Rocking The Stage Quotes

That's the beautiful thing about innocence; even monsters have a pocketful of childhood memories with which to seek comfort with.

So, congratulations. You're married to a rock star.

As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.

If you're going to be a fucking rock star go be one. People don't want to see the guy next door on stage; they want to see a being from another planet. You want to see somebody you'd never meet in ordinary life.

You are my Marilyn. You are my lake full of fishes. You are my sky set, my 'Hollywood in Miniature,' my pink Cadillac, my highway, my martini, the stage for my heart to rock and roll on, the screen where my movies light up.

She looked at him, watched the lights from the stage flicker over his expression, in the dark depths of his eyes. There was a whole other world in there, she thought and it was hers to explore forever if she would stop being so afraid.

I was going to kill him. Slowly. Strangle him with the overpriced thong. A fitting death for a rock star.

I put on some make-up, turn on the 8-track, and I'm pulling the wig down from the shelf - suddenly I'm Miss Punk Rock Star of Stage and Screen and I ain't ever turning back!

Ronnie James Dio died the other day, quietly succumbed to a relatively sudden onset of stomach cancer and up and left the planet in a blaze of stage fire, dragonsmoke and general metal awesomeness. Maybe you heard.

For two years the battles raged across the lands, one side fighting for conquest, the other for freedom. Othium-powered weapons wreaked havoc on defending armies. The red fire was hard to resist, but the white light was stronger. Gradually the tide turned and the freedom fighters regained control of their lands and their cities. The stage was set for the final battle. The opposing forces met outside the Ackar city of Erbea in 1302 and the forces of good won the day. The alchemist escaped and was about to take his revenge at a wedding ceremony when he was bound by the white light. All that remained was his heart, or maybe his soul, encapsulated in a piece of red rock. Dewar the Third succeeded his father and the new king promised a time of peace and prosperity. History would call him the Peacemaker. Now, two hundred years on, a new Emperor seeks to rule the world, while an illegitimate son sets out on a path towards revenge and a thief begins to learn his trade. It is time for the alchemist to return.

Leaders can change the tenor of the workplace and create harmony in motion toward a favorable result. So every time you say to your team, "Let's rock and roll," make sure you have already set up the stage to where they can actually perform like rock stars.

The bravest thing David Bowie ever did was to go on stage after Queen at Live Aid.

There are moments in every relationship that define when two people start to fall in love. A first glance A first smile A first kiss A first fall… (I remove the Darth Vader house shoes from my satchel and look down at them.) You were wearing these during one of those moments. One of the moments I first started to fall in love with you. The way you gave me butterflies that morning Had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else, and everything to do with you. I was falling in love with you that morning because of you. (I take the next item out of the satchel. When I pull it out and look up, she brings her hands to her mouth in shock.) This ugly little gnome With his smug little grin… He's the reason I had an excuse to invite you into my house. Into my life. You took a lot of aggression out on him over those next few months. I would watch from my window as you would kick him over every time you walked by him. Poor little guy. You were so tenacious. That feisty, aggressive, strong-willed side of you…. The side of you that refused to take crap from this concrete gnome? The side of you that refused to take crap from me? I fell in love with that side of you because of you. (I set the gnome down on the stage and grab the CD) This is your favorite CD ‘Layken’s shit.’ Although now I know you intended for shit to be possessive, rather than descriptive. The banjo started playing through the speakers of your car and I immediately recognized my favorite band. Then when I realized it was your favorite band, too? The fact that these same lyrics inspired both of us? I fell in love with that about you. That had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. I fell in love with that about you because of you. (I take a slip of paper out of the satchel and hold it up. When I look at her, I see Eddie slide her a napkin. I can’t tell from up here, but that can only mean she’s crying.) This is a receipt I kept. Only because the item I purchased that night was on the verge of ridiculous. Chocolate milk on the rocks? Who orders that? You were different, and you didn’t care. You were being you. A piece of me fell in love with you at that moment, because of you. This? (I hold up another sheet of paper.) This I didn’t really like so much. It’s the poem you wrote about me. The one you titled 'mean?' I don’t think I ever told you… but you made a zero. And then I kept it to remind myself of all the things I never want to be to you. (I pull her shirt from my bag. When I hold it into the light, I sigh into the microphone.) This is that ugly shirt you wear. It doesn’t really have anything to do with why I fell in love with you. I just saw it at your house and thought I’d steal it.

Grace rocked through the rhythm and stepped forward towards the audience and the edge of the stage, looking out over the crowd.People screamed louder. Strangely enough, I could hear Lea screaming, “That’s my best friend, bitches,” over everyone.

Our eyes met and locked as the song came to a halt, followed by a screaming conclusion from the crowd, girls around us pressing me into the stage, forcing all the air out of my lungs, but I’d forgotten about doing anything so basic as breathing.

RJD was pretty much heavy metal personified, a tiny 5-foot-4-inch sorcerer with a mangy mane, demonic eyes and sly grin, all coupled to a simply huge, operatic voice, a diminutive powerhouse who prowled the stage like a feline elf and who was, it turns out, also finely intelligent and well spoken, an actual gentleman in a genre known all too well for its bombastic, monosyllabic doltbuckets. A rare thing indeed.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron-clad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you alive and alert! Believe you are the baddest ass in town – and [that] you suck! It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And when you walk on stage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it’s all we have – and then remember it’s only rock’ n’ roll.

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a reindeer-the flying kind. I spent a couple years galloping around looking for lichen and fantasizing about boy reindeer. Then one day I saw Peter Pan and my reindeer phase was over. I didn't understand the allure of not growing up, because every little girl got boobs and go steady. I did understand that a flying Peter Pan was better than a flying reindeer. Mary Lou had seen Peter Pan too, but Mary Lou's ambition was to be Wendy, so Mary Lou and I made a good pair. On most any day we could be seen holding hands, running through the neighborhood singing, "I can fly! I can fly!" If we'd been older this probably would have started rumors. The Peter Pan stage was actually pretty short-lived because a few months into Peter Pan I discovered Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman couldn't fly, but she had big, fat bulging boobs crammed into a sexy Wondersuit. Barbie was firmly entrenched as role model in the burg, but Wonder Woman gave her a good run for her money. Not only did Wonder Woman spill over her Wondercups but she also kicked serious ass. If I had to name the single most influential person in my life it would have to be Wonder Woman. All during my teens and early twenties I wanted to be a rock star. The fact that I can't play a musical instrument or carry a tune did nothing to diminish the fantasy. During my more realistic moments I wanted to be a rock star's girlfriend.

