Traded Movie Quotes

My favourite characters are people who think they’re normal but they’re not. I live in Baltimore, and it’s full of people like that. I’ve also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they’re crazy, but they’re completely normal. I get my best material in Baltimore – you get dialogue that you just couldn’t imagine. I asked this guy in a bar what he did for a living and he said he traded deer meat for crack. I never realised that job even existed. You could make a whole movie about that person. And he was kind of cute too, if you could ignore his eyes rolling around his head. Although I did crack once, accidentally, and I thought: Oh my God, what, am I gonna rob my parents now? I prefer poppers – they’re legal in London, right? I used to do them on roller coasters. They’re illegal in Provincetown, which is the gay fishing village where I live in the summer. In the airport there are signs warning you to get rid of your poppers.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

I'm a Christian, but if God is truly a God of love, then why would he have a private torture chamber where he put people that he was suppose to love and forgive to punish forever? if you actually read the Bible, the idea of hell like in the movies and most books was invented by a writer. Dante's inferno was ripped off by the Church to give people something to ba afraid of...

Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopeless of children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust--and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes--it nauseated him to look, but he had to look.

But here’s my little trade secret that I put into every All Is Lost moment just for added spice, and it’s something that many hit movies have. I call it the whiff of death. I started to notice how many great movies use the All Is Lost point to kill someone. Obi Wan in Star Wars is the best example — what will Luke do now?? All Is Lost is the place where mentors go to die, presumably so their students can discover “they had it in them all along.” The mentor’s death clears the way to prove that. But what if you don’t have an Obi Wan character? What if death isn’t anywhere near your story? Doesn’t matter. At the All Is Lost moment, stick in something, anything that involves a death. It works every time. Whether it’s integral to the story or just something symbolic, hint at something dead here. It could be anything. A flower in a flower pot. A goldfish. News that a beloved aunt has passed away. It’s all the same.

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

With a final click of the door, I know she's gone. It feels like that moment when the end credits run at a movie, and you wish there were just a few more minutes left before you have to dump your popcorn in the trash. A few more moments before you return to your real life, leaving the imaginary world and characters of the movie behind, trading them in for your own reality.

New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck".

I’m Christian, but if God is truly a God of love, then why would he have a private torture chamber where he put people that he was supposed to love and forgive to be punished forever? If you actually read the Bible, the idea of hell like in the movies and most books was invented by a writer. Dante’s Inferno was ripped off by the Church to give people something to be afraid of, to literally scare people into being Christian.

When you make a decision you believe in but you know will upset your child, you might say as much to your kid: “Two things are true, sweetie. First, I have decided that you cannot watch that movie. Second, you’re upset and mad at me. Like, really mad. I hear that. I even understand it. You’re allowed to be mad.” You don’t have to choose between firm decisions and loving validation. There’s no trade-off between doing what feels right to you and acknowledging the very real experience of your child. Both can be true.

Lacking a clear formula for making decisions, we get reactive and fall back on familiar, comfortable ways to decide what to do. Pinballing through our day like a confused character in a B-horror movie, we end up running up the stairs instead of out the front door. The best decision gets traded for any decision.

When Lyssa was seven, her mother took her to see the movie where the mermaid wants legs, and when it ended Lyssa shook her head and squinted at the prince and said, Why would she leave her family for that? which for years contributed to the prevailing belief that she was sentimental or softhearted, when in fact she just knew a bad trade when she saw one. The whole ocean for one man.

continued. “The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. “‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ teaches us the value of a good reputation and the power of honesty. ‘Cinderella’ shows us the rewards of having a good heart. ‘The Ugly Duckling’ teaches us the meaning of inner beauty.” Alex’s eyes were wide, and she nodded in agreement. She was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair that was always kept neatly out of her face with a headband. The way the other students stared at their teacher, as if the lesson being taught were in another language, was something Mrs. Peters had never grown accustomed to. So, Mrs. Peters would often direct entire lessons to the front row, where Alex sat. Mrs. Peters was a tall, thin woman who always wore dresses that resembled old, patterned sofas. Her hair was dark and curly and sat perfectly on the top of her head like a hat (and her students often thought it was). Through a pair of thick glasses, her eyes were permanently squinted from all the judgmental looks she had given her classes over the years. “Sadly, these timeless tales are no longer relevant in our society,” Mrs. Peters said. “We have traded their brilliant teachings for small-minded entertainment like television and video games. Parents now let obnoxious cartoons and violent movies influence their children. “The only exposure to the tales some children acquire are versions bastardized by film companies. Fairy

What’s your dad doing for his bachelor party?” I laugh. “Have you met my dad? He’s the last person who would ever have a bachelor party. He doesn’t even have any guy friends to have a party with!” I stop and consider this. “Well, I guess Josh is the closest thing he has. We haven’t seen much of him since he went to school, but he and my dad still e-mail every so often.” “I don’t get what your family sees in that guy,” Peter says sourly. “What’s so great about him?” It’s a touchy subject. Peter’s paranoid my dad likes Josh better than him, and I try to tell him it’s not a contest--which it definitely isn’t. Daddy’s known Josh since he was a kid. They trade comic books, for Pete’s sake. So, no contest. Obviously my dad likes Josh better. But only because he knows him better. And only because they’re more alike: Neither of them is cool. And Peter’s definitely cool. My dad is bewildered by cool. “Josh loves my dad’s cooking.” “So do I!” “They have the same taste in movies.” Peter throws in, “And Josh was never in a hot tub video with one of his daughters.” “Oh my God, let it go already! My dad’s forgotten about that.” “Forgotten” might be too strong of a word. Maybe more like he’s never brought it up again and he hopefully never will. “I find that hard to believe.” “Well, believe it. My dad is a very forgiving, very forgetful man.

