Damnit. My immediate thought was "well, I should go dig up his Random Roles interview because of course it'll be awesome…"

Well fair. :)

I never saw anything that directly addressed whatever falling out AR and El-P had — he's acknowledged in a couple of songs and interviews that he had a serious breakdown and fallings-out with a lot of friends after Camu Tau died, but neither of them have ever seen fit to actually air any of the details in public which…

There is absolutely fucking BOSS Sri Lankan food to be had on Victory Blvd.

The Power Broker is fucking amazing. You'd think that a 1200-page biography of a city parks commissioner would be the single most boring book ever written, but it's actually gripping. Damn near every last problem that we are still struggling with in modern cities comes to us courtesy of Robert Moses or other men who…

I have excellent news: many Broadway shows are terrible, so you can abandon your family inside one of them for several hours and miss nothing. Once you've ditched them, there are like a million more interesting places all within 20 minutes subway ride of the theater district.

Fair warning: Coney Island is basically always that windy. It's just easier to take when the ambient temperature is north of 85f. Expect to be cleaning some airborne sand particles out of your camera though.

I always thought that Pacific Park in Santa Monica was basically built to be a physical counterweight to Coney Island.

The Poe Cottage and the Dyckman Farmhouse are no joke two of my favorite NYC historic sites to take people to. The staff are all so happy to actually see, well, anyone, and they've both amazing windows into an era that has been literally paved over multiple times.

The amusement park and boardwalk are great. The New York Aquarium was pretty nice before Sandy levelled it, and hopefully will be again soon.

(Disclaimer: met Vast once briefly after a show they played in san francisco in 2012, and he was a total sweetheart; everything about him being a dick is 5th-hand stories on various fan boards about why he and El-P and Aesop Rock don't talk any more.)

Man, it's really a pity that Vordul's mental health problems and Vast being apparently one of the biggest assholes in human history even by the standards of Def Jux acts tanked their followup for so long. The Cold Vein was and is a strong contender for the best underground hiphop album of the 00s, and those beats……

When the topic of what it was like to live in NYC in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 comes up, I tell people to just put on The Cold Vein, Bazooka Tooth and FanDam. Def Jux was on one hell of a run back then.

Remember: Cameron started out in Roger Corman's studio. He learned how to stretch a dollar from the undisputed all-time king.

Gah. Please, god, someone, anyone: give Ridley Scott a six-film contract deal to make literally anything else. He's 79, that should keep him well occupied until we're out of danger of this happening.

It's an interesting total failure for sure, but… it's still a total failure. It's great that they handed the series briefly to a genuine auteur, but it's hard to think of one whose visual/narrative sensibility was less well-matched to the source material. (Maybe Terry Gilliam?)

I say this every time the subject, comes up, but having Ripley cry over the picture of her daughter is just awful, even though Weaver tries her best to sell it.

Emphatically not, in fact it's a preview of everything that was going to become a really bad habit in Cameron's future. Everything it added was better off left unsaid or imagined by the viewer; the theatrical cut is a lean, mean, relentless thrill machine.

Due to their exoskeleton, I'm going to assume they go through ecdysis (molting) like arthropods in order to grow.

One of our crewmembers got turned into a bent-in-half frog zombie thing! Was that interesting? Worthy of further comment? Should we alter our plans based on now knowing that this is a thing that happens on this planet?