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The day we hit number one was September 11, 2001.
I was an activist long before I was an artist and I have never wanted to be one of those vacant souls who speaks to millions but talks to no one.
but in the early days of my spiritual practice, I mistook
passivity for nonaggression.
my life’s work has always been about learning how to deliver hard truths at difficult moments in ways people will hear them.
he showed that it was possible to override hunger, discomfort, and our innate survival instinct if you were committed enough. Who does that? What creates that sort of willpower in a person?
There have been studies that show how trauma is actually passed down across generations, literally imprinted onto your DNA.
In my personal quest for truth, justice, and the path of righteousness, I tend to listen to everyone but ultimately stick to my gut.
was called a War on Terror, but the one thing war is most effective at producing is terror. The phrase “collateral damage,” used so often during war, is a cold euphemism for the killing of innocent people.
Its beauty and its ugliness feel inextricably linked, two sides of the same coin, so to speak—glamour and grit woven together in mutual codependence.
Does fear
invite negative outcomes? Isn’t fearful thinking just a form of negative visualization?
There is something almost prehistoric or animalistic in the male need to be able to handle conflict, to be able to protect himself and others.
However, avoiding violence and avoiding conflict are not the same thing. Even now, I think the former is probably healthy. The latter, not so much. But that can be a hard lesson to learn.
usually played what’s called Armenian revolutionary music. These were dramatic rock, pop, and folk songs, mostly celebrating heroes of the resistance against the Turks, exhorting Armenians to stand up to their oppressors, or memorializing the blood spilled in defense of the nation and its people. Occasionally, there might be a love song mixed in, but this music and these shows were inherently political.
I didn’t yet know much of anything about punk rock, but I’d already become a stout believer in its guiding principle: those in power were suspect and needed to be challenged.
Is violence ever necessary to achieve political goals? Can you support someone’s goals without endorsing their means of achieving them?
The American Dream is often understood in a way that flatters America’s conception of itself, but at best, that’s only half the story. The other half are the immigrants who, generation after generation, take huge chances, work incredibly hard, and achieve things that those born here might be less likely to attempt.
it’s hard to disentangle all that history from what may simply be my personality.
the American Dream is more like a rollercoaster, with towering peaks, deep valleys, and all sorts of sharp twists and turns in between. And like a rollercoaster, the ride itself could be disorienting enough to make you sick.
Years later, I’d learn there’s a term for this in music business circles: a lifer. It’s not someone who necessarily makes a living from playing music but for whom playing music makes life itself worth living irrespective of its worldly rewards.
I often question why some people are taken from this place in their prime. Has their vision already been realized? Why do others who rot the chair they sit on and exude nothing but villainy seem to live forever? It all seems so unfair.
“You must enter a room to destroy it,”
“My words are hidden in the blanket folds of my mind / Tucked away, neatly, like an orphan, or a carcass / Beneath the shifting waves of neurological reality.”
I think he was the one who suggested the eye-catching image of the hand with five outstretched fingers that eventually ended up on the cover of our self-titled debut. The artwork was created by a guy named John Heartfield, a German communist who used his art to oppose the Nazis during their rise to power.
The image of “The Hand” was originally plastered up all over Berlin in 1928 with the text “The hand has five fingers! With these five, grab the enemy!” beneath it.
I have to say that I’m pretty comfortable with our decision not to reduce a profound artistic statement against the Nazis into a boob joke.
Slayer fans famously love Slayer and hate just about everything and everyone else. As their opening act, the crowd saw us as the one thing standing between them and Slayer. This was a group of fans for whom “homemade” knife-carved tattoos were not unusual,
If there was one valuable lesson I learned, it was this: don’t be neutral—it’s boring.
mille-feuille
napoleon puff pastry
home is where your spirit feels unconstrained.
I was fortunate not to have the predilection for addiction that others had. I also may have thought about drugs differently than some of my peers. To me, these were opportunities to have an experience, to learn more about myself and the people I was with, to connect more deeply. For others, maybe less so.
Ancestral land has a unique pull on your blood. It seems like an almost mystical idea, that the physical topography of a place you’ve never been to, full of people you’ve never met, could exert such a strong magnetic force,
Artsakh itself was beautiful, its hillsides swathed in brilliant shades of emerald like the Irish countryside, topped with high mountain peaks and cut through with clear, freshwater streams.
Geghard, a monastery complex that was carved out of a mountainside in the Azat River Gorge in the fourth century. It was initially constructed on the site of a mountain spring, which still flows through a cave into a basin in a cathedral there.
along with the infamous, ominous quote from Adolf Hitler, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
So, the key is to watch the thoughts come but gently tell them that it’s not the right time to deal with them. Find a place in your mind where they can sit until later.
The goal was to make meditation a basic thing in your life, something accessible and easy to do every day, like walking.
People are addicted to smoking cigarettes in part, I believe, because of the power and necessity of that spiritual pause. When people smoke, they’re getting in touch with their breathing. I’m not discounting the genuine addictiveness of nicotine, but in modern life, the physical act of smoking cigarettes is a ritual that often involves taking yourself out of a situation—work, dinner, whatever—standing outside and breathing in and out, over and over. That has value that stands apart from the sheer chemistry.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Franz Werfel
The worst show of that run was in Atlanta. The venue was beautiful, a tiered outdoor amphitheater built into a hill,
Lakewood?
Bari Arakeel
"blessed angel"
gone from being the thing I do, to just being a thing I do. All my eggs were no longer in that one basket. If the reunion was a disaster, I knew I had a dozen other things on my plate anyway.
In math, coinciding angles are where two lines meet at a specific point. Coincidence is not a random chance.
we cannot love others without loving and honoring the truth in ourselves.
