Street Performers Quotes

I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin. And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin. I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies. John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat. The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies. But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.

Street performances?" "A little singing. A little martial arts. Some interpretive dance." "Wow." "I know! The Portuguese have taste.

Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.

Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.

Zhi yin. Jem had told her once that it meant understanding music, and also a bond that went deeper than friendship. Jem played, and he played the years of Will's life as he had seen them. He played two little boys in the training room, one showing the other how to throw knives, and he played the ritual of parabatai: the fire and the vows and burning runes. He played two young men running through the streets of London in the dark, stopping to lean up against a wall and laugh together. He played the day in the library when he and Will had jested with Tessa about ducks, and he played the train to Yorkshire on which Jem had said that parabatai were meant to love each other as they loved their own souls. He played that love, and he played their love for Tessa, and hers for them, and he played Will saying, In your eyes I have always found grace. He played the too few times he had seen them since he had joined the Brotherhood- the brief meetings at the Institute; the time when Will had been bitten by a Shax demon and nearly died, and Jem had come from the Silent City and sat with him all night, risking discovery and punishment. And he played the birth of their first son, and the protection ceremony that had been carried out on the child in the Silent City. Will would have no other Silent Brother but Jem perform it. And Jem played the way he had covered his scarred face with his hands and turned away when he'd found out the child's name was James. He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears. Jem set down his bow, and came toward the bed, drawing back his hood, so she could see his closed eyes and his scarred face. And he had sat down beside them on the bed, and taken Will's hand, the one that Tessa was not holding, and both Will and Tessa heard Jem's voice in their minds. I take your hand, brother, so that you may go in peace. Will had opened the blue eyes that had never lost their color over all the passing years, and looked at Jem and then Tessa, and smiled, and died, with Tessa's head on his shoulder and his hand in Jem's.

Everybody will die, of course, sooner or later. Circus performers will die, and clarinet experts will die, and you and I will die, and there might be a person who lives on your block, right now, who is not looking both ways before he crosses the street and who will die in just in a few seconds, all because of a bus. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.

Where'e're I go, my Soul shall stay with thee: 'Tis but my Shadow I take away...

Ladies and dogs,” said Jeffrey, “we are about to perform ‘Fanfare for the Uncommon Seal.’ ” “With apologies to Aaron Copland,

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship. Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.

Sometimes we’re on a collision course, and we just don’t know it. Whether it’s by accident or by design, there’s not a thing we can do about it. A woman in Paris was on her way to go shopping, but she had forgotten her coat - went back to get it. When she had gotten her coat, the phone had rung, so she’d stopped to answer it; talked for a couple of minutes. While the woman was on the phone, Daisy was rehearsing for a performance at the Paris Opera House. And while she was rehearsing, the woman, off the phone now, had gone outside to get a taxi. Now a taxi driver had dropped off a fare earlier and had stopped to get a cup of coffee. And all the while, Daisy was rehearsing. And this cab driver, who dropped off the earlier fare; who’d stopped to get the cup of coffee, had picked up the lady who was going to shopping, and had missed getting an earlier cab. The taxi had to stop for a man crossing the street, who had left for work five minutes later than he normally did, because he forgot to set off his alarm. While that man, late for work, was crossing the street, Daisy had finished rehearsing, and was taking a shower. And while Daisy was showering, the taxi was waiting outside a boutique for the woman to pick up a package, which hadn’t been wrapped yet, because the girl who was supposed to wrap it had broken up with her boyfriend the night before, and forgot. When the package was wrapped, the woman, who was back in the cab, was blocked by a delivery truck, all the while Daisy was getting dressed. The delivery truck pulled away and the taxi was able to move, while Daisy, the last to be dressed, waited for one of her friends, who had broken a shoelace. While the taxi was stopped, waiting for a traffic light, Daisy and her friend came out the back of the theater. And if only one thing had happened differently: if that shoelace hadn’t broken; or that delivery truck had moved moments earlier; or that package had been wrapped and ready, because the girl hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend; or that man had set his alarm and got up five minutes earlier; or that taxi driver hadn’t stopped for a cup of coffee; or that woman had remembered her coat, and got into an earlier cab, Daisy and her friend would’ve crossed the street, and the taxi would’ve driven by. But life being what it is - a series of intersecting lives and incidents, out of anyone’s control - that taxi did not go by, and that driver was momentarily distracted, and that taxi hit Daisy, and her leg was crushed.

No matter what line of work you do, success cannot truly be achieved until you own who you are. The most offensive liability then becomes an asset. It makes you perform your best, regardless of the challenges you might face.

stick with a steady and consistent performer

I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone recieved the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead." Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise... There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now?" How can we go on without him?" In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, mo matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror....we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

She bought raffle tickets for charity, gave money to street performers, and was always sponsoring annoying friends who were running yet another marathon for some worthy cause (even though the true cause was their own fitness).

We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

But he hadn't realized that grace is not a thing you performed, but a weight you carried.

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work. You couldn’t teach a person what I’ve learned just standing and watching. Some musicians—Springsteen and U2, for example—may feel they got their education from the streets. I’m a performer at heart. I got mine from the stage.

When a dancer performs, melody transforms into a carriage, expressions turn into fuel and spirit experiences a journey to a world where passion attains fulfillment.

Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.

The history of Immanuel Kant's life is difficult to portray, for he had neither life nor history. He led a mechanical, regular, almost abstract bachelor existence in a little retired street of Königsberg, an old town on the north-eastern frontier of Germany. I do not believe that the great clock of the cathedral performed in a more passionless and methodical manner its daily routine than did its townsman, Immanuel Kant. Rising in the morning, coffee-drinking, writing, reading lectures, dining, walking, everything had its appointed time, and the neighbors knew that it was exactly half-past three o'clock when Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey, tight-fitting coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, and betook himself to the little linden avenue called after him to this day the "Philosopher's Walk." Summer and winter he walked up and down it eight times, and when the weather was dull or heavy clouds prognosticated rain, the townspeople beheld his servant, the old Lampe, trudging anxiously behind Kant with a big umbrella under his arm, like an image of Providence. What a strange contrast did this man's outward life present to his destructive, world-annihilating thoughts! In sooth, had the citizens of Königsberg had the least presentiment of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt far more awful dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, who can but kill the body. But the worthy folk saw in him nothing more than a Professor of Philosophy, and as he passed at his customary hour, they greeted him in a friendly manner and set their watches by him.

We should just get a giant bottle of bargain vodka or something," Gil said, pushing his gorilla mask back on his head. "Not classy," Steph said. "This is a special night, not a frat party." "Special? Classy??" Ethan asked. "Steph. We're seniors in high school going trick-or-treating. We look like third-rate street performers.

I forget every single thing in the world, every heartache, every tear, every pain as I watch that performance. The dancers, the music, the lights, the people in the theater are all so beautiful that I want to wear them on my skin for the rest of my life.

The index performance is not mediocre—it exceeds the results achieved by the typical active manager.

Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, thank you very much. Have no interest in a repeat performance.” So

The sirens in the distance were growing louder. Although it was the music of his neighbourhood, he knew the pigs would soon be performing in his dead-end street.

There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then perform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon.

I like these streets... I always feel as though it's a performance being staged for me; as though the second I've passed they'll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad

Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.

Passersby looked at us curiously. In the porch, Mr. Whitman held the church door open for us. “Hurry up, please,” he said. “We don’t want to attract attention.” No, sure, there was nothing likely to attract attention in two black limousines parking in North Audley Street in broad daylight so that men in suits could carry the Lost Ark out of the trunk of one of the cars, over the sidewalk, and into the church. Although from a distance the chest carrying it could have been a small coffin . . . The thought gave me goose bumps. “I hope at least you remembered your pistol,” I whispered to Gideon. “You have a funny idea of what goes on at a soiree,” he said, in a normal tone of voice, arranging the scarf around my shoulders. “Did anyone check what’s in your bag? We don’t want your mobile ringing in the middle of a musical performance.” I couldn’t keep from laughing at the idea, because just then my ringtone was a croaking frog. “There won’t be anyone there who could call me except you,” I pointed out. “And I don’t even know your number. Please may I take a look inside your bag?” “It’s called a reticule,” I said, shrugging and handing him the little bag. “Smelling salts, handkerchief, perfume, powder . . . excellent,” said Gideon. “All just as it should be. Come along.” He gave me the reticule back, took my hand, and led me through the church porch. Mr. Whitman bolted the door again behind us. Gideon forgot to let go of my hand once we were inside the church, which was just as well, because otherwise I’d have panicked at the last moment and run away.

Watching Tommy perform this scene, I wondered what his psychologist or psychiatrist had made of him. I tried to image Tommy's mind from the inside out. I saw burning forests, blind alleys, volcanoes in the desert, city streets that plunged into the ocean, barricades everywhere, and all of it lit in the deep-cherry light of emergency.

What does it mean to demonstrate in the streets, what is the significance of that collective activity so symptomatic of the twentieth century? In stupefaction Ulrich watches the demonstrators from the window; as they reach the foot of the palace, their faces turn up, turn furious, the men brandish their walking sticks, but “a few steps farther, at a bend where the demonstration seemed to scatter into the wings, most of them were already dropping their greasepaint: it would be absurd to keep up the menacing looks where there were no more spectators.” In the light of that metaphor, the demonstrators are not men in a rage; they are actors performing rage! As soon as the performance is over they are quick to drop their greasepaint! Later, in the 1960s, philosophers would talk about the modern world in which everything had turned into spectacle: demonstrations, wars, and even love; through this “quick and sagacious penetration” (Fielding), Musil had already long ago discerned the “society of spectacle.

A pack of five dogs, as variable in size and shape as humans, trotted in a veering path toward the two men; they sniffed and growled and nipped at one another, then broke into a lope down the street, with the smallest mutt in the lead.

A vagina or a penis need not cause gender identity from the inside to be relevant in staging oneself as a woman or a man. The extent to which they are relevant depends on the scene. Out in the streets one does not need a penis to perform masculinity. But in communal showers at the swimming pool, it helps a lot. So there they are, the genitals: on stage.

What kind of town is this What sort of streets are these Who invented this who profits by it I saw peddlers at every corner they’re selling little guillotines with tiny sharp blades and dolls filled with red liquid which spurts fro the neck when the sentence is carried out. What kind of children are these who can play with this toys so efficiently and who is judging

The fire-eater? The swordsman? The gentleman who nearly drowns each night… do you believe they’d be welcomed into the circles you belong to?” He shook his head. “Society scorned them, turned them into freak shows and curiosities, and now they are only interested in cheering because of the glamour of those velvet curtains. The allure of magic and mysticism. Should they encounter those same performers on the street, they would not be so kind or accepting. It is a sad truth that we do not live in a world where differences are accepted. And until such a time, Miss Wadsworth, I will provide a home to the misfits and unwanteds, even if it means losing bits of my soul to that hungry, unsatisfied beast Mr. Barnum has called show business.

Life is naturally breathtakingly beautiful. Appreciating that beauty is a skill you can develop. The more you learn to appreciate life’s beauty, the more it will show off for you, like a street performer who suddenly realizes he has an audience.

Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

Pure entertainment is not an egotistical lady singing boring songs on stage for two hours and people in tuxes clapping whether they like it or not. It's the real performers on the street who can hold people's attention and keep them from walking away.

I wandered the sidewalk watching all the street performers doing their juggling acts, playing their musical instruments, busting their asses to avoid work. I liked that. But I wanted to tell them there were easier ways to avoid work, like cab driving.

The numbers were, at best, guesstimates, and all three men knew it. The relevant figure would ultimately be the one that represented the most they could possibly ask from Congress without raising too many questions. Whatever that sum turned out to be, they knew they could count on (Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury) Kashkari to perform some sort of mathematical voodoo to justify it:

Todd:I had him! His throat was there beneath my hand. No, I had him! His throat was there and now he'll never come again. Mrs. Lovett: Easy now, hush love hush I keep telling you, Whats your rush? Todd: When? Why did I wait? You told me to wait - Now he'll never come again. There's a hole in the world like a great black pit And it's filled with people who are filled with shit And the vermin of the world inhabit it. But not for long... They all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because in all of the whole human race Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two There's the one staying put in his proper place And the one with his foot in the other one's face Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you. No, we all deserve to die Even you, Mrs Lovett, even I! Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death will be a relief We all deserve to die. And I'll never see Johanna No I'll never hug my girl to me - finished! Alright! You sir, how about a shave? Come and visit your good friend Sweeney. You sir, too sir? Welcome to the grave. I will have vengenance. I will have salvation. Who sir, you sir? No ones in the chair, Come on! Come on! Sweeney's. waiting. I want you bleeders. You sir! Anybody! Gentlemen now don't be shy! Not one man, no, nor ten men. Nor a hundred can assuage me. I will have you! And I will get him back even as he gloats In the meantime I'll practice on less honorable throats. And my Lucy lies in ashes And I'll never see my girl again. But the work waits! I'm alive at last! And I'm full of joy! ps. love the movie the performance that Johnny Depp did was amazing and he sang amazing.

And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called “The People.” Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.

I roamed L.A. by night. I got repeatedly rousted by LAPD. I sensed that a cop-street fool compact existed. I behaved accordingly. I denied all criminal intent. I acted respectfully. My height-to-weight ratio and unhygienic appearance caused some cops to taunt me. I sparred back. Street schtick often ensued. I mimicked jailhouse jigs like some WASP Richard Pryor. Rousts turned into streetside yukfests. They played like Jack Webb unhinged. I started to dig the LAPD. I started to grok cop humor. I couldn't quite peg it as performance art. I hadn't read Joseph Wambaugh yet.

Pfefferberg still saw Cracow as a genial city, and dogs like that looked foreign, as if they'd been brought in from some other and harsher ghetto. For even in this last hour, among the litter of packages, behind an iron gate, he was grateful for the city and presumed that the ultimate frightfulness was always performed in some other, less gracious place. This last assumption was wiped away in the next half-minute. The worst thing, that is, occurred in Cracow. Through the crack of the gate, he saw the event which revealed that if there was a pole of evil it was not situated in Tarnow, Czestochowa, Lwow or Warsaw as you thought. It was at the north side of Jozefinska Street a hundred and twenty paces away. From 41 came a screaming woman and a child. One dog had the woman by the cloth of her dress, the flesh of her hip. The SS man who was the servant of the dogs took the child and flung it against the wall. The sound of it made Pfefferberg close his eyes, and he heard the shot which put an end to the woman's howling protest.

Necessary policemen, firemen, street cleaners, health officers, judges, legislators and executives perform productive services as important as those of anyone in private industry. They make it possible for private industry to function in an atmosphere of law, order, freedom and peace. But their justification consists in the utility of their services. It does not consist in the "purchasing power" they possess by virtue of being on the public payroll.

