"Sunset Boulevard is the ultimate film noir for me. It has this incredibly unpleasant main character, who is played with a lot of charm by William Holden, and he thinks he’s really smart, and it turns out that he’s kind of in over his head. I love the environment. I love the way the story is told in flashbacks. I love the sense of Los Angeles. I love the humor in it — it’s a really funny movie — and it’s just one of those iconic things that, if you know the movie, you run into it once a month in some way, especially living in L.A. It’s got great lines in it. There’s incredible dialogue, incredible visual moments. Surprises. It’s a horror movie and a comedy at the same time; it’s all over the place in terms of genre. When I first saw it, I just couldn’t believe that it was a big Hollywood movie made by a studio because it’s so peculiar."

"This wild ride was released in 1959. John Cage reads 90 one-minute texts, while David Tudor creates inventive cacophony in another room, out of hearing; so that any relation between voice and accompaniment is purely accidental, as Cage says in the liner notes, "to suggest that all things – stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and by extension, beings – are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person's mind." Cage's preoccupations include music, mushrooms, and Merce Cunningham; personal anecdotes, Zen proverbs and monk jokes, and lots of modernist name dropping. Tudor's palette includes prepared piano, springs, radios, and existing music, notably Cage's 1958 Fontana Mix. Cage complains that at his readings inevitably "someone comes up afterwards and insists that the continuity was a planned one, in spite of the ideas that are expressed regarding purposelessness, emptiness, chaos, etc." Planned, schmanned! "