Most of the conversation about how geopolitics is changing in the 21st century focuses on the shift from west to east and on how we're moving from the bipolar power equation of the Cold War to a new bipolar relationship, that of the U.S. and China, that determines the mood music for everyone else.
It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it's like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I'm not fighting. I don't have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.
One of my biggest personal holdings is Rotana. That company has a very dominant force in the Middle East. It has around 45% of all the movie industry and around 75% of all the music.
I was lucky enough as a kid to spend most of my weekends at the Fillmore East. On a great night, that was like a Holy Roller evangelical church.
The tragedy of 9/11 and the bloody scrambling-up of the Middle East were painful reminders that the world had not yet reached any end-of-history ideal. But these events mattered less to the assumptions and strategies of huge multinational companies than one might guess.
We also want to try and slow down all this foolishness that's going on between the East and West. We gotta understand that Hip Hop is now universal. Hip Hop is not East coast or West coast.
Liturgy, in truth, is an event by means of which we let ourselves be introduced into the expansive faith and prayer of the Church. This is the reason why the early Christians prayed facing east, in the direction of the rising sun, the symbol of the returning Christ.
I regard the endorsement of both the objective and a method - which can differ from one country to another- of democratization by the parties in the region as a basic requisite of democratization in the Middle East.
I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.
The fact that the Bush administration, and those in Europe who have followed its 9/11-inspired agenda, somehow believe that the future of the world is being played out in the Middle East and Central Asia rather than East Asia has only served to accelerate China's rise and the U.S.'s decline.
There are different opinions across the Middle East of Al-Jazeera. They've been kicked out of Egypt and Jordan and then let back in; they've been totally banned from Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria.
The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia.
I grew up with comics. Whether it be from the East or the West, I devoured them.
No matter what's happening in the Middle East - the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment - the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.
I'm so much more of an East Coast girl than a West Coast girl.
The Middle East is literally going up in flames, as is California, and Katrina's problems haven't been solved, and Congress' response is to criticize Federal judges.
I think that most people in the Middle East, at least 50%, believe in being sharia-compliant. If you're sharia-compliant or want to impose sharia law, the United States is the wrong place for you.
Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed.
I found that part of it towards San Salvador extending from north to south five leagues, and the other side which we coasted along, ran from east to west more than ten leagues.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I split my time between the West Coast and the East.
Being from the Midwest, I would say that I like that East Coast mentality, it's more direct. What you see is what you get.
The whole idea of doing the Hollywood thing never even occurred to me. When you grow up on the East coast, Hollywood seems like this fantasy land and you don't think that people can actually make a living there.
I moved up over Lower East Side and I was adopted by eight foster parents; I lived all over New York City with these parents, man, till I was about ten years old.
What happened in the region in the last 30 years is not the Middle East. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, people wanted to copy this model in different countries; one of them is Saudi Arabia. We didn't know how to deal with it. And the problem spread all over the world.
I think Donald Trump believes in defeating ISIS, resolving issues in the Middle East.
The Muslim world and its subset the countries of the Middle East have been left behind in the marathon of political, economic and human development. For that, there is a tendency to blame others as the primary cause.
I think my favorite, and Coppola and that whole thing. East coast Italian directors I guess.
We face neither East nor West: we face forward.
We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.
The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home.
We can get more energy out of the north slope of Alaska; we have available the ability to make ourselves less dependent on those uncertain sources of supply from the Middle East. And it's important we do that.
Because I work with so many people on the east coast, I get some work done before I get the kids up.
Remember, you can always find East by staring directly at the sun.
It was the early 1970s and I was recently divorced. I had three kids and was totally broke. I managed to find work back east on the straw-hat circuit - summer stock - but couldn't afford hotels, so I lived out of the back of my truck, under a hard shell.
In this context, the current recovery in the Japanese economy is taking place in tandem with the growing interdependence with the rest of the world, particularly with the other East Asian economies.
I feel enormously proud to be part of East Anglia's Children's Hospices and to see the wonderful life-changing work that you do.