Show Pleasant Riderhood a Wedding in the street, and she only saw two people taking out a regular license to quarrel and fight. Show her a Christening, and she saw a little heathen personage having a quite superfluous name bestowed upon it, inasmuch as it would be commonly addressed by some abusive epithet; which little personage was not in the least wanted by anybody, and would be shoved and banged out of everybody's way, until it should grow big enough to shove and bang. Show her a Funeral, and she saw an unremunerative ceremony in the nature of a black masquerade, conferring a temporary gentility on the performers, at an immense expense, and representing the only formal party ever given by the deceased. Show her a live father, and she saw but a duplicate of her own father, who from her infancy had been taken with fits and starts of discharging his duty to her, which duty was always incorporated in the form of a fist or a leathern strap, and being discharged hurt her. All things considered, therefore, Pleasant Riderhood was not so very, very bad.

People can read books and watch children at the same time . . . Of course, both the reading of the books and the watching of the children will be performed in a way best described as half-assed. If you want to read your book in a non-half-assed way, you have to wait until your child is in kindergarten, or you must pay someone to watch your child while you read your book. Even then, however, you must not read the book in your home because the child will find you and jump on you and make reading impossible. You must leave your home, leave your yard, leave your street. You must drive to a cafe in town to read your book. You must run and hide from your child as if your child is serving you a subpoena. This is not insane. It does not make you bad if you do this.

The Joy of Sex!—Elaine brought home that dreary tract one day, those tidings of comfort and joy by some Californicated Englishman, and we studied the ghastly pictures, the two hundred different positions. What a joyless book. That poor fucker the instructor-model, performing his gymnastic routines over and over, with slight variations, for three hundred pages, each and every time upon the same woman. No wonder he has that look on his soft hairy degenerate face of a bored he-dog hooked up on the street with an exhausted bitch, longing to leave but unable to extricate himself from what breeders call a “tie.” The woman in the book looks only slightly happier; somebody out of mercy should have emptied a bucket of ice water on the miserable couple. Technique, technique, technical engineering, curse of the modern world, debasing what should be a wild, free, spontaneous act of violent delight into an industrial procedure. Comfort’s treatise is a training manual, a workbook which might better have been entitled The Job of Sex.

They burn down Satanist churches, perform exorcisms on politicians, and they once crucified a street mime. Upside down. And then they set fire to him. A lot of people applauded.

Once you know how an illusion is performed, you cannot go back to being tricked by it.

, But the streets need cleaning, brother," Gromph said. "That is why the gods gave us magic, brother," Jarlaxle replied in the same smug tone. "To perform the mundane tasks of life.

This particular May morning begins with the appearance of a procession on the corner of Pancake and Rosa Luxemburg Streets. The procession is evidently religious: it consists of eight clerical personages, well known to the entire town. But instead of censers, the clerical personages are swinging brooms, which transfers the entire action from the plane of religion to the plane of revolution. These personages are now simply unproductive elements of society performing their labor duty for the benefit of the people. Instead of prayers, golden clouds of dust rise to the heavens. ("X")

Everybody will die, of course, sooner or later. Circus performers will die, and clarinet experts will die, and you and I will die, and there might be a person who lives on your block, right now, who is not looking both ways before he crosses the street and who will die in just a few seconds, all because of a bus. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact. The

While men are limited from childhood in the range of emotion they are expected to have the capacity of feeling, they are paradoxically given more space to be unfiltered in public. Women, treated like emotional thermostats whether they like it or not, not only must constantly manage their own feelings but they are also held responsible for the feelings of others. When women are told to "smile" by a stranger on the street, they are being reminded of this through harassment. When women going about their business are accused of having "resting bitch face," they are being reminded of their expected constant enthusiastic performance for the benefit of the world. A man not smiling while going about a task is never told he has "resting dick face." He's likely treated as busy and important, if his expression is noted at all.

They are the appreciators of genius, and as art critic Clive Bell said, “The essential characteristic of a highly civilized society is not that it is creative but that it is appreciative.” By that measure, Vienna was the most highly civilized society to grace the planet. Mozart didn’t compose for an audience but for audiences. One audience was the wealthy patrons—nobles, typically, including the emperor himself. Another audience was the city’s finicky music critics. A third was the public at large, middle-class concertgoers or dust-caked street sweepers attending an open-air, and free, performance. Musical Vienna was not a solo performance. It was a symphony, often harmonious, occasionally discordant, never dull. Mozart was no freak of nature. He was part of a milieu, a musical ecosystem so rich and varied it practically

There was a man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, “What can we do now? How can we go on without him?

Some of the things written during those years, justifying, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me something about the irresponsibility and cowardice of the liberal community which I will never forget. Their performance, then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with which this community has always protected itself against the deepest implications of black suffering, persuaded me that brilliance without passion is nothing more than sterility. It must be remembered, after all, that I did not begin meeting these people at the point that they began to meet me: I had been delivering their packages and emptying their garbage and taking their tips for years. (And they don’t tip well.) And what I watched them do to each other during the McCarthy era was, in some ways, worse than anything they had ever done to me, for I, at least, had never been mad enough to depend on their devotion. It seemed very clear to me that they were lying about their motives and were being blackmailed by their guilt; were, in fact, at bottom, nothing more than the respectable issue of various immigrants, struggling to hold on to what they had acquired.

Warren Buffett, quoting Henry Ford, often talks about the importance of keeping all your eggs in one basket, then watching that basket very carefully. One thing that appalled me and that I’d seen too many times was the Wall Street practice of having many eggs in many baskets. Even the most reputable mutual fund companies have a practice of selling multiple funds. The ones that do well are those that then get the marketing dollars and raise more money from investors. The ones that do poorly are either shut down or merged into the better-performing funds. In the process, the failures are buried as if they’d never existed while

band mates, audiences or bewildered passers-by on the street. Anyone, as long as he could make a connection. His was not a persona applied for a performance and removed at the end of the evening along with the gold lamé suit,

Late in November, Lenny took off for his eagerly anticipated job in Chicago. It had been nearly a year since he played the chilly city, and those who hadn't seen him for that period, or even longer, were shocked at the change in his appearance. The once handsome, animated, brilliant performer and commentator was now a fat, bent, shabby-looking street loafer, a horribly dissipated, baggy-eyed, numb-fleshed junkie, with a tragic darkness in his eyes.

The Midnight Dance of the Universal Desk Sergeant, a performance that is somehow the same whether the precinct house is in Boston or Biloxi. Was there ever a desk sergeant who didn’t peer out over reading glasses? Was there ever a desk man who wanted to be bothered with police work at three in the morning? Was any station house desk ever manned by anything but aging civil servants, six months from their pensions, whose every movement seemed slower than death itself?

EAMES: Word is, you're not welcome in these parts. COBB: Yeah? EAMES: There's a price on your head from Cobol Engineering. Pretty big one, actually. COBB: You wouldn't sell me out. Eames looks at Cobb, offended. EAMES: 'Course I would. COBB: (smiles) Not when you hear what I'm selling. A ramshackle balcony overlooking a busy street. Eames pours. COBB: Inception. Eames' glass stops halfway to his mouth. COBB: Don't bother telling me it's impossible. EAMES: It's perfectly possible. Just bloody difficult. COBB: That's what I keep saying to Arthur. EAMES: Arthur? You're still working with that stick-in-the-mud? COBB: He's a good point man. EAMES: The best. But he has no imagination. If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination. COBB: You've done it before? EAMES: Yes and no. We tried it. Got the idea in place, but it didn't take. COBB: You didn't plant it deep enough? EAMES: It's not just about depth. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.

Musical intelligence. Agent attends a concert and receives his instructions. Information and directives in and out through street singers, musical broadcasts, jukeboxes, records, high school bands, whistling boys, cabaret performers, singing waiters, transistor radios.

I soon saw, however, that Creed's obsession with death was typical of most of the children. This came out in their play. "Let's play funeral" was a favorite game at recess. To me, it seemed bizarre and mawkish play. All that saved it was the spontaneous creativity of the children and the fact that, unerringly, they caught the incongruities and absurdities of their elders. One child would be elected to be "dead" and would lay himself out on the ground, eyes closed, hands dutifully crossed across his chest. Another would be chosen to be the "preacher," all the rest, "mourners." I remember one day when Sam Houston Holcomb was the "corpse" and Creed Allen, always the class clown of the group, was elected "preacher." Creed, already at ten an accomplished mimic, was turning in an outstanding performance. I stood watching, half-hidden in the shado of the doorway. Creed (bellowing in stentorian tones): "You-all had better stop your meanness and I'll tell you for why. Praise the Lord! If you'uns don't stop being so defend ornery, you ain't never goin' gift to see Brother Holcomb on them streets paved with rubies and such-like, to give him the time of day, 'cause you'uns are goin' to be laid out on the coolin' board and then roasted in hellfire." The "congregation" shivered with delight, as if they were hearing a deliciously scary ghost story. The corpse opened one eye to see how his mourners were taking this blast; he sighed contentedly at their palpitations; wriggled right leg where a fly was tickling; adjusted grubby hands more comfortably across chest. Creed then grasped his right ear with his right hand and spat. Only there wasn't enough to make the stream impressive. So preacher paused, working his mouth vigorously, trying to collect more spit. Another pucker and heave. Ah! Better! Sermon now resumed: "Friends and neighbors, we air lookin' on Brother Holcombe's face for the last time." (Impressive pause.). "Praise the Lord! We ain't never goin' see him again in this life." (Impressive pause.). "Praise the Lord!" Small preacher was now really getting warmed up. He remembered something he must have heard at the last real funeral. Hearty spit first, more pulling of ear: "You air enjoyin' life now, folks. Me, I used to git pleasured and enjoy life too. But now that I've got religion, I don't enjoy life no more." At this point I retreated behind the door lest I betray my presence by laughing aloud.

Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven figures a year, set out o coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the highest possible ratings for the worst possible loans. They performed the task with Ivy League thoroughness and efficiency.

FOR THE VOICELESS by El Niño Salvaje I speak for the ones who cannot speak, for the voiceless. I raise my voice and wave my arms and shout for the ones you do not see, perhaps cannot see, for the invisible. For the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised; for the victims of this so-called “war on drugs,” for the eighty thousand murdered by the narcos, by the police, by the military, by the government, by the purchasers of drugs and the sellers of guns, by the investors in gleaming towers who have parlayed their “new money” into hotels, resorts, shopping malls, and suburban developments. I speak for the tortured, burned, and flayed by the narcos, beaten and raped by the soldiers, electrocuted and half-drowned by the police. I speak for the orphans, twenty thousand of them, for the children who have lost both or one parent, whose lives will never be the same. I speak for the dead children, shot in crossfires, murdered alongside their parents, ripped from their mothers’ wombs. I speak for the people enslaved, forced to labor on the narcos’ ranches, forced to fight. I speak for the mass of others ground down by an economic system that cares more for profit than for people. I speak for the people who tried to tell the truth, who tried to tell the story, who tried to show you what you have been doing and what you have done. But you silenced them and blinded them so that they could not tell you, could not show you. I speak for them, but I speak to you—the rich, the powerful, the politicians, the comandantes, the generals. I speak to Los Pinos and the Chamber of Deputies, I speak to the White House and Congress, I speak to AFI and the DEA, I speak to the bankers, and the ranchers and the oil barons and the capitalists and the narco drug lords and I say— You are the same. You are all the cartel. And you are guilty. You are guilty of murder, you are guilty of torture, you are guilty of rape, of kidnapping, of slavery, of oppression, but mostly I say that you are guilty of indifference. You do not see the people that you grind under your heel. You do not see their pain, you do not hear their cries, they are voiceless and invisible to you and they are the victims of this war that you perpetuate to keep yourselves above them. This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible, that you would just as soon be swept from your streets like the trash that blows around your ankles and soils your shoes. Congratulations. You’ve done it. You’ve performed a cleansing. A limpieza. The country is safe now for your shopping malls and suburban tracts, the invisible are safely out of sight, the voiceless silent as they should be. I speak these last words, and now you will kill me for it. I only ask that you bury me in the fosa común—the common grave—with the faceless and the nameless, without a headstone. I would rather be with them than you. And I am voiceless now, and invisible.

In China, often only the practice of infanticide makes marriage and family life possible.  In all the major towns, parents annually abandon many children in the streets or drown them like unwanted puppies.  Some people even make a living out of performing infanticide contracts for money.

He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man’s love when you have removed his self-love. There was a man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, “What can we do now? How can we go on without him?

A date was soon set for the wedding. He and Marie were married on Saturday, August 31, 1940, at the Church of Our Lady of Refuge on East 196th Street in the Bronx. The nuptial mass was performed by the Reverend Jeremiah F. Nemecek, a Fordham football fan who idolized the Seven Blocks of Granite

I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the windowledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes, and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned on both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all." The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south." Transparanoia owns this building," he said. She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond maps of language. Opal knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fervers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism. She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her life, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget...There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first.

O felt that he was watching her the way a lion trainer watches the animal he has trained, careful to see that it performs with complete obedience and thus does honor to him, but even more the way a prince’s bodyguard or a bandit’s second-in-command keeps an eye on the prostitute he has gone down to fetch in the street.

I may love the great outdoors in winter, but even I draw the line at sunset. When November comes, I have no desire to leave the house after dark. My instinct is to hibernate the evenings away. I hate those strange walks along the high street, lit only by street lamps and the glow of shop windows, the cold seeping up your coat sleeves. I don’t like the way that 4 o’clock can feel so desolate, the air damp without the corrective force of the sun./ The very thought of driving seems nightmarish – those impenetrable roads their edges uncertain; the dance you have to perform with the full beam, flicking it on and off, on and off. Far better to stay at home.

had read a description of this ability to act so well in public in Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind, in which he describes life in 1950s Poland under the authoritarian influences of Nazism and Stalinism. He writes that in such circumstances people must, of necessity, become actors and actresses. ‘One does not perform on a theatre stage,’ says Milosz, ‘but in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room one lives in. Such acting is a highly-developed craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations.

A Day Away We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true, or if it is true, then our situations were so temporary that they would have collapsed anyway. Once a year or so I give myself a day away. On the eve of my day of absence, I begin to unwrap the bonds which hold me in harness. I inform housemates, my family and close friends that I will not be reachable for twenty-four hours; then I disengage the telephone. I turn the radio dial to an all-music station, preferably one which plays the soothing golden oldies. I sit for at least an hour in a very hot tub; then I lay out my clothes in preparation for my morning escape, and knowing that nothing will disturb me, I sleep the sleep of the just. On the morning I wake naturally, for I will have set no clock, nor informed my body timepiece when it should alarm. I dress in comfortable shoes and casual clothes and leave my house going no place. If I am living in a city, I wander streets, window-shop, or gaze at buildings. I enter and leave public parks, libraries, the lobbies of skyscrapers, and movie houses. I stay in no place for very long. On the getaway day I try for amnesia. I do not want to know my name, where I live, or how many dire responsibilities rest on my shoulders. I detest encountering even the closest friend, for then I am reminded of who I am, and the circumstances of my life, which I want to forget for a while. Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, lovers, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops. If we step away for a time, we are not, as many may think and some will accuse, being irresponsible, but rather we are preparing ourselves to more ably perform our duties and discharge our obligations. When I return home, I am always surprised to find some questions I sought to evade had been answered and some entanglements I had hoped to flee had become unraveled in my absence. A day away acts as a spring tonic. It can dispel rancor, transform indecision, and renew the spirit.

