"My band, Ui, played the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona last May. It was to be our first live show since 2000. The band started as a quartet in 1990, but we have performed as a trio for most of our career. For the Primavera show, we added a fourth member to help render songs that we'd never played live. We spent six months preparing for the show, including a trip to an abandoned mental hospital on Staten Island for a very cold photo shoot. To be certain that we were not cheating the fans at Primavera, we played two test gigs in the New York area. A show in Trenton was fantastic basements force intimacy on a band and make it easier for everyone to hear everyone else and one in Brooklyn was miserably inept because I decided to test out a slide show that made the stage so dark we couldn't see our instruments."

"Our show in Barcelona was the kind of thing you dream about when you’re fifteen and are beginning to make up stories about what being in a band will be like. We faced the biggest crowd we'd ever played to thousands of screaming strangers, many of whom knew our songs. After we played, I was dizzy and calm and unable to be bothered by anything. After a few days and approximately forty-five free San Miguels, I woke up in a hotel I could not afford and knew the band was over. I hadn't gone to Spain knowing this. While reading a street map of Barcelona and eating overpriced eggs in front of the hotel, I realized that the band hadn't reconvened to play a new string of shows that would last into 2011. We hadn't added a keyboard player to create Ui Mach III. No, we had crossed an item off a very old list, rubbed out a fading scribble on a blackboard. The show in Barcelona was an un-played show that belonged in 2000, or 2003. Barcelona gave me satisfaction and an ego boost but, more than anything, a sense of completion. Bearing this in mind, revisit your To Do list and see if you can spot the stragglers. It's a waste of resources to think you're building a new boat only to find out you've patched up a boat you have no intention of ever using again."

- Sasha Frere-Jones, Pop Critic, The New Yorker

"Two years ago, when I found out we were having a son, I panicked. I was worried that all the stuff I sucked at as a boy - camping, sports, fighting - I'd pass down to my son.  Then I had this bad ass baby who liked trucks, wanted to be outdoors all the time and - while smiling at women - gave all men the staredown. Did I mention he's blond? So I've been learning man skills - I shot a tank with the U.S Army, fought Randy Couture for a round, went turkey hunting, was a fireman for a day - for this book I'm writing about learning to finally be a man at 39, but really so I can do this stuff if Laszlo wants to.
 
This year, we went to the emergency room twice: One when we found out he has nut allergies, and once for his first asthmatic attack. Which is horrible. But also a relief. I can handle this kid. And I realized the truth to what Randy Couture told me after sitting on my chest and punching me in the face for five minutes: " Trying to steer or push your son in any way is going to be unsuccessful. He’s going to gravitate toward the things he has an affinity for." Oddly, I think I'm more able to handle whatever that is than before I got beat up."

- Joel Stein