.” Alec is a master of both Film Acting and Real Acting. He can play the emotion at the core of a scene—he is falling in love, his mother is torturing him, his mentor has been reincarnated as a peacock—while reciting long speeches word for word and hitting all the jokes with the right rhythm. You would be surprised how many major Oscar-winning movie stars cannot do this. There are only about nine people in the world who can do this; maybe three more that we don’t know about in North Korea. Alec knows how to let the camera come to him. He can convey a lot with a small movement of his eyes. He speaks so quietly sometimes that I can barely hear him when I’m standing next to him, but when you watch the film back, it’s all there.

My favourites are I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, Large-Hearted Boy, Aquarium Drunkard, When You Awake and Funky 16 Corners, among scores of others. (Some

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

The Year Of The Cat" On a morning from a Bogart movie In a country where they turn back time You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre Contemplating a crime She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running Like a watercolor in the rain Don't bother asking for explanations She'll just tell you that she came In the year of the cat She doesn't give you time for questions As she locks up your arm in hers And you follow till your sense of which direction Completely disappears By the blue tiled walls near the market stalls There's a hidden door she leads you to These days, she says, "I feel my life Just like a river running through" The year of the cat Why she looks at you so coolly? And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea She comes in incense and patchouli So you take her, to find what's waiting inside The year of the cat Well morning comes and you're still with her And the bus and the tourists are gone And you've thrown away your choice you've lost your ticket So you have to stay on But the drumbeat strains of the night remain In the rhythm of the new-born day You know sometime you're bound to leave her But for now you're going to stay In the year of the cat Year of the cat

Jungle’s soundworld constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle’s treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you’d be vulnerable to trauma). ‘It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for,’ runs the martial-arts-movie sample in Source Direct’s ‘The Cult’, a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call ‘neurofunk’ (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips ’n’ blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don’t even sound like breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle’s strategy of ‘cultural resistance’: the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.

Is your body made of stone? Or iron? You are clothed with flesh, human flesh, which is en-flamed by desire as easily as grass. Surely you are not a better philosopher than those great and noble men, who were cast down merely by such a sight? Have you not heard what Solomon says: "If someone walks onto a fire of coals, will he not burn his feet? If someone lights a fire in his lap, will he not burn his clothing?" For even if you did not have intimate relations with the prostitute, in your lust you coupled with her, and you committed the sin in your mind. And it was not only at that time, but also when the theater has closed, and the woman has gone away, her image remains in your soul, along with her words, her figure, her looks, her movement, her rhythm, and her distinctive and meretricious tunes; and having suffered countless wounds you go home.

I wanted to be braver—wanted to reach for her, close the space between us the way guys in movies did, like it was all instinct and rhythm. But my body didn’t move fast enough, and maybe that was the point.

Once we finish eating, Amira volunteers to help me with the dishes, which of course makes her even more special in Ma’s eyes. If I didn’t hate washing dishes, I would’ve told her I could do it myself, just so Ma could remember that I’m her real daughter and the one she loves. But washing dishes is my least favorite chore, and Amira and I get through them in half the time, with her helping me dry. Plus, it’s kind of nice. We get into a steady rhythm of me passing her each clean dish, and she quickly figures out where everything goes after she dries.

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