I volunteered at a homeless shelter in preparation for 'Being Flynn,' and when I'm walking along the Bowery, that's the first thing that comes to mind. That's a nice memory.
The first time I was homeless was when I went to Atlanta. I was in a homeless shelter, then when I got a job I used to miss the curfew for the shelter. So I ended up sleeping outside in the streets.
All of us who covered the Reagans agreed that President Reagan was personable and charming, but I'm not so certain he was nice. It's hard for me to think of anyone as 'nice' when I hear him say 'The homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless.'
I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )
Shortly after my first daughter was born in 2007, we had to move into a homeless shelter.
Half of NYC's homeless populations are families.Homeless people have been ignored for too long. I'll just say this: If you are a family on the brink of eviction you are 80% less likely to get evicted if you have legal counsel. However, there is no right to legal counsel in housing court.It would cost the city $12,500 to grant that family legal counsel. Meanwhile, the average stay for a homeless family in a shelter once they have been evicted cost the city $45,000. So not only does it seem like the right thing to do morally, it's also the right thing to do fiscally.
Staying in a hotel this time. They put me up in a little bit of a shithole. Yeah. Just this side of rinky dink. The first 7 floors are a homeless shelter, but I'm on 8.
The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.
They say people are fundamentally interested in only three things - food, sex and shelter. I can't say I'm authoritative on the first two, although I'm in favor of both. It's shelter that concerns me, and it's nice to be doing something people are interested in.
As far as vocal preparation goes, it's really an interesting thing for such a fragile instrument and using it properly is like walking a tightrope. I have learned not to do extensive warm-ups. It's really more of a cerebral mind-body connection Zen hippy thing, just knowing your body and figuring out if I do that then I will be able to speak tomorrow.
So many people that we met had some sort of connection to the [Olympics] games. Some story about how they volunteered there, or some sort of memory of it. It still is in the cultural memory and identity of these cities as much as it is in the physical and architectural memory. It's where these two things overlap, I think, that we're trying to explore with the photos.
You have to be reminded of a basic fact: intelligence belongs to the watching consciousness; memory belongs to the mind. Memory is one thing - memory is not intelligence. But the whole of humanity has been deceived for centuries and told indirectly that the memory is intelligence. Your schools, your colleges, your universities are not trying to find your intelligence; they are trying to find out who is capable of memorizing more. And now we know perfectly well that memory is a mechanical thing. A computer can have memory, but a computer cannot have intelligence.
Leigh Bowery is a legend. Everybody loves Leigh Bowery. Everybody should love Leigh Bowery.
I don't mind comments saying things about me. I do mind them saying things about those young, brave men and women who have volunteered. That's offensive to me that people would say those kind of comments about Americans who have volunteered to take the fight to the enemy.
I'm not sure why working at a homeless shelter made sense to me, except that I needed to immerse myself in some sort of larger real-life situation to get me out of the cage of my mind, in some ways.
My father had taught me to be nice first, because you can always be mean later, but once you've been mean to someone, they won't believe the nice anymore. So be nice, be nice, until it's time to stop being nice, then destroy them.
I was an extra on 'New York Undercover.' I played a person at a homeless shelter.