Optimism Print

When I was very young, my older brother exposed me to a lot of punk rock music and he had several rare albums that featured small collaborations with Noam Chomsky. Bad Religion, Crass, and Chumbawamba. I was a bit young at the time, so I didn’t fully understand them, but they were very compelling. Later, I worked for an animation company in San Francisco as an in-betweener. There was a guy there named Roger who had literally hundreds of hours of cassette tapes and CDs with interviews and speeches by Noam Chomsky. I would sit for eight hours a day, every day, in-betweening animation (using a light table and paper and pencil), with an IV of Noam Chomsky’s ideas plugged into my brain. It was a really intense, wonderful experience. I never went to college, so I don’t have a special academic mentor. My disposition, as a person though, is very much rooted in thoughts and ideas, so Noam Chomsky has been that mentor for me. Since that time in San Francisco, I’ve seen him speak, read several of