There is not one single invention of (Nature's), however subtle or impressive it may be thought to be, that the human spirit cannot create; no forest of Fontainebleu or moonlit scene that cannot be produced with a floodlit stage set; no waterfall that hydraulics cannot imitate so perfectly as to be indistinguishable from the original; no rock that papier-mâché cannot copy; no flower that specious taffetas and delicately painted papers cannot rival! There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface.

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home.

He’d smashed my heart, thrown me out, and moved on with being the rock ’n’ roll bad boy. “Fuck him,” I whispered.

The village hall is already packed by the time we arrive. Myreton’s local band, the appropriately-named Unbeerables, is on stage, playing covers of old rock songs, as they have at every party for the past thirty years, to a handful of spectacularly uninterested men in varying stages of intoxication. Right now, they’re about half-way through Bohemian Rhapsody, and while it’s not a song generally associated with Halloween, the way they’re murdering the operatic passage really is genuinely shocking, so credit where credit’s due, I suppose.

One final insight about prioritizing involves getting disciplined about what you don’t put on the stage. This means not thinking when you don’t have to, becoming disciplined about not paying attention to non-urgent tasks unless, or until, it’s truly essential that you do.

None other than Malcolm Ericson, drummer for worldwide renowned rock group Stage Dive, had somehow shacked up with my sister. My quiet, calm, color-within-the-lines-or-else sister.

I understood then why rock stars have such big egos: from the stage, the world is just one faceless, shirtless, obedient mass, as far as the eye can see.

It may not be quite enough to find a nice inclusive Episcopal church led by Progressive White Cleric to replace the lily-white rocking megachurch led by Conservative White Guy in Jeans on Stage.

I’m the lady by day, and I’m Gaga by night. And I’m always going to be that way, because it’s a testament to your discipline as a musician. I do like to drink, I like to get crazy, I like to go out with my friends, and I like to sing rock and roll. I used to go-go dance! And I like to be inspired by young artists, people like Millie who are outrageously hard, disciplined individuals. But at the end of the day I’m a classically trained pianist and I’m a singer, and that’s what allows the girl that goes out at night to also go on stage with Tony Bennett at Lincoln Center. Because I know how to do it.

She looked down at him, smiling with exasperated amusement. *Stubborn, snarly male.* *Stubbornness is a much-maligned quality,* he panted as he climbed toward her. Her silvery, velvet-coated laugh filled the land. Then he finally got a good look at her. He sank to his knees. *I owe you a debt, Lady.* She shook her head. *The debt is mine, not yours.* *I failed you,* he said bitterly, looking at her wasted body. *No, Daemon,* Jaenelle replied softly. *I failed you. You asked me to heal the crystal chalice and return to the living world. And I did. But I don’t think I ever forgave my body for being the instrument that was used to try to destroy me, and I became its cruelest torturer. For that I’m sorry because you treasured that part of me.* *No, I treasured all of you. I love you, Witch. I always will. You’re everything I’d dreamed you would be.* She smiled at him. *And I—* She shuddered, pressed her hand against her chest. *Come. There’s little time left.* She fled through the rocks, out of sight before he could move. He hurried after her, following the glittering trail, gasping as he felt a crushing weight descend on him. *Daemon.* Her voice came back to him, faint and pain-filled. *If the body is going to survive, I can’t stay any longer.* He fought against the weight. *Jaenelle!* *You have to take this in slow stages. Rest there now. Rest, Daemon. I’ll mark the trail for you. Please follow it. I’ll be waiting for you at the end.* *JAENELLE!* A wordless whisper. His name spoken like a caress. Then silence.

To everything, in other words, there is a season, and McCarthy’s hubris hastened the end of his hour upon the stage. “I was fully aware of McCarthy’s faults, which were neither few nor minor,” Cohn recalled. “He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had—in order to draw attention to the rock-bottom seriousness of the situation. He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements.” The urge to overstate, to overdramatize, to dominate the news, could be costly, and so it proved to be for McCarthy. The Wisconsin senator, Cohn said, was essentially a salesman. “He was selling the story of America’s peril,” Cohn recalled. “He knew that he could never hope to convince anybody by delivering a dry, general-accounting-office type of presentation. In consequence, he stepped up circumstances a notch or two”—and in so doing he opened himself to attacks that proved fatal. He oversold, and the customers—the public—tired of the pitch, and the pitchman.

It seemed to me then - and to be honest, sir, seems to me still - that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own.

We were all—every kid in the crowd and every person on stage—chasing the same thing: a feeling of rebellion, of possibility, of promise, of chaos. We had to find it so we could figure out how to be ourselves, and we couldn’t locate it without each other.

lines he'd splattered on the wall of his villa? He hadn't quoted Romeo and Juliet, though – his lines had come from a different play. One she hadn't been as familiar with, though she did remember a few lines of it. "All the world’s a stage, And all the men

I’m well aware of that. But now one of the buttons on my coat sleeve is caught as well.” “What if I—” “Don’t twist like that!” Now they were even more entangled. “What if you shed your coat?” she asked. Shed his coat. What a brilliant idea. And while he was at it, why didn’t he just strip off her gown as well? His shirt and trousers. Her chemise. Set this stage box a-rocking. Really give the guests a show they’d never forget.

My goal tonight is to maintain a steady stream of invincibility. If I hit stage four—“I’m Invisible”—I’ll likely pass out, and that would ruin all my fun.

Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages.

The whole landscape-beach and headland and sea and rock-quavered in front of my eyes like a stage backcloth.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, while the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet—or more frequently around a completely different planet.

At one stage in the history of English, the past tenses of verbs were marked by a regular vowel change process; instead of “help/helped,” we had “help/holp.” Over time, -ed became the preferred way to mark the past tense, and eventually the past tense of most verbs was formed by adding -ed. But the old pattern was preserved in verbs like “eat/ate,” “give/gave,” “take/ took,” “get/got”—verbs that are used very often, and so are more entrenched as a linguistic habit (the very frequently used “was/ were” is a holdover from an even older pattern). They became irregular because the world changed around them.

The famous sea squirt, beloved of popular neuroscience lectures, in its larval stage is motile and has a primitive nervous system (called a notochord) so it can navigate the sea – at least, its own very small corner of it. In its adult stage it fastens limpet-like to a rock and feeds passively, simply depending on the influx of seawater through its tubes. It then reabsorbs its nervous system – it is no longer needed since the creature no longer needs to move.

This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement, one of the tallest probably in the township and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast,—the hill is the hulk. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestic it starts! as it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks , advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear. I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.

