Leon Redbone Quotes

In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.

I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.

I played Othello at RADA - blacked up. I didn't know it was going to be offensive now!

When I decided to make 'Blackface,' a short film about Black Pete, I had little knowledge of the giant cesspool of hate I was about to dive into. I didn't realize how popular and passionate many white Dutch are about a figure that they connect to fond memories from their childhood.

Not that long ago - in my parents' lives, in fact - actors in minstrel shows wore blackface to mimic and mock African Americans. These performances were based in contempt and gave people an opportunity to act out their prejudices.

I think when black performers performed in blackface, they were kind of taking back slave songs, but it was still a little bit iffy because they were performing, a lot of times, for white audiences who found it hilarious.

Just reading that - just reading that a person can be black and still perform in blackface, making fun of black people for a living, and at the same time be a genius and be an incredible entertainer and at the same time be extremely conflicted and feel like - just feel terrible for doing that, essentially, which is what Bert Williams felt, from what I gather, from what I read - all of that just made - was so incredible to me.

You know it's going to hell when the best rapper out there is white and the best golfer is black.

I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.

I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

The exposure I have had to beautiful materials across the world, from Japan to Italy, enables me to pull design ideas together. This, combined with years of historical research, has created a great fountain of ideas for me.

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

I think the Beatles is one band that, if I'm working on a song arrangement or if I have some idea for a song, and there's a little bit of a Beatles quality to it, I never avoid that. I always will steer into it.

When I was studying comedy in Chicago, it wasn't long after 9/11. There were a lot Middle Eastern comedians who were doing bits about hailing cabs and being terrorists. So the first two years, I didn't do any of that because I wanted to separate myself from those guys. But race is a big part of who I am, and it should be a big part of my comedy.

My great-grandmother was in one of the first girl bands, in the 1920s. Their outfits were mental: velvet bloomers with big ribbons and headpieces. They were brilliant.

Actually, the only thing that I can honestly say I really regret now is the blackface thing. I did not understand.

We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.

I have a huge issue with blackface.

I think, in history, everything is about the remix.

When you are playing somebody who did exist, and there is good source material on them, whether it is a biography or archives or experts, you would be stupid not to delve into them. But there is a point in the process where you leave the books alone, and instead, you focus on the script and creating your version.

Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.

The underground always has the best ideas. Sometimes those underground artists transcend and make it to the mainstream, but most of the time, the big guys just steal from us.

It's important to understand you can't remove the historical context of racially charged stereotypes or slurs as much as we like to pretend that we can.