"I heard this through a journalist, Michael Azerrad, he's a good guy. We started direct messaging on Facebook or I met him, I don't know what happened, and he said, ""You should listen to this"" and then I got it. He said that you're either going to love it or it'll feel like you're getting punished by having water dripped on your head! And I said, ""Perfect, I'll do that!"" It's incredible; once again, I watched it on YouTube, him performing in Japan, like, ""Fuck, really?! You can do this live?!"" Also, I just like the atonal thing of it and what they get from composing. It's very neutral. I actually used it, it's a total influence, you can totally hear it, on 'Birthday Video', it's on Weeds. I layered a lot of guitars and to my surprise, a lot of these noises start coming through, these sympathetic notes, and I was like, ""Wow-whee! This is cool!"" Totally taken from him, I hear it plain as day. I also got his box set, it's great. He's always got some kind of concept to it. He wrote one for what it would be like on a train ride to the Holocaust [Different Trains], to reach finality. He's got all these studies, drums, all sorts of percussion, but ...18 Musicians, I love it, I listen to it in my bunk in the bus!"

"I watch this with my family a lot. All of the Marx Brothers movies have been very popular in the Columbus household for the last 20 years or so. I was a bit of a dictator making my kids watch these movies. They grew up with them because kids are really reluctant to watch black-and-white films. Our family loved the Marx Brothers films, and for some reason the one that we always went back to, and the one that we were obsessed with, was Horse Feathers. It’s 1932, so that’s going back a long way. Yet at the same time I would show that movie to my kids who were seven and five and three, and they were mesmerized. I learned a lot about comedy and breaking the rules in that movie — in terms of comedy — which extended to seeing movies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and Annie Hall to a certain extent. The Marx Brothers started it all, and it’s smart comedy. The funny thing about the movie is, there are scenes that, still for me and my family, are falling down funny. So they can watch that movie and take away from it — maybe laugh a little harder than they do at some of the more modern comedies. That movie — and there’s like five or six Marx Brothers movies — is just a wonderful sort of family experience and that’s why it’s on the list."

"In many ways the perfect double bill with Young Mr. Lincoln. Democracy in America, Part II. There is a lot of carbon dating at work in this movie (how an interior, a suit, a gesture spell class—as in middle or working—and the historic moment, 1969, in which these classes function); but this unfurling of specificity is there to give us its metaphysical sense and resonance (the essence of labor, its afferent solitude, the pathos of success). A lot has to do with the amount of space the frame encloses and how resolutely off center it chooses to remain. For all its relentless attention to the matter at hand, Salesman is never a claustrophobic film. It is a film that often goes one (or two or three) better on what a long line of American writers (from Dreiser on) have tried to pin down. Which might explain why Salesman often feels like a valentine to a time in film (and society in general) when work defined character, registering the cusp moment after which it will cease to do so. One can look at Salesman and weep when what rules as “documentary” these days comes to mind; one can—maybe naively—take the film as a perfect illustration of what the genre might still produce; one can celebrate the film as definitively proving the inanity of the dichotomy between fiction and documentary. I tend to go for the latter."

"Yojimbo is the most entertaining movie ever made. Kurosawa’s flat-out entertaining. He said “I wanna make a movie that’s delicious enough to eat,” and that’s the way it is — it’s the most entertaining movie you can possibly think of. It’s been redone, as you know, as Fistful of Dollars, and it owes a lot to Red Harvest: It’s about any stranger that comes in to a corrupt town, and there are a lot forces at work. It’s very much like Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett’s novel, in which he puts all the bad forces at work against each other. Yojimbo is hilarious. Toshirô Mifune in as great a role as he ever played, and he’s great in about 20 Kurosawa films. It’s just delightful from first shot, which is him walking along the road and then deciding where to go by throwing a stick up in the air and following the direction the stick lands, and he immediately comes upon a peasant boy who’s leaving home and wants a more exciting life, and that boy is seen throughout the film as he becomes involved in the criminal element in town; and at the end Mifune spares his life and tells him to go back to eating rice or whatever he’s complained about at the very beginning. The photography is phenomenal. Kurosawa’s the greatest filmmaker of all time. The use of lenses, the mise en scène — absolutely spectacular."

"It's just the way that they manage to get so much done in such a short space of time. It's three minutes. Change. Two minutes. Change. But they manage to get all of these beautiful things to happen, and I think you can sense that something amazing is about to happen. With the transition in British pop music at the time, it was losing a lot of the peace and love and starting to get quite moody. It reflected a lot of things that were happening, or at least on the horizon, at the time. The economy, the Vietnam war, the Troubles in Ireland, all of these different things. You could sense that something was happening to The Beatles on Revolver. It was exciting for me as well, because the stuff on this album is a long way off from 'She Loves You'. It was all quite mature and sophisticated. From day one I was a Beatles fan though. Those tunes are infectious and it's impossible not to like them. There's just something about their instant communication that I really love. I still listen to them now, and I find their music very inspiring. They were a direct influence on 'Breaking The Law' and 'Living After Midnight'. Those two songs are straight out of the Beatles songbook as far as simplicity and getting to the point goes. Short, little songs that sail away in a short space of time and are packed with hooks, melody and riffs."

"We've been around them quite a few times in the last three or four years. They have a way of doing this hypnotic, simple, grinding-away thing. The guitarist, Ira Kaplan - he's crazy with all these delay effects, the way he's layering them up. We would end up listening to them almost by accident. There have been a couple of times where we would do these long drives and we'd put on a record like Boris or Yo La Tengo, and they'll have songs that go on for ten minutes, and you're getting into these big soundscapes that just dig into oblivion. We've really embraced that in the past couple of years: to find this perfect goal, a sound you can play over and over, and not necessarily get to a crescendo and back, but to get to the edge and stay there. And they do that great. There's a lot of good qualities about their group. They're fucking weirdos, they're just not a typical rock group. A lot of times, I feel like The Flaming Lips are a typical rock group. I mean, we're influenced by The Beatles. It's a bunch of dudes with long hair that do drugs. We're pretty typical. I try to remind ourselves that we like weirdos, although I don't always believe that we're weirdos ourselves. But we love the weirdos, and we love when they get the keys to the house and they can have their party that night."