"Once the Seattle scene exploded and the band names became living-room buzzwords, Dinosaur Jr. got a modicum of recognition. They deserve a little more. If there is such a thing left as the avant-garde – as you know, all of the foreboding walls of the forbidden zone have been removed – it seems to me that Dinosaur Jr. have a bit of an edge. Nirvana was everywhere you went at that time. I was living in Laguna Beach. Some friends stopped in for a visit and we wound up on Balboa Island. To get to the other side there were two routes: the roundabout way, or a small five-car ferry that makes the short hop across. I remember waiting in line to board the ferry and some cute young barefooted hippie chick walked up to the car window and, out of the clear blue, gazed in with a smile and said, ""It smells like teen spirit in here."" I was going, wow. Okay.
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"That was the first of his records that I jumped in on. It's a good record to jump in. For starters, he's like a one-man orchestra and he plays three saxes at once, but that kind of overshadows him as a musician in some ways. It's the emotional punch in his playing that's the important thing here. His personality really comes across and he also sounds impish at times, just like a naughty boy. Or like a street fighter. He's got so many aspects to his personality that he really does wear them on his sleeves. He can take things like a Rogers and Hammerstein tune and he can turn it into something else. The thing with jazz is that people think you have to approach it thinking really deeply, but with Rahsaan Roland Kirk the music is so immediate. It should impact you immediately. He's got a pop sensibility but he gets into some really deep stuff as well."

"This includes all of the films in the box set John Cassavetes: Five Films. I’m always a little leery of the routine critical construction “Without X, there would be no Y.” Surely Y would have come along; his or her work might have been a bit different, but he or she would have come along. But in the case of Cassavetes, it is difficult not to think of a whole talkative, financially strapped mob of filmmakers, some brilliant, some not so much, who very well might not have come along if he hadn’t, you know, blazed the path. Still, you don’t watch a Cassavetes film for its historical significance. These films are alive. How very well I remember my first, A Woman Under the Influence. I probably went in because I was a Columbo fan. Not only was I enthralled by a whole new Peter Falk; Gena Rowlands simply blew . . . me . . . away."

"I think a lot about Martin Scorsese and how heavily influenced Paul Thomas Anderson was by him. I feel like he learned so much from Scorsese in Boogie Nights, and so I feel like picking Boogie Nights is somewhat accounting for my Martin Scorsese love. But I’m also being very honest about a movie that I can watch over and over. Just the epic nature and the grandness of it, and some of the shots and the style of it, and the music — my God, the way he uses music — and that great shot where somebody jumps into the pool and you hear the muffled soundtrack. It’s brilliant. I never get sick of watching it. And the acting is just some of my favorite actors at the top of their game. I love doing impressions and one of my earliest impressions of an actor was Philip Seymour Hoffman in that movie, when he’s saying how much he loves the name and he’s chewing on the pen."