"It was the first record I ever bought with my own money. I was 12 and I chose it because of the cover: I thought David Bowie looked really cool. I loved how weird the album was: it’s a combination of avant-garde and some really great pop songs. I can listen to it endlessly and it’s still one of my favourite records. I think when I was a kid I was responding to Bowie’s androgyny but I just didn’t realise it because I was too young. There was just something about his image and the way that he presented himself that really rang true with me and I found that really exciting. I think that, for me, music is very genderless and that’s what I feel about his music specifically. When I write music it doesn’t feel like it’s restricted by any gender norms and that’s always what I look for in other artists as well."

"Once the Seattle scene exploded and the band names became living-room buzzwords, Dinosaur Jr. got a modicum of recognition. They deserve a little more. If there is such a thing left as the avant-garde – as you know, all of the foreboding walls of the forbidden zone have been removed – it seems to me that Dinosaur Jr. have a bit of an edge. Nirvana was everywhere you went at that time. I was living in Laguna Beach. Some friends stopped in for a visit and we wound up on Balboa Island. To get to the other side there were two routes: the roundabout way, or a small five-car ferry that makes the short hop across. I remember waiting in line to board the ferry and some cute young barefooted hippie chick walked up to the car window and, out of the clear blue, gazed in with a smile and said, ""It smells like teen spirit in here."" I was going, wow. Okay.
"

"The idea of Stan Brakhage’s films being transferred to DVD once seemed heretical. The preeminent avant-garde filmmaker of the past half century, Brakhage made hundreds of intense films, many of them silent, that seem to be pure celluloid expression—poetic visual studies based on the play of light, tactile editing, and frame-by-frame editing. He worked mainly in 16 mm, but also made movies that were painstakingly hand-painted onto IMAX-size frames. Yet shortly before his death, Brakhage embraced the idea of a Criterion set, acknowledging the reality of a future (okay, present) where his films were more likely to be seen by an individual, perhaps on a laptop, rather than projected in 16 mm to a small film-society audience. The ability to study Brakhage’s films frame by frame, and to read Fred Camper’s superb commentary, also enhances the experience, easing the bittersweet film nostalgia for die-hard celluloid purists."