High Cultures and Low Lives.
You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake. You must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand-heap. You must have so good an appetite as this, else you will live in vain. (Henry David Thoreau)
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread. (Baldwin)
Madlib, Sonic Youth, David Bowie, Erykah Badu, Regina Spektor, Eagles of Death Metal, Dinah Washington, The Zombies, Plastic Ono Band, Metric, A Tribe Called Quest, Leon Redbone, Nellie McKay, Lightnin' Hopkins, the DItty Bops, Daftpunk, Velvet Underground, Eels, Brazilian Jazz (Celso Fonseca makes me hott), Blossom Dearie, Sufjan Stevens, Sarah Vaughan, The Beatles (duh?), Dre, Detroit Cobras, Nick Drake, RJD2, Elastica, gipsy guitar, Living Legends, Immortal Technique, Beck, Franz Ferdinand, Camera Obscura, Cafe Tacuba, Imperial Teen, The Doors, the Presidents, Poe, Suzanne Vega, Cardigans, Spoon, Cake, Jens Lekman, The DIrtbombs, Elliott Smith, The Kinks, Toots and the Maytals, and Lauryn Hill (she knows whats up)
Princess Bride, What's Up Tiger Lily, Spirited Away, Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Pan's Labyrinth, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Silence of the Lambs, The Big Lebowski, Paper Moon, The Princess Bride, American Splendor, Quills, Pulp Fiction, 10 Things, Coming to America, I would also like to add that Christopher Guest, Pedro Almodovar and Wong Kar Wai are geniuses, etc. (emphasis on etcetera)
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And, PLANET EARTH (David Attenborough narrated whenever possible.)
Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins
Here's to the few I manage to remember: Lolita (Nabokov), Still Life with Woodpecker (Tom Robbins), Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe), Paris to the Moon (Adam Gopnik), and the Shouts & Murmurs column in the New Yorker (I'm a little obsessed)& graphic novels (especially Adrian Tomine and Jeffrey Brown).