A Quote by Leslie Odom, Jr.

It's still a political statement to stand on stage as a person of color and be excellent. We still need those images to combat the narrative we're often fed - as someone innately inferior or inexorably linked with lack.
For a long time, images of black men with big lips and a round head were used to make us feel inferior, but it doesn't need to be like that, we don't need to self'loathe. We can change the narrative.
Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.
During my stage shows, I am so energetic. It's constant! I just don't stand still. I actually got given a mic stand from my team to say 'Just calm down. Stand still for at least two songs.' But now I just pick it up and walk around with it.
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world. That woman-a pieta. Those men, rough angels with an unknown message. The children holding hands, spanning time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you need to know.
I see women who have this struggle between what they know is right, what they know is necessary, what they know is healthy, what they know is good for them, what they know is good for the work that they need to do, what they know is good for their bodies, what they know is good for their families - all too often ending that statement with the upturned question mark: "If it's okay with everyone?" Still asking, still requesting, still filing petitions for somebody to say that it's all right.
The images that people see in the media of black people - whether journalistic or narrative - remain horrible. And those images, combined with the lack of respect among black people in the poorer neighborhoods for themselves, and the part the police and other people coming into those neighborhoods play, it creates no value for life.
I feel like I'm still discovering my stage style, but I love - well, I'm not a huge color person onstage, but I am in real life.
The Democrats, because they are the media, still establish the narrative for Washington every day. And whatever that narrative is, the Republicans - for some reason (I think it's force of habit and years and years of conditioning) - still become subservient to whatever that narrative is.
The problem in the Syrian opposition is not between Islamists and non-Islamists. It was the lack of any political experience after 50 years of no political experience. The problem was a lack of political organizations that are truly effective and powerful. This is still a challenge now; it is a weakness in the reality of Syrian political life.
People who consider themselves political, who follow political developments most rigorously, are often those who view the political process with the greatest lack of perspective.
Algorithms learn by being fed certain images, often chosen by engineers, and the system builds a model of the world based on those images. If a system is trained on photos of people who are overwhelmingly white, it will have a harder time recognizing nonwhite faces.
Those with dementia are still people and they still have stories and they still have character and they're all individuals and they're all unique. And they just need to be interacted with on a human level.
I would love to say that I'm a humanist, but I think the word "feminist" still needs to exist to acknowledge that there's still a problem. It's a statement; we're not equal yet. There's still a fight to be fought.
Animals see a video of the world. If an animal were only to see still images, how would its vision develop? Neuroscientists have run experiments in cats in a dark environment with a strobe so it can only see still images - and those cats' visual systems actually underdevelop. So motion is important, but what is the algorithm?
I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives. ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened.
We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.
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