Rachel Ries is a wonderful singer/performer/songwriter who writes her music with a literary and poetic style. In an interview with Amanda Miller for Rumpus Magazine Rachel Ries listed some of her literary influences. You can listen to her perform at this site too, if you've never heard her before. Here is her list in the order she gave them: Al Kennedy – Everything You Need Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum China Miéville – Perdido Street Station Everything by Tolkien Jeannette Winterson Dostoevsky – The Idiot John Steinbeck – East of Eden Willa Cather – Song of the Lark Diana Gabaldon – Anything Outlander Neil Gaiman – American Gods Victor Hugo – Les Miserables Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping Justin Cronin – The Passage David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street—and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art—and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.

He watched Richard Gordon lurching down the street until he was out of sight in the shadow from the big trees whose branches dipped down to grow into the ground like roots. What he was thinking as he watched him was not pleasant. It is a mortal sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one's religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must, all operations in life be performed with out an anesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. The poor stupid man. The poor homeless man. I ought to stay with him, but I know that is too much for him to bear. I am ashamed and disgusted with myself and I hate what I have done. It all may turn out badly too. But I must not think about that. I will now return to the anesthetic I have used for seventeen years and will not need much longer. Although it is probably a vice now for which I only invent excuses. Though at least it is a vice for which I am suited. But I wish I could help that poor man who I am wronging.

He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilisation. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on the city street - he was the hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art - he was the virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.

Every place has its own music, if you listen hard enough. The woods have a quiet, whispery nocturne, all swishing leaves and wind, one of my favorite sounds. It makes me want to lie down and close my eyes and just breathe. But the city is a symphony, so many sounds all clashing and blending, rising and falling: honking cars, shouting people, and of course, the street musicians who perform magic for spare change.

Italy still has a provincial sophistication that comes from its long history as a collection of city states. That, combined with a hot climate, means that the Italians occupy their streets and squares with much greater ease than the English. The resultant street life is very rich, even in small towns like Arezzo and Gaiole, fertile ground for the peeping Tom aspect of an actor’s preparation. I took many trips to Siena, and was struck by its beauty, but also by the beauty of the Siennese themselves. They are dark, fierce, and aristocratic, very different to the much paler Venetians or Florentines. They have always looked like this, as the paintings of their ancestors testify. I observed the groups of young people, the lounging grace with which they wore their clothes, their sense of always being on show. I walked the streets, they paraded them. It did not matter that I do not speak a word of Italian; I made up stories about them, and took surreptitious photographs. I was in Siena on the final day of the Palio, a lengthy festival ending in a horse race around the main square. Each district is represented by a horse and jockey and a pair of flag-bearers. The day is spent by teams of supporters with drums, banners, and ceremonial horse and rider processing round the town singing a strange chanting song. Outside the Cathedral, watched from a high window by a smiling Cardinal and a group of nuns, with a huge crowd in the Cathedral Square itself, the supporters passed, and to drum rolls the two flag-bearers hurled their flags high into the air and caught them, the crowd roaring in approval. The winner of the extremely dangerous horse race is presented with a palio, a standard bearing the effigy of the Virgin. In the last few years the jockeys have had to be professional by law, as when they were amateurs, corruption and bribery were rife. The teams wear a curious fancy dress encompassing styles from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. They are followed by gangs of young men, supporters, who create an atmosphere or intense rivalry and barely suppressed violence as they run through the narrow streets in the heat of the day. It was perfect. I took many more photographs. At the farmhouse that evening, after far too much Chianti, I and my friends played a bizarre game. In the dark, some of us moved lighted candles from one room to another, whilst others watched the effect of the light on faces and on the rooms from outside. It was like a strange living film of the paintings we had seen. Maybe Derek Jarman was spying on us.

Imagine if one should drag an innocent passer-by from the street to the operating room of a nearby hospital and force him at gunpoint to perform a delicate operation. The man would burst into tears. However, if one were to ask him to sound off on problems such as nuclear experiments, Vietnam, the borders of Israel, support for Indonesia, aid to Latin America, or recognition of Red China, in most cases he would start spouting opinions.

I’m considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I’m miming myself.

While the meetings included traders, that is, people who are judged on their numerical performance, it was mostly a forum for salespeople (people capable of charming customers), and the category of entertainers called Wall Street “economists” or “strategists,” who make pronouncements on the fate of the markets, but do not engage in any form of risk taking, thus having their success dependent on rhetoric rather than actually testable facts.

It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, Street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St. Paul's at Covent Garden. Martin, who was none too sober himself, at first thought the body was that of one of the many celebrants who had chosen the Piazza as a convenient outdoor toilet and dormitory. Being a seasoned Londoner, Martin gave the body the "London once-over" - a quick glance to determine whether this was a drunk, a crazy or a human being in distress. The fact that it was entirely possible for someone to be all three simultaneously is why good-Samaritanism in London is considered an extreme sport - like BASE jumping or crocodile wrestling. Martin, noting the good quality coat and shoes, had just pegged the body as a drunk when he noticed that it was in fact missing its head.

On New Year’s Eve 1777, after performing in a play entitled The Devil to Pay in the West Indies, a party of drunken officers—one dressed up like Old Nick himself, complete with horns and tail—disrupted services at the John Street Methodist Church. Nor was that the worst of it. “I could narrate many and very frightful occurrences of theft, fraud, robbery, and murder by the English soldiers which their love of drink excited,” said one dismayed German officer.

window. I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day. • • • I’D MOVED INTO MY apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in 1996, a year after I graduated from Columbia. By summer 2000, I still hadn’t had a single conversation with any of my neighbors—almost four years of complete silence in the elevator, each awkward ride a performance of hypnotized spaceout. My neighbors were mostly fortysomething married people without children.

But Physician was a composed man, who performed neither on his own trumpet, nor on the trumpets of other people. Many wonderful things did he see and hear, and much irreconcilable moral contradiction did he pass his life among; yet his equality of compassion was no more disturbed than the Divine Master's of all healing was. He went, like the rain, among the just and unjust, doing all the good he could, and neither proclaiming it in the synagogues nor at the corner of streets.

The temple prostitutes from Inanna’s district had come down to mingle in the streets, resulting in public copulations as some male citizens could not withhold their urges until they could find a tent. Spontaneous dancing broke out in the streets, led by the blue dancers and their traveling minstrels. The human dancers jerked and spasmed as if taken over by spirits. Their eyes turned upward, showing only the whites, and they uttered strange guttural sounds as if performed by a distant ventriloquist.

A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.

Like the musician's portrait, the person who has become a real part of your life is not located in one part of you, and can never be neatly excised. To really lose the notion of them... Well, how would you? You couldn't lose the picture without destroying the room. In time, however, the furniture will be rearranged and will come to represent other people and places. But the old shapes linger, haunt the room. If you look from a certain angle, you can still see them there. But you move on, your perspective shifts. New friends walk beside you through the streets of Belfast. You practise and perform new routines until, eventually, you can't quite remember how the room used to look or how the streets used to feel when walked in the days of love. That is perhaps the saddest loss of all, and why we want to linger for a while at the end of grief. We don't want to lose the notion. There is no real forgetting. Everything leaves a mark, whether you remember it, whether you bring it to mind or not. There is no subtraction in mind. Only and.

Charlie, I want to get married," she said. "Well, so do I, darling -" "No, you don't understand," she said. "I want to get married right now." Froggy knew from the desperate look in her eyes that Red was dead serious. "Sweetheart, are you sure now is a good time?" he said. "I'm positive," Red said. "If the last month has taught me anything, it's how unpredictable life can be - especially when you're friends with the Bailey twins. This could very well be the last chance we'll ever get! Let's do it now, in the Square of Time, before another magical being can tear us apart!" The idea made Froggy's heart fill with joy, but he wasn't convinced it was the right thing to do. "Are you sure this is the wedding you want?" he asked. "I don't mean to be crude, but the whole street is covered in a witch's remains." A large and self-assured smile grew on Red's face. "Charlie, I can't think of a better place to get married than on the ashes of your ex-girlfriend," she said. "Mother Goose, will you do the honors?" Besides being pinned to the ground by a three-ton lion statue, Mother Goose couldn't think of a reason why she couldn't perform the ceremony. "I suppose I'm available," she said. "Wonderful!" Red squealed. "And for all intents and purposes, we'll say the Fairy Council are our witness, Conner is the best man, and Alex is my maid of honor. Don't worry, Alex! This will only take a minute and we'll get right back to helping you!" Red and Froggy joined hands and stood in the middle of Times Square as Mother Goose officiated the impromptu wedding. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today - against our will - to unexpectedly watch this frog and woman join in questionable matrimony. Do you, Charlie Charming, take Red Riding Hood as your lovably high-maintenance wife?" "I do," Froggy declared. "And do you, Red Riding Hood, take Charlie Charming as your adorably webfooted husband?" "I do," Red said. "Then it is with the power mistrusted in me that I now pronounce you husband and wife! You may kiss the frog!" Red and Froggy shared their first kiss as a married couple, and their friends cheered. "Beautiful ceremony, my dear," Merlin said. "Believe it or not, this isn't the strangest wedding I've been to," Mother Goose said.

In a day before passive spectatorship and the mass media, entertainment was supplied by actual people—not just paid performers but also ordinary people alone or in groups. Whitman’s picture in “I Hear America Singing” of average people singing their “varied carols” was more than just a metaphor. It reflected a pre-mass-media culture in which Americans often entertained themselves and each other. Whitman’s spouting Shakespeare atop omnibuses, declaiming Homer and Ossian at the seashore, and humming arias on the street typified these performances in everyday life.

Rasputin, returning to his village on June 27, had been followed there without his knowledge by Khina Gusseva, Iliodor’s agent. Gusseva caught the starets alone in a village street. She accosted him and, when he turned, drove Iliodor’s knife deep into his stomach. “I have killed the Antichrist,” she screamed hysterically and then attempted unsuccessfully to stab herself. Rasputin was gravely hurt; the slash in his stomach had exposed his entrails. He was taken to a hospital in Tyumen, where a specialist sent by his friends in St. Petersburg performed an operation.

Einstein also became a supporter of racial tolerance. When Marian Anderson, the black contralto, came to Princeton for a concert in 1937, the Nassau Inn refused her a room. So Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Mercer Street, in what was a deeply personal as well as a publicly symbolic gesture. Two years later, when she was barred from performing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, she gave what became a historic free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Whenever she returned to Princeton, she stayed with Einstein, her last visit coming just two months before he died.63 One

And so, with their first public action on Halloween of 1968, the feminist activist group called W.I.T.C.H. was born. Its members donned witch costumes, replete with brooms and pointy black hats, and did a public ritual performance of hexing the New York Stock Exchange. Did it work? Well, as Gloria Steinem wrote about the incident in New York magazine, “A coven of 13 members of W.I.T.C.H. demonstrates against that bastion of white supremacy: Wall Street. The next day, the market falls five points.” (The glue that the witches added to the locks of the NYSE doors also added a bit of whammy, no doubt.)

In short, there is no question that a country can run a stable paper currency without a gold standard, a central bank, a lender of last resort, or much regulation; and not only avoid disaster, but perform well. Bottom–up monetary systems – known as free banking – have a far better track record than top–down ones. Walter Bagehot, the great nineteenth-century theorist of central banking, admitted as much. In his influential book Lombard Street, he effectively conceded that the only reason a central bank needed to be a lender of last resort was because of the instability introduced by the existence of a central bank. The

On 119th Street there had been a sign for years in the front window of an old dilapidated three-storey brick house, announcing: FUNERALS PERFORMED. For five years past the house had been condemned as unsafe for human habitation. The wooden steps leading up to the cracked, scabby front door were so rotten one had to mount them like crossing a river on a fallen tree trunk; the foundation was crumbling, one side of the house had sunk more than a foot lower than the other, the concrete windowsills had fallen from all the upper windows and the constant falling of bricks from the front wall created a dangerous hazard for passing pedestrians.

Worse than knowing I needed out, I didn't know what I needed back into. Even when I could feel there was something else beyond the edges of any color in the street or window where no one waited even to just totally ignore me, I couldn't recognize it enough to know how to want it harder. Along each street it was as if I were waiting for some hole to swallow my face. Each moment it didn't made the going into the next step that much less worth doing. This is what life had always felt like. In my mind, expecting the absence of something or someone there before me made the presence in its place feel like the punch line to a routine no one was performing. And where I couldn't find a way to laugh, I became my own stand-in, over and over, like painting white over a window from the inside.

To the untrained eye, the Wall Street people who rode from the Connecticut suburbs to Grand Central were an undifferentiated mass, but within that mass Danny noted many small and important distinctions. If they were on their BlackBerrys, they were probably hedge fund guys, checking their profits and losses in the Asian markets. If they slept on the train they were probably sell-side people—brokers, who had no skin in the game. Anyone carrying a briefcase or a bag was probably not employed on the sell side, as the only reason you’d carry a bag was to haul around brokerage research, and the brokers didn’t read their own reports—at least not in their spare time. Anyone carrying a copy of the New York Times was probably a lawyer or a back-office person or someone who worked in the financial markets without actually being in the markets. Their clothes told you a lot, too. The guys who ran money dressed as if they were going to a Yankees game. Their financial performance was supposed to be all that mattered about them, and so it caused suspicion if they dressed too well. If you saw a buy-side guy in a suit, it usually meant that he was in trouble, or scheduled to meet with someone who had given him money, or both. Beyond that, it was hard to tell much about a buy-side person from what he was wearing. The sell side, on the other hand, might as well have been wearing their business cards: The guy in the blazer and khakis was a broker at a second-tier firm; the guy in the three-thousand-dollar suit and the hair just so was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan or someplace like that. Danny could guess where people worked by where they sat on the train. The Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Merrill Lynch people, who were headed downtown, edged to the front—though when Danny thought about it, few Goldman people actually rode the train anymore. They all had private cars. Hedge fund guys such as himself worked uptown and so exited Grand Central to the north, where taxis appeared haphazardly and out of nowhere to meet them, like farm trout rising to corn kernels. The Lehman and Bear Stearns people used to head for the same exit as he did, but they were done. One reason why, on September 18, 2008, there weren’t nearly as many people on the northeast corner of Forty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue at 6:40 in the morning as there had been on September 18, 2007.

The results of the most recent such study were published in Psychological Science at the end of 2008. A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous, and mentally fatiguing, series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were then divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy down town streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results. The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. “In sum,” concluded the researchers, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces?

The vivid scenes with their elegant colour, their unexpected distinction, and their strangeness, were like an arras before which, like mysterious, shadowy shapes, played the forms of Kitty's fancy. They seemed wholly unreal. Mei-Tan-Fu with its crenellated walls was like the painted canvas placed on the stage in an old play to represent a city. The nuns, Waddington, and the Manchu woman who loved him, were fantastic characters in a masque; and the rest, the people sidling along the tortuous streets and those who died, were nameless supers. Of course it had, they all had, a significance of some sort, but what was it? It was as though they performed a ritual dance, elaborate and ancient, and you knew that those complicated measures had a meaning which it was important for you to know; and yet you could see no clue, no clue.

