Writing, podcasting , music, books, reading, art, travel.
I'd like to meet:
I wish I'd known my paternal grandfather as I grew up. From everything I was told about him, he was a very interesting guy. Grandpa quit school at 16 after my great-grandfather died, went to work as a bank teller to support his family ... and within relatively few years rose to become (at the time) the youngest bank president in the history of the state where he worked. Imagine how small the chances are of that happening today - ha! And what people didn't know was that he was actually four years younger than he'd told them, a fact my father discovered years later, and only by accident. In my mind, Grandpa fit the definition of "self-made man" to a t. Unfortunately, Grandpa died just several months after I was born.
Contemporary famous people? Celebrities are just regular folks who got lucky in their chosen fields of endeavor. Oh, without question they're talented and deserve some respect for their talent, but I'm not inclined to get all goo-goo-eyed around 'em.
Also, anyone famous for being famous - I trust I don't have to provide examples - hold absolutely, positively no interest for me what. so. ever.
Please note: Anyone is welcome to be my MySpace friend (except for porn sites, of course), but do me a favor? Please don't view the opportunity to post a comment here as a chance to post a blatantly commercial ad for whatever your enterprise may be. If you post an ad, I'll remove it at my first opportunity.
If you have the phrase "helping people dream again" in your profile, your "friend" request will be denied. I am not, repeat, not interested in participating in any kind of multi-level marketing scheme. Period, end of story. I'm also not interested in being friends with attractive women whose suggestively worded MySpace pages prominently display a link to their "other" sites.
Gig or CD release notices from musicians are welcome, because music, musicians, and their friends and fans, are why I'm here.
Music:
My tastes in music are very, very broad. Obviously, since I do a blues podcast, I love the blues. But chances are excellent I like at least some of the same music you do. Literate lyrics and a strong melody are essential in most of the other music to which I listen.
There are people here in MySpace who have long, long lists of musicians they like, but I've got more than 24,000 songs (yes, twenty-four thousand!) on my iPod - can you imagine how long my list would have to be? Oh, Lord!
Currently, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jon Dee Graham, Alejandro Escovedo and Elvis Costello head my list, followed by Andy Partridge of XTC and Bruce Springsteen.
While I like some metal (on a song-by-song basis), I find most of it repetitive and ho-hum boooh-ring. The guys in Bowling for Soup put it best - the metal genres are populated by "... singers who are mad at their dads," a line that absolutely slays me.
I'm fascinated by the pop music of other cultures.
Movies:
There are so many great movies - where to start? I usually find many of my favorites on lists compiled by serious film critics.
No, I don't consider most of the writers quoted in movie ads in newspapers to be serious film critics.
I'll be impressed if you tell me (honestly) that you've heard of, let alone seen, "The Italian Straw Hat" by Rene Claire, "The Bicycle Thief" by Vittorio de Sica or "M" by Fritz Lang.
I find I'm almost always disappointed by movies that are hyped to the skies.
Television:
Hmmmmmmmm ... great television, great television ... surely there must be some. Oh, yeah - The Sopranos!! But I'll be damned if I can think of much else. Oh, there's some *fun* television ... but I usually watch television in between doing other things, or during evenings when I'm too tired to do much else.
Books:
Again, too many to name. If you choose your reading from the best seller lists, you haven't yet grasped the fact that, except in very rare cases, total sales and popularity are not guarantors of literary merit - and literary merit means a lot to me.
I've been called a literary snob more than once, and ya know what? Guilty as charged. There's too much great literature yet to be read for me to waste time on bestseller pop lit.
The Godfather of English literature is William Shakespeare, of course. If you have bad memories of Shakespeare from English classes - get over them - now!
My other favorite authors are (in no particular order): Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, Robertson Davies, Mark Twain, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, John Updike, Phillip Roth, Toni Morrison, Richard Yates, Eudora Welty.
Extra points if you've read *anything* by J.P. Donleavy, another one of my favorites.
Heroes:
They were murdered back in the 1960s.
