My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.
I use social media every day. I don't have a Twitter account, but not because I'm a dinosaur about it. I have enough of a platform here. People in my position who do it tend to use it in a promotional way or in a hamstrung way. I look at Twitter all the time as a news tool or for cultural conversation. I've used it in my reporting. It's very useful.
The Gospel lives in conversation with culture, and if the Church holds back from the culture, the Gospel itself falls silent. Therefore, we must be fearless in crossing the threshold of the communication and information revolution now taking place.
If my book generates any sort of dialogue among Afghans, then I think it will have done a service to the community.
2 Jewish women in New York. One says, "Do you see what's going on in Poland?" The other says, "I live in the back, I don't see anything."
While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
'Looking' is more than just a television show. It's contributing to the cultural conversation, and for me, those are the most exciting projects to be a part of.
I'm actually all for political correctness. If you want to work to change the usage of a word that's discriminatory then fine, I'm behind you. But that's a conversation that needs to be had in the culture. You can't just decide that commonly used parts of a language are evil and that the people who didn't get the memo must be bad people.
I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't.
When artists and philosophers talk only amongst themselves, they ignore the potential of popular culture to become a variety of dialogues with and between everyday people. Its discourse may be productive of desire and pleasure, but popular culture is also a language in which people discuss politics, religion, ethics, and action.
I would love to be nominated for an award at some point or do something that at least engenders the type of cultural conversation that a role like Giancarlo Esposito on 'Breaking Bad,' or actually any of the people on 'Breaking Bad.' I would love to have a role in a feature film that was a cultural talking point.
That's what I always hoped for when I became an actor - that you would do something that people can escape to, find identification with and excitement in and be able to talk about it in bars, restaurants, and workplaces.
Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.
I think for television generally, the question that often arises is, "Does television lead, or does it follow?" You know, does it lead the conversation, or culture, or does it follow what's going on? And I think it does both.
My pride at being a member of the theater community is deep, and we have a chance to reach a lot of people who might feel like there's a place for them. I want theater to be part of the cultural conversation and be on par with all mediums of television in its ability to be relevant.
I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.
I think certain people would be moved to be nostalgic about America's glory days, when the music set the tone for the cultural conversation and popular musicians had this absurd level of authority.
Culture is a fluid, ongoing process. People tend to look at culture in a fixed time but it's constantly moving and evolving, as is the conversation between Americans and Cubans.
I feel really fortunate and grateful that not only do I get to do what I love, but I get to do it and serve a conversation that I feel is necessary culturally. The fact that I get to bring those two passions together is amazing to me - that I get to use my art in order to inform my activism and vice versa!
People have an actual bias against there being some kind of popularity for political films, and when they get acknowledged, it helps keep the conversation going.
