[A] In the Queens where I grew up in the '50s and '60s the Chinese people who have long dominated the Main Street area of my native Flushing were still exotic and Chinese restaurants rare although fairly busy on Sundays. My beloved grandfather Tom Snyder lived a few miles closer to Manhattan in Forest Hills, already a relatively Jewish neighborhood, and in his open minded way explored the culinary offerings of Queens Boulevard, which is how he came to take me to the place he called "the Chinese." I have no doubt I ordered what he recommended when he did. Hong Fat, however, was another story. I was introduced to it by the great editor Clay Felker, who gave me my start in magazine journalism, when circa 1967 I gave him a lift in my car from the downtown offices of what I think was called the World Journal Tribune to his snazzy 57th Street apartment and he suggested we stop for a bite in Chinatown, which was then almost entirely south of Canal Street. That I should a) own a car in NYC (whence I commuted to Newark so I could work for the Star-Ledger there) and b) be able to find a place to park it in Chinatown (those streets were short and narrow) was highly atypical even for the time. But Clay knew his restaurants and directed me to the now long-gone Cantonese Hong Fat, 63 Mott Street. Hong Fat definitely had a rep as both cheap and good and I subsequently ate there many times. There are now Chinese restaurants all over Manhattan, although we're still scrounging around for a first-rate one in our nabe. But there are few as mythic as Hong Fat.

[A] I was aware of his passing early and was in fact interviewed about him by a mag connected to my New Hampshire-based alma mater Dartmouth College. Check him out on my site, where I make clear enough that his late work is a lot creakier if still often fun than the masterful Have Moicy! On the other hand, much of the early music was pretty damn good.

[A] I don't really expect amateurs to fully grok my grading "system," but let me make two points. First, much better to say "at least an A minus," because "at least an A" implies "maybe even an A plus," and A pluses are too rare to make unlikely claims for. Second, that little face next to the album you have every right to adore because your taste is your own, doesn't indicate Dud, it indicates what I like to call Neither. The little bomb next to Learning to Flinch indicates Dud. Under these circumstances I feel no obligation to relisten to these albums unless you get the Warren Zevon Fan Club on the job and maybe not then either—though I did appreciate your putting the effort into those somewhat obscure beer and cement metaphors.

[A] I've written about plenty of gospel music over the years, but—call it the lapsed Christian in me—nowhere near as comprehensively as I have blues, where I'm not a completist either. I no longer recall how my Tharpe review came to pass, though it was only five years ago, but for sure there's plenty of guitar on that album. Were I to make a project of it I'm sure I'd find more of her music I liked but not therefore music that demanded coverage or was right down my alley. Plus serious gospel delving would probably unbalance my music coverage in general. As for throwing herself a Griffith Stadium wedding, a story I don't recall ever running across, I say good for her. For one thing, there's no doubting the strength of her religious commitment as there is with Sly and Tiny.

[A] That one never came in the mail, although I do have some social connections to Lurie that to the best of my faltering recollection do not touch on Carola. If somebody were to send me a copy I promise I'd take a look at Chapter 1 after checking out Chapter 23. But not therefore to finish the thing. That would have to be on narrative merit alone, though for sure Lurie is a very smart guy.

[A] For quite a while I counteracted the Voice's annual Thanksgiving things-to-be-thankful-for guff, which I found ickily liberal, by writing an annual all-pans November CG I dubbed the Turkey Shoot, plus for a while there every CG included one highly unrecommended album I dubbed the Must to Avoid, a label inspired by the Herman's Hermits hit "(She's) A Must to Avoid." I once did an EMP lecture about these devices in which I explained that the basic reason I did this over and above broadening my coverage was that it's easier to be funny when you're putting something down. The lecture also reported to the assembled academics that while this ploy may have looked easy in fact I found it intellectually and spiritually exhausting.