Time collapsed into a delicate dark pencil brushed against our eyebrows, the emergent rumble of crowds gathering above our heads. We slid into our costumes. Pirate, outlaw, futuristic rebels. Red, purple, gold. Chains hanging from our belts, tight black trousers. We were moved upstairs, closer to the stage. Finally, we heard the cannon's roar: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Tanzar recording artists... THE MASTER PLANETS!" The world shot forward. We stepped into the spotlight.

(Reed looks out over the audience from the stage) "Some of them don't even move, they stand riveted in a kind of reverence as they endure the jostling madness. They see you. They hear you. I never knew there could be any other reason to keep on breathing. Ever.

But the benefit of starting from rock bottom is that you've basically been handed a gift: a clean slate. Your pride's been demolished, your ego is pulverized, your fear of failure has been realized in its most brutal forms, you are...free. Suddenly you're able to shake the judgment of others in a way you never could before, because you no longer give a shit what they think! You've entered a primal survival stage, one you didn't even realize existed. Now all your energy must be reserved for action, for making things happen.

Not every girl is like you,” Sid says sadly. “There are plenty like me. You just don’t find them in a mosh pit or with their tits hanging out outside the stage door.” “Damn, that’s my dating pool gone then,” mutters Seth from the front of the car and the others snigger.

A year or so earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dosen stone-broke freaks from Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound system that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar - even a cough or the sound of a boot drooping on the stage - to half-deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away. But the best technicians available to the National DAs' convention in Vegas apparently couldn't handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to addres his troops during the Siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phaze with the speaker's gestures. (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 73)

And it took me a long time and a lot of struggle to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it. I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I was playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process.

The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics . . . The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy--then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.

I'll lean over your crib, lift your squalling form out, and sit in the rocking chair to nurse you. The word 'infant' is derived from the Latin word for 'unable to speak,' but you'll be perfectly capable of saying one thing: 'I suffer.,' and you'll do it tirelessly and without hesitation. I have to admire your utter commitment to that statement; when you cry, you'll become outrage incarnate, every fiber of your being employed in expressing that emotion. It's funny: when you're tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I'd insist they include the halo. But when you're unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell. At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense. In many ways, it's an enviable state.

Led Zeppelin was the rock band's rock band, but it was Plant who made it special. He had the knack of taking a seemingly inconsequential string of words, adding a searing shriek, and knocking the listener back on his heels. This was no less impressive on stage than in the restaurant.

I frowned, realizing we were completely alone. There was no audience. There was no orchestra. “Rune?” Rune rocked nervously on his feet and pointed to the stage. I followed his hand. In the center of the large stage was a single chair, and a cello resting on its side with its bow lying on top.

A shrill, glass-endangering scream of outrage from the direction of the stage yanked me around just in time to see the guitarist swing his gleaming back Stratocaster at the drummer's head. He struck with the kind of accuracy that comes only with years of practice and/or extremely vivid wishful thinking.

The first time I heard rock music it was really exciting. I felt that this new music and vibe was really me. I remember going to bed and having dreams that I was performing this music and visualizing myself on stage, way before it actually happened… What always appealed to me about rock music is the feeling of freedom, that I could finally be who I wanted to be and sing the music that I felt in my heart. Some black people that I met in the music industry felt that we could be stronger and better empowered if we all stayed within in the same box, but I had always relished the fact that I never belonged to any cliques, or any scenes…

There's a metamorphosis happening right before my eyes. I'm watching a devil shed its skin, shrink its horns and grow wings. The dark haze in the air is lifting, banished by the bright lights of the stage. Even metaphorically, a trick like that is hard to pull off. I'm impressed. Or I would be if I didn't hate the asshole so much.

It's a pushing age," Churchill wrote his mother as a young man, "and we must shove with the rest." It may well be that Winston Churchill was the greatest pusher in history. His life spanned the final calvary charge of the British Empire, which he witnesses as a young war correspondent in 1898, and ended well into the nuclear age, indeed the space age, both of which he helped usher in. His first trip to America was on a steamship (to be introduces on stage by Mark Twain, no less) and his final one was on a Boeing 707 that flew 500 miles per hour. In between he saw two world wars, the invention of the car, radio, and rock and roll, and countless trials and triumphs.

I figured I spent years running around after rock stars, catering to their every whim. How different could it be? So he’s shorter and doesn’t know how to express himself particularly well. All Mal ever did was babble incoherently at me. Some days I basically had to wipe the drool off that maniac’s chin. After him, Gibson should be a dream, right?

Yet, for all the hours Imogen spent as an adult cocooned in her apartment, she still wasn’t sure if she’d ever felt truly at home anywhere. Sometimes in the company of a tree—or a creek, or a moss-covered rock, or a desert night haloed by the Milky Way—she felt the tension inside her finally relent. There—out there—was a place where she belonged.

It is occurring to people all over the city that rap is a sound that can be carved. And so it is occurring to three young city kids, lately in the punk-rock business, that they can use it to make anthems and stage sketch comedy and arrange pinpoint-precise repartee that wears a stupid hat to conceal its sophistication—and that’s just the beginning.

Frankie,I noticed as I flipped the mic up to its normal position, was staring at me through narrowed eyes, clapping so slowly that I could actually measure the silence in between beats. I felt about three inches tall as I stepped off the stage. ~~~ "...and went down like a rock.Bam." "Oh,man. What did you do?" "What could I do?" I shrugged. "I hopped up, took a bow, and ran. I was late to meet you." Alex was gently rubbing my bare knee. I'd rolled up my jeans to show him the bruise already blossoming there. "I would have caught you," he said, fingers sliding to the inside of my leg and making my insides feel like jelly. "Not likely, O Gallant One.The stage is only a foot high." "I gotta see this place sometime.

In the days of the Alan Freed package shows he had so resented being forced to go on before Chuck Berry in Berry’s home city of St. Louis that he played thirty minutes of viciously hard Rock ’n’Roll, then took out a can of lighter fuel, poured it on the piano, and put a match to it, telling the stage crew as he stomped off, “I’d like to see any son-of-a-bitch follow that.

I didn’t know about all that, only that Texas had ZZ Top. The show, my first rock concert, took place in a huge outdoor field called Kings Village and featured five bands. It had rained the day before, and I ended up blasted drunk, falling around in the mud, and throwing up next to a row of reeking portable toilets before ZZ Top even made it to the stage. I thought it was one of the best days ever.

