I'm not a good reader. I had to take remedial reading in school. I was a slow reader and therefore it's tough for me to stay interested in things long enough, I've read, probably, since college maybe 10 books, which is disgusting.
My parents instilled in me the value of learning and encouraged me to succeed in school.
I was nurtured in the church; I went to a Catholic school; I was an altar boy; I went to a Catholic university; I was steeped in the moral tradition of the Catholic Church. My Catholicism plays a very strong role. But I thought President John F.Kennedy answered rather well when he said that ultimately my conduct as a public official does not come ex cathedra from Rome; it comes from my conscience.
I had received some minor indie label interest when I was 14 after I was in a schools music competition thing in NZ called 'Rockquest', but I knew it wasn't the right time and that I wasn't good enough and needed to concentrate on school.
I was always keen to get involved in the school drama productions and was a member of the school choir. I was lucky to have attended schools that took music and drama very seriously and the teachers were just brilliant.
I was home-schooled. My mom wasn't a fan of public school systems.
Early rejections are really tough, especially when all of your friends who you went to school with now have legitimate jobs, are getting married, having children, buying real estate, being adults. And you're still trying to figure out how to make a living doing the thing you think you love, but you're not even sure yet because you haven't even done it. It was a long road of risk and treachery.
I grew up Irish Catholic with a bunch of kids at Catholic school.
I didn't have a regular school experience and wanted a more abstract way of learning. I started exploring in lots of different creative ways. It gave me the opportunity to travel and play music, so it was good for me.
I had a tough time fitting in, as I guess most kids do. I felt like school was kind of a grand opportunity to figure yourself out and to figure out what you wanted.
Being bullied is something I experienced in school, and it is not fun.
Girls in my school were always prettier.
When my friends who were college age took a year off of school, they'd play in Weatherbox, or between high school and college. People always joined on a short-term basis and I did things one day at a time, I guess. There was never a big plan when someone was joining. They were never joining on a full-time membership basis. Since then, we just deal with it. I'd like to have a band that's a total constant, but it's probably not realistic at some point.
I was basically 18 when I got offered to join Mister Valentine band and go on tour and leave high school. I was pretty stoked on that, but the band wasn't really my style so after like six months of playing with them I decided to play with the aesthetic of a DIY hardcore band playing pop music. That was the original idea.
All over Montana, you can walk into a bar, a café or even a school or a courthouse and just listen for a while as people talk to each other. And you will hear somebody, before very long, say something outrageously racist.
I worked my way through law school.
A public school-educated stockbroker, who wants to shrink the state and let the markets rip, who reinvented himself as a man of the people and convinced millions of disillusioned working-class voters he was on a mission to smash the rich elite he belonged to.
Americans are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American is what they live for.
I got into Kiss before I got into anybody. The first thing I heard was Detroit Rock City. I heard it in the school library, where I lived.
It also helps that what Dan Slott is doing with Peter Parker in the comics has elevated him to something else, so that Miles Morales at the moment is the more traditional Spider-Man figure in the universe: the high school student trying to balance high school and superheroics, and he can't catch a break. That was Peter's role, but it's not his role anymore, and it's Miles' role. That was given to me, and it's pretty cool.
I was in the hospital for a month and a half of my first-grade year, so I missed a lot of school. I remember that I returned home from the hospital and there was a bicycle waiting for me in front of the house, a yellow and red bicycle with a big banana seat on it. This was 1980, and it's still my favorite bike.
I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.
How is it possible that our parents lied to us?" "Lets see: Santa, the Tooth Fairy,the Easter bunny,um, God. You're the prettiest kid in school. This wont hurt a bit. Your face will freeze like that..." "Everythings going to be alright.
At that point, I thought probably special effects, something like that, and indeed, the early days when I was working with my dad, after I left school, I only went to less than one year of college, and then I was transferring, and then I delayed my transfer, and I did a movie, and then another movie, and then I never finished college.
When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.
