"""Among all of Orwell’s great unflinching reportage, this book stands out as a personal odyssey and first-person witness to history. He went to Spain in 1936, during the civil war there, to help fight Fascism. He joined a leftist militia and found himself targeted not only by Franco’s forces but by Stalinists intent on crushing anyone not toeing the Moscow line. Orwell’s descriptions of wartime Barcelona and impoverished rural Spain, his clear-eyed analysis of the shifting factions in the war, are triumphs of tender, hard-headed participant-observation. He was wounded at the front, shot through the throat by a sniper. His peerless moral grasp of the dangers of totalitarianism began in Spain."

"That title track, it really affected me emotionally. I can't really explain why, but it really got under my skin. We were going to a lot of parties and stuff, and that was always the track that was played, and everybody would get up and start dancing to it. I love most of the Bowie stuff, but '"Heroes"' and that whole era, I found it really moving. "Heroes" was a rebellion inspiration, an "I told you so"-type thing. It seemed to be very anti-establishment, and something your parents wouldn't approve of, so we loved it. I've never seen Bowie, though we did play a tour supporting him in South America."

"I think you’ve got to go with the classics. You’ve got to go with The Wizard of Oz. That’s the one that I can think of as a kid you always looked forward to, because when I was a kid, they only aired it at Thanksgiving. You had to wait. There was no DVRs, there was no Netflix. Until the network ran it on Thanksgiving, you didn’t see it. You couldn’t record it, nothing. The fact that it still holds up; it’s one of those movies you can’t redo. You can redo it, but it’s not going to be the same. We found that out with Peter Pan, when they tried to do that."

"Possibly my favorite of the many Cassavetes films I love. Why? Maybe because he found a way to depict the ruthlessness of the Hollywood system, and because of how Cosmo (Ben Gazzara) keeps smiling as he searches for a civil way out of his predicament. It’s very roughly made, which I find touching and refreshing, now that we all seem to fetishize high production values above all else. The cabaret scenes are authentically seedy, even a little pathetic, and are set in an LA that no longer exists. But there’s real tenderness between Cosmo and his black girlfriend and her mother. The story seems to meander in an alive, curious way, even as it drives to its terrible conclusion."