Tattoos, tattoos, tattoos! Other modern day rites of passage, nothing like starving alone in the wilderness to promote personal growth . I read more than any human ought to. I am a closet video game addict. I draw and paint for pleasure as well as for my job. I play the banjo, fer real. I was once a decent rock climber but now woefully off my game. Ditto for Martial Arts. Alternative building: I used to live in a house of mud that I built myself. Serious, devolutionary anarchy.
New canvasses, freaks, pirates, human pincushions, monkey people, situationists, other tattoo artists, artists of any stripe, people who actually LIVE D.I.Y. YOU, YEAH YOU. Incidentally I probably won't add your band unless I already love your music or actually know you. I'm always looking for models of the suicide girl type who want to show my work to the world at large.
So I dug out an old mix tape from my first true love. It is pretty close to mix tape perfection, and these are the bands on it:
Depeche Mode
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Marc Almond
The Glove
The Cure
Love and Rockets
Peter Murphy
Legendary Pink Dots
New Order
Tori Amos
These groups/individuals also rule:
Hank Williams III, Wayne Hancock, Shooter Jennings, Ani Di Franco, Combichrist, Lords of Acid, Skinny Puppy, Kevorkian Death Cycle, TKK, Asylum Street Spankers, Gomez, The Thermals, The Pogues, Morphine, The the, Los Cerveceros, Dresden Dolls, Sixteen Horsepower, Elliot Smith, Mountain Sprout, Dead Man Street Orchestra, Lavay Smith, Lee Press-on and the Nails, Johnny Cash, Paris, Oingo Boingo. These are the bands I've been listening to most recently. By no means the only ones I like.
Sin City, Lost in Translation, Angel heart, True Romance, Suicide Kings, Monty Python's Meaning of Life, Hero, The Thin Man, Kung Fu Hustle, Time Bandits, City of Lost Children, SERENITY!!!!!! Mal could beat Han Solo's ass anyday!
Deadwood, Cocksucker!, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Daily Show, Hollow Men, Kids In The Hall, Firefly, Dexter
James Ellroy
Neal Stephenson
Bukowski
Andrew Vachss
Tolkien
Roger Kamenetz
Neil Gaiman
David Sedaris
Steven Foster, Meredith Little. I think at this point I'll limit my heroes to the people that I know and love. It's so easy to worship people you've never actually hung out with only to find after prolonged exposure that those people are not anything like what they pretend to be.