That’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t know how.” Her father rubbed his hand over his jaw. “God, I loved your mother. But she was very, very sick. And even so, I wouldn’t have traded a single moment of the time I had with her. Not even when she was throwing up or when she cried herself to sleep. Love isn’t Hallmark movies, Melina. It’s Jeopardy! but with categories so narrow only two people in the whole world know the answers. Have you seen my reading glasses? and Do I have a tick on my back? and Will you be there for me when it’s time for me to go?” He shook his head, laughing ruefully. “Mind you, when people say this is what your mom would have wanted for me, I don’t believe a word of it. Your mother would have come at me with a hatchet at the thought of me with some other woman. But…I also think she’d forgive me.” A small smile ghosted over his face. “Because that’s what best friends do.

Whatever our history, whatever the root of our surnames, we remain a good and decent people, and we do not bow down and we do not give up. The fire of the human spirit cannot be quenched by bomb blasts or body counts. Cannot be intimidated forever into silence or drowned by tears. We have endured worse before. We will bear this burden and all that come hereafter because that's what ordinary men and women do. No matter what. This has not made us weaker. It has only made us stronger.

We need Holy Fools in our society, from time to time. They perform a valuable role. That’s why we romanticize them. Harry Markopolos was the hero of the Madoff saga. Whistleblowers have movies made about them. But the second, crucial part of Levine’s argument is that we can’t all be Holy Fools. That would be a disaster. Levine argues that over the course of evolution, human beings never developed sophisticated and accurate skills to detect deception as it was happening because there is no advantage to spending your time scrutinizing the words and behaviors of those around you. The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful. As he puts it, the trade-off between truth-default and the risk of deception is a great deal for us. What we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination. The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison. Sure, we get deceived once in a while. That is just the cost of doing business.

So maybe we never would have realized we were so compatible if we hadn't been trading song lyrics and movie dialogue. That's textbook trivia right there." Mindy looks unconvinced. "But that's how *everybody* gets together. They find some dumb thing they both know a little about that they can talk about until the waiter brings dinner. According to you, there probably isn't a marriage or a relationship or a friendship anywhere today that wasn't jump-started by trivia." "I think that's exactly right," I agree. "To trivia.

New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck".

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony. This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They are not flawed protagonists either, but are driven at least as much by their unsavory characteristics as by any moral sense. They aren't flawed figures who try to do the right thing; they don't necessarily learn from their mistakes; and we aren't asked to like them in spite of their obvious faults. Though they usually aren't interested in making good, they do set themselves some kind of mission--Anderson's films are mostly quest movies in an age that no longer believes in quests, and this gives them both an old-fashioned flavor and an air of disillusionment and futility.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

The public offering occurred exactly one week after Toy Story’s opening. Jobs had gambled that the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off, big-time. As with the Apple IPO, a celebration was planned at the San Francisco office of the lead underwriter at 7 a.m., when the shares were to go on sale. The plan had originally been for the first shares to be offered at about $14, to be sure they would sell. Jobs insisted on pricing them at $22, which would give the company more money if the offering was a success. It was, beyond even his wildest hopes. It exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of the year. In the first half hour, the stock shot up to $45, and trading had to be delayed because there were too many buy orders. It then went up even further, to $49, before settling back to close the day at $39. Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained—80% of the company—were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he’d made when Apple went public in 1980.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop complaining about Hollywood values. It's Oscar time again, which means two things: (1) I've got to get waxed, and (2) talk-radio hosts and conservative columnists will trot out their annual complaints about Hollywood: We're too liberal; we're out of touch with the Heartland; our facial muscles have been deadened with chicken botulism; and we make them feel fat. To these people, I say: Shut up and eat your popcorn. And stop bitching about one of the few American products--movies---that people all over the world still want to buy. Last year, Hollywood set a new box-office record: $16 billion worldwide. Not bad for a bunch of socialists. You never see Hollywood begging Washington for a handout, like corn farmers, or the auto industry, or the entire state of Alaska. What makes it even more inappropriate for conservatives to slam Hollywood is that they more than anybody lose their shit over any D-lister who leans right to the point that they actually run them for office. Sony Bono? Fred Thompson? And let'snot forget that the modern conservative messiah is a guy who costarred with a chimp. That's right, Dick Cheney. I'm not trying to say that when celebrities are conservative they're almost always lame, but if Stephen Baldwin killed himself and Bo Derrick with a car bomb, the headline the next day would be "Two Die in Car Bombing." The truth is that the vast majority of Hollywood talent is liberal, because most stars adhere to an ideology that jibes with their core principles of taking drugs and getting laid. The liebral stars that the right is always demonizing--Sean Penn and Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin and Tim Robbins, and all the other members of my biweekly cocaine orgy--they're just people with opinions. None of them hold elective office, and liberals aren't begging them to run. Because we live in the real world, where actors do acting, and politicians do...nothing. We progressives love our stars, but we know better than to elect them. We make the movies here, so we know a well-kept trade secret: The people on that screen are only pretending to be geniuses, astronauts, and cowboys. So please don't hat eon us. And please don't ruin the Oscars. Because honestly, we're just like you: We work hard all year long, and the Oscars are really just our prom night. The tuxedos are scratchy, the limousines are rented, and we go home with eighteen-year-old girls.

