"Morrissey's a big Sparks fan; it must be a Manchester thing for people whose surnames start with 'Morris'. Sparks are kind of elusive; sometimes you'll hear something by them and think it's rubbish, but I keep going back to No. 1 In Heaven because it's a disco record that has Giorgio Moroder - and the thing about Moroder is that he was using sequencers, but there's real playing over the top of them. It wasn't like machine music; it has synthesisers and it is robotic, but it's got a disco groove about it. And I like that Russel Mael has got a weird voice; you just can't understand it. Me and Gillian have always tried to do a song that sounds like No. 1 In Heaven, but it's never worked out. I kind of see a parallel with that particular sound and when we were becoming New Order."

"A perfect movie. Too perfect for me the first time I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971. It went right by me. The same thing happened the first time I had dinner at Chez Panisse. Sometimes an aesthetic experience is so sure-handed and flawless it’s beyond your ability to absorb it. I returned to Rules of the Game after seeing Grand Illusion and my favorite Renoir, The Crime of M. Lange. In fact, I saw a whole retrospective of his work before I realized what I had missed the first time I saw Rules of the Game. “Everyone has his reasons” is more than a line of dialogue; it is a comment on the true nature of what makes us so painfully human. Twenty-five years of meals and a day in the kitchen of Chez Panisse has taught me how they make a masterpiece right."

"Full disclosure: Amy is a friend, and I have tasted her cupcakes. They’re really, really good. (And that is not a euphemism.) I Like You is a spin on those 1960s cookbooks about how to make a nice home and how to entertain. I picked it because I love the character Amy plays: a hostess from the ’60s, in cheap hosiery, wigs, and crazy costumes. But it’s also got recipes for a delicious meatloaf and advice on how to deal with drunk guests. My favorite tip is that when you’re having a party, you should fill your medicine cabinet with marbles—so that when people are snooping, they get caught. I know that Amy really does like to entertain that way. Sometimes she’ll charge people 25 cents to take a picture with a stuffed rabbit. The book is hilarious, beautifully designed, and captures Amy in so many ways"

"As a child, I wanted to grow up to be a professional cartoonist, and when I was about twelve or thirteen my father (right around the time he showed me The Rocky Horror Picture Show) handed me a Washington Post article about Robert Crumb and said, “Here, you might be interested in this.” And boy, was he right! Like finding out that the Cramps and Meet the Feebles existed, this was revelatory. I didn’t know you were allowed to make art like this. (And of course, in Crumb’s case, sometimes you’re not.) Zwigoff’s portrait-of-the-artist-as-nihilistic-misanthrope is one of the all-time great docs about creativity and the toll it can take (see Burden of Dreams for another one!), and on top of that, it’s caustically funny and soul-crushingly humane. Where have you gone, Terry Zwigoff? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you."