"Like a lot of my most recent reads, I found a copy of this in my local Underground station book swap/donation area. It's a very moving and insightful, disturbing and sometimes humorous account of Ben coming to terms with a rare illness, a massive change to his life, and the seemingly unending search for clarity about his condition, and an improvement in his health. It is gripping from the first page, and barely touches on his music career, focusing much more on family and his experiences with the NHS. I’ve not read anything else quite like it."

"Actually, a great book is Billy Idol's book (Dancing With Myself). I don't consider it a rock memoir, though. That guy is such a deep figure. It's a deep, self-searching book about his life, his motorcycle accident and just all the crap he went through. I knew that he wrote it himself without help and that really impressed me. I know Billy a little bit. I really look up to him. I was hoping that it was going to be good. It was. Right away, in the foreword, it seemed he found his writing voice."

"Both of these films are in the box set America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, which is a masterpiece. It’s too bad companies like BBS don’t exist anymore. These two films capture loneliness and melancholy in a way that affects me deeply, yet they also have humor and beautiful open endings. There are moments in the performances in The Last Picture Show—Cloris Leachman’s final scene with Timothy Bottoms, or Ben Johnson’s scene at the water tank, just to name a few—that are stunning. The film also has incredible mood and feeling, and sometimes that’s more important than anything."

"The documentarians David and Albert Maysles found some real-life Tennessee Williams characters in Edith and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, mother and daughter eccentrics holed up for years in a sagging, cat-and-raccoon-infested mansion in otherwise grand East Hampton. The ladies’ kinship with cousin Jackie Bouvier Kennedy explains their old-money sense of entitlement, but nothing can explain why two people would want to hammer away at each other for decades on end the way these two trapped souls do. Except that maybe you’d do the same thing under the same circumstances. I’d like to think I would, anyway."