THE SPANISH JEW'S TALE. THE LEGEND OF RABBI BEN LEVI. Rabbi Ben Levi, on the Sabbath, read A volume of the Law, in which it said, "No man shall look upon my face and live." And as he read, he prayed that God would give His faithful servant grace with mortal eye To look upon His face and yet not die. Then fell a sudden shadow on the page And, lifting up his eyes, grown dim with age, He saw the Angel of Death before him stand, Holding a naked sword in his right hand. Rabbi Ben Levi was a righteous man, Yet through his veins a chill of terror ran. With trembling voice he said, "What wilt thou here?" The angel answered, "Lo! the time draws near When thou must die; yet first, by God's decree, Whate'er thou askest shall be granted thee." Replied the Rabbi, "Let these living eyes First look upon my place in Paradise." Then said the Angel, "Come with me and look." Rabbi Ben Levi closed the sacred book, And rising, and uplifting his gray head, "Give me thy sword," he to the Angel said, "Lest thou shouldst fall upon me by the way." The Angel smiled and hastened to obey, Then led him forth to the Celestial Town, And set him on the wall, whence, gazing down, Rabbi Ben Levi, with his living eyes, Might look upon his place in Paradise. Then straight into the city of the Lord The Rabbi leaped with the Death-Angel's sword, And through the streets there swept a sudden breath Of something there unknown, which men call death. Meanwhile the Angel stayed without, and cried, "Come back!" To which the Rabbi's voice replied, "No! in the name of God, whom I adore, I swear that hence I will depart no more!" Then all the Angels cried, "O Holy One, See what the son of Levi here has done! The kingdom of Heaven he takes by violence, And in Thy name refuses to go hence!" The Lord replied, "My Angels, be not wroth; Did e'er the son of Levi break his oath? Let him remain; for he with mortal eye Shall look upon my face and yet not die." Beyond the outer wall the Angel of Death Heard the great voice, and said, with panting breath, "Give back the sword, and let me go my way." Whereat the Rabbi paused, and answered, "Nay! Anguish enough already has it caused Among the sons of men." And while he paused He heard the awful mandate of the Lord Resounding through the air, "Give back the sword!" The Rabbi bowed his head in silent prayer; Then said he to the dreadful Angel, "Swear, No human eye shall look on it again; But when thou takest away the souls of men, Thyself unseen, and with an unseen sword, Thou wilt perform the bidding of the Lord." The Angel took the sword again, and swore, And walks on earth unseen forevermore.

Being traumatized is not just an issue of being stuck in the past; it is just as much a problem of not being fully alive in the present. One form of exposure treatment is virtual-reality therapy in which veterans wear high-tech goggles that make it possible to refight the battle of Fallujah in lifelike detail. As far as I know, the US Marines performed very well in combat. The problem is that they cannot tolerate being home. Recent studies of Australian combat veterans show that their brains are rewired to be alert for emergencies, at the expense of being focused on the small details of everyday life.43 (We’ll learn more about this in chapter 19, on neurofeedback.) More than virtual-reality therapy, traumatized patients need “real world” therapy, which helps them to feel as alive when walking through the local supermarket or playing with their kids as they did in the streets of Baghdad.

My father was a constable and died while performing his duty. My brother-in-law and partner died while performing his duty. I saw the effects those deaths had on my mother and sister, and I cannot, in good conscience, do that to a woman I . . .” Her spirits sank as he trailed off. “What a shame, Detective. I suppose that such a woman would then marry a factory worker, or other laborer, or a man in any one of a number of dangerous professions. Or perhaps a banker, who is accidently trampled in the street by a runaway carriage. Or a farmer who contracts consumption at the village autumn fete and succumbs to it weeks later.” She shook her head and pulled back. He released her, remaining silent, watching her. She shrugged, stuffing the pen and notebook into her reticule. “We are all going to die someday, and what a pity it would be to lose the possibility for happy opportunities because of fear.

To me, Chicago was the bar in the twelfth-floor lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, where I drank strawberry daiquiris—sophisticated!—with my visiting parents and with girls I was trying to impress. It was the elegant shops at the new, fancy Water Tower Place. My favorite Chicago spots were primarily restaurants. Dianna’s Opaa, in Greektown on South Halsted Street, with its lanky, serpent-like owner, Petros Kogiones, performing his host duties that were as important as the food—on the nights he wasn’t there, you felt cheated—sliding back his sheet of long black hair to greet his female customers with an overly familiar kiss and their dates with a disarming, arms-flung-wide cry of “cousin!” then conducting his odd 9 p.m. ceremonies, calling up all the engaged couples to be officially blessed by Famous Petros in the name of God, the Greek Orthodox Church, and Dianna’s Opaa! We’d all cheer and raise our juice glasses of Roditis high. Or

On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a heartland of the South Slavs. Philosophers refer to ‘the inevitable accident’, and this was a very accidental one. Some young Serb terrorists had planned to murder him as he paid a state visit. They had bungled the job, throwing a bomb that missed, and one of them had repaired to a café in a side street to sort himself out. The Archduke drove to the headquarters of the governor-general, Potiorek (where he was met by little girls performing folklore), and berated him (the two men were old enemies, as the Archduke had prevented the neurasthenic Potiorek from succeeding an elderly admirer as Chief of the General Staff). The Archduke went off in a rage, to visit in hospital an officer wounded by the earlier bomb. His automobile moved off again, a Count Harrach standing on the running board. Its driver turned left after crossing a bridge over Sarajevo’s river. It was the wrong street, and the driver was told to stop and reverse. In reverse gear such automobiles sometimes stalled, and this one did so - Count Harrach on the wrong side, away from the café where one of the assassination team was calming his nerves. Now, slowly, his target drove up and stopped. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, fired. He was seventeen, a romantic schooled in nationalism and terrorism, and part of a team that stretches from the Russian Nihilists of the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified especially in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic The Possessed and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Austria did not execute adolescents and Princip was young enough to survive. He was imprisoned and died in April 1918. Before he died, a prison psychiatrist asked him if he had any regrets that his deed had caused a world war and the death of millions. He answered: if I had not done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.

the foot of the downhill Eighties lay the Hudson, as dense as mercury. On the points of radio towers in New Jersey red lights like small hearts beat or tingled. In midstreet, on the benches, old people: on faces, on heads, the strong marks of decay: the big legs of women and blotted eyes of men, sunken mouths and inky nostrils. It was the normal hour for bats swooping raggedly (Ludeyville), or pieces of paper (New York) to remind Herzog of bats. An escaped balloon was fleeing like a sperm, black and quick into the orange dust of the west. He crossed the street, making a detour to avoid a fog of grilled chicken and sausage. The crowd was traipsing over the broad sidewalk. Moses took a keen interest in the uptown public, its theatrical spirit, its performers—the transvestite homosexuals painted with great originality, the wigged women, the lesbians looking so male you had to wait for them to pass and see them from behind to determine their true sex, hair dyes of every shade.

Matt asked me to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a relatively young sketch group. They needed a girl. I had heard of their shows around town, which seemed like a mixture of improvisation and performance art. They had done a show where each member sat on a street corner and had a Thanksgiving dinner. They did a show where they pretended a member was committing suicide. They did a show where they took an audience member for a virtual-reality tour out into the streets of Chicago. Most of their stuff was about getting the audience out of their chairs and out of their comfort zone. The Upright Citizens Brigade name came from a fake big bad corporation that was mentioned in one of their shows. The idea was this group had co-opted the name and was causing chaos on purpose—picture Occupy Wall Street if they renamed themselves “Halliburton Inc.” Like I said, Matt had big ideas. He had a big plan for the UCB and I wanted to be part of it. I grabbed his coattails and held on tight.

Then, as we ascend into the fifth and final act of the show, we can choose what we want to take back with us: a piece of our underworld self that, frankly, the cheating boyfriend may need to meet, or the boss that doesn't appreciate you, or the terrorizing Bitch at school—or maybe you're the terrorizing Bitch, maybe I am. Some fragments that took their masks off while we were on this underworld journey sometimes walk quietly with me. Only I know that after the show they will be staying with me as my figurative New Renter in my seafront condo, down the street from Pituitary Lane, behind Heart Terrace. Then again, some unmasked Beings that I see during a performance find me once I'm back in my dressing room and receive from me the “Okay you, thank you for the perspective and the vision, but in this century you can't just chop people's heads off and feed them to your cats, and I know these guys are bad guys, and thank you for the vision. So you can haunt me during the show again in Indy

As an instrument of empowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. "No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches," writes Roy Scranton, "they cannot put their hands on the real flow of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume." Under these circumstances, a march or a demonstration of popular feeling amounts to "little more than an orgy of democratic emotion, an activist-themed street fair, a real-world analogue to Twitter hashtag campaigns: something that gives you a nice feeling, says you belong in a certain group, and is completely divorced from actual legislation and governance." In other words, the public sphere, where politics is performed, has been largely emptied of content in terms of the exercise of power: as with fiction, it has become a forum for secular testimony, a baring-of-the-soul in the world-as-church. Politics as thus practices is primarily an exercise in personal expressiveness.

On Contemporary Jazz—‘Bebop’” (from a handwritten journal dated February 24–May 5, 1947) focuses more intently on the effects of speed and virtuosity on stylistic changes in the jazz idiom, as embodied in the playing of figures such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—all of whom Kerouac had seen perform in New York’s Fifty-second Street jazz clubs by the mid-1940s. Flexing his talents as a music writer, Kerouac presents an informed, condensed jazz history of the 1930s and 1940s. He not only recognizes the significance of bebop’s modern, avant-garde revision of jazz’s compositional vocabulary, but views those compositional developments in rhythm and harmony as the virtuosic equivalent of the European classical tradition. If “A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence” displays Kerouac’s tendency at times to sentimentalize the premodern, this early essay on bebop valorizes propulsive, forward-looking art, the avant-garde abandon that came to characterize American expressive culture in the decades following World War II.

The deeply flushed midsummer sunlight, the strong, clear alcohol filling a dirty glass, a goat tethered with a rope, the enormous sides of a glitteringly white modern building, the solemn melody of the national orchestra, the slender-necked actress who was performing on the stage, the arc of a rainbow which, after a sudden shower, fell to the earth like an arrow from between the clouds, a sheepdog pressed flat under the wheel of a car, a herd of stubborn goats bobbing their heads with profound indifference, blue cloth fluttering in the wind, designating something sacred, a swarthy woman looking down on the street below from a first-floor window, her exposed chest leaning out over the wooden frame, cat-sized rats threading their way around the legs of market stalls, unlit signs and display windows, a sombrely lit butcher’s fridge, each dark red carcass still buttressed with the animal’s skeleton, Banchi’s printing shop, on the ground floor of a temple on the main street in the city centre, there Banchi makes picture postcards featuring his own translations of Indian sutras.

On Rossini's 'The Barber of Seville' - "Much has been written about the fiasco of the opera's first night on 20 February 1816, most of it true: the mockery of Rossini's Spanish-style hazel jacket, the rowdy animosity of the Paisiello lobby, the jeering and the catcalls, as one mishap succeeded another. Basilio sang his 'Calumny' aria with a bloodied nose after tripping over a trap door; then during the act 1 finale, a cat wandered onstage, declined to leave, and was forcibly flung into the wings. According to the Rosina, Gertrude Righetti Giorgi, Rossini left the theatre 'as though he had been an indifferent onlooker'... The second performance was a triumph, though Rossini was not there to witness it. He spent the evening pacing his room, imagining the opera's progress scene by scene. He retired early, only to be roused by a glow of torches and uproar in the street. Fearing that a mob was about to set fire to the building, he took refuge in a stable block. Garcia tried to summon him to acknowledge the adulation. 'F***' their bravos!' was Rossini's blunt rejoinder. 'I'm not coming out'.

Martin Street is the archaeologist who has done most work in recent years on the dog from Bonn-Oberkassel. His theory is that what is known as ‘putting the game at bay’ was one of the first important tasks performed by dogs. This is a method of hunting still used today in many places, including the forests of Sweden. The dog runs around in the woods on its own to track game, while the hunter tries to stay near it. Once the dog locates its quarry, it starts to bark, forcing the animal to stop moving and focus on the dog’s irritating barking. The dog has put its quarry at bay. In the meantime, the hunter creeps nearer and shoots the animal. This type of hunting emerged when woods started to grow on the tundra, blocking the view. Before that time it was easier for hunters to scan the landscape for their prey from an elevated point. This is what makes it so interesting that the first dog universally recognised as such, the one from Bonn-Oberkassel, lived 14,500 years ago, at precisely the time when the tundra of the Ice Age was beginning to give way to woodland. That circumstance, in my view, is rather too striking to be a mere coincidence. If

And as a long-short fund, he'd also been obligated to take short positions — betting against companies — which was a tactic that, to most experts in finance, was uncontroversial. The thinking went, when companies were performing poorly, or were mismanaged, or were in an industry that was being overrun, or were simply likely to fail, taking a short position wasn't just logical — it protected the marketplace by pointing out overpriced stocks, prevented fraud by acting as a check against dubious management, and poked holes in potential bubbles. Short sellers also added liquidity and volume to a stock — because they were obligated to buy the stock back at some point in the future. Yes, short sellers profited when companies failed, but usually a short seller wasn't banking on a company failing — just that the stock's price would eventually correct toward its true valuation. Sometimes, though, a trader picked up a short position because the company in question really was going to fail. Because, perhaps, it was in an industry that was dying; had management that seemed completely unable or unwilling to pivot; and had deep fundamental issues in its financing that seemed impossible to overcome.

In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health. Nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast. A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever. Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil. And however quietly doctors and psychologists may go to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant—as intolerant as Bloody Mary. Their attitude is really this: that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living. Their counsel is one of intellectual amputation. If thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell—or into Hanwell.

As Merripen gave the ribbons to a stableman at the mews, Amelia glanced toward the end of the alley. A pair of street youths crouched near a tiny fire, roasting something on sticks. Amelia did not want to speculate on the nature of the objects being heated. Her attention moved to a group—three men and a woman—illuminated in the uncertain blaze. It appeared two of the men were engaged in fisticuffs. However, they were so inebriated that their contest looked like a performance of dancing bears. The woman’s gown was made of gaudily colored fabric, the bodice gaping to reveal the plump hills of her breasts. She seemed amused by the spectacle of two men battling over her, while a third attempted to break up the fracas. “’Ere now, my fine jacks,” the woman called out in a Cockney accent, “I said I’d take ye both on—no need for a cockfight!” “Stay back,” Merripen murmured. Pretending not to hear, Amelia drew closer for a better view. It wasn’t the sight of the brawl that was so interesting—even their village, peaceful little Primrose Place, had its share of fistfights. All men, no matter what their situation, occasionally succumbed to their lower natures. What attracted Amelia’s notice was the third man, the would-be peacemaker, as he darted between the drunken fools and attempted to reason with them. He was every bit as well dressed as the gentlemen on either side … but it was obvious this man was no gentleman. He was black-haired and swarthy and exotic. And he moved with the swift grace of a cat, easily avoiding the swipes and lunges of his opponents. “My lords,” he was saying in a reasonable tone, sounding relaxed even as he blocked a heavy fist with his forearm. “I’m afraid you’ll both have to stop this now, or I’ll be forced to—” He broke off and dodged to the side just as the man behind him leaped. The prostitute cackled at the sight. “They got you on the ’op tonight, Rohan,” she exclaimed. Dodging back into the fray, Rohan attempted to break it up once more. “My lords, surely you must know”—he ducked beneath the swift arc of a fist—“that violence”—he blocked a right hook—“never solves anything.” “Bugger you!” one of the men said, and butted forward like a deranged goat. Rohan stepped aside and allowed him to charge straight into the side of the building. The attacker collapsed with a groan and lay gasping on the ground. His opponent’s reaction was singularly ungrateful. Instead of thanking the dark-haired man for putting a stop to the fight, he growled, “Curse you for interfering, Rohan! I would’ve knocked the stuffing from him!” He charged forth with his fists churning like windmill blades. Rohan evaded a left cross and deftly flipped him to the ground. He stood over the prone figure, blotting his forehead with his sleeve. “Had enough?” he asked pleasantly. “Yes? Good. Please allow me to help you to your feet, my lord.