I like solitude.” “Doesn’t seem to fit with the personality of a rock guitarist.” “Let me tell you a secret.” He leaned forward. “My stage persona is not who I am at all.” Gina realized she had completely stopped painting while listening, enraptured with what he had to say. “What are you then?” He gave her a mischievous grin that reached his eyes. “Right now, I’m just a guy standing in front of a pretty girl who makes his pulse race.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

Daltrey was by all accounts the toughest man in the Who; maybe the toughest man in London. Filled with blue collar attitude, he strutted around the stage, screaming out the rage of a century of London's dead end lives, roaring like a young lion trapped in a decadent, dying England. Townsend wrote prettily, daydreaming foolishly individualistic dreams of artistic expression, but it was Roger's sledghammer voice that smashed the skulls of the enemy.

A group of giant insectoid creatures floated to the area near the stage. One of them spoke in a series of clicks that the language master knew instantly. "Play hard and fast hairless monkeys!" Greeg shouted, "We're Transmitted Infections from the inner-worlds and this is punk fucking rock!" Crash hit a crunching , distorted guitar note. the Slugs spit in happiness at the sound of the guitar. Greeg liked a species with a love for badass music. He was sure this would be a great show.

When people think of slavery, they think of whips, chains and neurological implants. While these things may be necessary, the real tools of a successful slave culture are psychological. Through a myriad of non-violent techniques, such as carefully selecting entertainment material, staging supportive news, and well-timed acts of love, one can tightly control the subject’s perception of his world. The mark of a truly superior slave-bearing society is when the slaves support the system as vehemently as the masters.

It may not be quite enough to find a nice inclusive Episcopal church led by Progressive White Cleric to replace the lily-white rocking megachurch led by Conservative White Guy in Jeans on Stage. Are we committed to moving toward a fully antiracist way of life?49 Are we ready to give up what has probably been a full-immersion bath in Christian whiteness? In our break with white evangelicalism, how radical are we prepared to be? Are we willing to lay down everything, even white Christianity, at the foot of the cross?

This ties around to my notion that the Church and rock music are very similar. There's a ritual in going to Mass and there's the ritual of going to see music or to dance at Blowoff. In reality, the stage was always the pulpit. That's what we do as musicians. We reach out and try to find or build community, and to foster a sense of belonging. When people come together and create a shared experience from a place of goodness, it can be really uplifting. Everyone can elevate together and build something that means a lot to them.

We don't just have equipment to set up, we have a whole stage set: TVs tuned to static, a busted old Moog synthesizer (also tuned to static - it basically just sits onstage, drooling, like a demented robot friend), an ironing board we use as a percussion stand, lamps (because we prefer mood lighting to rock-show lighting), various car parts and kitchen utensils (for hitting), a movie screen we project slides onto and a pair of mannequin legs in a gold lamé miniskirt with a TV for a torso. All this may sound arty, but really, it's just overenthusiastic.

Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.” Part motivational tactic, part sheer drive and ambition, this field made him notoriously dismissive of phrases such as “It can’t be done” or “We need more time.” Having learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children, Jobs had a much more aggressive idea of what was or wasn’t possible. To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable. For instance, in the design stages for a new mouse for an early Apple product, Jobs had high expectations. He wanted it to move fluidly in any direction—a new development for any mouse at that time—but a lead engineer was told by one of his designers that this would be commercially impossible. What Jobs wanted wasn’t realistic and wouldn’t work. The next day, the lead engineer arrived at work to find that Steve Jobs had fired the employee who’d said that. When the replacement came in, his first words were: “I can build the mouse.” This was Jobs’s view of reality at work. Malleable, adamant, self-confident. Not in the delusional sense, but for the purposes of accomplishing something. He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary. He was Napoleon shouting to his soldiers: “There shall be no Alps!” For most of us, such confidence does not come easy. It’s understandable. So many people in our lives have preached the need to be realistic or conservative or worse—to not rock the boat. This is an enormous disadvantage when it comes to trying big things. Because though our doubts (and self-doubts) feel real, they have very little bearing on what is and isn’t possible. Our

a brief summary of perhaps the most famous Third Man account: that of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. With their boat frozen in the ice, Shackleton and two other men trekked for thirty-six hours across a mountain and glacier-filled South Georgia to a whaling station. The three men barely survived the harrowing trip, spending weeks convalescing in a hospital afterward. Shackleton and his crewmates reported that a mysterious fourth man had joined them and had walked silently alongside during the latter stages of the trek. The mysterious man never spoke, but his presence was a comfort and helped to keep them moving forward.

Not only did I no longer feel the anxious dread of isolation which had gripped my heart the first evening, I had no longer any need to fear its reawakening, nor to feel myself a stranger or alone in this land productive not only of chestnut trees and tamarisks, but of friendships which from beginning to end of the journey formed a long chain, interrupted like that of the blue hills, hidden here and there in the anfractuosity of the rock or behind the lime trees of the avenue, but delegating at each stage an amiable gentleman who came to interrupt my course with a cordial handclasp, to prevent me from feeling it too long, to offer if need be to continue the journey with me

Edmund said they must gather gulls’ eggs from the rocks, but when they came to think of it they couldn’t remember having seen any gulls’ eggs and wouldn’t be able to cook them if they found any. Peter thought to himself that unless they had some stroke of luck they would soon be glad to eat eggs raw, but he didn’t see any point in saying this out loud. Susan said it was a pity they had eaten the sandwiches so soon. One or two tempers very nearly got lost at this stage. Finally Edmund said: “Look here. There’s only one thing to be done. We must explore the wood. Hermits and knights-errant and people like that always manage to live somehow if they’re in a forest. They find roots and berries and things.” “What sort of roots?” asked Susan. “I always thought it meant roots of trees,” said Lucy.

It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their places. You can read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other.Nobody dies here...

All night the fighting had been furious, with no let-up. Fur and Freedom Fighters had battled against flaming shafts with their bare paws and sand. Four lay dead and three wounded. Smoke-grimed and bleary-eyed, they had plucked burning arrows from the wood, strung them on their bows and returned them to stick blazing in the gates of Marshank. The javelin supply was depleted, one shaft being retained for each creature in the event that paw-to-paw combat would be their final stand. There were still plenty of rocks to sling, Keyla and Tullgrew taking charge of the slingers whilst Ballaw managed a frugal breakfast. The hare sat wearily against one of the sandbanks that had been shorn up either side of the cart, Rowanoak slumped beside him. Both were singed and smoke-grimed. Rowanoak drank half her water, passing the rest on to Brome, who distributed it among the wounded. The badger wiped a sandy paw across her scorched muzzle. ‘Well, Ballaw De Quincewold, what’s to report?’ The irrepressible hare wiped dust from his half-scone ration and looked up at the sky. ‘Report? Er, nothin’ much really, except that it looks like being another nice sunny day, wot!’ A flaming arrow extinguished itself in the sand close by Rowanoak. She tossed it on to a pile of other shafts waiting to be shot. ‘A nice day indeed. D’you think we’ll be around to see the sunset?’ Without waiting for an answer, she continued, ‘I wonder if that owl – Boldred, wasn’t it – I wonder if she ever managed to get through to this Martin the Warrior creature.’ Ballaw picked dried blood from a wound on his narrow chest. ‘Doesn’t look like it, does it? No, old Rowan me badger oak, I think the stage is all ours and it’ll be our duty to give the best performance we can before the curtain falls for the last time.

