The importance of keeping some old-fashioned values.

Question: Are you religious?

Crosley:  I’m not religious in the fact that I don’t practice so I’m not religious by any standard of any human being that’s ever made up a religion or developed any sort of theology. I’m not religious in that sense. But I do believe in God and not just in that gee, whiz, I’m pretty sure there’s something bigger than us. I think there’s a God. And he doesn’t want me blogging. He doesn’t want that. I’m not excessively religious.

Question: Is society becoming too secular?

Crosley:  I think it’s becoming less structured than it should be. Maybe it’s just a matter of taking yourself a decade ahead and then looking back on the ‘90s. What do you even call them? The ought ofs? I don’t even know what they’re going to be called. Someone should figure that out. Maybe someone has. But it’s a matter of maybe it’s the time period and you need to look back and say okay, that was clearly this. This was grunge. This was the time period of fake memoirs. This was the time period when there were random school shootings. This was the time period when there was a lot of tie dye and Technicolor. Whatever you want. Maybe it’ll just be as simple as this was the time period when Bush ruled the land. But it feels a little unstructured to me right now. It feels like people don’t feel a part of something the way they did, even in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I felt a little bit disconnected and it’s easy to blame the web, which is funny because maybe the web is what we’re part of. Maybe no one wants to admit that. Everyone says it’s sort of obscuring our humanity and I’m like maybe that’s it. And religion seems to, in a weird way, follow that same kind of path. I don’t really know many people who are religious. I don’t know. I think that maybe everyone should just be in therapy. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the church.

Question: Is society obsessed with overachievement?

Crosley:  New York can be but you have to be. I guess you don’t have to be but it’s certainly hard to-- You see what all your friends are doing, especially if you work in the arts and have some sort of palpable way of measuring achievement, of saying you’ve painted this many paintings and that kind of thing. Then again, I guess that’s how it works for dollars signs and court cases won and heart surgeries completed as well. I don’t think it’s too overachieving. Is that the question? I think that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Aren’t you supposed to want more and to want to succeed? I think the ideal thing really, and what any good overachiever should want is to succeed as much as they can within the confines that are provided to them; to get as far as they can in their job or in whatever creative endeavor they want to pursue and then break out of it and do something that someone else hasn’t done before. That is exceedingly ridiculously hard. I’m talking about like George Plimpton or a new kind of heart surgery. That’s sort of the goal, I guess.