Dither and I like to take the ladies out. Last night Maggie showered her blue-black guts over the barstool at the Dirty Truth while I swung the bartender into the wall-sized mirror by his ankles. Dither put his many fingers into six fraternity brothers while Winnie sucked off the beer spigots, her shattered pelvis undulating obscenely, her hair and dress alive with blood beetles. Then we burst out into the streets. I sliced off heads all down Pleasant while Dither shoved swords up through the seats at the Calvin Theater. Winnie set bassinets afire at Cooley Dickinson while Maggie squatted to piss in the lobster tank in the Stop & Shop. We pinwheeled through the Bridge Street cemetery, upending ancient caskets and sending their contents into the grey sky until it looked like smoke from a great fire. It was a beautiful night; we poured wine into our lungs like drowning sots. In the pink morning we were stacked on the benches like cordwood. The sky was a sick yellow bruise. The sun was a cold dead eye. The winds raised up and shook the houses and thrashed the trees. A great fire is coming to Leeds. Pneumonic plagues and blood from the faucets and worms exploding up into bath tubs from the drains. You’re listening to WXXT. The time is 6:16 a.m. It is not too late to rise, rise and do what needs to be done. Up next, we’ve got Burton Stallhearse and the Grappling Grannies performing their version of “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.

If you have been in the street in Paris or Rouen, and seen a mother pull her child by the hand, and say, “Stop that squalling, or I’ll fetch an Englishman,” you are inclined to believe that any accord between the countries is formal and transient. The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island. English armies laid waste to the land they moved through. As if systematically, they performed every action proscribed by the codes of chivalry, and broke every one of the laws of war. The battles were nothing; it was what they did between the battles that left its mark. They robbed and raped for forty miles around the line of their march. They burned the crops in the fields, and the houses with the people inside them. They took bribes in coin and in kind and when they were encamped in a district they made the people pay for every day on which they were left unmolested. They killed priests and hung them up naked in the marketplaces. As if they were infidels, they ransacked the churches, packed the chalices in their baggage, fueled their cooking fires with precious books; they scattered relics and stripped altars. They found out the families of the dead and demanded that the living ransom them; if the living could not pay, they torched the corpses before their eyes, without ceremony, without a single prayer, disposing of the dead as one might the carcasses of diseased cattle.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city’s most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre and Montparnasse, respectively the Right and Left Bank haunts of artists, intellectuals, poets, and musicians since the late nineteenth century. Performing in these high-profile and popular entertainment districts could give an advantage to jazz musicians because Parisians and tourists already knew to go there when they wanted to spend a night out on the town. As hubs of artistic imagination and experimentation, Montmartre and Montparnasse therefore attracted the kinds of audiences that might appreciate the new and thrilling sounds of jazz. For many listeners, these locations leant the music something of their own exciting aura, and the early success of jazz in Paris probably had at least as much to do with musicians playing there as did other factors. In spite of their similarities, however, by the 1920s these neighborhoods were on two very different paths, each representing competing visions of what France could become after the war. And the reactions to jazz in each place became important markers of the difference between the two areas and visions. Montmartre was legendary as the late-nineteenth-century capital of “bohemian Paris,” where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on flying in the face of respectable middle-class values. But by the 1920s, Montmartre represented an established artistic tradition, not the challenge to bourgeois life that it had been at the fin de siècle. Entertainment culture was rapidly changing both in substance and style in the postwar era, and a desire for new sounds, including foreign music and exotic art, was quickly replacing the love for the cabarets’ French chansons. Jazz was not entirely to blame for such changes, of course. Commercial pressures, especially the rapidly growing tourist trade, eroded the popularity of old Montmartre cabarets, which were not always able to compete with the newer music halls and dance halls. Yet jazz bore much of the criticism from those who saw the changes in Montmartre as the death of French popular entertainment. Montparnasse, on the other hand, was the face of a modern Paris. It was the international crossroads where an ever changing mixture of people celebrated, rather than lamented, cosmopolitanism and exoticism in all its forms, especially in jazz bands. These different attitudes within the entertainment districts and their institutions reflected the impact of the broader trends at work in Paris—the influx of foreign populations, for example, or the advent of cars and electricity on city streets as indicators of modern technology—and the possible consequences for French culture. Jazz was at the confluence of these trends, and it became a convenient symbol for the struggle they represented.

The Nazis no longer resorted to hypocritical pretexts about the urgency of opposing and eliminating Marxism. They did not just rob and steal, they gave free rein to every kind of private vengeful instinct. University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while shouting “Heil Hitler!” in chorus. They rounded up innocent citizens in the streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight. They broke into apartments and tore the jewels out of the ears of trembling women—it was the kind of thing that might have happened when cities were plundered hundreds of years ago in medieval wars, but the shameless pleasure they took in the public infliction of pain, psychological torture and all the refinements of humiliation was something new. All this has been described not by one victim but by thousands, and a more peaceful age, not morally exhausted like our own, will shudder some day to read what horrors were inflicted on that cultured city in the twentieth century by a single half-deranged man. For in the midst of his military and political victories, that was Hitler’s most diabolical triumph—one man succeeded in deadening every idea of what is just and right by the constant attrition of excess. Before

I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great services to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone received the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead." Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead. There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now? How can we go on without him?

In Bergotte’s books, which I constantly reread, the sentences were as clear to me as my own thoughts, I perceived them as distinctly as the furniture in my room and the carriages in the streets. Everything was easily visible, if not as one had always seen it, then certainly as one was accustomed to see it now. But a new writer had just started to publish work in which the relations between things were so different from those that connected them for me, that I could understand almost nothing in his writing.... Only I felt that it was not the sentence that was badly constructed, but that I myself lacked the energy and agility to see it through to the end. I would make a fresh start, working really hard to reach the point where I could see the new connections between things. At each attempt, about half-way through the sentence, I would fall back defeated, as I did later in the army in horizontal bar exercises... From then on I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose transparency struck me as a shortcoming... The writer who had supplanted Bergotte in my estimation sapped my energy not by the incoherence but by the novelty – perfectly coherent – of associations I was not used to making. Because I always felt myself falter in the same place, it was clear that I needed to perform the same feat of endeavour each time. And when I did, very occasionally, manage to follow the author to the end of his sentence, what I discovered was always a humour, a truthfulness, a charm similar to those I had once found reading Bergotte, only more delightful.

Moscow can be a cold, hard place in winter. But the big old house on Tverskoy Boulevard had always seemed immune to these particular facts, the way that it had seemed immune to many things throughout the years. When breadlines filled the streets during the reign of the czars, the big house had caviar. When the rest of Russia stood shaking in the Siberian winds, that house had fires and gaslight in every room. And when the Second World War was over and places like Leningrad and Berlin were nothing but rubble and crumbling walls, the residents of the big house on Tverskoy Boulevard only had to take up a hammer and drive a single nail—to hang a painting on the landing at the top of the stairs—to mark the end of a long war. The canvas was small, perhaps only eight by ten inches. The brushstrokes were light but meticulous. And the subject, the countryside near Provence, was once a favorite of an artist named Cézanne. No one in the house spoke of how the painting had come to be there. Not a single member of the staff ever asked the man of the house, a high-ranking Soviet official, to talk about the canvas or the war or whatever services he may have performed in battle or beyond to earn such a lavish prize. The house on Tverskoy Boulevard was not one for stories, everybody knew. And besides, the war was over. The Nazis had lost. And to the victors went the spoils. Or, as the case may be, the paintings. Eventually, the wallpaper faded, and soon few people actually remembered the man who had brought the painting home from the newly liberated East Germany. None of the neighbors dared to whisper the letters K-G-B. Of the old Socialists and new socialites who flooded through the open doors for parties, not one ever dared to mention the Russian mob. And still the painting stayed hanging, the music kept playing, and the party itself seemed to last—echoing out onto the street, fading into the frigid air of the night. The party on the first Friday of February was a fund-raiser—though for what cause or foundation, no one really knew. It didn’t matter. The same people were invited. The same chef was preparing the same food. The men stood smoking the same cigars and drinking the same vodka. And, of course, the same painting still hung at the top of the stairs, looking down on the partygoers below. But one of the partygoers was not, actually, the same. When she gave the man at the door a name from the list, her Russian bore a slight accent. When she handed her coat to a maid, no one seemed to notice that it was far too light for someone who had spent too long in Moscow’s winter. She was too short; her black hair framed a face that was in every way too young. The women watched her pass, eyeing the competition. The men hardly noticed her at all as she nibbled and sipped and waited until the hour grew late and the people became tipsy. When that time finally came, not one soul watched as the girl with the soft pale skin climbed the stairs and slipped the small painting from the nail that held it. She walked to the window. And jumped. And neither the house on Tverskoy Boulevard nor any of its occupants ever saw the girl or the painting again.

In 1979, Christopher Connolly cofounded a psychology consultancy in the United Kingdom to help high achievers (initially athletes, but then others) perform at their best. Over the years, Connolly became curious about why some professionals floundered outside a narrow expertise, while others were remarkably adept at expanding their careers—moving from playing in a world-class orchestra, for example, to running one. Thirty years after he started, Connolly returned to school to do a PhD investigating that very question, under Fernand Gobet, the psychologist and chess international master. Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack. Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.

I am glad when we enter the conference room that Chihiro made sure I wasn’t late to the meeting. Not only does my appearance cut short several whispered confabs in the corners of the room (confirming her suspicion that people would have used my lateness as a chance to talk about me), but I also get to take my favorite seat: at the far end of the table next to my favorite monkey. I’ve never quite understood how the monkeys got here. The fresco on the ceiling of this room –originally the formal dining room- is modeled on the one in the formal dining room at La Civetta. It depicts a lemon-covered pergola in a garden. An assortment of birds –doves, sparrows, and long-tailed peacocks – roost on the wooden struts. In the original fresco, fat cupids also frolic amidst the greenery, their chubby feet dangling precariously from their perches. In one corner a plaster foot even protrudes from the frescoed surface. In this New York version of the fresco, there are monkeys instead of cupids: monkeys peering out between leafy branches and monkeys dangling by their tails from the wooden slats of the pergola. If you look carefully (and I have had ample opportunity through long and tedious budget reviews to examine every inch of the palatial room), you can even find a few monkeys that have climbed down from the pergola and found their way into the formal dining room to perform rude and unspeakable acts... My favorite monkey, though, is the little one who peers out from behind the leafy fronds of an aspidistra, making an obscene gesture I have seen only on the streets of Italy. I always sit right next to him. He gives me some relief for the sentiments I am unable to express in the course of department meetings.

I’ve known Florence long, sir, but I’ve never known her so lovely as to-night. It’s as if the ghosts of her past were abroad in the empty streets. The present is sleeping; the past hovers about us like a dream made visible. Fancy the old Florentines strolling up in couples to pass judgment on the last performance of Michael, of Benvenuto! We should come in for a precious lesson if we might overhear what they say. The plainest burgher of them in his cap and gown had a taste in the matter! That was the prime of art, sir. The sun stood high in heaven, and his broad and equal blaze made the darkest places bright and the dullest eyes clear. We live in the evening of time! We grope in the gray dusk, carrying each our poor little taper of selfish and painful wisdom, holding it up to the great models and to the dim idea, and seeing nothing but overwhelming greatness and dimness. The days of illumination are gone! But do you know I fancy—I fancy”—and he grew suddenly almost familiar in this visionary fervor—“I fancy the light of that time rests upon us here for an hour! I have never seen the David so grand, the Perseus so fair! Even the inferior productions of John of Bologna and of Baccio Bandinelli seem to realize the artist’s dream. I feel as if the moonlit air were charged with the secrets of the masters, and as if, standing here in religious contemplation, we might—we might witness a revelation!” Perceiving at this moment, I suppose, my halting comprehension reflected in my puzzled face, this interesting rhapsodist paused and blushed. Then with a melancholy smile, “You think me a moonstruck charlatan, I suppose. It’s not my habit to hang about the piazza and pounce upon innocent tourists. But to-night I confess I’m under the charm. And then somehow I fancied you too were an artist!

1. His back is full of knives. Notes are brittle around the blades. 2. He sleeps face down every night in a chalk outline of himself. 3. He has difficulties with metal detectors. 4. At birthday parties, someone might politely ask, may I borrow one of those knives to slice this chocolate cake? 5. He likes to stand with his back to walls. At restaurants, he likes the corner tables. 6. There is a detective who calls to ask him about the brittle notes. Also: a biographer, a woman who'd like to film a documentary, a curator of a museum, his mother. I can't read them, he says. They're on my back. 7. It would be a mistake for anyone to assume he wants the knives removed. 8. Most of the brittle notes are illegible. One of them, even, is written in French. 9. Every Halloween, he goes as a victim of a brutal stabbing. Once he tried going as a whale, but it was a hassle explaining away the knives. 10. He always wears the same bloody suit. 11. When he walks, he sounds like a tree still full of dead leaves holding on. 12. It is ok for children to count on his knives, but not to climb on them. 13. He saw his own shadow in a park. He moved his body to make the knives reach other people's shadows. He did it all evening. In the shadows, his knives looked like soft outstretched arms. 14. His back is running out of space. 15. On a trip to Paris, he fell in love and ended up staying for a few years. He got a job performing on the street with the country's best mimes. 16. The knives are what hold him together. It is the notes that are slowly killing him. 17. He is difficult to hold when he cries. 18. He will be very old when he dies and the Doctor will say, he was obviously stabbed, brutally and repeatedly. I'm sorry, the Doctor will say to a person in the room, but he's not going to make it.