While the picture houses were struggling to maintain their audiences, things were not going terribly well on the production side of the business either. The previous November unions representing the craft trades—painters, carpenters, electricians, and the like—had secured something called the Studio Basic Agreement, which granted them important and costly concessions. The studios were now terrified of being squeezed similarly by actors and writers. With this in mind, thirty-six people from the creative side of the industry met for dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in January 1927 and formed a kind of executive club to promote—but even more to protect—the studios. It was a reflection of their own sense of self-importance that they called it the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, elevating the movies from popular entertainment to something more grandly artistic, scientific, and literally academic. In the second week of May, while the world fretted over the missing airmen Nungesser and Coli, the academy was formally inaugurated at a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. (The idea of having an awards ceremony was something of an afterthought, and wasn’t introduced until the academy’s second anniversary dinner in 1929.)

As an analogy, we used to think of books, music, and movies as distinct. Then they all became represented by packets sent over the internet. Yes, we listened to music in audio players and viewed books in ebook readers, but their fundamental structure became digital. Similarly, today we think of stocks, bonds, gold, loans, and art as different. But all of them are represented as debits and credits on blockchains. Again, the fundamental structure became digital. Now, we are starting to think of different kinds of collections of people –— whether communities, cities, companies, or countries —– all fundamentally as networks, where the digital profiles and how they interact become more and more fundamental. This is obvious for communities and companies, which can already be fully remote and digital, but even already existing cities and countries are starting to be modeled this way, because (a) their citizens48 are often geographically remote, (b) the concept of citizenship itself is becoming similar to digital single sign-on, (c) many 20th century functions of government have already been de-facto transferred to private networks like (electronic) mail delivery, hotel, and taxi regulation, (d) cities and countries increasingly recruit citizens online, (e) so-called smart cities are increasingly administrated through a computer interface, and (f) as countries issue central bank digital currencies and cities likely follow suit, every polity will be publicly traded on the internet just like companies and coins.

And, so, what was it that elevated Rubi from dictator's son-in-law to movie star's husband to the sort of man who might capture the hand of the world's wealthiest heiress? Well, there was his native charm. People who knew him, even if only casually, even if they were predisposed to be suspicious or resentful of him, came away liking him. He picked up checks; he had courtly manners; he kept the party gay and lively; he was attentive to women but made men feel at ease; he was smoothly quick to rise from his chair when introduced, to open doors, to light a lady's cigarette ("I have the fastest cigarette lighter in the house," he once boasted): the quintessential chivalrous gent of manners. The encomia, if bland, were universal. "He's a very nice guy," swore gossip columnist Earl Wilson, who stayed with Rubi in Paris. ""I'm fond of him," said John Perona, owner of New York's El Morocco. "Rubi's got a nice personality and is completely masculine," attested a New York clubgoer. "He has a lot of men friends, which, I suppose, is unusual. Aly Khan, for instance, has few male friends. But everyone I know thinks Rubi is a good guy." "He is one of the nicest guys I know," declared that famed chum of famed playboys Peter Lawford. "A really charming man- witty, fun to be with, and a he-man." There were a few tricks to his trade. A society photographer judged him with a professional eye thus: "He can meet you for a minute and a month later remember you very well." An author who played polo with him put it this way: "He had a trick that never failed. When he spoke with someone, whether man or woman, it seemed as if the rest of the world had lost all interest for him. He could hang on the words of a woman or man who spoke only banalities as if the very future of the world- and his future, especially- depended on those words." But there was something deeper to his charm, something irresistible in particular when he turned it on women. It didn't reveal itself in photos, and not every woman was susceptible to it, but it was palpable and, when it worked, unforgettable. Hollywood dirt doyenne Hedda Hoppe declared, "A friend says he has the most perfect manners she has ever encountered. He wraps his charm around your shoulders like a Russian sable coat." Gossip columnist Shelia Graham was chary when invited to bring her eleven-year-old daughter to a lunch with Rubi in London, and her wariness was transmitted to the girl, who wiped her hand off on her dress after Rubi kissed it in a formal greeting; by the end of lunch, he had won the child over with his enthusiastic, spontaneous manner, full of compliments but never cloying. "All done effortlessly," Graham marveled. "He was probably a charming baby, I am sure that women rushed to coo over him in the cradle." Elsa Maxwell, yet another gossip, but also a society gadabout and hostess who claimed a key role in at least one of Rubi's famous liaisons, put it thus: "You expect Rubi to be a very dangerous young man who personifies the wolf. Instead, you meet someone who is so unbelievably charming and thoughtful that you are put off-guard before you know it." But charm would only take a man so far. Rubi was becoming and international legend not because he could fascinate a young girl but because he could intoxicate sophisticated women. p124

