"It was hard to pick a Cure album because they're one of my favourite bands, and one of the bands that has made brilliant albums in very different styles, perfect pop albums. Pornography is a pretty unique record that is just insanely bleak, so hopeless but also really again self-contained and perfect. It's not got a shit song on it, even some of my favourite albums have a song that you can imagine they could have done without, but Pornography is absolutely brilliant in that respect. It's just a really suffocating, druggy, bleak amazing record. I hear there was a lot of drinking… I've never really been party to any studio meltdowns, so these stories are… I mean, maybe I'll have a couple of slices of cake too many. They're always quite fascinating. I was definitely a bit of a goth, and still am at heart, I just have no hair to dye black any more. The Cure were the first band that I got properly into. The Disintegration tour was the first gig I ever saw, when I was 14 or 15 or something. We toured with the Cure, they were great to tour with. There was a party every night, they treated all the bands really well."

"Camille Paglia is one of the most controversial feminists of all time, and also one of the most compelling. This mammoth book, put very shortly, examines the representation of sexuality in Western art. But it also goes into fierce discussion about religion, literature, art history, psychology, the brutal forces of sex and nature, and the amorality and pornography present in great art. As someone who personally writes a lot about sex work, one of my favorite lines in the book is, “The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.”"

"Seventeen Seconds is my favorite Cure album. It wasn’t the first one I heard; I bought Japanese Whispers and then The Head on the Door, both on cassette tape, and used to listen to them while I did my newspaper delivery round at the age of about 15 in Oxford. But then I went back and started getting into the earlier Cure records. With the people I knew, Pornography and Faith were both really big, but I gravitated toward Seventeen Seconds because it was less heavy, more minimal. Like most of their albums, it has its own unique sound. My favorite track off the album is ‘Play for Today,’ and I was absolutely buzzing when we played with them in Greece last week and they played this and ‘A Forest’ together in the setlist."

"I love L.A. Confidential. If it’s on for even a second, I just watch it to the end. I almost want to call my cable service provider and ask them not to show it any more, because it has overwhelmed my life. It’s because I’m from California, from Los Angeles, because the idea of police corruption, of political ambition, of logic and defying expectations. Really, Bud White is Rudy, in the thug cop questing for detective greatness. [laughs] There’s something about that. Also, the way that it commingles all of the ideas of pornography and politics and financial development and mob power and drugs. You know, I studied history and English at UCLA, and one of the big themes in a bunch of our history classes had to do with, “How is it that Los Angeles and Hollywood and California present themselves to the world as both this destination place of palm trees and glitter and gold and your future, and also corruption and deceit?” There’s this duality to it, and I just think that Curtis Hanson’s way of delivering that… And the performances! I mean, David Strathairn and Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger and Kevin Spacey and James Cromwell… Police corruption, and justice, vigilante justice, and it’s just got everything. It’s just a perfect movie."

"Noir, of course, typically displays shadows, rain, urban darkness, blunt seediness, and the realization that since not just at the end but at the center of things are death and other hopeless mysteries, human striving is meaningless. There’s something soothing about realizing that all is futile. It’s liberating. Kiss Me Deadly might be the most cynical and fatalistic noir of them all. It happens to take place in sunny LA, but it’s certainly got the seediness too, including fantastic location shooting in long-gone slums. It’s one of those flicks that’s too good to be true. You’re stopped alone at a motel somewhere in the desert late at night, dead tired, but you can’t sleep, so you switch on the TV . . . and there’s a near-teenage Cloris Leachman running towards you, moaning and sobbing in the darkness, too blonde and naked to believe. But there she is. What a world. Ralph Meeker speeds up in a Jaguar! Nat King Cole warbles on the radio. Cloris is named after Christina Rossetti! It’s 1955. She’s a bitter feminist escapee from a mental asylum. And it just gets better, all the way till after the last second. Along with the action, corruption, sadism, and sex (when the blonde in her car, who happens to be behind Mike Hammer when he parks in a driveway, is immediately compelled to press herself against him and kiss him, framed with bulging taillights protruding from the fin of the forward auto, somehow it's sexier than the porniest pornography), the photography/mise-en-scène would make this movie immortal alone. It’s the kind of movie that makes me laugh at the notion of “art” photography. A few thousand frames from this one film would make a better life’s work in photography than any artist has yet created. Cindy Sherman has a right to a living like everyone else, but, Jesus . . . Nicholas Raymondo (“Very Smart. Very Bright. Very Sad.”) was “sad . . . for the way the world is,” but as Christina tells us: if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile It’s actually misquoted in the movie, but it’s still probably the nicest thing that’s happened to Christina Rossetti in a hundred years . . ."