"The lead singer for Deerhunter, Bradford Cox... I don’t like saying people are geniuses or whatever, but I just think that dude is so good at every single thing he does. He stays within his genre, but I think he does so well experimenting with stuff. He has two different bands. It’s just amazing how much he can expand over the one genre and make it radical. It’s a band I stumbled on and I was just pleasantly surprised by them. I really love all of Deerhunter’s stuff and they’re not afraid to get experimental which is really cool."

"Early in our marriage my husband gave me The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin and published by Harvard University Press. What an amazement to see her poems in her own hand, intact in their radical, astonished beauty without the many editorial interventions made after her death which silently “corrected” and altered her grammar, idiosyncratic capitalization, punctuation, and much else. I could even see the alternate word-choices she left on the page—that feeling of the mind in motion. Recently, New Directions published The Gorgeous Nothings, which beautifully reproduces her late envelope writings and includes as well a photo of the small pencil she carried in the pocket of her dress—another book to treasure"

"A shocking parable for authoritarian populism. There’s nothing else like Canoa. Although Cazals and cinematographer Álex Phillips Jr. use only static shots, the movie is structurally fleet, shuffling chronology and cycling between faux-documentary, historical re-creation, and purely dramatic modes. I can’t think of anything else that so successfully fuses dyed-in-the-wool radical filmmaking and horror. There’s a wry on-screen narrator who creates this Brechtian distancing effect and manages to sound sinister while providing facts and statistics about life in rural communities, and by the end we’re in something like the Jonestown machete massacre. Ostensibly less outré yet harder to swallow than Salò, this is an unsettling, essential gem."

"For most other filmmakers, making a movie as good as Mysterious Object at Noon would be a crowning achievement. Because it’s Apichatpong, the film is usually considered relatively minor, a promising start. That’s nuts. A portrait of the collective imagination of Thailand, the movie doesn’t just anticipate many of his long-term themes––memory, the boundaries between real and unreal, dislocation––it explores them deeply, intricately, and with a radical appetite for play and invention. Neither documentary nor fiction, and existing somewhere between the total control of his later features and the experimental spryness of his short films and gallery work, it’s a unique masterpiece by the best filmmaker in contemporary cinema."

"The whole range of arguments in that book is quite radical and complex and beautiful. It’s the first book I’ve read by an author, masculine or feminine, that has a defiance of the situation, which is deeply subversive in the holy sense – it’s other-worldly. She says that this world is stained by human misconception, that men and women have wrong ideas – even if they are ten million years old and come from the mouth of god, they are still wrong! The position in that book is so defiant and passionate that she creates another reality and just might be able to manifest it. It’s from that kind of appetite, with the way things are that new worlds arise, so I have deep admiration for Andrea Dworkin."

"Well, speaking of authenticity, if you are going to be authentic then you really have to do it right. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, what Bert Jansch was doing as a young man was deeply authentic and was genuinely very weird. Bert was a young person very much of his time but was making music that almost sounded ancient. From the guitar-playing point of view, he was innovating on an acoustic guitar in a way that was as powerful as Pete Townshend with electricity in The Who and as intricate as what Jimi Hendrix was doing with his space rock-blues. Vocally, Bert was almost punky and in the way he and his peers went about their lives, he was one of the very first lo-fi musicians - and that was 40 or 50 years ago. Bert was one of my few real heroes. I got to be friends with him for about ten years before he died. He was an amazing person and because we were friends I got to find out that the lifestyle choice of the folkies in Soho in the 60s was a very deliberate and radical. They made certain choices and the fact their music was not in the charts was no accident. In Bert's case, he was the king of the UK beats as a result of the beat poet influence on his generation. Also, he was tuned into the political climate of the time and things like the CND movement and the radical student scene. Bert was a lot more than an earnest folky with an acoustic guitar. I particularly like his second record. The album before it [1965's Bert Jansch] is more revered and held up by most journalists as being the seminal one, but I think the songs are better on It Don't Bother Me, particularly the title track. The fact that they were both recorded in a kitchen at his mate's house is another reason why it has never dated."