"I know everyone expected Bikini Kill. It was on my list, but I wanted to put Huggy Bear, because it was wacky. Nathan [Paine, Gossip guitarist] got me into them. It was pre-internet, pre-everything but I wanna say probably Nirvana helped too. They brought so many great things, like The Raincoats and Bikini Kill to the conversation. I think that was how we knew about them, but Nathan, he had all those 7”.. He would spend his lunch money on records and in fact when we moved to Olympia, when we went into Kill Rock Stars as we were going to be on their label, they told me a story that when Nathan moved there, and he came in, they all went 'You're Nathan'! Because he ordered so many records, they knew who he was. I thought that was so sweet. Also Bikini Kill was never on television, there was no The Word so to be able to see Huggy Bear in mainstream media, on television, that was so cool. See I didn't listen to L7, it wasn't melodic enough for me. Or Babes In Toyland either. It wasn't my 90s. It wasn't silly enough. One of my favourite things is this 90s resurgence because I get to wear all the clothes I wore as a kid. In Utero was gonna be on the list, but I took it off. And if I really wanna get down to the nitty gritty, I woulda put The Wipers, but let's be honest, I heard Nirvana first."

"One of my favorite mini-genres is the B crime movie from the late fifties and early sixties. It was a unique period in American cinema that gave birth to these half-cocked, no-budget movies that were made by some visionary filmmakers. They’re all super raw and gritty, very existential, and absolutely innovative in technique. It’s no wonder that the French New Wave filmmakers all discovered them and ripped them off (I’m looking at you, Jean-Pierre Melville). Movies like Don Siegel’s The Lineup and Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract (both of which have popped up on the new Criterion Channel recently!) embody this subgenre, but the high point for me is Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence, which seems to grow in stature every year. It’s hard to describe it. Imagine if Orson Welles was a crazed junkie on the Bowery in the late 1950s and somehow conned someone out of $20k to make a bleak movie about a hit man. It’s sorta part Point Blank, part Taxi Driver, part Shadows, and it’s as hardboiled as they come. It’s also one of the great New York City movies, with amazing time-capsule photography in all the boroughs and near pristine documentary coverage of streets. The Criterion disc also unearthed another absolute gem: a 1990 documentary in which Baron visits all the locations from the film. Oh, and the Criterion cover art, by comic artist Sean Phillips, is maybe my favorite cover! And the edition also includes a graphic novel based on the film! (Damn, should I have put this first?)"