"It’s probably not cool to admit you don’t quite get a cult movie. But it’s probably better than trying to act cool by pretending you really dig a movie that you don’t fully understand. There are several other films on the Criterion label that I could expound on sincerely and endlessly: Life of Brian, Robocop, Straw Dogs, Hard Boiled, and The Red Shoes, for example. Instead, for the eleventh movie in my top ten, I would like to include a film that has become something of an intangible Magic Eye picture for me: Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. There is no movie that I have watched more often in an attempt to unpeel and unravel it. I have seen the film many times, first on Alex Cox’s BBC2 series Moviedrome, once at the theater, and many times in this very Criterion edition. Hell, I even visited some of the locations on a Route 66 trip. Still, I’ll admit that the movie is an endearing puzzle for me. I may not be the right age or nationality to fully crack the enigma of this movie, but the fact that I haven’t stopped trying in twenty-three years has to stand for something. Ryan O’Neal’s character from The Driver and Kowalski from Vanishing Point I feel I can race alongside, but James Taylor and Dennis Wilson always seem way ahead of me, their Chevy a mirage in a heat haze. But the fact that I’m talking about it now and waxing lyrical over it means that it has got under my skin in a way that other movies haven’t. And I will continue to pursue this film, even if I never quite catch up."

"About 15 pages into Paul Beatty’s The Sellout: A Novel, I had the great realization that this book was different, so I started over to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. It’s laugh-out-loud funny over and over because it’s shocking and unpredictable, but even more amazing is the feeling of familiarity that comes from the narrator’s voice. Why do I feel like I know this guy? I don’t. According to Wikipedia, Beatty is from Los Angeles and (also according to Wikipedia) I am from Washington DC, so it’s not some hyper-local humor (that was my first guess). Also according to Wikipedia he was born in 1962, and I was born in 1978… so we’re not of the same hyper-small generation (apparently “X-enial” is the lame term for me… Caught between those damned cynical Gen-Xers and those damned faux-sincere Millennials [Wikipedia]). So there goes my second guess. So what is it? The truth is, I’ve thought about it and I don’t know. Apparently he said he wrote it “because he was broke,” and something transcends in the back-to-the-wall, earnest rawness that could only come from someone who feels like they might have nothing to lose. This book takes on the very sensitive and heated subject of race relations in America. A New York Times interview quotes him as saying “I feel like there is a point to be made… [but] I don’t know what it is.” I will leave it there and not try to analyze what the book’s point might be. I will say that it is profoundly powerful and heavy, precisely because it is so funny and unpredictable — and that is why I think it’s the greatest piece of art created this decade."