Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.
I used to do ballet all the time, and I do this ballet workout: it is an amazing thing called Barrecore. It is like pulsing. It turns your legs into, like, jelly, and you feel like a Bambi; you lose so much control over your body because you're pulsing so much.
A lot of children remember seeing cartoons, 'Pinocchio' or 'Bambi' or something that breaks their heart. I remember seeing 'The Blue Angel' and it breaking my heart. It was the first time I realised there was an adult world - that adults could damage each other or destroy each other emotionally.
If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.
After a workout, you definitely have to have a protein shake. I drink my six-pound whey protein all the time, too. I throw some fruit in there - strawberries, blueberries - with some peanut butter and banana, and it gives you all the recovery you need from a hard day of lifting and running.
Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn't know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.
When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band - or at least in a Pixies cover band.
You spend more time with your fellow band members than your girlfriend or wife, and you end up at each other's throats. It happens to all bands.
It's time to pull the bandage off America's foreclosure problem. The economy is ready to emerge from its recent dark period, but to make it happen soon we need to speed the resolution of millions of troubled home loans. Six years have passed since the crisis began, yet instead of accelerating, foreclosures have slowed.
The most common phrase bandied about these days is 'Oh my God'. People say it automatically all the time - not realising that that's a form of prayer.
Smokey and The Bandit was just a lark. All we did was run up and down those Georgia roads wrecking cars and having the time of our life.
Certainly, there are huge, multiplatinum bands whose singers command their audience's attention. Sadly, much of the time they have little to say.
When the Internet came along, at first it was just a medium for moving text around - books first, then pictures, finally video. Each time the bandwidth expanded, so did the capabilities of the medium, and each time it happened, the Internet cannibalized preexisting formats. And each time, those formats had to adapt. Or die.
Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call them working memory and executive control - that we use in nearly every activity.
Music is designed to be listened to, so it's calling for attention all the time, syphoning off our very limited auditory bandwidth and elbowing aside our ability to listen to the voice in our head we need when we're doing mental work.
A protective self-narrative during conflict and duress sometimes obscures us from seeing the worst in ourselves. When the self-sustaining haze lifts after that conflict has subsided, we may recognize in ourselves the flaws the other saw in us at the time that we didn't have the emotional bandwidth to examine in the moment.
Captcha is the bane of the Internet. I can't figure them out myself half the time!
I have spent a great deal of my time defending my work against those who see it as too complicated, too old in approach, too bleak to qualify as children's literature. This has been the bane of my life.
I don't think that the total creation took place in six days as we now measure time. If we can confirm, say, the Big Bang theory, that doesn't at all cause me to question my faith that God created the Big Bang.
I enjoy humour more than anything, I don't really sit around banging my head and crying all the time.
