In my couple of books, including Going Clear, the book about Scientology, I thought it seemed appropriate at the end of the book to help the reader frame things. Because we've gone through the history, and there's likely conflictual feelings in the reader's mind. The reader may not agree with me, but I don't try to influence the reader's judgment. I know everybody who picks this book up already has a decided opinion. But my goal is to open the reader's mind a little bit to alternative narratives.
There's periods now in our New York residence when I hear the door opening, especially the first couple of years. . . Anytime I hear that door opening I still think I'm gonna hear her.
Look at Senegal, about 90% of the Muslims in Senegal are Tijani or Qadiri Sufis. Among them, they have very great teachers who have written poems about al-Hallaj, and they have not been killed. In fact, it's Sufism that brought Islam through all of Senegal, right under our noses the last couple of centuries. And you can go down the same line through Indonesia and Malaysia.
This was very exciting. I'd never had two boys get into a fight over me before. The fact that one of the boys was my stepbrother, however, and held about as much romantic appeal for me as Max, the family dog, somewhat dampened my enthusiasm. And Michael wasn't much of a catch, either, when you actually thought about it, being a potential murderer and all. Oh, why did I have to have such a couple of losers fighting over me? Why couldn't Matt Damon and Ben Affleck fight over me? Now that would be truly excellent.
Some kid can say, "Hey, I really want you to play my town in Switzerland, or Sweden, or Latvia," and they could have a fun night at the show. On the other hand, all those kids could have a record that means something to them in a more personal way a couple months down the road. The live band is a really important thing for us, but my focus is on the album now.
In 1844, there was a balance of perhaps of a couple of thousand dollars on the cr side.
We need to make sure that our children know different kinds of people, eat different kinds of food, and learn our true history. The way most schools teach history is wrong. If they talk about slavery it's typically just for a couple of days and the lessons almost never address the systems that have hindered people of color for more than 250 years. This has to change.
I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia.
I was able to go over [Saxophone Competition] and work a little more in Europe. I'm thankful that those of kinds of things. Simultaneously, some nice things did come in. I got a nice festival that came in, in Virginia through that. There was a club that opened in DC in the famous Willard Hotel near the White House. And the club was called The Nest. I played there a few nights. Some musicians in Philly and D. C. kind of brought me down and got me on a couple things. So things opened up a little bit.
Well I'm still working on The Incredibles. So I'm going to take a little time off. I've got a couple of tricks up my sleeve. I'm not ready to talk about them yet, but expect the unexpected.
Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.
If I could've picked a birthday it would've been on Halloween. Yeah, it's always been my favorite holiday. Not because it was my birthday, but actually because, I think it was the freedom, you know? When you were a little kid, you got to go out and be an adult for a couple of hours. You got to, like, just go out with your friends and knock on peoples' doors and be nuts and pull pranks and stuff like that. You could be whoever you wanted to be, you know, I guess that was the appeal to it.
So for a long time, I did a lot of freelance writing in addition to writing fiction and such - I was a food critic for a magazine for a bit, I did writing for nonprofits and political things, I was the editorial consultant for another magazine for a couple years, all sorts of jobs.
Obviously my game wasn't too good at Augusta, I had a couple of technical faults, the posture wasn't too good. It's a bit unfortunate because I was playing a lot of good golf, but when I got sick (flu) before The Masters, that was bad timing and I wasn't quite myself.
I've been trained in dancing and I used to be quite good, though I am a bit rusty right now. But I could probably brush up in a couple of months.
If the court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act, is that a 'liberal' result enabling gay couples married in states where gay marriage is legal to enjoy the same economic advantages that federal laws now grant to straight couples? Or is it a 'conservative' ruling, limiting the federal government's ability to override state power?
Ozzy wanted to get us back together. It's been 20 years. We did a couple of songs during his farewell in 1992 and that got the ball rolling.
There are things that I value now that I didn't when I first went over there, like Zen Buddhism, which has become part of my life over the last couple years.
I needed to feed my family. I read a couple of the episodes. How can you keep on doing the same thing?
Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.