“Once there is that outreach to the police, we try to find solutions for that community member, even if it means directing them to find who can assist their problem, as opposed to stepping back and saying, ‘It’s not my problem’. Now that is critical to the relationship that exists and we build between our police officers and the community.”
“What we need to do is we need to talk out to communities about what the specific public safety challenges are that they face...and then we need to look at whether or not we can come up with credible, non-police strategies to address those specific concerns.”
“Jazz is a music of freedom, as Sun Ra said, because we had to create, we had to fight, we had to struggle, we had to break down barriers.”
“Informed refusal, to me, is a crucial dimension of power. You don’t have real power if you can’t refuse, if you can’t say no to something.”
“The complete erosion of trust and truth in our country where no one knows what to believe...what will it take to restore faith in fact-based discourse? Because that has been substantially undermined.”
“The secret to connecting with other people is to deeply connect with ourselves.”
“I think, sadly, not enough attention is paid to preparedness in peacetime years. People go through these cycles of panic and neglect where a crisis hits, everyone freaks out, and the minute it’s over, attention to resources starts to dwindle and that’s exactly what we saw over the last several years. We’re even seeing it now in the middle of this outbreak where the pandemic isn’t even over and, already, people are relaxing into neglect.”
“I went from that place of believing that what I was doing was on the right side of the angels, if you will, to understanding that there were not only limitations to the utility in what I was doing, but then understanding that, actually, so much of what I was doing was a part of a larger social, economic problem in this nation that preceded, certainly, me and really beginning to search for other ways to address these issues.”
“We learned through Wikileaks and others how all our phone conversations, emails, and so on, were made available to state agencies or even to private agencies and so on and so on. I think that COVID just made us aware, or made it more visible, something that was already going on before.”
“Just the status of race in this country, it’s still aspirational for us, but I do think an awful lot of people are saying, 'I don’t think I ever quite understood. I’m taking this more seriously now'. At least, I hope that’s the case.”
“For me, personally, art is always about challenging the status quo.”
“For me it was remixing the function of the hieroglyph and it just feels like endless possibilities that I’m able to shape-shift, not just myself, but identity, representation, future, people, images--it’s just everything at once. It can be some of everything, which I love.”
“My dream is that we think about the right to vote and to participate in this democracy as a core part of personhood, of membership in this community that we call The United States of America. Rather than looking for ways to exclude people and carve them out of the franchise, which we have done time and time again in our history, that we look to include people and understand that everyone needs to have a voice for this system to have legitimacy and for our elected officials to be accountable to ...
“I want to live in a world where people aren't afraid to pay attribution and to say where their inspirations come from and to pay people for their ideas. I think it’s actually quite possible, but it takes a shift in mindset.”
“What was happening twenty, thirty, forty years ago--it seems like if you don’t know your history, you tend to repeat it again. Some of the things that were happening then are happening now, except I think people are becoming more conscious and aware of how important it is to know the things that are around their history and the social conditionings.”
“Synthesizers create such a range of sound and sound that you can treat almost like these very fine-tuned surgical tools when you’re exploring your own consciousness.”
"I think, in a way, it’s really the role of a writer to find the people that nobody knows...and to speak directly to those people.”
“For the most part, the Federal Reserve being able to electronically create money that effectively then goes through the largest bank in the country--the idea of that is to incentivize them to lend it out to the actual people in the country and to therefore help the economy, because individuals and small businesses and so forth will be able to get loans from their banks. The banks get that money from the Federal Reserve and the idea is that makes things work well.”
“I think there’s an almost universal experience of loss that is devastating to many of the people who have lost not only their connection to the friends they no longer see and the places they no longer go, but to their sense of stability and security in the world.”
“In a divisive country, in a country [where] there are so many voices trying to divide us, we have so much in common with so many people.”
“Nothing inspires an artist like limitation.”
“How we respond and how we react and how we get prepared and stop trying to master and control a phenomenon that you never will, but rather our response to it is the wake-up call and the message.”
“Poetry was, and remains, the closest thing to prayer that I know.”
“People have always come together with music.”
Change is a constant that we can’t escape, and part of this change is the changing of our bodies and our lives. When we sit in contemplation of that, I really think, in my experience with my patients, it gives you a new inspiration and outlook on the moments you do have, whether you’re sick or not.
“We’re seeing a lot of this ugly nationalism, populism, and I think without genuine connection with people, a lot of these messages are taking root and the audience is growing. I want to be optimistic, but I think there is bigger political, social, economic unrest coming.”
“There is another kind of refusal, and that is the refusal of silence. I think one of the most disappointing things to me is how many of our professions and disciplines have been silenced--dangerously silenced in the context of all that is happening in the U.S.--worried that speaking out will politicize the discipline and profession. Well, silence is its own politics as well.”
“There are people from different backgrounds inside of publishing, critical apparatus, and bookstores. There are conversations where we are included, but how strongly our voices are considered, and whether or not we have the power to leverage change from the seats at the table we have earned and been given--I think that there’s a lot of work there.”
“We have to tell the truth about the stories that we tell ourselves to protect us, to protect our innocence, our so-called innocence. We have to, in some ways, grab the country by the collar and pull it into maturity. That’s going to require an honest reckoning with what we’ve done.”
“[A] pandemic tends to reveal the truth. I think the truth is so enormous that we can’t handle [it]. We’ve ran out of words, we ran out of ways to see. What is in between reality and us are our old notions, our worn-out words, and our worn-out images.”