Guilt and self-image. When someone says, “I can’t forgive myself,” it indicates that some standard or condition or person is more central to this person’s identity than the grace of God. God is the only God who forgives — no other “god” will. If you cannot forgive yourself, it is because you have failed your true god — that is, whatever serves as your real righteousness — and it is holding you captive. The moralists’ false god is usually a god of their imagination, a god that is holy and demanding but not gracious. The relativist/pragmatist’s false god is usually some achievement or relationship. This is illustrated by the scene in the movie The Mission in which Rodrigo Mendoza, the former slave-trading mercenary played by Robert de Niro, converts to the church and as a way of showing penance drags his armor and weapons up steep cliffs. In the end, however, he picks up his armor and weapons to fight against the colonialists and dies at their hand. His picking up his weapons demonstrates he never truly converted from his mercenary ways, just as his penance demonstrated he didn’t get the message of forgiveness in the first place. The gospel brings rest and assurance to our consciences because Jesus shed his blood as a “ransom” for our sin (Mark 10:45). Our reconciliation with God is not a matter of keeping the law to earn our salvation, nor of berating ourselves when we fail to keep it. It is the “gift of God” (Rom 6:23). Without the gospel, our self-image is based on living up to some standards — either our own or someone else’s imposed on us. If we live up to those standards, we will be confident but not humble; if we don’t live up to them, we will be humble but not confident. Only in the gospel can we be both enormously bold and utterly sensitive and humble, for we are simul justus et peccator, both perfect and sinner!

Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of .05 or .10, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastesit made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: * music * movies * microcode (software) * high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills." So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

The main street in Harbel was nothing more than a slight widening of the road leading to the entry of the Firestone Plantation. Looking like a town in a “Western Movie,” it consisted of a branch of Citibank, which had been the “Bank of Monrovia” prior to the 1950’s. The Firestone Trading Company, and the adjourning Coca Cola Bottling Company which were wholly owned business’ belonging to the Firestone Rubber Company. There was also an “Arabic Company named the “Abidjan Trading Post,” which I figured was a company headquartered in Abidjan the former capital city and currently the economic center of the Ivory Coast. Although Farrell Lines expected us to deal with Firestone, the Arabs were always less expensive. On the street there was also a government run Telegraph and Postal Office, as well as the American Foundation for Tropical Medicine. Small as Harbel it still had the second largest population in the country. Somewhat removed from the main street, on the street going to the piers were the buildings used by the Firestone Plantation Company, including, what seemed to be a huge, vehicle repair facility and the Firestone Fire Department. Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford had been friends for years and although neither was still living, their legacy continued. Firestone used only Ford vehicles and Ford only used Firestone tires.

When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery The

Damn if Oprah wasn't yakking with three movie actresses about what a hassle it was to be famous and have photographers snooping around, following you to the grocery and the ATM, whatever. Tool didn't feel one tiny bit sorry for her and them other gals, on account of they was rich enough to build twenty-foot walls around their mansions if they wanted. Butlers, bodyguards, the best of everything. Tool found himself thinking about Maureen, the old lady at Elysian Manor, alone and dying of God knows what kind of rotten cancer. Damn nurses won't even let her out of the sack to take a shower or go to the can. There's somebody would trade places with them actresses in a heartbeat, Tool thought, Maureen would. She'd be smilin' and wavin' at them photographers, she'd be so grateful not to be sick.

Even when Ben was around and belittling me for selling out and writing crappy romance movies, I felt grateful for my work. I mean someone had to sell out, you can’t walk into the Stop n’ Save and trade big ideas for chicken.

Then he broke into his laugh. “I was rewatching Life of Brian,” he said, referring to the Monty Python movie. He recounted the scene where a beggar complains that Jesus cured him of leprosy, making it harder for him to make a living begging: “I was hopping along, minding my own business, all of a sudden, up he comes, cures me! One minute I’m a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood’s gone. Not so much as a by-your-leave! ‘You’re cured, mate.’ Bloody do-gooder.

It’s not just Africa’s movie and music industry that is booming. African literature, led by the Young Lions, or rather, Lionesses, is seeing a revival, too. I mentioned Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her TED Talk about Africa’s “Single Story.” But Adichie, 37, is best known for writing, and her novels Half of a Yellow Sun (now a film directed by fellow Nigerian novelist Biyi Bandele) and Americanah, winner of the United States’ prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013, are international best sellers. Adichie is able to write in an authentic African voice and yet still connect with huge numbers of readers in the West. I have been told about other young African women who are taking the literary world by storm such as Zimbabwean NoViolet Bulawayo, who was long-listed for Britain’s Man Booker Prize, and her countrywoman, international trade lawyer Petina Gappah, a finalist for the United Kingdom’s prestigious Orwell Prize in 2010. These talented women are part of a confident, new, global Africa.