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.

This book has pushed back against the randomness thesis, emphasizing instead the skill in venture capital. It has done so for four reasons. First, the existence of path dependency does not actually prove that skill is absent. Venture capitalists need skill to enter the game: as the authors of the NBER paper say, path dependency can only influence which among the many skilled players gets to be the winner. Nor is it clear that path dependency explains why some skilled operators beat other ones. The finding that a partnership’s future IPO rate rises by 1.6 percentage points is not particularly strong, and the history recounted in these pages shows that path dependency is frequently disrupted.[5] Despite his powerful reputation, Arthur Rock was unsuccessful after his Apple investment. Mayfield was a leading force during the 1980s; it too faded. Kleiner Perkins proves that you can dominate the Valley for a quarter of a century and then decline precipitously. Accel succeeded early, hit a rough patch, and then built itself back. In an effort to maintain its sense of paranoia and vigilance, Sequoia once produced a slide listing numerous venture partnerships that flourished and then failed. “The Departed,” it called them. The second reason to believe in skill lies in the origin story of some partnerships. Occasionally a newcomer breaks into the venture elite in such a way that skill obviously does matter. Kleiner Perkins became a leader in the business because of Tandem and Genentech. Both companies were hatched from within the KP office and actively shaped by Tom Perkins; there was nothing lucky about this. Tiger Global and Yuri Milner invented the art of late-stage venture capital. They had a genuinely novel approach to tech investing; they offered much more than the equivalent of another catchy tune competing against others. Paul Graham’s batch-processing method at Y Combinator offered an equally original approach to seed-stage investing. A clever innovation, not random fortune, explains Graham’s place in venture history.

THE MAGIC OF LOVE The magic of personal love works miracles as this true story testifies: Even one person’s intimate love can deeply heal another. For example,Tom, a simple person without training in psychotherapy, worked as an orderly in a mental hospital. One of the sickest patients in the hospital, a deeply psychotic woman, had been there for eighteen years. She never spoke to anyone, or even looked in another’s eyes. She sat alone all day in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth. One day during his dinner break, Tom found another rocking chair, pulled it over, and rocked along beside her as he ate his dinner. He returned the next day, and the next. Tom worked only five days per week, but he asked for special permission to come in on his days off so he could rock with the psychotic woman. Tom did this every day for six months. Then one evening as he got up to leave, the woman said, “Good night.” It was the first time she had spoken in eighteen years. After that, she began to get well. Tom still came to rock with her every day, and eventually she was healed of her psychosis.* *Healing the Eight Stages of Life. M. Linn, S. Fabricant, D. Linn. Paulist Press. 1988.

Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalization: And so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You’re picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home? Certain things she’d always loved, like lighting the dinner-table candles or stirring a cake mix alongside her mother or sitting up on the roof to play her accordion or decorating the Christmas tree or collecting the eggs in the morning, felt suddenly hollow, distant, staged. It was as if someone had dimmed the lights, as if she was viewing her existence from behind a glass wall. And her body! Some mornings she woke and it was as if lead weights had been attached to her limbs by some ill-meaning fairy. Even if she had the urge to walk across the paddock to feed the neighbors’ horses—which she hardly ever did anymore, she didn’t know why—she wouldn’t have the energy, the sap in her, to do it. She wanted it returned to her, Marithe did, that sense of security in her life, of certainty, of knowing who she was and what she was about. Would it ever come back?

If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be able to reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other. So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really is cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you're going. Hiro appears solid to himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as if it's a fogbank, clearly seeing The Black Sun in front of him. He steps over the property line, and he's in the doorway. And in that instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As one, they all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he is -- Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over the line into The Black Sun. He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that he's all by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of avatars, he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars, hoping that Da5id -- The Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief -- will invite them inside. They flick and merge together into a hysterical wall. Stunningly beautiful women, computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two frames a second, like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional -- these are would-be actresses hoping to be discovered. Wild-looking abstracts, tornadoes of gyrating light-hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice their talent, invite them inside, give them a job. A liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people -- persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans, devoted to the fantasy of stabbing some particular actress to death; they can't even get close in Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. There are would-be rock stars done up in laser light, as though they just stepped off the concert stage, and the avatars of Nipponese businessmen, exquisitely rendered by their fancy equipment, but utterly reserved and boring in their suits.

It seems to Marithe that her life has undergone two changes: one, when her father left. And two, about a year ago, when she turned thirteen, when her life and the way she felt about it and the way she viewed it suddenly tilted; like the deck of a ship in a storm. At first it seemed to her that her house, her family, her dogs, her accordion, her books, her room with its geology samples, its display of feathers, its pictures of foxes and wolves, all took on an unreal aspect. Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalisation: and so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You're picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home? [...] And her body! Some mornings she woke and it was as if lead weights had been attached to her limbs by some ill-meaning fairy. Even if she had the urge to walk across the paddock to feed the neighbours' horses -- which she hardly ever did any more, she didn't know why -- she wouldn't have the energy, the sap in her to do it. She wanted it returned to her, Marithe did, that sense of security in her life, of certainty, of knowing who she was and what she was about. Would it ever come back?

Johnny Rotten slouches at the front of the stage, propped up on the mike stand. He's leaning so far forward he looks as if he might topple into the empty space in front of the audience. · His face is pale and his body is twisted into such an awkward ugly shape he looks deformed. He looks ordinary, about the same age as us, the kind of boy I was at comprehensive school with. He's not a flashy star like Marc Bolan or David Bowie, all dressed up in exotic costumes, he's not a virtuoso musician like Eric Clapton or Peter Green, he's not even a macho rock-and-roll pub-band singer – he's just a bloke from Finsbury Park, London, England, who’s pissed off. Johnny sneers at us in his ordinary North London accent, his voice isn't trained and tuneful, it's a whiny cynical drawl, every song delivered unemotionally. There's no fake American twang either. All the things I'm so embarrassed about, John's made into virtues. He's unapologetic about who he is and where he comes from. Proud of it even. He's not taking the world's lack of interest as confirmation that he’s wrong or worthless. I look up at him twisting and yowling and realise it's everyone else who's wrong, not him. How did he make that mental leap from musically untrained, state-school-educated, council estate boy, to standing on stage in front of a band? I think he's brave. A revolutionary. He's sending a very powerful message, the most powerful message anyone can ever transmit. Be yourself.

