One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.
Frank RichRead
I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.
Interpretation
The quote expresses admiration for aspiring young artists seeking opportunities in big cities.
Frank Rich highlights the determination and ambition of young artists who migrate to major cultural hubs like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago in pursuit of careers in theater, independent film, and media. This aspiration reflects their passion for the arts and the challenges they face in breaking into competitive fields.
In practice
This quote is a great opener for a discussion on the struggles and triumphs of young artists.
One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.
The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly 'changed everything,' slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.
There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.
My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.
Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.
Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.
Film acting, if you don't play the lead, you come, and you do your scenes in a few days, and you act with a couple of colleagues. All the rest of the actors you never see, and you don't even meet many of them. And you don't know what will happen with what you've done. Maybe it will be in the film, maybe it will not.
You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
Obsession is beautiful. It's what makes art.
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