In the movie Star Wars, the malign aspect of technology is the Death Star. It is an object huge and disconnected from humanness that reduces its clients to clones-recognizably human, but all identically in thrall to the machine, all drained of color and drained of will. Its protagonist, Darth Vader, is not a full human being either. He is constructed-part technology, part human body. The heroes, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, by contrast are fully human. They have individuality, they have will, and they hang with creatures in a haunt called the Mos Eisley Cantina-creatures that are strange, distorted, and perverse, but that brim with messy vitality. If you look at the heroes, they have technology as well. But their technology is different. It is not hidden and dehumanizing; their starships are rickety and organic and have to be kicked to get running. This is crucial. Their technology is human. It is an extension of their natures, fallible, human, individual, and therefore beneficent. They have not traded their humanness for technology, nor surrendered their will to technology. Technology has surrendered to them. And in doing so it extends their naturalness.

We are living in a world where most of our time is spent by the majority in front a screen and a software, whether its a game, trading, movie, pictures etc... in principal this is where we spend most of our time. For that be cautious and aware of that fact and apply changes - dont forget the real world, it will give you lots of happiness for getting into the real world for a short time - that is because our brains miss reality !

PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.

The Abortionist’s Daughter Declares Her Love Here is the church. These are the doors that open to the sea. My grandmother once knelt here, awed, a special guest to an exorcism.   It is nothing like the movies would have you think, she told me, and I believed her.   They have called me many things between these aisles, she told me, and I believed her.   That is the trouble with our trade, she said. When men aspire to terrible jobs, we offer them hushed respect, the blushing necks of virgins.   Women wearing the same gloves, sorting the same straight-backed pins between the prayers of their teeth, are taught to deserve nothing more than an acreage of sorrow.   Why

Two caregivers accidentally meet and decide to trade their charges. It was like something from a Hitchcock movie.

However, I’m completely open to trades.” Jordyn snorted. “You can’t trade — ” “You can have this half-empty can of Coke,” Dylan said quickly. Jordyn rolled her eyes. “He’s not going to trade — ” “Done.” I held out my hand to collect my prize. “MY RESPECT IS WORTH MORE THAN A HALF-EMPTY CAN OF COKE!

He smiled on camera with movie stars for decades when he was a reality TV star; maybe he really did believe they were his friends, but now they won’t even talk to him. It’s like he traded all his old friends for this crowd, and now it’s all he has left. It almost sounds lonely. Well, at least he and the crowd have each other. At every event, they literally chant, “We love you!” and he insists they promise to love him more than any other politician. They have a co-dependent relationship.

Murnau now inserts scenes with little direct connection to the story, except symbolically. One involves a scientist who gives a lecture on the Venus flytrap, the “vampire of the vegetable kingdom.” Then Knock, in a jail cell, watches in close-up as a spider devours its prey. Why cannot man likewise be a vampire? Knock senses his Master has arrived, escapes, and scurries about the town with a coffin on his back. As fear of the plague spreads, “the town was looking for a scapegoat,” the titles say, and Knock creeps about on rooftops and is stoned, while the street is filled with dark processions of the coffins of the newly dead. Ellen Hutter learns that the only way to stop a vampire is for a good woman to distract him so that he stays out past the first cock’s crow. Her sacrifice not only saves the city but also reminds us of the buried sexuality in the Dracula story. Bram Stoker wrote with ironclad nineteenth-century Victorian values, inspiring no end of analysis from readers who wonder if the buried message of Dracula might be that unlicensed sex is dangerous to society. The Victorians feared venereal disease the way we fear AIDS, and vampirism may be a metaphor: The predator vampire lives without a mate, stalking his victims or seducing them with promises of bliss—like a rapist or a pickup artist. The cure for vampirism is obviously not a stake through the heart, but nuclear families and bourgeois values. Is Murnau’s Nosferatu scary in the modern sense? Not for me. I admire it more for its artistry and ideas, its atmosphere and images, than for its ability to manipulate my emotions like a skillful modern horror film. It knows none of the later tricks of the trade, like sudden threats that pop in from the side of the screen. But Nosferatu remains effective: It doesn’t scare us, but it haunts us. It shows not that vampires can jump out of shadows, but that evil can grow there, nourished on death. In a sense, Murnau’s film is about all of the things we worry about at three in the morning—cancer, war, disease, madness. It suggests these dark fears in the very style of its visuals. Much of the film is shot in shadow. The corners of the screen are used more than is ordinary; characters lurk or cower there, and it’s a rule of composition that tension is created when the subject of a shot is removed from the center of the frame. Murnau’s special effects add to the disquieting atmosphere: the fast motion of Orlok’s servant,

