I felt my music wasn't aiming at anybody. Everything I was doing was because it was a good song.
I had just been in some repressive situations - the black middle-class college scene and the crazy United States Air Force - and so I just felt like getting out of that. I thought, now, that I wanted to be a writer. I had something that I wanted to do, that I was interested in doing, so I wanted to pursue that.
Uber is redefining the transportation industry now; Airbnb is doing it to the hotel industry. You can expect that to happen in every single industry.
Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Russell Crowe - these leading men. These are the ones I grew up with. And Hugh Jackman. I love everything that these guys are doing. It's kind of been my mission to be an Asian-American version of that.
I was doing a play out in L.A. 20-some-odd years ago called 'Goose and Tomtom' by David Rabe, and somebody saw it and the next thing I know I'm doing the table read of the film version of 'Glengarry Glen Ross' with Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon - one of the great films of our generation.
I really do think I can make a contribution in helping eliminate the disparity here in Australia and doing my small bit to help eliminate slavery around the world. These are huge issues for our fellow countrymen and our fellows in the world, where slavery is growing at an alarming rate, and it needs to be arrested.
The ALAS Foundation was born as a consequence and a continuation of what we are doing with Pies Descalzos. I started the Pies Descalzos foundation in Colombia when I was 18, and since then, I have been very involved in the crusade for education.
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
In ramp skating, there's this guy Alex Perelson who's really coming into his own and doing some amazing new stuff we haven't seen before. Just different types of spin.
The job of an elected official is to communicate, to talk with constituents, to talk with the people of America, and I think Alexandria is excellent at doing that.
I've been doing the 'Sherman's Lagoon' strip for about 18 years, and I was a political cartoonist before that for my hometown paper in Alexandria, Va.
When I went into the seminary, I was one of those victims of New Math and had not had Algebra I and had no idea what we were doing in New Math in the ninth grade. But when I went into the seminary, they had gone the traditional route and taught first-year algebra.
Streaming is a really big market for me. We've been doing great in the streaming market, so it's not something I want to alienate at all. Streaming counts now. They're treating artists the way we deserve to be treated.
In the beginning, when I was doing my shows, I was incorporating a lot of Spanish, just trying to be a Latino comic instead of just a comic. Now I try to make the show as broad as possible... I don't want to alienate people. I want to make it so everybody can follow along and everybody can relate.
The biggest thing that I learned is when you're building something - especially a project that requires partners - you have to make sure that there is a lot of overlapping desire and a lot of overlapping alignment with the people that you're doing work with.
I was 19 when I discovered Pilates, and I'm still doing it. It's the workout my body really responds to. It's all about alignment, elongating your spine, and strengthening your core. It makes me feel my strongest.
I was at college doing performing arts, and just spending all my time mucking about, and the lecturers thought I would be pretty good at stand-up, so I gave it a whirl.
I don't want to spend all my time working as an activist. I don't get satisfaction out of it. I'd rather be doing something else. I'm a musician.
In 2001, the hard disk on my laptop crashed, and everything on it was lost. I'd been using the computer for two, almost three years, and had all my work on it - email, which was stored locally; photos; fragments of poems; presentations; sketches; ideas; love letters; everything. I lamented the loss to my friends and got lectured on doing backups.
I'm a big believer that the reception is not the endeavor. And what I enjoy about almost all my work is the endeavor, the doing of something.
