The first time I experimented with sound design was on 'Fruitvale Station,' where I recorded the BART train and manipulated it.
By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.
I was a bartender for a long time, so I know how to make drinks, but I'm more likely to offer them than to have them. I think this is one of the reasons why I get to live longer than my great-grandmother did, and why I get to produce more writing than she did, and why my marriage isn't in dire straits.
Every time I sit with our general manager at a baseball game, and there's number-cruncher and statistician guy - I'm sitting around - they start talking about stuff, and I say, 'What's that? I've never heard of that one before.'
I had a client who was a professional baseball player once, and he would go to clubs and dance for seven, eight, nine hours at a time. He wouldn't drink, he wouldn't take drugs - he just danced because he had so much physical energy; he was this amazing athlete.
When I think about athletes, probably my favorite guest of all time among baseball players was Ted Williams.
People know more about baseball players' contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our children's lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, 'Do you want to bring a child into this world?' That's pretty dire.
There was a time when rival teams used a shift against me. They would put the second baseman on the shortstop's side of the bag, move the shortstop into the hole to his right, and have the third baseman hug the foul line. The idea was to build an infield wall against a known right-handed pull hitter.
When I throw a softball, there's no time to think about the motion of my arm. I just look at the first baseman's glove and react.
I know that collector types can be a pain in the neck and seem perpetually frozen in time - or at least in their parents' basement - but someone has to look out for the past, lest it slip away forever.
Now that I think about it, my 40th birthday was the most anxiety I've ever had, and my wedding was also the second time I've had that much anxiety. So I'm starting to realize that I can't be throwing these big bash parties because I need to own that I get anxiety with a lot of people diverting their attention to me.
I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction you're going to get bashed by critics.
People all the time come up and ask how we do this or how we do that, and there isn't any secret to it. You're just getting bashed with something, and you're either a man and you take it, or you're not. People don't realize the toughness of WWE superstars.
The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.
When you say 'the man of the house,' the black woman has been the woman and the man of the house, because black men have so often had to spend all of their time and energy working and trying, at least, to give their families the basic needs. So black women, I find, are not really concerned about women's liberation.
On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away.
At first, I simply wanted to get a basic understanding of sign language, but as time went on, I really got the bug and wanted to become proficient so that I could make good use of my skills.
Of course, my interests and my focus change and become more diverse, more worldly. At the same time, I am interested in the simple basics, which is I love to dance and I love to make people dance.
Man, anytime the ball goes through the basket. It doesn't matter if it's a jumper or a drive. Any time the ball goes through the basket, and it's going through consistently, it's demoralizing for any opponent.
Herb Solo at that time was the head of MGM. I said, 'I want to live like Clint Eastwood.' Did I know at that time Clint Eastwood, to him, Heaven was a truck, a dog, and a picnic basket for food or something?