I always dreamed of eating my meals out of coconuts. I may have seen too many Jungle Jim movies as a kid perhaps, but there was also that one desert island book which ruined me forever: Island of the Blue Dolphins, a wonderful

Making the movie” is the term that a venture capitalist friend applies to the process of building a start-up. In my friend’s tech-company-as-movie analogy, the VCs are the producers and the CEO is the leading man. If possible, you try to get a star who looks like Mark Zuckerberg—young, preferably a college dropout, with maybe a touch of Asperger’s. You write a script—the “corporate narrative.” You have the origin myth, the eureka moment, and the hero’s journey, with obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, markets to disrupt and transform. You invest millions to build the company—like shooting the movie—and then millions more to promote it and acquire customers. “By the time you get to the IPO, I want to see people lined up around the block waiting to get into the theater on opening night. That’s what the first day of trading is like. It’s the opening weekend for the film. If you do things right, you put asses in the seats, and you cash out.

from their peak in 2006, and the decline is explained entirely by the evaporation of interesting, intelligent mid-budget films. Studios realized their assumption that they had to make every type of movie for everyone was no longer true. So they focused on the types of movies that delivered the biggest and most consistent profits to their publicly traded parent corporations. Increasingly, that meant movies that appealed to audiences in Russia, Brazil, and China. These consumers weren’t likely to understand the cultural subtleties of an American drama or to consider people talking or even running for their lives to be adequate bang for their buck on an expensive night out. They expected spectacle, particularly if they were paying premiums for an IMAX or 3D screen, and they wanted stories that made sense to a villager in China, a resident of Rio de Janeiro, or a teenager in Kansas City. Transformers, in other words. And The Avengers. And Jurassic World and Fast and Furious and Star Wars. With the exception of 1997’s Titanic, which made a spectacle out of the sinking of a cruise ship and Leonardo DiCaprio’s eyes, the forty-eight highest-grossing Hollywood films overseas are all visual-effects-heavy action-adventure films or family animation.

The movie intermission is actually the end of the trade.

Tencent had partnered with leading mobile carriers like China Mobile to receive 40 percent of the SMS charges that QQ users racked up when they sent messages to mobile phones. A new service could hurt Tencent’s financial bottom line and at the same time risk its relationships with some of China’s most powerful companies. It was the sort of decision that publicly traded, ten-thousand-person companies typically refer to a committee for further study. But Ma wasn’t a typical corporate executive. That very night, he gave Zhang the go-ahead to pursue the idea. Zhang put together a ten-person team, including seven engineers, to build and launch the new product. In just two months, Zhang’s small team had built a mobile-first social messaging network with a clean, minimalistic design that was the polar opposite of QQ. Ma named the service Weixin, which means “micromessage” in Mandarin. Outside of China, the service became known as WeChat. What came next was staggering. Just sixteen months after Zhang’s fateful late-night message to Ma, WeChat celebrated its one hundred millionth user. Six months after that, it had grown to two hundred million users. Four months after that, it had grown to three hundred million users. Pony Ma’s late-night bet paid off handsomely. Tencent reported 2016 revenues of $ 22 billion, up 48 percent from the previous year, and up nearly 700 percent since 2010, the year before WeChat’s launch. By early 2018, Tencent reached a market capitalization of over $ 500 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable companies, and WeChat was one of the most widely and intensively used services in the world. Fast Company called WeChat “China’s app for everything,” and the Financial Times reported that more than half of its users spend over ninety minutes a day using the app. To put WeChat in an American context, it’s as if one single service combined the functions of Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Venmo, Grubhub, Amazon, Uber, Apple Pay, Gmail, and even Slack into a single megaservice. You can use WeChat to do run-of-the-mill things like texting and calling people, participating in social media, and reading articles, but you can also book a taxi, buy movie tickets, make doctors’ appointments, send money to friends, play games, pay your rent, order dinner for the night, plus so much more. All from a single app on your smartphone.

Duncan had never felt more powerfull than when Ghost trusted him enough to fall asleep beside him. And to know that Ghost felt the same way about it? He was so fucked. Ghost's brow creased. "Do you? Want? I mean. That. With me?" Damn Ghost for asking. And damn himself for this self-destructive stupidity. "Yes." "I don't mean sex. I mean -" "I know what you mean. Yes." "But you don't want to. You wish you didn't." "It would be easier not to want you. It would be safer. Probably better for my long-term mental health. But it's kind of moot. I do want you. It's not a choice." "Then we can. Watch movies." Duncan sighed. "No. I-" He didn't have the first clue how to say this if Ghost hadn't already figured it out. "You can't plot to kill someone and then watch a movie with me. It doesn't work that way. I don't work that way. Ghost considered that for a long time." Fine, I won't kill him. Even if that's the only way out. I won't." "That's-" Duncan wasn't sure whether to be flattered or appalled. "Are you flirting with me by not murdering people?" Ghost looked thoughtful. "Do you like it?

