"One of my all-time favorite bands. What I admire about them so much is that they ‘learned to unlearn.’ Jimmie Vaughan had perfected techniques on the guitar to the point where he could keep up with the best of them, as had the rest of the lineup. They recognized the idiom of the blues as an art form long before people talked about it in such a way. Everybody in the band had done their homework and figured out that this wasn’t some simplistic, sports bar music; this was serious business. But they dished it out in a way that was both fierce and casual. I think this is one of the finest interpretations of the blues that has ever found its way to the marketplace. Not a bad moment anywhere. It’s a beauty."

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."