I don't respond. Instead, I chuck my shoes over the fence and start to climb. When I was twelve, I could climb fences pretty quick. Especially growing up in Tampa where we would hop fences to get to each other's yards. But I'm not even halfway up and i'm winded, my foot has slipped more than once, and I can only imagine what I look like from below. "Shit!" I yell as my toe misses the next opening. Nicole's laughter fills the air. "Stop laughing and start climbing!" "This is priceless," she laughs harder. "Wait. Let me get my camera!" "Nicole! We need to get out of here in case he comes looking for me." "Fine. Fine. Chicken shit." Her shoes fly over my head, and the entire fence shakes. "You owe me." "Stop moving!" I try not to laugh, but it's futile. This is hysterical. "I'm going to pee," tears fall from my eyes as I hold on. "I need a Go-Pro for the next time we go out." "I hate you," I say between giggles. She purposely rocks back, causing me to almost fall. "You only wish you did." "If I fall..." I warn as I sway and try to climb higher. "It'll be what you deserve for making me climb a freaking fence at one in the morning!" The amount of ways that I'm going to pay for this is unimaginable. My co-workers saw me being sung to on stage, I'm sure one of the guys from my squad caught me going backstage, I'm going to have scrapes from climbing a fence, and Nicole will never let me live this down. I reach the top, one leg swung over on one side and one still in Eli-land. And that's when I hear him. "You're just going to run out?" Eli's voice is filled with disbelief. "Just like that?

I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. [...] (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you, I will show you fear in a handful of dust. [...] Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. [...] II. A Game of Chess [...] Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. III. The Fire Sermon [...] The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. [...] At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. [...] I Tiresias, old man with dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest-- I too awaited the expected guest. [...] IV. Death by Water [...] A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. [...] V. What the Thunder Said [...] A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

This new generation of Italian American entertainers shared Sinatra’s view of the new dance music that emerged in the 1950s. “Rock-and-roll is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear,” Sinatra told Congress in 1958. “Rock-and-roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd—in plain fact, dirty—lyrics … it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.” In response to the raw, driving sexuality of black-influenced rock, young Italian American men in New York and Philadelphia did to the new music what Sinatra and his generation had done to jazz. A style combining smooth vocal harmonies, romantic lyrics, and a stationary stage presence, doo-wop was invented in the 1940s by black youth on street corners, but it shot to the top of the pop charts in the late 1950s when Italian Americans adopted it as their own—just as most African American performers moved toward “soul music.” From 1958, when Dion (DiMucci) and the Belmonts placed several songs on the pop charts, until the “British Invasion” of 1964, Italian American doo-wop groups dominated American popular music. All wearing conservative suits and exuding a benign romanticism, the Capris, the Elegants, the Mystics, the Duprees, the Del-Satins, the Four Jays, the Essentials, Randy and the Rainbows, and Vito & the Salutations declared the arrival of Italians into American civilization. During the rise of doo-wop and Frank Rizzo, Malcolm X mocked the newly white Italians. “No Italian will ever jump up in my face and start putting bad mouth on me,” he said, “because I know his history. I tell him when you’re talking about me you’re talking about your pappy, your father. He knows his history. He knows how he got that color.” Though fewer and fewer Italian Americans know the history of which Malcolm X spoke, some have reenacted it.

MATHEMATICAL MIRACLE Some years ago, I heard a story which has been making the rounds in Midwest A.A. circles for years. I don’t have any names to back up this story, but I have heard it from many sources, and the circumstances sound believable. A man in a small Wisconsin city had been on the program for about three years and had enjoyed contented sobriety through that period. Then bad luck began to hit him in bunches. The firm for which he had worked for some fifteen years was sold; his particular job was phased out of existence, and the plant moved to another city. For several months, he struggled along at odd jobs while looking for a company that needed his specialized experience. Then another blow hit him. His wife was forced to enter a hospital for major surgery, and his company insurance had expired. At this point he cracked, and decided to go on an all-out binge. He didn’t want to stage this in the small city, where everyone knew his sobriety record. So he went to Chicago, checked in at a North Side hotel, and set forth on his project. It was Friday night, and the bars were filled with a swinging crowd. But he was in no mood for swinging—he just wanted to get quietly, miserably drunk. Finally, he found a basement bar on a quiet side street, practically deserted. He sat down on a bar stool and ordered a double bourbon on the rocks. The bartender said, “Yes, sir,” and reached for a bottle. Then the bartender stopped in his tracks, took a long, hard look at the customer, leaned over the bar, and said in a low tone, “I was in Milwaukee about four months ago, and one night I attended an open meeting. You were on the speaking platform, and you gave one of the finest A.A. talks I ever heard.” The bartender turned and walked to the end of the bar. For a few minutes, the customer sat there—probably in a state of shock. Then he picked his money off the bar with trembling hands and walked out, all desire for a drink drained out of him. It is estimated that there are about 8,000 saloons in Chicago, employing some 25,000 bartenders. This man had entered the one saloon in 8,000 where he would encounter the one man in 25,000 who knew that he was a member of A.A. and didn’t belong there. Chicago, Illinois

Of course, we suffer from bottomless avidity. Our lives are so precious to us, we are so watchful of waste. Or perhaps a better name for it would be the Sense of Personal Destiny. Yes, I think that is better than avidity. Shall my life by one-thousandth of an inch fall short of its ultimate possibility? It is a different thing to value oneself, and to prize oneself crazily. And then there are our plans, idealizations. These are dangerous, too. They can consume us like parasites, eat us, drink us, and leave us lifelessly prostrate. And yet we are always inviting the parasite, as if we were eager to be drained and eaten. It is because we have been taught there is no limit to what a man can be. Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him. He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome. But whether, after life, he went to hell or to heaven, his place among other men was given. It could not be contested. But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it, and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to. We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock our hearts are abraded on. Great minds, great beauties, great lovers and criminals surround us. From the great sadness and desperation of Werthers and Don Juans we went to the great ruling images of Napoleons; from these to murderers who had that right over victims because they were greater than the victims; to men who felt privileged to approach others with a whip; to schoolboys and clerks who roared like revolutionary lions; to those pimps and subway creatures, debaters in midnight cafeterias who believed they could be great in treachery and catch the throats of those they felt were sound and well in the lassos of their morbidity; to dreams of greatly beautiful shadows embracing on a flawless screen. Because of these things we hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately. The fear of lagging pursues and maddens us. The fear lies in us like a cloud. It makes an inner climate of darkness. And occasionally there is a storm and hate and wounding rain out of us.