I previously spoke to Mrs. Newton of such… She's trading your shifts. She spoke to inform you she wishes you a: 'Happy Birthday.'' ‘I- yet can't come over,’ I resolved, clambering for an excuse. ‘I, well, I mustn't watch Romeo and Juliet yet for English.’ Olivia squealed, ‘You have Romeo and Juliet memorized.’ ‘Although Mr. Smith proclaimed, we obliged to notice it performed to thoroughly acknowledge it that's how Shakespeare intended it to be presented.’ Marcel rolled his eyes. ‘You've already seen the movie,’ Olivia accused. ‘Although not the nineteen-sixties version. Mr. Smith said it was the best.’ Subsequently, Olivia lost the self-satisfied smile and glared at me. ‘This can be obvious, or this can be troublesome, Bell, but one way or the others’ Marcel interrupted her threat. ‘Relax, Olivia. If Karly wants to watch a movie, then she can. It's her birthday.’ ‘So there,’ I added. ‘I'll bring her over around seven,’ he continued. ‘That will give you more time to set up.’ Olivia's howling sounded again. ‘Sounds immeasurable good. See you tonight, Bell! It'll be fun, you'll see.’ She grinned- the wide smile revealed all her perfect, glistening teeth-then pecked me on the cheek and danced off moving her first class before I could respond. ‘Marcel, please-’ I started to beg, but he clasped one crisp finger to my lips. ‘Let's review it later. We're going to be late for school.’ No one bothered to stare at us as we took our representative seats in the back of the classroom (we should almost every class together now-it was amazing the favors Marcel could get the female administrators to do for him.)

But history tells us that, in the early stage of their development, virtually all successful countries used some mixture of protection, subsidies and regulation in order to develop their economies. The history of the successful developing countries that I discussed in chapter 1 shows that. Furthermore, the history of today's rich countries also confirms it, as I have discussed in this chapter. Unfortunately, another lesson of history is that rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves succesfully used in the past. Even the newest member of the club of rich countries, my native Korea, has not been an exception to this pattern. Despite once having been one of the most protectionist countries in the world, it now advocates steep cuts in industrial tariffs, if not total free trade, in the WTO. Despite once having been the world piracy capital, it gets upset that the Chinese and the Vietnamese are producing pirate CDs of Korean pop music and pirate DVDs of Korean movies. Worse, these Korean free-marketeers are often the same people who, not so long ago, actually drafted and implemented interventionist, protectionist policies in their earlier jobs. Most of them probably learned their free market economics from pirate-copied rock and roll music and watching pirate-copied videos of Hollywood films in their spare time.

My threshold for being respectful to this lucky, absent bastard was evaporating. I was going to make a move on her. If I didn’t, I’d never forgive myself for not trying. If there was even the slightest chance she might be into me, I had to try. But how? Should I just try to kiss her? Would she tell me to go to hell? Probably. What if I slid my hand over hers? Would she yank it away? She would. I knew she would. I needed something else. Something less. More subtle. Something that could go either way to test the waters. Something that could lead to something else. “Hey, I give a decent foot massage if your feet hurt.” I nodded to the center console where her heels still sat after being dropped through the sunroof. To my surprise, she pivoted until her back was against the door, and she swung her legs over into my lap. She put an arm behind her head and leaned back. “Go for it. Those heels were killing me today.” I grinned inwardly that my strategy worked and put my back to the door while I took her tiny foot in my hand. “I’m a foot massage master. ‘I don’t be tickling or nothing,’” I said, giving her a Pulp Fiction line. She snorted. “I’m exfoliated and pedicured. Someone should touch them.” I thought about what Vincent Vega says in the movie, that foot massages mean something. That men act like they don’t, but they do and that’s why they’re so cool. This meant something, and I knew she knew it. She was as familiar with that movie as I was. She had to be making the connection. And she’d allowed it. I reveled in the chance to touch her and at the unspoken meaning behind her letting me do it. “So, Foot Massage Master, what other tricks do you have in your bag?” she asked, giving me a sideways smile. I pressed a thumb into her arch and circled it around with a smirk. “I’m not giving you my trade secrets.” What if I need them? She scoffed. “Your gender doesn’t have any secrets that every woman hasn’t already seen by the time they’re twenty.” I arched an eyebrow. “Ever heard of the naked man?” She rolled her eyes. “Oh God, the naked man. That one’s the worst.” I laughed. “Why? Because it works?” She scrunched up her face. “I have to admit it has worked on me in the past. I mean, the guy’s naked. Half the work is done for you already. It’s kind of hard to say no. But when it doesn’t work, it’s so cringey.” I tipped my head from side to side. “It’s risky. I’ll give you that. You have to know your audience. But big risks can reap big rewards.” “Waiting for your girlfriend to leave the room and then stripping naked to surprise her when she gets back is so unoriginal though. You men have no new material. I swear you could go back twenty thousand years and peek into a cave and find cavemen drawing penises on everything and doing the naked man and the helicopter.” I pulled her foot closer and laughed. “Hey, don’t knock the helicopter. It’s the first move we learn. It can be a good icebreaker.” “The helicopter should be banned over the age of eight. I’m just going to spare you the illusion right now. No woman is sitting around with her girlfriends going, ‘Gurl, it was the sexiest helicopter I’ve ever seen. Totally broke the ice.’” I chuckled and ran my hand up her smooth calf, rubbing the muscle. I pictured that delicate ankle on my shoulder where I could kiss it, run my palm down the outside of her thigh, pull down those light-blue lace panties…

