If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back.
Yes, I am transgendered but I also am a cross-dresser - I dress as a woman. It's not that I just want to be seen as a female in our society, I'm also a drag queen and a performer - there are many levels there.
Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.
Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals', the ones who somehow know how to teach.
I've done a lot of films that are purely live-action roles, and even if I hadn't come across performance capture as a technology, I think I'd always consider myself a sort of mercurial actor.
Nobody wants to be against technology, but I think that regulators should not - and people should not - assume that faster is always better in markets. We need to question technology to insure that markets continue to perform their fundamental purpos...
I always had the desire to perform. If it wasn't my career now, I'd still be doing amateur dramatics. It's just something you love, and when you get paid to do it, you pinch yourself every day.
I'd love to go back to Greek times and see the birth of theater and performing, in that time. It would be so extraordinary to see the need that theater came out of, in the first place. I think we could probably all learn a bit from that.
Actually, I would love to make a music video. Maybe it would finally put to rest those persistent rumours that have followed me throughout my career - particularly when I was on camera performing - that I had died.
Now, performing is second nature and I love every second of it. It is a very emotional thing when I can't play a song; maybe I'm hitting on something that I don't want to deal with. All of it is so personal. It is like therapy.
I'm not sure it's a better music world of appreciation and performance. I think the listener is a different guy, and listening is something he does in passing, with other stuff going on. There's less care and understanding of the relationship between...
I had no intention of becoming a performer, and yet under miraculous circumstances I was brought into the music industry fold. If divine powers hadn't intervened, I'd still be living in China working in some area of Sino-American comparative law.
I wrote 'Wish U Were Here' for Cody Simpson, and he invited me to perform with him on tour and be in his music video. He was shy at first. I think it's the surfer boy in him that makes him so mellow.
In pop music, the public usually see the results - the hit records, the Grammy Awards performances, the concert tours - but not all the work that goes into getting into the spotlight. And not everyone realizes that, even if you have a lot of talent, ...
Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
I don't really like meetings, I like recording and performing music. I need to set myself up for when the time does come that I need better distribution or just a bigger team behind me.
People ask me all the time which I would prefer doing more, but I honestly can't say. When I'm filming, I'm like, 'No, this is my favorite,' and when I'm writing music and recording and performing, it's like, 'This is definitely it.'
My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.
It's kind of like I'm Phil Spector, and I'm forcing a young girl to make pop music and perform exhaustively. Except, instead of it being someone else, that girl is also me.
When I recorded Contra la Puerta, I never really thought out doing the material live. Mostly because I haven't really seen any electronic music performed live in an interesting way.
I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.
