"I was 60 in 2014, and we had moved to Brighton. It was the first move that was about lifestyle more than anything else. London has changed quite a lot. Everything interesting that’s happening is happening in the East. Even the central part of the city is dead now. It’s a danger period. I don’t know what effect Brexit is going to have—probably not a good one, because it’s unaffordable now. It’s problematic for the culture of the city and the country. That’s part of how we ended up in Brighton and got to know the Go! Team guitarist Sam Dook, who’s also based there. Cuz is a project from Sam and Mike Watt; Mike sent a bunch of basslines to Sam and then he worked out pieces using the basslines. It’s quite far from something that Mike would develop by himself, it’s more Sam’s world. It’s a really fascinating record, especially the song “Houdini.” Sam is someone that Malka and I play with now. We haven’t done much together yet but we are friends and we are developing something."

"[It] would have to be up there for sheer enthusiasm. I love it for a million reasons. It’s just such a celebration. But I think I also — god not to sound like too much of a shrink — I grew up in a family with lots of divorces and things. Growing up, the first couple I knew that were really, truly like Disney movie in love and devoted to each other was a gay couple. And then one of them died — of AIDS — and I remember I was so young; I was in junior high when it happened. It was still at a time when gay culture was so judged and so reviled in so many places. The movie was such a celebration of song and dance, but also of a gay lifestyle, and it was a beautiful thing to see at that point in my life. For there to be something out there in pop culture that was celebrating and not apologizing [for] all of that — I just thought it was brilliant."

"This is proof that despite the difficulties it is possible to make a wonderful film from a wonderful but very long book, in this case Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which describes the dissolution of the great Sicilian ruling families during the 1860s. Set in the magnificent and sometimes crumbling palaces of Palermo and the arid Sicilian summer countryside, the film shows us the privileged but largely pointless lifestyle of the ruling elite, threatened by political change and their own inertia. One shot in the film encapsulates the message: when the central family arrives at their country estate exhausted from the grueling journey there, they enter the local church and sit in their family pew, along the length of the nave. The camera tracks across their faces, exhausted and gray with dust. The reference is unmistakable; they resemble those mummified bodies held in catacombs under the Capuchin monastery of Palermo, held upright in endless rows, many still in their nineteenth-, even eighteenth-century clothes, rotting and collapsing, covered in the dust of centuries. It is a beautiful example of how much can be said in a single camera shot when used by a master."