"This is Katharine Hepburn’s second movie, and it’s directed by a female director, Dorothy Arzner, who’s one of only a couple of prominent female film directors during the sound era of the 20th Century. It’s just a really interesting film about a supposedly liberated woman, and how she navigates a professional life and a personal life, and how she kind of stays trues to her ideals in a world where – while there may be rhetoric supporting the idea of a new woman – really what the world values is women being domestic. Katharine Hepburn plays basically an Amelia Earhart-type aviatrix who has never had a romance, and she ends up meeting and falling in love with a married man who has never been unfaithful to his wife, and disaster ensues. The name of the film is the name of the man that she falls in love with, but it’s definitely her story."

"Every aspect of the movie is excellent. There isn’t one wrong move — from the script, to the acting, to the music. It’s such a beautiful human story about an individual struggle set against the corrupt unions screwing over the dock workers. So, you have this social background for the situation, and then you have the personal human journey of the brother of one of these union mobsters, who has to sort of turn on his own people. Marlon Brando pretty much rocked the cinema with this new style of acting, and you can never go back to Cary Grant. As wonderful as Cary Grant is, Marlon Brando changed the game. Karl Malden has one of the greatest movie monologues of all time as the priest in the docks, encouraging everyone to take a stand. He was like the first Norma Rae. I have the soundtrack on my iPod. I love great movie soundtracks, and I consider that one of those."

"One of my favorite films is Red Sorghum, by Zhang Yimou, who’s an incredible director — just incredibly visual. The way that he shoots a film and takes a time in history and connects it to somebody; he takes a moment in somebody’s life and also connects it historically to what happened between the Japanese and the Chinese during the war. I just think it’s so elegantly done. It sort of shows not just what’s going on in the family itself, but links that personal story — you get involved in that and then connected to the backdrop of the war, how their family, how their business all kind of connects. It’s incredibly heartbreaking and very real. It was very impactful. I saw it when I was in college, and I was destroyed. [Laughs] Destroyed by that movie. There’s a quality in his movies that really stands out, that I haven’t really seen in a lot of other movies."

"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! "

"I had to chop out Songs Of Love & Hate by Leonard Cohen, but I've got a later man-and-acoustic-guitar record that I think I like a little more. What I've got in now is October Language by Belong. The first Belong album is just synthesised guitar noise but incredibly serene and beautiful. It's a pretty unique record. The only record that I could compare it to through personal experience is Endless Summer by Fennesz, the so-distorted-that-it-starts-to-confuse-you guitar noise. It's just a wonderful record. It's a great record to listen to while travelling. I think that's the best circumstance to listen to music in. Where did I discover it? Probably record shopping. I'm really good friends with the guys who work in Monorail, and they have quite a good gist of what music I like, so there's a good chance I went in and they threw it at me and said 'this has got you written all over it'."