The Quarantine Tapes

“I think making a picture is listening and being ready and receiving, in some way, what’s happening around you.”

“If we want to stop this pandemic from spreading further, then we have to treat the weakest among us better. That means the migrants, that means providing different health care and housing, whether or not you have papers, because you are already in the country.”

“It’s important to fight for truth, but accepting the responsibility that we are shaping it rather than believing that truth just exists and it’s up to us to find it and talk about it. We need to take on the responsibility that we are shaping it together, collectively.”

“One of the things I’ve been doing these last three months in self-isolation is that I’ve been trying to answer this question of, 'How do cultures and civilizations articulate dissent?', because I think dissent is absolutely crucial to the health of any society.”

“I think [this moment] is at once philosophical but also a moment that demands practical action. Such moments are rare. Generally, you see a problem and you charge at it to fix it or you are faced with some kind of existential, emotional kind of crisis. I think this is a moment where it’s both.”

“I think humor is essential, for me, every day. It’s my way of dealing with anxiety, it’s my way of dealing with depression, and it’s my way of trying to learn my faults and become better.”

“For me, the way music works is in very small little granules of time. It might be a chord change, it might be a tambor, it might be a rhythm, but there’s something that strikes an element of what I call “the truth”. I’m not sure I can define it, but I can feel it.”

“This situation of separation has so many forms, doesn’t it? Throughout our world, this sense of disconnect. I do think that poetry is a way that we try to connect further somehow. If not with the other side (whatever that side will be), with our own selves, with our own thinking, with other meanings, trying to make connections.”

“I think that the end of this narrative is that ultimately this will all come together, painfully so, but in a way that shapes this world to be in a better place, in a better direction.”

“There’s no question that the imperial aspects of our republic today, that which we call the United States of America, are eating away at our soul, much the way they ate Rome’s soul or they ate Britain’s soul.”