I never imagine myself as anything. I've never had a goal or any future vision at all. I just do what's in front of me.

People ask me: ‘What is punk? How do you define punk?' Here's how I define punk: It's a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It's just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn't being dictated by a profit motive.

The Corcoran show was actually almost a reportage. The exhibit was, in many ways, pretty unique. It was one of the first pieces about DC culture that doesn't include some marble building or the Kennedy Center.

I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all. I don't take anything back, so I do look after them to some degree. But my main focus is on what I'm doing now.

I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it.

It makes me sad, the way human beings talk smack. It's why I don't like irony. People are too gleeful to put some teeth into something.

I'm not a religious person, and I'm not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples.