Word: tic
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What Method actor would not love to work with John Cassavetes? His films (Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence) are actors' showcases. His camera waits patiently for the smallest behavioral tic or the grandest explosion of dynamite acting. The characters he creates are compulsive talkers, walkers, smokers, prowling the urban nightscape, their lives a cacophonic symphony of desperation, their aggressions spilling out like a Bowery bum's shirttail. Cassavetes encourages openness, improvisation, the primacy of being over performing. An actor prepares, and the moviegoer watches, and Cassavetes approves. He as much as tells his cast: The screen...
THEY HAVE THIS CONTEST at Dunkin' Donuts. Buy a coffee or a cruller and you get a small, rectangular card. Back in the car, coffee resting on the floor, scratch the little wax squares off the card with your thumbnail; some luck and you've won "Tic Tac Dough." On the back are the odds against winning--an even chance would require drinking something more than a million cups of coffee...
...Arden Chapman, caught in his mouth a grape thrown the longest distance-259ft. It is easy to understand the performer's urge to do the improbable, the difficult, the unique, the best. Claiming a record, any record, provides massage to the ego, varnish for the pride and a tic of celebrity. To hold a record, in the words of Allen Guttmann, professor of American Studies at Amherst College, "is a uniquely modern form of immortality...
...fashioned from his uncle's life, and from his own struggle not to become a pale copy of him, a book that is rather like one of his uncle's historical films-warm, well structured, humorous, a little larger and more roman tic than life, but underneath it all, shrewdly observed...
...portray a sliver of the moon reflected in a dusty courtyard pool in Morocco. Shikasta invites argument. There is something unsatisfying about a vision of history that suggests humans could not, after all, help making the messes they have, that their blunders were all ordained by a small tic in the cosmos. But belief in Lessing's theory is not required to find her novel pleasurably, even furiously engaging on every page...