Was this luck, or was it more than that? Proving skill is difficult in venture investing because, as we have seen, it hinges on subjective judgment calls rather than objective or quantifiable metrics. If a distressed-debt hedge fund hires analysts and lawyers to scrutinize a bankrupt firm, it can learn precisely which bond is backed by which piece of collateral, and it can foresee how the bankruptcy judge is likely to rule; its profits are not lucky. Likewise, if an algorithmic hedge fund hires astrophysicists to look for patterns in markets, it may discover statistical signals that are reliably profitable. But when Perkins backed Tandem and Genentech, or when Valentine backed Atari, they could not muster the same certainty. They were investing in human founders with human combinations of brilliance and weakness. They were dealing with products and manufacturing processes that were untested and complex; they faced competitors whose behaviors could not be forecast; they were investing over long horizons. In consequence, quantifiable risks were multiplied by unquantifiable uncertainties; there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns; the bracing unpredictability of life could not be masked by neat financial models. Of course, in this environment, luck played its part. Kleiner Perkins lost money on six of the fourteen investments in its first fund. Its methods were not as fail-safe as Tandem’s computers. But Perkins and Valentine were not merely lucky. Just as Arthur Rock embraced methods and attitudes that put him ahead of ARD and the Small Business Investment Companies in the 1960s, so the leading figures of the 1970s had an edge over their competitors. Perkins and Valentine had been managers at leading Valley companies; they knew how to be hands-on; and their contributions to the success of their portfolio companies were obvious. It was Perkins who brought in the early consultants to eliminate the white-hot risks at Tandem, and Perkins who pressed Swanson to contract Genentech’s research out to existing laboratories. Similarly, it was Valentine who drove Atari to focus on Home Pong and to ally itself with Sears, and Valentine who arranged for Warner Communications to buy the company. Early risk elimination plus stage-by-stage financing worked wonders for all three companies. Skeptical observers have sometimes asked whether venture capitalists create innovation or whether they merely show up for it. In the case of Don Valentine and Tom Perkins, there was not much passive showing up. By force of character and intellect, they stamped their will on their portfolio companies.

Taking hold of the ladder, she began to climb, stopping when she got to eye level with him. That, however, turned out to be a mistake, because the moment her eyes met his, she forgot everything—even the lines she’d just committed to memory—because nothing else mattered to her except . . . him. “You wrote a scene with a strong heroine in it, and one where the hero gets dangled by his feet.” “I did.” “Why?” “Because I couldn’t figure out a better way to let you know I love you, the real you, without dangling from my feet and letting you cut me down.” Lucetta’s eyes immediately took to turning a little misty. “You . . . love me?” “I do, but before we continue this, I have to admit that hanging upside down is far less pleasant than I imagined, so if you’d be so kind, I really do need you to get me down from here.” Realizing he was completely serious, but also realizing if she cut him down he’d go plummeting to the hard floor and most likely suffer a horrible injury—which certainly wouldn’t have the night turning out well at all—Lucetta looked to the side of the stage and caught Mr. Skukman’s eye. As he, along with a good number of backstage hands, walked across the boards, whispers began circulating around the theater, growing louder after Bram got released and rose to his feet. Smiling ever so charmingly at the audience, he presented them with a small bow right before he took center stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, I must beg your indulgence for just a few more minutes because you see . . . I am . . . Mr. Grimstone.” The whispers ceased immediately. Bram smiled. “I’m Mr. Grimstone, alias Mr. Bram Haverstein, and I’ve come here tonight, with all of you as my witnesses, to proclaim my love for Miss Lucetta Plum, and . . .” He dropped to one knee. “Ask her to do me the very great honor of becoming my wife.” He reached out and took hold of Lucetta’s hand. “Miss Lucetta Plum, I am completely and irrevocably in love with you, and just so we’re clear, I’m in love with the real you, not the person you turn into when you take to the stage. I love the idea that you’re completely oblivious to your unusual beauty, can outrun a goat, and . . . you fascinate me as no one ever has. I’m asking you, in front of all of these people who will probably never buy another one of my books again if you turn me down . . .” He stopped talking and turned his head to the audience. “And just to remind everyone, I will have another novel releasing soon, although I haven’t decided on a title just yet, something about a strong-willed lady, no doubt, or . . .” “You’re getting distracted,” Lucetta interrupted. Bram immediately returned his gaze to hers. “Quite right, but . . . I’ve lost my train of thought.” “You were just about to the part where you were going to ask her to marry you,” a voice called out, a voice that sounded remarkably like Abigail’s. “Thank you, Grandmother,” he called back. “You’re welcome, darling. And just to remind you, I’m not getting any younger, so you might want to hurry this proposal business along.” Grinning, Bram shook his head, brought Lucetta’s fingers to his lips, and then sobered as he held her gaze. “I love you, Lucetta, more than I ever imagined I could, and I would be so incredibly honored if you’d agree to be my wife.” For a second, Lucetta was unable to answer him because her heart had taken to rising in her throat, but after drawing in a deep breath, she managed to nod, ignoring the tears that had filled her eyes and were blurring her vision. “I would be honored to become your wife, especially since—I’m not sure when this happened, but—I’m in love with you as well.” Bram’s hold on her hand tightened for just a second, and then he was sliding a ring on her finger she hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. Before she could take even a second to admire what felt like an enormous rock on her hand, he was standing instead of kneeling, looking intently into her eyes, before he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. The

Jesus Christ, Pippa. Do you have any idea what you do to me? You completely wrecked me. The mess I’ve made of my life, you make me want to fix it. You make me think I can fix it. but more than anything else – when I’m with you, I want to fucking live. Just take everything I can out of this one shot we’re all given. And I want to rock the shit out of it. Not just on stage or in a music studio. But with you. Anywhere and everywhere…with you.

This is our space, this is real. Fuck stages and division between band and audience. Fuck rock stars and bands with bumper stickers, websites, and $12 ticket prices.