Thai prostitution was a haven for the men and a nuisance for the women. The streets of Phuket were outlined with bars ready to nourish thirsty sailors with euphoric intoxication to smother their pinched nerves from their personal lives deteriorating in their six-month absence. Thailand truly lived up to its port reputation. Hundreds of bikini-clad prostitutes littered the strip. Slim and petite, their narrow hips and flat chests appeared to be the appropriate age for the pink plaid schoolgirl skirts, dress shirts, ties, and pigtails intended to entice pedophilic eroticism. They wore heavy coats of pastel liquid shadow that clashed against their yellow tinted tans. They awkwardly wiggled to a nauseating blend of techno and Reggaeton as cotton-haired granddaddies lustfully gawked at them. Any Caucasian male cannot trek a block without the treatment of a pop culture heartthrob with a trail of Thai teens at his heels. “Wan hunnet baaht!” they taunt in a nasal screech. “Wan hunnet baht and I suck yo cock!” The oriental beauties cup their fists and hold them to their mouths as they wiggle their tongues against their cheeks to provide a clear visual for their performance skills. It’s easy to dismiss the humanity in Thai prostitutes. Their splotchy, heavily accented English allows the language barrier to muffle signs of intellect. They’re overtly sexual in their crotch bearing ensembles, loud and vulgar invitations, and provocative dancing that makes even corner butcher shops feel like Vegas strip clubs. Swarms of them linger in front of bars holding cardboard signs scribbled with magic marker that offer a blow job with the first beer purchased. Their eyes burn into passing tourists, with acute radar for creamy, sun-flushed complexions and potbellies - signals of the deep pockets of white male privilege.

There are twelve unique nerves that sprout from the brain, exit the skull into the face, and mediate smell, sight, hearing, taste. These are called cranial nerves, and the tenth one is nicknamed the “wandering nerve” because it’s the only one out of the twelve that ventures well beyond your face and around your heart and lungs. After its exit from a tiny hole in the base of the skull, it descends in the neck tucked between the carotid artery and jugular vein. If you were to slice it and look at its cut end head-on, you’d see fibers called efferents, because they carry outbound signals to your chest cavity. These are half of the nerve fibers that your brain uses to control your heart rate in times of stress or rest; specifically, these are the fibers which are activated in rest. They are also, unsurprisingly, the pathway that Buddhist monks and others, through years of training, use to lower their heart rate with thought alone. Less well known is that the wandering nerve is a two-way street. It also carries signals (via afferent fibers) back into the skull from your heart and lungs to shower the brain with ascending information signaling the brain to enter a more calm and restful state. And these fibers can be manipulated or even hijacked. How? You can do it yourself through the intense practice of mindful breathing. Meditative breathing can calm the electrical oscillations and stress responses in your mind by resetting your vagal tone. The neuroscience term is “network reset.” So, despite the increasing popularity of inserting catheters and wires into brains, the basic ability to modify your thoughts and feelings is actually already a built-in technology in each of us. I’m not saying that mindful, meditative breathing alone would have necessarily relieved Raymond’s compulsive use of eyedrops; certainly, it would not have helped Nathan Copeland regain feeling in his fingers. But I do say this: never underestimate the power of the human brain.

The mornings came hard, and our caddie master, Dick Millweed, had a temper that could make a hangover seem like a seismic fracture. He was a small man with a soft, friendly voice. He was not intimidating at all, until he lost it. In his defense, he took shit from all sides - from the members who wanted their favorite caddie and their preferred tee time, from the golf staff who wanted him to perform a million menial duties, and from us when we showed up bleary eyed and incoherent and sometimes didn't show up at all. And God forbid a caddie should stumble in late, because then Millweed's lips would begin to tremble and his blue eyes would explode from his head. They grew as large as saucers and shook as though his skull was suffering earthquake. And he appeared to grow with them. It was like some shaman or yogi trick. Pound for pound, I've never met anyone else who could so effectively deliver anger. He would yell, "You like fucking with me, don't you? You like making me look bad! You wake up and say, 'Today I'm gonna fuck with Millweed!' and it makes you happy, doesn't it?" And we had no choice but to stand there and take it - hang our heads and blubber apologies and promise never to be hung over again, never to show up late again, because he held the ultimate trump card _ he could fire us and cut us off from the golden tit. But once we were out on the course walking it off, the hanover and any cares associated with it (including Millweed) evaporated into the light mountain air. And after the round, with our pockets replenished and our spirits restored by the carefree, self-congratulatory ebullience of the uberrich, we were powerless to resist the siren song of clinking glasses, the inviting golden light of the street lamps and tavern windows in town, and the slopeside hot tubs steaming under the stars. We all jumped ship and dined, danced, and romanced the night away and then were dashed against the rocks of Millweed's wrath all over again the next morning.

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.

Breeding has made the creation of new species illegal. DISILLUSIONMENT CHARMS The wizard on the street also plays a part in the concealment of magical beasts. Those who own a Hippogriff, for example, are bound by law to enchant the beast with a Disillusionment Charm to distort the vision of any Muggle who may see it. Disillusionment Charms should be performed daily, as their effects are apt to wear off. MEMORY CHARMS When the worst happens and a Muggle sees what he or she is not supposed to see, the Memory Charm is perhaps the most useful repair tool. The Memory Charm may be performed by the owner of the beast in question, but in severe cases of Muggle notice, a team of trained Obliviators may be sent in by the Ministry of Magic. THE OFFICE OF MISINFORMATION The Office of Misinformation will become involved in only the very worst magical–Muggle collisions. Some magical catastrophes or accidents are simply too glaringly obvious to be explained away by Muggles without the help of an outside authority. The Office of Misinformation will in such a case liaise directly with the Muggle prime minister to seek a plausible non-magical explanation for the event. The unstinting efforts of this office in persuading Muggles that all photographic evidence of the Loch Ness kelpie is fake have gone some way to salvaging a situation that at one time looked exceedingly dangerous. 7. In his 1972 book Muggles Who Notice, Blenheim Stalk asserts that some residents of Ilfracombe escaped the Mass Memory Charm. ‘To this day, a Muggle bearing the nickname “Dodgy Dirk” holds forth in bars along the south coast on the subject of a “dirty great flying lizard” that punctured his lilo.’ 8. For a fascinating examination of this fortunate tendency of Muggles, the reader might like to consult The Philosophy of the Mundane: Why the Muggles Prefer Not to Know, Professor Mordicus Egg (Dust & Mildewe, 1963). 9. The largest department at the Ministry of Magic is the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, to which the remaining six departments are all, in some respect, answerable – with the possible exception of the Department of Mysteries.

The information in this topic of decision making and how to create and nurture it, is beneficial to every cop in their quest to mastering tactics and tactical decision making and are a must read for every cop wanting to be more effective and safe on the street. My purpose is to get cops thinking about this critical question: In mastering tactics shouldn’t we be blending policy and procedure with people and ideas? It should be understandable that teaching people, procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully doesn’t always apply. Procedures are most useful in well-ordered situations when they can substitute for skill, not augment it. In complex situations, in the shadows of the unknown, uncertain and unpredictable and complex world of law enforcement conflict, procedures are less likely to substitute for expertise and may even stifle its development. Here is a different way of putting it as Klein explains: In complex situations, people will need judgment skills to follow procedures effectively and to go beyond them when necessary.3 For stable and well-structured tasks i.e. evidence collection and handling, follow-up investigations, booking procedures and report writing, we should be able to construct comprehensive procedure guides. Even for complex tasks we might try to identify the procedures because that is one road to progress. But we also have to discover the kinds of expertise that comes into play for difficult jobs such as, robbery response, active shooter and armed gunman situations, hostage and barricade situations, domestic disputes, drug and alcohol related calls and pretty much any other call that deals with emotionally charged people in conflict. Klein states, “to be successful we need both analysis (policy and procedure) and intuition (people and ideas).”4 Either one alone can get us into trouble. Experts certainly aren’t perfect, but analysis can fail. Intuition isn’t magic either. Klein defines intuition as, “ways we use our experience without consciously thinking things out”. Intuition includes tacit knowledge that we can’t describe. It includes our ability to recognize patterns stored in memory. We have been building these patterns up all our lives from birth to present, and we can rapidly match a situation to a pattern or notice that something is off, that some sort of anomaly is warning us to be careful.5

Christopher Cerf has been composing songs for Sesame Street for twenty-five years. His large Manhattan townhouse is full of Sesame Street memorabilia – photographs of Christopher with his arm around Big Bird, etc. ‘Well, it’s certainly not what I expected when I wrote them,’ Christopher said. ‘I have to admit, my first reaction was, “Oh my gosh, is my music really that terrible?” ’ I laughed. ‘I once wrote a song for Bert and Ernie called “Put Down The Ducky”,’ he said, ‘which might be useful for interrogating members of the Ba’ath Party.’ ‘That’s very good,’ I said. ‘This interview,’ Christopher said, ‘has been brought to you by the letters W, M and D.’ ‘That’s very good,’ I said. We both laughed. I paused. ‘And do you think that the Iraqi prisoners, as well as giving away vital information, are learning new letters and numbers?’ I said. ‘Well, wouldn’t that be an incredible double win?’ said Christopher. Christopher took me upstairs to his studio to play me one of his Sesame Street compositions, called ‘Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain!’ ‘The way we do Sesame Street,’ he explained, ‘is that we have educational researchers who test whether these songs are working, whether the kids are learning. And one year they asked me to write a song to explain what a mountain is, and I wrote a silly yodelling song about what a mountain was.’ Christopher sang me a little of the song: Oompah-pah! Oompah-pah! Ya! Ya! Das is a mountain! Part of zee ground zat sticks way up high! ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘forty per cent of the kids had known what a mountain was before they heard the song, and after they heard the song, only about twenty-six per cent knew what a mountain was. That’s all they needed. You don’t know what a mountain is now, right? It’s gone! So I figure if I have the power to suck information out of people’s brains by writing these songs, maybe that’s something that could be useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques.’ Just then, Christopher’s phone rang. It was a lawyer from his music publishers, BMI. I listened into Christopher’s side of the conversation: ‘Oh really?’ he said. ‘I see . . . Well, theoretically they have to log that and I should be getting a few cents for every prisoner, right? Okay. Bye, bye . . .’ ‘What was that about?’ I asked Christopher. ‘Whether I’m due some money for the performance royalties,’ he explained. ‘Why not? It’s an American thing to do. If I have the knack of writing songs that can drive people crazy sooner and more effectively than others, why shouldn’t I profit from that?’ This is why, later that day, Christopher asked Danny Epstein – who has been the music supervisor of Sesame Street since the very first programme was broadcast in July 1969 – to come to his house. It would be Danny’s responsibility to collect the royalties from the military if they proved negligent in filing a music-cue sheet.

A Tale of Two Parking Requirements The impact of parking requirements becomes clearer when we compare the parking requirements of San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco limits off-street parking, while LA requires it. Take, for example, the different parking requirements for concert halls. For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, fifty times more parking than San Francisco allows as its maximum. Thus the San Francisco Symphony built its home, Louise Davies Hall, without a parking garage, while Disney Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, did not open until seven years after its parking garage was built. Disney Hall's six-level, 2,188-space underground garage cost $110 million to build (about $50,000 per space). Financially troubled Los Angeles County, which built the garage, went into debt to finance it, expecting that parking revenues would repay the borrowed money. But the garage was completed in 1996, and Disney Hall—which suffered from a budget less grand than its vision—became knotted in delays and didn't open until late 2003. During the seven years in between, parking revenue fell far short of debt payments (few people park in an underground structure if there is nothing above it) and the county, by that point nearly bankrupt, had to subsidize the garage even as it laid employees off. The money spent on parking shifted Disney Hall's design toward drivers and away from pedestrians. The presence of a six-story subterranean garage means most concert patrons arrive from underneath the hall, rather than from the sidewalk. The hall's designers clearly understood this, and so while the hall has a fairly impressive street entrance, its more magisterial gateway is an "escalator cascade" that flows up from the parking structure and ends in the foyer. This has profound implications for street life. A concertgoer can now drive to Disney Hall, park beneath it, ride up into it, see a show, and then reverse the whole process—and never set foot on a sidewalk in downtown LA. The full experience of an iconic Los Angeles building begins and ends in its parking garage, not in the city itself. Visitors to downtown San Francisco have a different experience. When a concert or theater performance lets out in San Francisco, people stream onto the sidewalks, strolling past the restaurants, bars, bookstores, and flower shops that are open and well-lit. For those who have driven, it is a long walk to the car, which is probably in a public facility unattached to any specific restaurant or shop. The presence of open shops and people on the street encourages other people to be out as well. People want to be on streets with other people on them, and they avoid streets that are empty, because empty streets are eerie and menacing at night. Although the absence of parking requirements does not guarantee a vibrant area, their presence certainly inhibits it. "The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages," Jane Jacobs argued in 1961, "the duller and deader it becomes ... and there is nothing more repellent than a dead downtown.

They killed everyone in the camps. The whole world was dying there. Not only Jews. Even a black woman. Not gypsy. Not African. American like you, Mrs. Clara. They said she was a dancer and could play any instrument. Said she could line up shoes from many countries and hop from one pair to the next, performing the dances of the world. They said the Queen of Denmark honored her with a gold trumpet. But she was there, in hell with the rest of us. A woman like you. Many years ago. A lifetime ago. Young then as you would have been. And beautiful. As I believe you must have been, Mrs. Clara. Yes. Before America entered the war. Already camps had begun devouring people. All kinds of people. Yet she was rare. Only woman like her I saw until I came here, to this country, this city. And she saved my life. Poor thing. I was just a boy. Thirteen years old. The guards were beating me. I did not know why. Why? They didn't need a why. They just beat. And sometimes the beating ended in death because there was no reason to stop, just as there was no reason to begin. A boy. But I'd seen it many times. In the camp long enough to forget why I was alive, why anyone would want to live for long. They were hurting me, beating the life out of me but I was not surprised, expected no explanation. I remember curling up as I had seen a dog once cowering from the blows of a rolled newspaper. In the old country lifetimes ago. A boy in my village staring at a dog curled and rolling on its back in the dust outside a baker's shop and our baker in his white apron and tall white hat striking this mutt again and again. I didn't know what mischief this dog had done. I didn't understand why the fat man with flour on his apron was whipping it unmercifully. I simply saw it and hated the man, felt sorry for the animal, but already the child in me understood it could be no other way so I rolled and curled myself against the blows as I'd remembered the spotted dog in the dusty village street because that's the way it had to be. Then a woman's voice in a language I did not comprehend reached me. A woman angry, screeching. I heard her before I saw her. She must have been screaming at them to stop. She must have decided it was better to risk dying than watch the guards pound a boy to death. First I heard her voice, then she rushed in, fell on me, wrapped herself around me. The guards shouted at her. One tried to snatch her away. She wouldn't let go of me and they began to beat her too. I heard the thud of clubs on her back, felt her shudder each time a blow was struck. She fought to her feet, dragging me with her. Shielding me as we stumbled and slammed into a wall. My head was buried in her smock. In the smell of her, the smell of dust, of blood. I was surprised how tiny she was, barely my size, but strong, very strong. Her fingers dug into my shoulders, squeezing, gripping hard enough to hurt me if I hadn't been past the point of feeling pain. Her hands were strong, her legs alive and warm, churning, churning as she pressed me against herself, into her. Somehow she'd pulled me up and back to the barracks wall, propping herself, supporting me, sheltering me. Then she screamed at them in this language I use now but did not know one word of then, cursing them, I'm sure, in her mother tongue, a stream of spit and sputtering sounds as if she could build a wall of words they could not cross. The kapos hesitated, astounded by what she'd dared. Was this black one a madwoman, a witch? Then they tore me from her grasp, pushed me down and I crumpled there in the stinking mud of the compound. One more kick, a numbing, blinding smash that took my breath away. Blood flooded my eyes. I lost consciousness. Last I saw of her she was still fighting, slim, beautiful legs kicking at them as they dragged and punched her across the yard. You say she was colored? Yes. Yes. A dark angel who fell from the sky and saved me.

