Photos: PLUG Awards 2008, Nick Cave, Dizzee Rascal, Marnie Stern, Ian Williams

“I haven’t been this excited about rock and roll in at least 10 years. First it was isolated artists, then a vanguard, but now it looks like a movement.”

“His cheeks, colored by a network of ruptured blood vessels, were formed by a coalescence of hanging globules, beneath which the double fold of his chin melted into his neck. And his skull was strung with cords of fat.”

"Do not the dead deserve an accounting at least as irreproachable as the survivors receive with each week’s edi­tion of Billboard?"

“One day his trajectory from junior high dropout to Video Archives clerk to cinema wunderkind may eclipse L.A.’s longstanding specimen tale of Lana Turner at Schwab’s.”

“When did whites come into the world? When was the first time that Europeans, faced with otherness, looked at each other and said, ‘We’re white’?”

“New York isn’t the center of the universe, this IS the uni­verse, and since I’m here, I’m important, too.”