Knowledge was rarer then. A secondhand magazine was an occasion. For a Far Rockaway teenager merely to find a mathematics textbook took will and enterprise. Each radio program, each telephone call, each lecture in a local synagogue, each movie at the new Gem theater on Mott Avenue carried the weight of something special. Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory. When a primer on mathematical methods baffled him, he worked through it formula by formula, filling a notebook with self-imposed exercises. He and his friends traded mathematical tidbits like baseball cards. If a boy named Morrie Jacobs told him that the cosine of 20 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 40 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 80 degrees equaled exactly one-eighth, he would remember that curiosity for the rest of his life,

Paradoxically, the musical Merrily is both very faithful yet rather untrue to its source. To repeat: in the musical, we lose a substantial piece of information about why the hero is so determined to achieve financial independence: to protect himself from the kind of beating he took during his first marriage. No one, we almost hear him cry, will ever own me again! But the musical also improved on that hero, trading the somewhat high-strung Richard Niles for the more fascinating Franklin Shepard, a wonder boy on whom everyone needs to project his or her fantasies. He’s a savior, yes—but of no redemptive power whatsoever, because he’s too self-absorbed to relate to others. Is that why he gave up the very creative vocation of composer for the bureaucratic post of movie producer? Like so many Sondheim shows, Merrily We Roll Along raises more questions than it answers. But raising questions is the theatre’s mandate. It may be that we’re never going to know what drives Franklin Shepard, just as we never quite understand the Franklin Shepards we meet in life. The better we know them, the more they confuse us. One Merrily lyric runs, “It started out like a song.” It always does, doesn’t it?

Campaigners for God, Country and the American Way of Life did not stop when they had crushed radical trade unions and jailed socialist, syndicalist and communist spokespeople. They also bought out and took over the communication apparatus: the press, the schools and colleges, the libraries, the churches, civic organizations, the movies, radio and television. The professions, notably education were purged of subversive teachers, textbooks and ideas. The same men who operated mines, factories and department stores became owners, directors and trustees of the entire communication apparatus. Communication, like merchandising and farming became parts of the big business octopus that was reaching its tentacles into every profit-yielding corner of American life. ….Papers that spoke for the Oligarchs and their interests got the advertising. Others died of financial malnutrition…. ….Book publishers and magazine editors were members of the American Oligarchy. They were not top-flight members; they held their jobs so long as they built readership, got advertising and showed profits on the investment…

Although B.V. Karanth made a brilliant film based on Tata's famous novel Chomana Dudiu Tata had not liked the film. B.V. Karanth, a warm, good-hearted man and a true genius of Kannada theatre, in contrast to Tata, was somewhat undisciplined and often unpunctual. I suspect Tata's dislike of that outstanding movie had more to do with B.V. Karanth's disorganised persona. B.V. Karanth had once confessed to me that he was 'scared of' Tata. Because Tata was a jack of all trades who dabbled in anything that took his fancy, some of his prolific intellectual output tended to be mediocre. Since Tata did not like B.V. Karanth's film, he set out to make a better movie based on another acclaimed novel of his, Kudiyara Koosu. Prathibha and I spent a couple of days on the sets when this movie, titled Maleya Makkalu, was filmed in a very scenic forested landscape in the Western Ghats. Although the scenery was grand and the movie starred the popular Kannada actress Kalpana, the movie was a rather amateurish effort compared to Chomana Dudi. Tata's flm failed the test of critical appreciation, and at the box office.

My life today is beautiful," he said at the end of the press conference, when a reporter asked how he was holding up. "I feel that I'm needed." The previous week, as horrifying and tragic as it had been for him and his country, was also among the most exciting and fulfilling of his life. He would not trade it for any of the comfort and security he knew in his old life as a movie star. "I think the main purpose in life is to be needed, not just to be a blank space that breathes, walks, and eats. But to live, to know that certain things depend on you being alive, and to feel that your life matters to others.

Try to imagine what cinema would look like without them. Collaborating with behind-the-camera talents including John Landis, Ivan Reitman, Carl Reiner, and John Hughes-and fellow stars such as Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Golden Hawn-this new wave would produce a litany of big, brash blockbusters and evergreen oddities: National Lampoon's Animal House, The Jerk, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, 48 Hrs., Trading Places, The Man with Two Brains, Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, Fletch, Coming to America, and Scrooged, to name but some. That list alone makes a compelling case that this period is as good as things have ever gotten for big-screen comedy. Quentin Tarantino certainly thinks so. "I think the '80s is the worst decade, with the '50s being the second worst, in the history of Hollywood," the director said in 2015. "The only movies from the '80s that I find myself really, really hanging on to, oddly enough, are the silly comedies. They're the ones that you have the most affection for.