A funny thing happens when you begin to take control of one part of your life—whether it is taking control physically, financially, or mentally: You gradually notice a positive change in other areas of your life, such as your personal relationships, your performance at work, and your ability to embrace your true passions.

2018, the stock market posted its worst annual performance since the financial crisis. The median shareholder return for the largest five hundred corporations was a negative 5.8 percent. But their top executives got raises of 5 percent or more, with the typical CEO pay reaching a record $12.4 million, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

The GOP passed a tax bill that is performing exactly as expected and predicted: A handful of hedge funds, America’s top corporations, and a few dozen billionaires were given a trillion-dollar-plus tax benefit. Even the tax cut’s most fervent proponents know that its effects were short-lived, the bill is coming due, and in 2022 or thereabouts it’s going to lead to annual deficits of close to $2 trillion. When the bubble pops, the correction hits, and Wall Street investment firms and banks go tango uniform, Trump will bail them out before you can say “golden parachute.” The “average guy with a 401k” who is going to get crushed in the next drop? Not so much.

I see good men performing wonderful deeds, smoking marijuana and feeding LSD to cops, telling fairytales about the future. Spectacular things, no doubt. But where? In the White House? On Wall Street? No. These wonderful things happen in tenement buildings, in the slums, in dying cities. Forgive me if I don't expect these, uh, these—great things—to change the course of history.

Charlestown’s most characteristic pastime had long been the reckless sport of “looping.” The young “looper” played by a rigid set of rules. First, he stole a car in downtown Boston. Then he roared into Charlestown, accelerating as he reached City Square, where the District 15 police station stood in a welter of bars, nightclubs, and pool halls. Often he had to take a turn around the square before the first policeman dashed for his patrol car or motorcycle. Then the chase was on: down Chelsea Street to Hayes Square, up the long slope of Bunker Hill Street to St. Francis de Sales’ Church at the crest, then down again, picking up speed, often to 70 or 80 miles per hour, until a screeching left into Sullivan Square took him onto Main Street, where, dodging the stanchions of the El, he roared into City Square again, completing the “loop.” All that remained was to ditch the car before the police caught up. Looping was an initiation rite, proof that a Townie had come of age. But it was something else as well: a challenge flung at authority, a middle finger raised to the powers that be. Before long, looping became a kind of civic spectacle, pitting the Town’s young heroes against the forces of law and order. Plans for a loop circulated well in advance. At the appointed hour, hundreds of men, women, and children gathered along Bunker Hill Street, awaiting the gladiators. When the stolen car came in sight, racing up the long hill, a cheer would rise from the spectators, followed by jeers for the pursuing policemen. The first recorded “loop” was performed in 1925 by a sixteen-year-old daredevil named Jimmy “Speed King” Murphy, but most renowned of all was “Shiner” Sheehan, the teenage son of a federal alcohol agent, whose exploits so electrified the Town that he drew round him a group of young acolytes. Membership in their “Speeders Club” was limited to those who could produce newspaper clippings showing they had bested the police.

I find it unsettling enough that listeners record concert performances, making permanent what was supposed to be a transitory experience.

We all act silly with our money, and that includes me, as well. If you want to find the investors most prone to these human investing biases, that’s easy. They are the ones who are bragging about their investment performance and don’t know they are acting silly with their nest eggs.

Let’s take one last peek at the Monte Carlo simulation. We won’t penalize the active portfolio for taxes, as we will give it the benefit of the doubt that no one would be silly enough to do active investing in a taxable account. Let’s just say that the active investor acts with human nature and pays the 1.5 percent penalty. So, now the average dollar invested has a 3.5 percent drag comprised of 2.0 percent expenses and 1.5 percent penalty for chasing performance. Running this in the Monte Carlo simulation against Kevin’s 0.23 percent fees, while he watches SpongeBob, creates the odds listed in Exhibit 5.6.

The speeches, the small talk, the easy familiarity—it all felt too comfortable, almost ritualized, a performance that each of the four leaders had probably participated in dozens of times before, designed to placate the latest U.S. president who thought things could change. I imagined them shaking hands afterward, like actors taking off their costumes and makeup backstage, before returning to the world that they knew—a world in which Netanyahu could blame the absence of peace on Abbas’s weakness while doing everything he could to keep him weak, and Abbas could publicly accuse Israel of war crimes while quietly negotiating business contracts with the Israelis, and Arab leaders could bemoan the injustices endured by Palestinians under occupation while their own internal security forces ruthlessly ferreted out dissenters and malcontents who might threaten their grip on power. And I thought of all the children, whether in Gaza or in Israeli settlements or on the street corners of Cairo and Amman, who would continue to grow up knowing mainly violence, coercion, fear, and the nursing of hatred because, deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible.

I now admit, with something of an apology, that I made my first appearance at the Copa Club in August of 1953 with the secret opinion that I was doing something slightly disreputable. I think I expected every member of the audience to be drunk, and that all chorus girls led scarlet lives. But I soon learned that life upon the wicked stage wasn't so wicked after all. I found that most entertainers were pretty average, hardworking citizens, and many of them simply went home to a husband or wife and children. They were often civic-minded, voted in elections, observed traffic laws, helped old ladies across the street, went to church, and gave innumerable benefit performances for no pay. The public only heard about the prodigals who were in the minority, as the virtues of the others simply weren't very interesting. Today, it makes me laugh to think that I was such a great moralist, and often branded as a questionable commodity myself, that I was so abundantly guilty of being a prude.

Time and time again I saw drag and queer culture bringing brilliant and unforgettable ideas to our own simple, self-made platforms. I loved how drag performances could adapt to any setting: theaters and street corners alike. That's transformation-that's art!

There is nothing wicked about having a dreadful singing voice, any more than there is something wicked about having dreadful posture, dreadful cousins, or a dreadful pair of pants. Many noble and pleasant people have any number of these things, and there are even one or two kind individuals who have them all. But if you have something dreadful, and you force it upon someone else, then you have done something quite wicked indeed. If you force your wicked posture on someone, for instance, by leaning so far back that they are forced to carry you down the street, then you have wickedly ruined their afternoon walk, and if you force your dreadful cousins on someone, by dropping them off to play at their house so you can escape from their dreadful presences and spend some time alone, then you have wickedly ruined their entire day, and only a very wicked person indeed would force a dreadful pair of pants on the legs and lower torso of somebody else. But to force your dreadful singing voice on somebody, or even a crowd of people, is one of the world’s most wicked crimes, and at that moment Carmelita Spats opened her mouth and afflicted the crew of the Carmelita with her wickedness. Carmelita’s singing voice was loud, like a siren, and high-pitched, like a squeaky door, and extremely off-pitch, as if all of the notes in the musical scale were pushing up against one another, all trying to sound at the same time. Her singing voice was mushy, as if someone had filled her mouth with mashed potatoes before she sang, and filled with vibrato, which is the Italian term for a voice that wavers as it sings, as if someone were shaking Carmelita very vigorously as she began her song. Even the most dreadful of voices can be tolerated if it is performing a good song, but I’m sad to say that Carmelita Spats had written the song herself and that it was just as dreadful as her singing voice.

One particular twist had her angled in flight, and our gazes locked. It took me back to that night she invited me to watch her perform. The night everything changed. Our broken bird had reclaimed her wings.

I couldn’t count the number of videos I’d watched of her performing in the last few years. She’d always been something else, but she’d also been a kid. A beautiful, talented kid.

What is most important—what is hardest and also most important—is to be natural. Humans have a difficult time with “natural." We are better at "interesting" or "beautiful" or "forceful" than we are at "natural." Everything is an exertion, everything is performance. One of the reasons I have lived on Christopher Street for as long as I have is that I know how to be natural there. I can sit at the table. I can cook an egg. And once you have found the way to be natural, the rest of what's important can be layered over top: lucidity, beauty, force.

I looked on for a moment; a frenzy seized my soul; unbidden my legs performed some entirely new movements of polka steps—I took several. Houses were too small for me to stay in; I was soon in the street in search of necessary outfits. Piles of gold rose up before me at every step; castles of marble, dazzling the eye with their rich appliances; thousands of slaves bowing to my beck and call; myriads of fair virgins contending with each other for my love—were among the fancies of my fevered imagination. The Rothschilds, Girards, and Astors appeared to me but poor people. In short, I had a very violent attack of the gold fever.

He continued, “That’s what you always say. When something is wrong or going bad, you just look at me and say, ‘Good.’” And I said, “Well, I mean it. Because that is how I operate.” So I explained to him that when things are going bad, there’s going to be some good that will come from it. Oh, mission got cancelled? Good. We can focus on another one. Didn’t get the new high-speed gear we wanted? Good. We can keep it simple. Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better. Didn’t get funded? Good. We own more of the company. Didn’t get the job you wanted? Good. Go out, gain more experience, and build a better résumé. Got injured? Good. Needed a break from training. Got tapped out? Good. It’s better to tap out in training than to tap out on the street. Got beat? Good. We learned. Unexpected problems? Good. We have the opportunity to figure out a solution.

The Ballad of Philippe Petit —for the world's greatest rope dancer Philippe Petit hangs his high wire in the third eye of God, fills the dull air with blue fire, all alone on the big city street, Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Philippe Petit, high priest of daring, feels wind pulse in his feet, flying high on his mystical string, between tall towers above the street. Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Little Phillip by the Golden Fleece, making Seventh Avenue sing. He draws a magic circle of chalk, rides his cycle around in a ring, Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Little Phillip, clown gargoyle, spewing light on the grey street, rope dances twirling sticks of fire, bright sparkle of the dark street, Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Philippe Petit juggles fire and balls, winks at Zeus, laughs at Mars, pulls Newton's beard, sups with God, cycling his way from heaven to street. Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Little Phillip, when we get there, you'll surely be on high, juggling molecules for your maker on the wide streets of the sky, Little Phillip, Philippe Petit. Philippe Petit, The King of Heaven has a brilliant little fool juggling fire at his footstool. A light on the dark city street, A light, a light, Philippe Petit.

There are two types of lane changes: the FIRST is called a simple lane change. This type of lane change can be performed on both one-way streets and two-way streets in the city. The SECOND type is called an advanced lane change which can be performed on streets with multiple lanes, highways, and expressways.

On the stages at the Cannery and Ghirardelli malls, busking was not only tolerated, it was encouraged; free performances lured shoppers and buskers enjoyed freedom from police interference. Out on the streets, it was a different story. Business owners—worried that performers were literally and figuratively stealing the show—filed complaints with the city. “Whenever somebody who’s paying for a business license and paying taxes on his property sees a crowd of people facing away from him, they immediately assume that business is being lost,” says tap dancer Rosie Radiator. “Now, art being the glue of all of us, it was, of course, the street performers who were drawing the people to the location. They weren’t coming for the trinkets in the shops as much as they were coming for the artisans on the sidewalks and the street performers who gave it ambiance and personality and the fun aspects of a destination.

It was as if I'd found myself in a performance of some extravagant, complex drama, and I didn't have a script. But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be.

short seller has an economic incentive to sell as much as possible – to attempt to drive the price down – in order to increase profits. A simple concept from economics is at work here: prices fall when supply increases. It is as true for cars as it is for shares. For stocks, we call this decrease in price a “dilution of share value” because the price of the shares is falling not because the company performed badly but because there are simply more shares in circulation (an increase in supply).

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As companies move toward distributed systems, Sybase and competing vendors—such as The ASK Group Inc., Informix Software Inc., and Oracle Corp.—are all offering products similar to System 10 . . . . Here we are in the “safe as milk” category, somewhat ironic in light of subsequent revelations about the limitations of Server 10. The innovations presented here are all continuous—performance, functionality, and capacity—and a number of other mainstream vendors are “all offering products similar” to it. Note the emphasis on company and market issues as opposed to product and technology. All of this speaks to mainstream positioning, either tornado or post-tornado. Since there is not a lot of emphasis on cutthroat competition, which one always expects with tornado products, the conclusion one would draw here is that Sybase 10 is on Main Street. Additional Indicators Beyond press coverage, a second source of clues to market status comes from the behavior of other companies in the infrastructure. Lew Platt at HP, for example, realized that their commercial Unix server business was in the tornado when software vendors were calling him rather than the other way around. Going further, when a tornado is under way, the easiest way to spot the gorilla is to look for the

Dahmer explained how he met fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone at the Grand Avenue Mall, just like his brother before him. He offered him a hundred bucks to come home with him and take some nude photos. He gave him the drugged drink and performed oral sex on him while he was drugged. He diluted the muriatic acid with some water and injected it into the boy’s brain after drilling two small holes in the top of his head. The victim didn’t die like the other ones, and appeared to be sleeping, so Dahmer left the apartment and went up the street to a local tavern to buy some more beer. The boy apparently woke up and tried to escape because as Dahmer returned, he saw the victim standing in the street surrounded by the police and onlookers. “I already told you how I duped the officers into believing that everything was all right. After they left, I injected another solution into his brain to render him even more helpless, but he died. I was disappointed but got busy severing the flesh from the both of them, double bagged it, and threw it in the trash. I kept both of their skulls because I wanted something to remember them by and felt it was a waste to throw everything out.” I could hear the disappointment in Dahmer’s voice as he spoke.

Michelle, the girls, and I visited a sprawling favela on the western end of Rio, where we dropped in at a youth center to watch a capoeira troupe perform and I kicked a soccer ball around with a handful of local kids. By the time we were leaving, hundreds of people had massed outside the center, and although my Secret Service detail nixed the idea of me taking a stroll through the neighborhood, I persuaded them to let me step through the gate and greet the crowd. Standing in the middle of the narrow street, I waved at the Black and brown and copper-toned faces; residents, many of them children, clustered on rooftops and small balconies and pressed against the police barricades. Valerie, who was traveling with us and witnessed the whole scene, smiled as I walked back inside, saying, “I’ll bet that wave changed the lives of some of those kids forever.” I wondered if that was true. It’s what I had told myself at the start of my political journey, part of my justification to Michelle for running for president—that the election and leadership of a Black president stood to change the way children and young people everywhere saw themselves and their world. And yet I knew that whatever impact my fleeting presence might have had on those children of the favelas and however much it might cause some to stand straighter and dream bigger, it couldn’t compensate for the grinding poverty they encountered every day: the bad schools, polluted air, poisoned water, and sheer disorder that many of them had to wade through just to survive. By my own estimation, my impact on the lives of poor children and their families so far had been negligible—even in my own country. My time had been absorbed by just trying to keep the circumstances of the poor, both at home and abroad, from worsening: making sure a global recession didn’t drastically drive up their ranks or eliminate whatever slippery foothold they might have in the labor market; trying to head off a change in climate that might lead to a deadly flood or storm; or, in the case of Libya, trying to prevent a madman’s army from gunning people down in the streets. That wasn’t nothing, I thought—as long as I didn’t start fooling myself into thinking it was anywhere close to enough.