[A] For reasons of physical convenience I don't play much vinyl or I'd add Attempted Mustache to the sole album you named that made me think it might be a good idea to put on right now: the Coup's Party Music. Without checking back I'm also pretty sure that one's the only full A. OTOH, were any of those albums to be requested by a guest (or maybe in the highly unlikely event that Nina, who turns 40 in June and has her own pantheon that enabled me to warm to Queen, belatedly became interested in alt-rock) of course I'd pull them out. And I bet they'd sound more than OK. But there are obviously countless alt-rock acts and other artists of some quality too that I'll never hear again.

[A] There are plenty of A and A minus records—all of them, to be precise—that achieve a measure of "excellence." If they didn't I would't give them A's of any sort. Those A plus albums (and quite a few full A's as well), however, are at a different level of excellence. In general they prove to be not just really good but actively thrilling, enthralling, uplifting, renewing. They make you feel better about being a human being, which these days the entire anti-Trump cohort needs (and if you don't belong to that cohort get out of here.)

[A] That film came to pass when a young NYU student named Paul Lovelace proposed it. Films and especially student films being the somewhat crude and iffy and time-consuming propositions they tend to be, I had my doubts, but I liked the kid a lot and figured what the hell. I thought the results were fine—think often of the final shot of my riding up Fourth Avenue on my bike from the Voice offices—and became full-fledged friends with Paul. Carola and I attended his marriage to Jessica Wolfson and as unremitting baby fans went to visit them uptown more than once after they became parents. Then they moved to Austin, where they became successful filmmakers; recently Paul was brought on board to help make a much larger-budget feature-length documentary directed by bizwise tech entrepreneur Matty Wishnow and focused on none other than uxorious rock critic Robert Christgau. Working with Paul on that film has been somewhere between a pleasure and a joy. In case you hadn't guessed, I can't wait to see it. Let me add that Paul was an producer, writer, and editor on the now-in-theaters documentary Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, which I've recommended here before and recommend again.

[A] Joel Whitburn's guides to the Billboard charts have always been valuable. I still keep them on my desk's bookshelf, although I see that the unbound, stapled, pamphlet-style first edition without which I couldn't have written the '70s CG book that made me slightly famous, is missing its first and final pages, so tattered it now starts with Avalon and ends with Welch. The Whitburn I still use is The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. I also keep The Trouser Press Record Guide close at hand.

[A] This New York chauvinist gibe was concocted by Village Voice fashion writer Blair Sabol. As an unbowed NYC chauvinist I couldn't resist it but will note that this was well before the flowering of such (note spelling) L.A. punk-era bands as X, the Minutemen, L7, Black Flag, NOFX, and my special faves the Descendents. El Lay is or should I say was about the biz, which I always made room for as well despite my continuing skepticism about the Laurel Canyon folkie-virtuoso sensibility, which helped generate plenty of good music even so.

[A] Pure oversight, obviously—an oversight reflecting the inconvenient fact that I've always respected them more than I've liked them, although I do have a dim memory of being surprised at how much I enjoyed hearing them after seeing a movie featuring them that's also a dim memory. One reason is that I've never found even one of them a remarkable singer, another that I've never thought either their songwriting or their groove all that either. The only album of theirs I actively liked was never Consumer Guided, at least in part because it came out precisely when I was breaking up with Ellen Willis, an all too engrossing endeavor: 1969's eponymous, as they like to say, The Band. If this answer hasn't perturbed you I suggest you look over the Consumer Guide reviews they inspired. The corrective to this disinterest is Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, where the Band plays a major role. After which you might take a look at Barney Hoskyns's considerably less idyllic Woodstock book Small Town Talk. Not exactly a utopia, that town.

[A] For starters, de gustibus non disputandum est. Like what you like. But prog is pretentious by proud self-definition and too often utterly devoid of anything I would call groove. If you actively enjoy its style of full-of-itself and have managed to reside in the Groove Capitol of the Universe without developing a deep-seated craving for groove itself, a peculiarity you clearly share with millions of others who prefer the technical skills of such prog drummers as Yes's Bill Bruford, none other than Genesis's Phil Collins, ELP's Carl Palmer himself, and Lord help you Kansas's Phil Ehart, enjoy if enjoyment is what that feeling is. This major Ziggy Modeliste fan would much rather feel his lungs expand as his mind taps its foot and his favorite person in the world dances around the dining room.

