"I've been listening to her for years, but I just watched a documentary about her – so much raw emotion! And free of so many complications that music has sometimes. The music is just very direct, simple and strong, free of filigree. She's direct to the heart. Her intimate collaboration with Portugal's poets is admirable. She definitely stuck by her rifles. And it's good to know that she was part of making the fado style. I first came across it, I would guess, 15 years ago. It has the same rawness as flamenco but it's less flamboyant, and more stern and stark somehow."

"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."

"It’s hard to pick which of Kurosawa’s films is my favorite, since they’re pretty much all top-ten worthy. But for sheer spectacle and beauty, Ran is pretty hard to beat. The cinematography is unreal, the acting heightened and emotional, and his use of music and sound (and the sometimes dramatic lack of it) shows a master at the top of his game. I’ve lived my life by the Kurosawa quote “An artist is one who never averts his eyes.” Make sure you don’t avert your eyes from this classic! (Yes, I just said that. You’re welcome, Criterion!)"

"A really good punk song. They had a really great ear for punk. They actually fused punk with metal, but it wasn't 70s Punk, it was kinda new wave punk. That's what I get from it, anyway: The Exploited, and Anti-Pasti. They probably weren't listening to it, but that's what I get. And there's obviously a bit of glam in there from the New York Dolls. "The songs are slightly ruined by the fucking production. It's a bit too much, and sometimes Axl's voice borders on the insane - it's like, 'what the fuck is that?' - but that's rock, isn't it?"

"I’m trying to remember records from when I was going through the most teenage, the most angsty periods of my life. I’ve got kids now, I listen to the radio sometimes, a I feel like as a teenager, what are you into? When I was at that age it was Portishead, I remember it soundtracking weird parties I went to where some kids were being more experimental with drugs. I remember it being quite an odd soundtrack to that time. And I think they’re a really brilliant band, one of a few uniquely British propositions, only Britain could produce that kind of group."

"I love that movie, when I was a kid I went to the movie theater and saw it 14 times the first weekend. You could see it over and over, they wouldn’t kick you out of the theater back then, so I would just stay there everyday and watch it. To this day, I still love that movie. I think it was brilliant. Sometimes with things like that, you attach a certain period of your life to it, and I saw this when I was a kid. If I’d been 40 years old in 1966, maybe I would have felt differently."