In its simplest form, investors sell losing stocks before the end of the current year, realizing losses that reduce the year’s income taxes. This behavior contributes to the so-called January effect where selling pressure in December further depresses the stock prices of the year’s losers, followed by a rebound and excessive performance in January.

In its simplest form, investors sell losing stocks before the end of the current year, realizing losses that reduce the year’s income taxes. This behavior contributes to the so-called January effect where selling pressure in December further depresses the stock prices of the year’s losers, followed by a rebound and excessive performance in January. The impact is greater for smaller companies. Investors used to realize a tax loss by selling a loser and buying it back immediately, with little risk of economic loss (or gain). To inhibit this loss of tax revenue by making it risky, the US government introduced the “wash sale rule,” which says that anyone who sells a stock at a loss and buys it back within thirty-one days may not recognize the loss for tax purposes. The rule is worded also to thwart savvy investors inclined to swap into an “equivalent” stock to get around this. The flip side of tax-loss selling is tax-gain deferral, where an investor who wishes to sell a security with a large gain waits until after the end of the year, deferring the tax due on it by one year. The money can be used for an additional year before being turned over to the government.

The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and hunted, transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself, becoming manipulation on a grand scale and ultimately an act of betrayal. Because what occurs in an interrogation room is indeed little more than a carefully staged drama, a choreographed performance that allows a detective and his suspect to find common ground where none exists. There, in a carefully controlled purgatory, the guilty proclaim their malefactions, though rarely in any form that allows for contrition or resembles an unequivocal admission.

The musical and the production embraced cheap bohemianism, and a clever, similarly minded marketing campaign sold cheap tickets to anyone who wanted to camp out on the street outside the run-down Nederlander Theater, which is right up the street from the gritty Port Authority Bus Terminal and was frequently populated by homeless people at the time. An astonishing number of young audience members enthusiastically took up the challenge, often sleeping on the street all night, and often for a remarkable number of repeat visits. According to Elizabeth Wollman, the marketing campaigns for rock musicals often have to be particularly innovative because of the difficulties of selling this kind of musical, and Rent was no exception.8 But the invitation to join the onstage community of Rent—the invitation for the audience to imagine themselves as the offstage counterparts to the characters—was an easy leap. That invitation is built into the story, the lyrics, and the performance style of the songs in the show, which were sung either directly to the audience, at standing microphones set downstage left and right, or into the obvious radio microphones the actors wore on their heads, with the accompaniment of an onstage rock band.

Garlock, you might have thought, had taken the Christian opposition to Rock as far as anyone could: “Bringing racism into his attack, Garlock noted that rock had its roots in the music of Africa, South America, and India, places he said where voodoo, sex orgies, human sacrifices, and devil worship abounded. Garlock linked some rock performers with Satan.”17 Yet, even further excesses of abuse on the theme of Rock-as-Satanic have followed as the years have passed. Possibly the craziest is Jacob Aranza’s claims that “75 percent of the rock and roll today (top 10 stuff!) deals with sex, evil, drugs, and the occult.” And that this is all part of a decades’ long, four step plan, “Satan’s Agenda”, to “pronounce rock stars as messiahs”.18 Jeff Godwin took this even further: “The Lord has also revealed to some Christians that incarnate demons from the netherworld actually are members of some of the most popular bands.”19 Converts are famous for their zeal, and as early as 1957 one celebrated rock’n’roller turned on the music that had propelled him to fame when he found religion. Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, stopped playing rock’n’roll and began to preach against it: “I was in the eighth grade at San Diego Adventist Elementary School, his conversion touched my life. Little Richard arrived at our school with an entourage of about three black limousines and a staff of personal assistants in black suits. He spoke in chapel, then preached Sabbath morning in a local church (probably San Diego 31st Street), then spoke and sang in the afternoon for a standing-room-only Associated MV (AY) meeting at the old San Diego Broadway church.

He saw El Lagartijo—“The Lizard”—one of the most famous bullfighters in Spain, and he met Cara Ancha, the celebrated Andalusian matador. When he was only nine years old, Pablo completed his first painting, Le Picador, a portrait of a man riding a horse in the bullring. Two years later, Pablo’s family moved to a new town, La Coruña, on Spain’s Atlantic coast. Don José got a job as an art teacher at the local college. Even though he was much younger than the other students, Pablo enrolled in his father’s class. He also took courses in figure drawing and landscape painting. By the time he turned thirteen, Pablo’s skill level had surpassed his father’s. Don José was so impressed that he handed his son his brushes and vowed never to paint again. When Pablo was fourteen years old, his family moved again, this time to Barcelona, where Pablo enrolled in the prestigious School of Fine Arts. His teachers quickly noticed his skills and allowed him to skip two grades. But just as in Málaga, Pablo had trouble adhering to the school’s rules. Before long he was back to his old tricks, cutting class so that he could wander the city streets, sketching interesting scenes that he observed along the way. Pablo repeated this behavior at his next school, the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. This time, Pablo’s father refused to tolerate his son’s antics and stopped his allowance. At age sixteen, Pablo found himself on his own for the first time, forced to support himself on nothing but his artistic ability. It has been said that the older Pablo grew, the more childlike his art became. During some periods he painted almost entirely in blue or depicted only circus performers.

I?” he asked in sweeping astonishment, as if she had proposed something truly shocking, such as strolling down Bond Street in his dressing gown. Naturally, she did not appreciate his needlessly dramatic response, and bristling with offense, said, “Yes, you can tell Marlow that you believe I will make a most biddable mistress. Upon reconsideration, it is in fact the better arrangement. It will carry more weight coming from you, as you know me slightly better than Jenkins.” “Slightly?” he said, succumbing entirely to his mirth. “I know you only slightly better than my groom?” She found his ability to be easily distracted by a trifle to be genuinely exasperating and sighed with hearty frustration.

I had to get back to this place where you just want water, food, and shelter. All the craziness of my life—this Wall Street life I had taken on—would go away, would melt away.

Where I grew up, nerds, dorks, and other kids who had a reputation for being “smart” in school did not automatically become targets for bullies for “acting white,” as the stereotype of poor black neighborhoods portrays it. We didn’t scorn nerds any more—or less—than white kids do. We definitely didn’t scapegoat them for the reasons that some “experts” have invoked to try to explain some of the persisting racial achievement gap in school. We were no more anti-intellectual than the rest of America. It wasn’t school achievement itself that we saw as “acting white.” It’s something much more subtle than that. And understanding this complexity is important to understanding my story and to recognizing what’s really going on in poor neighborhoods. What was being reinforced and what was being punished was not about education. Sure, there were some black children who were bullied for “acting white” in the neighborhoods where I grew up. And, indeed, some of those kids were high achievers in school. Some, however, were not. It wasn’t scholarly success itself that made people targets. We didn’t disdain academic achievement per se and we didn’t look down on those who got good grades because of their marks. “Acting white” was a whole different ball game, something that frequently correlated with school performance but wasn’t defined by it. What really got kids labeled as dorks or sellouts and picked on about their schoolwork were their attitudes toward other black people. It was the way they used language to demonstrate what they believed was their moral and social superiority. The kids who were targeted wouldn’t speak in the street vernacular that the rest of us used, even on the street or in other informal settings. They wouldn’t really deign to talk to us at all if they could avoid it. Their noses in the air, they looked down on us. It was snobbery, not schoolwork, that was “white” to us.

However, Martoglio, in defense of his poetry, claims that while the academicians have not made a fuss about his work, the people have consistently displayed affection for it, so much so that he can say that “there isn’t any town in Sicily where Centona10 has not brought people cheer Martoglio goes on to say that his poetry is a favorite of the Sicilian people wherever they may be, within Sicily, in war trenches and in foreign lands. The reason for this predilection is that Centona brings people the smells and sounds of Sicily, the passions that are always raging in their unhappy hearts, and the memories of their beloved and tragic land. And he concludes with a beautiful testimony to his poetry that says: as long as you leave on each street you pass of restless Sicily the scent and soul, you’ll always be assured of great success. While some readers may regard this as wishful thinking on the part of the poet, I can testify from personal experience that it is actually true. Sicilians love Martoglio and they love his poetry. One brief story will make the point: I was browsing one day in the Cavallotto bookstore in Catania looking through their Sicilian language poetry section and started a conversation with the store manager, Rosario Romeo. When I told him that I was working on a book about Nino Martoglio, he began to recite the “Lu cummattimentu tra Orlandu e Rinardu” from memory. He went through nearly the last 8 stanzas of the poem without faltering once, showing great appreciation for Martoglio’s cleverness by highlighting with shifts in tone and manner of reciting those parts he deemed most interesting. His wonderful performance, however, is not to be considered all that extraordinary. In fact, on several occasions, on learning of my interests in Sicilian literature, my interlocutors have begun reciting their favorite poems or excerpts of poems. As it happens, the poets most commonly found in such personal repertories are Giovanni Meli11 Micio Tempio12 and Nino Martoglio.

therefore an investment like that is unbeatable. Buildings that I would buy for $500K within the year were $800K and I put only maybe $100K down, so you made 300% on your money. . . . I quickly developed and traded up my buildings and bought more apartment buildings and office buildings on Main Street down in Santa Monica and so on. . . . I benefited from [a magic decade] and I became a millionaire from my real estate investments.

Aykroyd was happy to let Belushi take the public heat: John loved it; Danny hated it. Danny had a talent for projecting an aura of anonymity that deflected the glances of passers-by, and as a result he was the only cast member who continued regularly to ride the subways and walk the streets unrecognized at the height of his fame. He kept a shield around himself that was all but impenetrable. When a production assistant put his address and phone number on a staff list once, he angrily confronted her and forced her to redo it, leaving his whereabouts blank. He alone among the performers never let publicist Les Slater interview him for an official NBC bio. He’d promise to do it but would always beg off, saying he was too busy. He was articulate with the press, but he talked to reporters only a few times in the four years he spent on Saturday Night.

Then there was the matter of Harry’s dismal academic performance. No match for his brother scholastically, Harry struggled with all his courses, failing two out of three. His D in geography was actually the lowest grade in his class. These failures, coupled with still-unaddressed feelings of grief and a newfound sense of shame, led Harry to believe he simply “didn’t measure up. I didn’t like school at all,” admitted Harry, who began to embrace the role in which Fleet Street had cast him. “I wanted to be the bad boy.” The

Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness.

Not only did this gain Sharpe his PhD, but it eventually evolved into a seminal paper on what he called the “capital asset pricing model” (CAPM), a formula that investors could use to calculate the value of financial securities. The broader, groundbreaking implication of CAPM was introducing the concept of risk-adjusted returns—one had to measure the performance of a stock or a fund manager versus the volatility of its returns—and indicated that the best overall investment for most investors is the entire market, as it reflects the optimal tradeoff between risks and returns.

But no one remembered Radovan Karadžić’s poems, and the hatred so evident in his early poetry just slipped by, even though his line “Take no pity let’s go / kill that scum in the city” became a slogan for the war project. Despite everything, Karadžić gave the impression of a peace-loving and good-natured fellow. During the first multi-party elections, after the fall of socialism, he founded the Greens. That seemed quite in character. Founding such a party, given conditions in the Balkans, represented more of an artistic performance than true political engagement. The Greens first action in Sarajevo proved this: they draped plastic bags in various colors over the boughs of the acacias lining some of Sarajevo’s main streets. Not too many months after this, he became the leader of the Serb nationalists. In order to fit his new role, he deliberately held his left hand off to the side so that inquisitive onlookers could see the handle of his pistol tucked under his jacket. The transformation was fundamental. Only Radovan had no need to put a stocking over his head for this change in physiognomy to become apparent: his expression turned wild and he was no longer the same person I had once known. His unassuming look evaporated, like the soul leaving the body of a dead man.

There are specific ways the system actually is rigged and distorted so that our perception of our money is manipulated, very similar to how a stage magician does illusions. And also, like those stage tricks, these financial manipulations are easy to see through with just a little bit of education and focus.

If you’ve ever thought that it shouldn’t be so hard to examine your investment portfolio or hold your financial advisor accountable, you’re right. The system distorts your view of your money in the same way that a magician stacks the deck against the audience. It’s not evil or bad, but once you know how the magician does the illusion, you simply cannot be tricked so easily anymore. And once we all are in on the trick, the financial industry will need to improve, because the old, tired illusions won’t work anymore.

Deception and misdirection are acceptable in a magic show, but they are not at all appropriate in the arena of finance. The way we look at our investments and what we see when we examine our portfolios are both important because our view determines how well we navigate toward our financial goals.

Wall Street works hard to make sure we focus on growing our net worth, but is that truly our goal? Is “more and more” really the answer, or are you being tricked into being a consumer who asks the wrong questions?

Magicians the world over love to make people’s money disappear because it’s an easy way to raise tension and arouse curiosity

False awe is just a gentle way to describe manipulation.

Most people believe, “My lifestyle is about the same every month. Our savings are fixed. We make a salary, so what we earn is fixed. And lastly, what we spend is fixed.” But the truth is that no one reading this book has a robotic life filled with endless repeating loops where they get paid the exact same amount of money every single month for decades on end. We all have fluctuations in our income.

When you give your money to a restaurant or a retail store, the goods you get in return might show others something of your financial means, but it also depletes your wealth. You’re showing people that you used to have money and now you have something that costs more money.

We’re conditioned that our success (and our neighbor’s) is best measured by looking at our possessions. Those possessions influence perception, and because a certain perception earns us status, we chase the proof of wealth rather than wealth itself.

A reflection of something cannot exist without the real thing to support it. Said another way, a reflection of something is dependent on what’s true and real.

In our race to show off our wealth, we are more like a rat on a wheel consuming material goods while trying to keep up with the Jones family.

Homes, and other purchases like it, supposedly prove to our community that we have money, but many times these purchases are just signaling to others that we used to have money.

Anything that is taxed by the government, like a house or car, will forever require income to keep it in your life. This means that when we dream of living in a fancy mansion with chandeliers, we’re really yearning to fill our life with additional cost and financial burden.

Money made by our own effort is limited by how much time, energy, and attention we can give to a task along with what other people will pay for us to do that task. Making money in this firsthand fashion is hard on us because we run our own personal rat race.

Don’t increase your lifestyle until your passive income surpasses your active income. You’ll know you can and should buy that luxury item when the cost of keeping it is totally covered by your passive income. The things you own (such as dividend-paying stocks, oil partnerships, and real estate investment trusts) should pay for the things you enjoy and consume.

Treat debt the same as a really sharp sword. Use debt sparingly for well-thought-out reasons. Maintain debt properly. Aim to retire your debts at a reasonable point in the future.

The way we measure the cost of something should change so we aren’t measuring the purchase price alone. We all need to be more aware of the cost of maintaining our lifestyle.