Quite often governments are one way and the people are another. You can't judge the many by the actions of a few. What if Americans were all judged by the actions of the Bush administration and people did not know the truth? That America is full of people who are, at present, poorly represented and poorly catered to by the media. All these places I go, people say that America is good and I'm like, "Well, thank you, I'm glad you can see it." And you know - we are good, we've just got work to do.
Nietzsche, who you don't spend too much time with after the age of seventeen, did have that one great line about "he who stares into the abyss must know that the abyss also stares into him" and I never really understood that until my friend got killed and you really get your head around the idea of what horror means. It's a truly awful thing, to really, kind of have that understanding of things and when you really peer into that.
I think that one of the hardest things in the world to be is a black male. I mean everyone hates your guts. White men are afraid of you. White women are afraid of you. The cops hate you. The government wants you dead. Your own people want to shoot you for what you got. You just can't get over it. And even if you are able to get over it you're forced to do it on the white guy's terms.
I don't get a rush from anything. I did music as hard as I could. Acting for me at least, is a far more restrained performance than music. It requires a lot of skill and discipline. I'm not any good at it but I enjoy trying to be good at it.
There is no heaven for me and no hell. And certainly not any Karma.
Capitalism does what it does and money doesn't belong to anybody. It just stays in someone's wallet for a while, then it goes somewhere else. It always goes somewhere and it is always about to go somewhere.
I live my life through the prism of capitalism and physiological limits and eventualities. In all of that, there is no spirituality required. No God and karma is needed for the numbers. I live my life by the numbers. Not only am I an American, I am an Americanist.
I have no pride about anything I have done. It's just not the way I think about things. I do the work, always, as hard as I can, to the point of pain, injury, exhaustion, if that is what it takes. Once I am done, I move on.
I can't imagine being sixty years of age and playing music I wrote when I was in my twenties. I would rather sail the sea of consequence to new lands. Laps around the shallow end of the pool, not for me.
There is a concerted effort to keep you and me, you know, the people, away from what it [war] really looks like, 'cause when you're selling war, when it's such a big industry. What they don't tell you is the rest of it and the down side of it. And so obviously there is a lot of money and a lot of time and effort being spent on that campaign "perpetual war for perpetual peace".
I want my fellow citizens to wise up and stop falling for [war]. I try with my limited access, I'm not getting into Kabul with a camera, they're not letting me get into Benghazi with a camera. I do what I can with my flimsy American passport and a visa. The photos are a bit more heavy from Southern Sudan and Haiti and Cuba.
There's a lot of stuff like that that American's don't know and since a lot of Americans don't have a passport, I'll get a passport for them and since a lot of Americans don't know what a war looks like thirty, forty years later and it's still doing damage.
Americans are poorly served by their media, you know, for the war machine and propaganda machine and the global empire and they're poorly served by what they are being told is representative government.
I'm not like paparazzi. I never force myself on anyone. I always ask, and some places offer money. And so I try and get these photos to give you, the viewer, a real look at what I was seeing.
I don't want to play old music. To me, it is fighting battles that are already over and calling yourself a warrior. For me, I see no courage or adventure in doing the old thing over again. If others want to, that's for them. For myself, I have to move on. Life is too short to live in the past. There is a lot to be done.
Everyone should have the right to go off and do their music or do their books. The people who are in the position to censor they're really not down to reality where that certain artists are coming from.
I'm not much of an improv guy. That's a talent I don't have.
I warn people, your 40s will require massive amounts of humor and humility.
I'm just a guy. I get treated like I'm famous but I don't take it seriously. I take the time people take out to check me out very, very seriously.
I really enjoy the lattitude I have with being a private citizen. I can get a lot done. I am good with that.
I spend a lot of time alone so I get a lot done. I don't do much else but work, check things out.
I would never be innovative enough to "blaze my own trail," I'm just trying to be interesting. So I don't look to anyone else as far as inspiration.
I'm always looking upwards and looking forwards and so when someone says, "Hey, would you consider a TV show?" I say, "Hell yeah, I'll consider that. I'll check that out."
The lowest stress environment is the radio show. I am not on camera and I can let the music do the talking. The rest is more highly pressurized or in the case of writing, time intensive task. I say yes to all of it and like all of it but the radio show, by nature of what it is, is the least hassle.
I'm not a young man, and I can find intensity in a lot of different ways, sometimes without even raising my voice. When I was younger, it was all about how I need three extra sets of lungs to get enough wind to get out the thing at the screaming level I need to, because that's the way it needs to be. Now, I see that there's a whole lot of other colors on the palette.