[A] I own a fair amount of classical music that came in the mail but just about never play it. I could say I like Stravinsky and Bach and Vivaldi and it would be true enough, but that's memory at best, although when I took it upon myself to read Proust at 17 my professor, a terrific old poet named Ramon Guthrie, told our little seminar that Proust was inspired by Beethoven's C sharp minor quartet, which I listened to on earphones in the library and liked so much I bought it as an adult and have even played it a few times.

[A] Nope, but maybe for senator or something. In 1968 I did vote for at least one Republican councilman I recall, named Don Weeden. The basically anti-electoral Ellen Willis did too. Our councilman, whose name has slipped my mind, was a Jewish Democrat who'd been around for decades and was no progressive. Of course, that was in 1968, by which time Republican John Lindsay was the relatively progressive mayor. And in 2000 I voted for Nader rather than Gore, which in New York meant nothing in the electoral college but in Florida might well have provided Bush with his tiny margin of victory. In retrospect, I think the fame Nader earned for his considerable consumer-protection and environmental achievements went to his head the way even earned and principled fame so often does and as a result wrecked our electoral politics. And I will add that I can't imagine how a Romanian could follow all this detail.

[A] Young, Mitchell, McGarrigles, to a somewhat lesser extent Cohen—titans all. And right, Rush to a much much lesser extent are my kind of band—my tastes jn rock run obviously run more punk/new wave, although the Guess Who played a minor role in my 1969 breakup with Ellen Willis ("Undun" was key at that moment) and I also found Bachman-Turner Overdrive OK. But really, give me the New Pornographers, Tokyo Police Club, recently Pony. Plus some great rappers: K'naan, Backxwash, and last but also very near the top of this graf the great Buck 65.

[A] A quick count indicates that I have going on 60 box sets in my office and another 30 or so in the hall. There may be more somewhere. I don't recall buying a single one, though there may be a few exceptions—just about every one arrived in the mail free, usually back in the good old review-copy days. I keep them primarily because they orient me as nothing else could when I want to write about one of the artists a collection compiles. The only ones I play with the slightest regularity are the two Armstrongs—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a career-spanning omnibus, and The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, which documents his '20s stuff. I don't play them because a choice album or sometimes two or even three will sate my hunger and curiosity (and/or maybe prove a special delight for Carola or Nina).

[A] From first grade, where I quickly learned to read well enough to devour all my mom's old Bobbsey Twins books, I've had a large vocabulary for my age, because my reading did not stop with the Bobbsey Twins. I've always read a lot. That said, however, "prognathous" I must have come upon while doing my best to nail a metaphor. "Lagniappe," however, has been in my recall vocabulary for decades. Have no idea why or how. But I don't use big words to impress; I use what I regard as the most apt under the circumstances, which can vary enormously.

[A] I believe that when I die I will survive nowhere except in the hearts and minds of my loved ones, friends, and admirers. But I'm aware that no living human has any way to be certain that there's no such thing as life after death, although if there is it will certainly not be life as physical humans experience it. As for the president (literate humans do not capitalize it as a noun as opposed to title, a grammatical usage I'm sure sticks in the barely literate motherfucker's craw in the unlikely event that he's aware of it at all): He's a vindictive, pathologically resentful, racist greedhead—evil, as I have not the slightest doubt the God whose existence I think so unlikely is all too aware if he's out there keeping tabs. Value that highly if you will.

[A] Hope not, but can hardly blame you for asking. To borrow two verb clusters from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, it's up to all of us on this side of the Atlantic to defy-delay-undo, to slow-impede-defeat. I'm a patriotic democrat/Democrat. So is almost everyone I know except a few out-and-out leftists. But I don't know anyone who's feeling actively confident that we'll be able to take some deep breaths four years from now.