[A] Since I got several of these get well soon notes both here and on Twitter--and appreciated they all are, believe me--I thought I'd offer a progress report. First of all, as I understand it pain is not one of the major dangers of a stem cell transplant. It's more days of serious gastrointestinal disruption, profound weakness and fatigue, a rash and worse associated with what's called engraftment syndrome, and dangerous opportunistic infections. Digestively Carola was uncomfortable but not alarmingly so, and she had trouble sleeping--still does. But basically she avoided the bad stuff, as some but not most patients do. Moreover, her white blood cells and hemoglobin and platelets rebounded with unusual vigor. She came home four days into her third week and is doing so well she doesn't require as much care as many patients, meaning I'm allowed to leave her alone to shop or go to the gym, which we didn't expect. Moreover, we have many friends close by in our rather communal building--my sister lives upstairs with her husband, as do Why the Beach Boys Matter author Tom Smucker and his wife. Which isn't to say it hasn't been tiring for me--caregiving is hard. First full day she was home I got into bed at 9 at night and got out of bed at 9 the next morning. Carola won't be out and about till January. But things have worked out very well.

[A] Did you read the review--which, I should make clear, is a formally eccentric essay, not a CG brief--or just look at the grade? I just reread it and was convinced all over again, then turned off the CD I was checking out and cued Liz Phair up on iTunes. Sounding great to me as I write this. I almost put that piece in my Is It Still Good to Ya? collection--OUT THIS FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, FROM DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS AND BETTER BOOKSELLERS NOT QUITE EVERYWHERE--and then chickened out because the accompanying Whitechocolatespacegg column seemed a little weak; now I'm sorry. As for the Pitchfork review--by one Matt LeMay, author of both an Elliott Smith 33 ⅓ and something called Product Management in Practice--almost no review with a grade of 0 should be taken seriously, and "subjectivity" has nothing to do with it. It took me a couple of years of Consumer Guiding to stop grading punitively because I could, which I believe lent cred to the E I gave G N' R Lies in 1989 as a way of refusing to shrug off the vile "immigrants and faggots" provocations of "One in a Million" (and even then I granted the album's "musical quality" a C plus in the text). But in 2004 P4K was still riding that warhorse to punish Dismemberment Plan guy Travis Morrison for the sin of growing up. Back then P4K was still a snotty boys club open to many "critics" were barely critics at all, although these were outnumbered by the honorable exceptions even then (Marc Hogan and Douglas Wolk come to mind, but not everyone I take seriously was at their level, founder and self-made millionaire Ryan Schreiber foremost among them). Too many amateur wise-asses and self-appointed aesthetes throwing their weight around. Eventually the general level rose a lot; I get better tips from P4K than from anywhere else these days, although I have to pick and choose, and although the departure of the Lindsay Zoladz-Carrie Battan-Amanda Petrusich troika a few years back was a blow. But to return to Liz Phair, it got killed in the indie press for two things: the indie sin of hiring name producers, which my review goes into in some detail, and explicit sexuality. Good sex songs are hard to write, but I love them when they happen; "Favorite" and "HWC" stand out. But the stone classic here is "Little Digger," in which her young son comes into the bedroom she's sharing with a guy not his dad. A complete killer, clearly over LeMay's head. Not yours, I hope.

[A] In general, great singers are supposed to combine what are called great voices with not just technical mastery but--bye bye, Mariah Carey--technical originality. Of the four you and I agree on, Green and Sinatra qualify on all three counts, Holiday is so technically original that everyone ignores how small her physical voice is, and Lennon is an outlier few would put in their class even though to my ears he also qualifies on all three counts. I guess my feeling is that, bottom line, a great singer has to supply what I can only call sheer physical pleasure--a slightly more flexible and permissive notion of the great voice that for me includes more "limited" vocalists such as, say, Willie Nelson or Lil Wayne or Shirley Alston of the Shirelles. But as much as I enjoy hearing Patti Smith and Joe Strummer, they're not quite in that category physically--unlike Johnny Rotten/John Lydon, who I find less interesting than either of them. And then there's Dylan, who I definitely do rate a great singer, not so much for all the qualities you list accurately enough, but for his humor, his intelligence, his malleability, his willingness to do anything and fuck you if you can't take a joke or make an adjustment.

[A] It's so nice to get one of these impossibly general questions I can answer, mostly because I'm not really interested in soundtracks. Answer is the RZA's Ghost Dog, hands down. Eventually caught the movie on television, which was OK but no more. In addition, I am a fan of some soundtracks that are really compilations, notably American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused.

[A] As an early major-league rock critic, I was actually the film critic for both Cheetah and Fusion back in the day, episodes now so obscure that I wasn't aware that writing wasn't on my site till I answered this question. Back then the overriding concept was "popular culture" by me, and when I was researching my memoir I looked back at that work and thought it was pretty good. But back then I went to the movies a lot, and as of 1972 hooked up with Carola Dibbell, whose first husband worked in film and who did some film work herself in the late '70s via a college pal who made documentaries. But once we had Nina movies became a much smaller part of our lives for time reasons alone, and even more important, I gradually became aware of all the things I didn't know about film, particularly editing. I've reviewed some films, all music-related as I recall, in the past few decades; one of those reviews is in Is It Still Good to Ya? I think the Jules and Jim section of the memoir is first-rate and also did some production notes for Inside Llewyn Davis that I'm quite proud of. And were someone to ask me to write about a movie I doubt I'd hesitate. But you know it'd be a music movie. And you also know I'll be gladder than usual that I have Carola's brain to pick.

[A] I've certainly held onto my vinyl, insofar as I don't have CD versions and in Beatles-Monk kind of cases even if I do, but am somewhat ashamed to say that I seldom play it--most often to pull something out for Carola, Charlie Haden's The Ballad of the Fallen, or Steve Reich's ECM Music for 18 Musicians. Except insofar as it provides an income stream for musicians, who deserve every one they can get, I'm not interested in the vinyl revival, although I do listen to vinyl-only releases that seem interesting (though I don't recall making a single significant discovery that way, including that Piranha Botswana comp, which I had on promotional digital). I'm also happy to use Spotify to rehear stuff I'm vinyl-only on. I do take seriously, however, the audiophile prophecy that bit-rot will ultimately destroy the music on CDs (although nowhere near as quickly as they say in my experience) and that therefore vinyl should be storehoused and treasured. The notion that digital is forever as regards any kind of information seems absurdly optimistic to me. That's one reason I want to republish my writing in books like, er, Is It Still Good to Ya?