Words. Books. Zines. Comics. Newspapers. Lit mags. Scrabble. Boggle. Theatre- acting and crew. working in the catwalks. And drinking tea, and sitting on decks or windowseats when it rains, and hopefully running out in the middle of the night for coffee or hashbrowns and staying up till all hours talking- I haven't grown out of any of that yet.
Different sorts of people. You should know that you run the risk of being borrowed for a story at any given moment. People who are passionate about something- anything. I like to learn from people who are in love. It's so much better that way.Also, Dave Eggers. Stuart Murdoch. Luna Moth. Tony Kushner. D. H. Lawrence, if he feels up to being reincarnated.
Belle and Sebastian, Death Cab for Cutie, Postal Service, The Decemberists, Bright Eyes, Jude, They Might Be Giants, Catch 22, Pain, Nigh Eve, Counting Crows, Ben Kweller, Tilly and the Wall, Modest Mouse, Hot Hot Heat, Wilco, Jamie Cullum, REM, Weezer, Freezepop, Carbon Leaf, The Wallflowers, Ben Folds Five, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright..... Okay, okay, basically, if you can pick up an acoustic guitar and strum a couple of chords, I'm probably going to fall all over it. It's a weakness.
I am awful about movies. The handful I own are mostly there for nostalgic purposes: Thoroughly Modern Millie, Empire Records, Wet Hot American Summer, Camelot, Mallrats, Rent, Mirrormask, Garden State, Hedwig, Sleeping Beauty, etc.
You actually have to have tv to make this one work. But if I'm around someone who does, or when I'm Netflixing, I'll watch The Daily Show and The Gilmore Girls.
Salinger (except not Catcher in the Rye), D.H. Lawrence, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, McSweeneys, The Believer, Virginia Woolf, Francesca Lia Block, Tony Kushner, The Escapist, The Sandman, The Hopeless Savages, Kerouac, Matt Ruff, Dostoevsky, Fables, Flannery O'Connor (like a good Southern female writer), Neil Gaiman, Vonnegut...that'll do for now.
Dave Eggers. And Stuart Murdoch, but not really, because idolizing someone for an accent they were born with is probably a little lame.