I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.

I like the feeling of not knowing where to look when you are only performing for one person or watching someone practice. It creates this kind of a strange in-between, which can be mirrored in the feeling of making a painting.

There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.

The crisis of the old order in Europe produced nearly 80 years of often bloody conflict between democracy and its foes from 1914 to 1991.

By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority.

Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.

I've talked about that with friends, about what genre makes sense to choose for each record and the strategy around that... Sometimes it's more about the moment of time, and other times it's more about the sound of the song. Sometimes it's about what's going on in larger life, in politics.