I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I read quite a few slave narratives and stories of escape, and I grew up in Ohio, which was a common stop on the Underground Railroad.
Out of every 10 scripts I get sent, seven are fairly generic about an American guy who gets the girl and is involved in underground espionage activity.
The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.
Though gay lifestyles have certainly moved into the open, there's little evidence that society has become more open in its basic attitudes or that entertainers should feel cozy in emerging from the velvet underground.
To me, 'Underground Luxury' is kinda like a contrasting title, and the reason for that is because on this album I plan on introducing to people and reintroducing to people the side of me that they didn't see on the first album.
In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.
As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.
I just like being on my own on trains, traveling. I spent all my pocket money travelling the London Underground and Southern Railway, what used to be the Western region, and in Europe as much as I could afford it. My parents used to think I was going places, but I wasn't, I was just travelling the trains.
Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.
It's man's work. My dad was gone at 4:30 in the morning and home at 8 at night, and he worked underground, and the last mine he worked in was 26 inches high in a lot of places. He liked the engineering of it - he liked the moving the earth and being able to extract something and put it back for reclamation. He enjoyed the whole process.
I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.
Us comics guys tend to get really good at the things we draw a lot. I'm good at creepy old forests, Victorian houses, underground goblin cities, and beautiful but creepy fairies.
In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.
The air that people breathe in many Chinese cities has become dangerously polluted. Their food supply is subject to constant contamination scandals. Now it appears that not merely stagnant ponds but the water people draw from deep underground is already tainted.
I have a tremendous support from a lot of the Underground fans. They believe in me, they want to see me do well, and they're behind me. But there are a lot of people out there who don't believe it, and so I want to separate perception and reality. I want to be able to do that.
The first show I ever played was the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, Washington. It was girl night, and I was in Heavens To Betsy. I had just turned 18.
Ultimately, the issue is not whether you are pro- or anti-sports betting. You begin, from my standpoint, from the premise that it is going to continue to exist, and if it is going to continue to exist, should it be shoved underground, or should it be regulated?
I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.
Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country.