It has become clear to me over the years that to become an artist is like preparing a recipe -- there are so many ingredients -- voice, style, drive... B - And luck -- you need the luck.
But there were also many dispiriting bits of avoidable sloppiness: a check dropped on the table before it was requested; canapés plunked down by junior servers who recited the ingredients in robotic voices and darted nervously away.
The movie's structural binding ingredient is the voice of Susan Sarandon reading excerpts from "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village," a 2008 recollection by Mr. Dylan's onetime girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who met him in 1961, when she was 17 and he was 20.
But the most important tool is TelePresence, so that nuances such as body language and tone of voice, essential ingredients of face-to-face meetings, are no longer lost.
"A powerful missing ingredient has been the voice of the churches, the mosques, the temples -- the entire religious constellation," said Stephen Lewis, special adviser on AIDS to the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan.
As Gabriele, Marcello Giordani offered the ingredients of a good tenor voice if not always the completed product.
When you're surprised by his cooking, it's because the voice of the ingredients is coming through more clearly than you're used to.
Political idealism, wistful aestheticism, counterproductive obsessive love, Francophilia, red hair, gemlike flames, a borrowed voice: all these ingredients are present, though more lugubriously, in his new novel, "The Green Hour" (Norton; $24.95).
A property boom gone wild; opaque financial systems (if bank executives can't grasp the complexities of their business, they must be opaque); central banks supporting for years a policy of easy money; rampant short-selling.The only ingredients missing are the snide voice of the IMF denouncing bank nationalisations and the American trade representative demanding that weak banks go bust.
But, from the research about this topic, one thing comes through quite loud and clear: Intangibles like eye contact, a good handshake, and the sound of your voice are all ingredients of the impression that can be influenced.
The fourth ingredient of course is the voice.