Ryan watched it all from a distance, seeing a man known for his enormous stage ego and rock swagger show another side of himself. Ryan found it hard not to get emotional. This visit was supposed to be all about revealing themselves to the other and exploring what they found together. But the man Ryan was discovering was better than he imagined, more human and real, with an endless amount of compassion.

THE MAGIC OF LOVE The magic of personal love works miracles as this true story testifies: Even one person’s intimate love can deeply heal another. For example,Tom, a simple person without training in psychotherapy, worked as an orderly in a mental hospital. One of the sickest patients in the hospital, a deeply psychotic woman, had been there for eighteen years. She never spoke to anyone, or even looked in another’s eyes. She sat alone all day in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth. One day during his dinner break, Tom found another rocking chair, pulled it over, and rocked along beside her as he ate his dinner. He returned the next day, and the next. Tom worked only five days per week, but he asked for special permission to come in on his days off so he could rock with the psychotic woman. Tom did this every day for six months. Then one evening as he got up to leave, the woman said, “Good night.” It was the first time she had spoken in eighteen years. After that, she began to get well. Tom still came to rock with her every day, and eventually she was healed of her psychosis.* *Healing the Eight Stages of Life. M. Linn, S. Fabricant, D. Linn. Paulist Press. 1988.

sigh. “Matt, I know. But it ended up to be fun—going to the dance with Walker … and seeing you on the stage playing the drums. You rocked!” Matt grins. “It was fun—playing while you danced.” Then his grin fades a little. “It wasn’t fun seeing you dance with Walker, though.” We

This means that most of the births they have seen were to women on epidurals lying still during labor, waiting for it all to be over. Seeing this kind of birth over and over again causes a subconscious imprint on the mind, and many women develop enough fear of the pains of childbirth that they block the messages their bodies give them about other positions they might take in labor. Others may simply fear diverging from the norm. A woman in the first stage of labor may find it beneficial to try several upright positions: standing, perhaps leaning on a counter or tray table; slow dancing with her partner; sitting while leaning forward or propped up with pillows; squatting; or sitting in a rocking chair. Sometimes one position suffices, but laboring women usually like to change from one position to another as labor progresses. One of the most effective labors I ever witnessed was that of a first-time mother giving birth to a very large baby. She moved through the first part of labor very efficiently by belly-dancing while putting as much of her weight as possible on a long staff she was holding to steady herself. She then pushed her baby out while leaning on the bed in a kneeling position. A woman’s position during labor and birth may affect her ability to breastfeed in a couple of ways. Dr. Roberto Caldeyro-Barcia, an Uruguayan obstetrician, was one of the first to scientifically investigate the effects of maternal position on labor. In 1979 he published a study now regarded as a classic, which demonstrated that mothers in a “vertical” position had thirty-six percent shorter opening stages of labor than “horizontal” women; the “vertical” women also reported less pain than the “horizontals.” Walking helped labor progress as well, because it brought the pressure of the baby’s head against the cervix, helping it to thin and open. And the “vertical” mothers’ babies’ heads were less apt to be extremely molded just after birth, indicating a somewhat smoother passage through the mother’s birth canal. Equally important, the babies of women who gave birth in upright positions had less fetal distress at birth.5 These factors all increase the chances that a woman will have a good early breastfeeding experience. Dr.

You can be Jax the rock star on stage, but you will always be Jackson Hartley to me, the love of my life, and the man I get to spend the rest of my life with.

We had a jam space in the garage, an inside bar with its own full-sized refrigerator and electric grill, seven couches to crash on, pot growing in the closet, a rooftop lounge … So we threw giant parties with the best rock bands. LOAD, Quit, One Eyed Kings, stage diving from the roof, good drugs and endless beer, the greatest personalities …

The legendary Broadway writer/producer/performer George M. Cohan is supposed to have once said: “In the first act, you get your main character up a tree. In the second act, you throw rocks at them. In the third act, you get them down.” The nature of what that tree is, and what those rocks are, is key. You could even say that “story = main character + tree + rocks.

Rather than merely identifying entrepreneurs and monitoring them, as Rock had done, the new venture capitalists actively shaped them: they told company founders whom to hire, how to sell, and how to structure their research. And to ensure that their instructions were implemented, the new venture capitalists came up with a second innovation: rather than organizing one large fundraising, they doled out capital in tranches, with each cautious infusion calibrated to support the company until it reached an agreed milestone. If the 1950s had revealed the power of liberation capital, and if the 1960s had brought the equity-only, time-limited venture fund, the advances of the 1970s were twofold: hands-on activism and stage-by-stage finance.

Third, the idea that venture capitalists get into deals on the strength of their brands can be exaggerated. A deal seen by a partner at Sequoia will also be seen by rivals at other firms: in a fragmented cottage industry, there is no lack of competition. Often, winning the deal depends on skill as much as brand: it’s about understanding the business model well enough to impress the entrepreneur; it’s about judging what valuation might be reasonable. One careful tally concluded that new or emerging venture partnerships capture around half the gains in the top deals, and there are myriad examples of famous VCs having a chance to invest and then flubbing it.[6] Andreessen Horowitz passed on Uber. Its brand could not save it. Peter Thiel was an early investor in Stripe. He lacked the conviction to invest as much as Sequoia. As to the idea that branded venture partnerships have the “privilege” of participating in supposedly less risky late-stage investment rounds, this depends from deal to deal. A unicorn’s momentum usually translates into an extremely high price for its shares. In the cases of Uber and especially WeWork, some late-stage investors lost millions. Fourth, the anti-skill thesis underplays venture capitalists’ contributions to portfolio companies. Admittedly, these contributions can be difficult to pin down. Starting with Arthur Rock, who chaired the board of Intel for thirty-three years, most venture capitalists have avoided the limelight. They are the coaches, not the athletes. But this book has excavated multiple cases in which VC coaching made all the difference. Don Valentine rescued Atari and then Cisco from chaos. Peter Barris of NEA saw how UUNET could become the new GE Information Services. John Doerr persuaded the Googlers to work with Eric Schmidt. Ben Horowitz steered Nicira and Okta through their formative moments. To be sure, stories of venture capitalists guiding portfolio companies may exaggerate VCs’ importance: in at least some of these cases, the founders might have solved their own problems without advice from their investors. But quantitative research suggests that venture capitalists do make a positive impact: studies repeatedly find that startups backed by high-quality VCs are more likely to succeed than others.[7] A quirky contribution to this literature looks at what happens when airline routes make it easier for a venture capitalist to visit a startup. When the trip becomes simpler, the startup performs better.[8]