"We all know the deal: a group of people want to get together and do something simple—see a movie, drink some coffee, eat some dinner. But it never works out that way. That’s what Buñuel did here, but with greater stakes/steaks on the table. Levity and seriousness, the intrusion of the surreal into the upper crust, forcing a single question at the end: would anyone portrayed in the film actually watch the film? After all, each oneiric explosion in it is something the politesse class doesn’t speak of at the table: sex, death, religion."

"Andy Hull played me this record before it was out in a van when we touring solo together. I read the lyrics and convinced him (over the course of two weeks) that the title HAD to be A Black Mile To The Surface. I also remember really liking the shift in their sound but worrying that it wasn’t going to connect with a lot of people and I was really, really wrong on that front. It’s a record that starts pretty great, but keeps growing and growing on you the more you listen. It gets a lot of spins in our house."

"I saw this one on the evening of its release in New York City. The advance buzz spread fears that it would ignite racial friction and incite race riots. The tension in the audience before it began was nothing I had ever experienced before in a movie house. The melting pot of moviegoers sat in stillness and silence and finally stood up and applauded the screen as the end credits rolled. We walked out of the theater transformed, more united, tolerant, and together than we were two hours before. How many films have ever been able to do that?"

"In the mid-seventies I got more into the art of cinema (and into the arts in general), which coincided with a great period in American cinema. I got seriously hooked on Taxi Driver, Badlands, Days of Heaven. These films with alienated heroes, where landscape becomes soul-scape. They made me realize that cinema can be this amazing space where images, words, faces, landscapes, and music all melt together in a mysterious way. Even now, my favorite films are those that take you out of yourself, that make you enter this other world on-screen. These three films did exactly that to me."

"In the mid-seventies I got more into the art of cinema (and into the arts in general), which coincided with a great period in American cinema. I got seriously hooked on Taxi Driver, Badlands, Days of Heaven. These films with alienated heroes, where landscape becomes soul-scape. They made me realize that cinema can be this amazing space where images, words, faces, landscapes, and music all melt together in a mysterious way. Even now, my favorite films are those that take you out of yourself, that make you enter this other world on-screen. These three films did exactly that to me."

"A coming-of-age story of two young Catholic girls in Ireland. This is a writer who is a woman, a lover, a daughter, a mother and she tries to bring all that together in her work. So few women writers were doing that in the 1960s. Instead, they were writing through a male persona, because they knew that otherwise they wouldn't be taken seriously. But as O'Brien says, 'I am the mother of sons; my sons have given me joy. I am a lover of men, and men have broken my heart -- but they've also given me joy."

"I don’t know how controversial it is in Beach Boys fan circles but I really like the Brother years. It’s as if they’ve all spent years with a genius, learning how to do it, soaking up musical know-how like sponges and then just gone for it themselves. There are some great songs – The Trader is one of my favourites, and Sail On Sailor is one of my wife’s all-time favourite songs. I’m drawn to beauty in music. You can put three chords together and it does something weird to me. It feels a little bit like magic."