"It’s one of the great ’50s melodramas, and it’s kind of like a musical without the music, but it has a great score, of course. I saw it in my early- to mid-20s, and it just really affected me. It’s about a guy who goes back to his hometown where his brother is a prominent citizen. He’s a stalled-out, blocked writer, and he’s been a soldier, and a worker, and a would-be novelist, and he’s kind of a gambler and a drinker — this is Sinatra, of course, the conflicted one — and he lives in two worlds. Because he’s a published writer, he has the respect of the local English teacher and her brother — the respectable world of literature — but he really has a soft spot for bars and gambling and floozies and the Shirley MacLaine character. And then you’ve got Gwen French, who’s played by Martha Hyer, who’s the uptight school teacher. So it’s all these opposites colliding — respectability, debauchery… It’s wonderfully melodramatic and beautifully made… It’s about male friendship too. I consider it kind of the first Rat Pack movie, although it’s just Dean and Frank with Shirley around too. It doesn’t have a lot of the other people, but it’s the first one to capture these guys gambling and hanging out and that camaraderie. They become roommates and go on, like, a trip to Terre Haute, IN, to go gambling. It’s just wonderful."

"I watched this for the first time at noon on September 28th. I remember the date very well, because it was the same day my own film opened in theaters, an event far less notable to me than finally getting to lay eyes on Luca Guadagino’s remake of one of my all-time favorite horror movies. I was beside myself with excitement. The lights went down in that little subterranean screening room and it didn’t take long for the film to confound every one of my expectations. What did I think I was getting myself into? Something lithely sensual? A blend of horror and eroticism? Any male-gaze-ish expectations I might have had were thwarted early on when Madame Blanc asks Suzie Bannion what it felt like when she performed one of her famous dances. “Like fucking,” says Suzie. “A man?” Blank asks, but Suzie shakes her head. “I was thinking an animal.” Just like that, the movie slapped some sense into me, and then it proceeded to keep slapping me, harder and harder, until it ended and I didn’t know what to think anymore other than that I wanted to watch it again right away. I had to wait until Halloween night. It wasn’t enough. A friend who saw an early cut told me that it was a whole lot of movie. It surely is, and my arms aren’t being enough to hug all of it."

"Robert Ashley is famous for having made these so-called operas, a lot of them were for TV. He works with the voice in these really great ways. I love this record because you don't know exactly what's going on: there's a lot of mystery. You have to piece together what's going on within the minutiae of the musical environment. Or you don't and you just listen and enjoy it. The sounds are very beautiful. Ther's a distant organ in the background just playing this one chord and you can also hear a bass. You can hear this woman whispering in French but you can barely hear her. Then this male singer appears but there's some crazy modulation on his voice. So all these crazy elements combine to create this crazy environment that you want to listen to for maybe ten minutes, because it's not like a song but it's got the elements of a song: you've got a bassline, you've got these instruments playing harmonies and you have voices. But you can't tell what's going on. It has an atmosphere. The album is called Automatic Writing but the track I'm talking about here, specifically, is called 'Automatic Writing'. It's important for me because it reinforced this idea that you could put beauty into music without necessarily using sweet melodies or whatever. I do have that in my music, but I also like the drama that can come from just… voices."