Music:
"I can safely say I've never had the desire to be the drummer in a band. That must be the worst occupation ever" - Robert Smith
By the time he was 24, Prince had written and starred in Purple Rain. By the time Ian Curtis was 24, he had killed himself. It grieves me to know that I'm already too old to match either of these tremendous accomplishments.
Rather than a list, I'll just say: I have something like 2000 albums, I'm sure we have some tastes in common.
Also: "I try to listen to music while I work out, but most of the music on my mp3 player is yours, so every other song is Morrissey!" - Chelsea
Movies:
The modern Asian new wave - Miike Takashi , Kurosawa Kiyoshi , Aoyama Shunji, Wong Kar-wai, Park Chan-Wook, those kind of directors - and anything with Yakusho Koji (I learned these names in the Japanese order). Pretentious existentialist French films, crime films of the black and white b-movie era, fearmongering WWIII/nuclear war exercises in terror, glacially-paced German nihilisms, Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch (but not his imitators), and the same usual American Indie stuff that all the cool people like.
Television:
30 Rock, Flight of the Conchords, WONDER SHOWZEN, House, Roseanne, all the trashy MTV dating shows, The Daily Show (not as good as The Colbert Report!), Star Trek (only The Next Generation), Project Runway, Twin Peaks, Parker Lewis Can't Lose
Books:
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books , and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind that we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply , like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
- Franz Kafka
"Farewell!
The day frowns more and more: thou'rt like to have
A lullaby too rough:
I never saw
The heavens so dim by day.
A savage clamour!
Well may I get aboard!
This is the chase:
I am gone for ever."
<[i>Exit, pursued by a bear]
William Shakespeare , A Winter's Tale, Act 3 Scene III
My favorite authors (I read with depth more than breadth; I find it more satisfying to read an entire body of work than an isolated book, if the author is any good): David Foster Wallace (true fact: he invented footnotes), Haruki Murakami , Walker Percy, Kobo Abe, Jacques Lacan , Roland Barthes, Jim Thompson, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. , Kurt Vonnegut SR, F. Scott Fitzgerald (mostly because of the Crack-Up), E.M. Cioran (clown prince of despair), William Gaddis, Nietzsche (shut up I do read him), Oscar Wilde , Patricia Highsmith, Donald Barthelme (mostly the short stories), Raymond Chandler, and, of course, anything Kafkaesque .
Lone wolves: The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer(!), House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller(yeah but who DOESN'T like this book?), White Noise by Don DeLillo, Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollman, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus(!), Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard (everything else he did is kinda dull), The Pursewarden Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, Brighton Rock (the definitive book about marriage) and The Heart of the Matter (a story of hope) by Graham Greene , Minima Moralia by Teodor Adorno (the most curmudgeonly book about postwar cultural elitism possible), Parerga and Paralimpomena by Artie Schopenhauer.
More recently: Kingsley and Martin Amis, All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, Richard Powers, Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian, Evelyn Waugh (I love British Catholics )
P.S. - I ain't no Houellebecq girl!