Always: Love, compassion, respect, sincerity, forgiveness (the hardest one), faith (also hard), kindness, gratitude, but not hope (I'm building on rocks from now on). Walking the talk. Failing a lot. Living passionately. Moxie. Gumption. Verve. Feminism.
Right now: Decorating, exploring my neighborhood, living poorly (but creatively!), thumbing through cookbooks for recipes for dinner parties, tea parties, pizza parties, un-birthday parties. "Upcycling." Box/community/urban gardens.
In general: reading and writing (especially hyperfiction, nonlinear fiction, short fiction and essays), making things, learning things, aspects of time, photo-based art, performance art, Total Artwork, paper, intense conversation, laughing heartily/listening to laughter, systems, cognitive science, augmented humans/cyborgs, haptics, the body, specimens/specimen-making, trees and bark and branches and leaves, ice, swarms, thunderstorms, walking for entertainment, health and meditative purposes, thrift stores and flea markets and garage sales (the pursuit of the undiscovered!), the ecstatic, systemic thinking, growth, renewal, cycles, etc.
Tortoises and people worth trusting. Those who treat you like they mean it. Also, sheer brilliance, Artificial Linguistic Entities, visionaries, artists, scientists, someone who will walk me to my car, and anyone who looks good in a skinny tie. Oh, yeah, and a man who listens.
In general: Pre-disco soul, r&b and funk, singer-songwriters, angsty girl groups of the '60s, rockabilly, psychobilly, alt-country, old country, honky-tonk, swampy backwoods stuff, and folk.
In particular: Cowboy Junkies, Joni Mitchell, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Tanya Tucker, Miles Davis, Devil Doll, Royal Trux, Woody Guthrie, Jude, Sinead O'Connor, K.D. Lang, X, Bob Dylan, John Prine, The Carpenters, Laura Nyro, Carole King, James Taylor, Dolly Parton, Beth Orton, Kasey Chambers, Kristin Hersh, Gillian Welch, Juliana Hatfield, Marvin Gaye, Solomon Burke, Stevie Wonder, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Frank Zappa, Cheap Trick, The Fifth Dimension, The Jackson Five, Dave Brubeck, Sam Cooke, Aimee Mann, Kate Bush, spirituals, Dusty Springfield, Rush (shut up), anything nostalgic (lots of grunge and Janis Joplin), and many others.
Old movies, Funny movies, Quirky movies, Pretty Movies
Some movies:
The Science of Sleep
The Women
T
he Cooler
Marty
Anything with Gene Wilder
Danny DeVito movies
Rebel Without a Cause
West Side Story
Singing in the Rain
Other musicals
Scoop
Qui etes-vous, Polly Maggoo?
Run Lola Run
I Heart Huckabees
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Singles
Amelie
Secretary
The Driver's Seat
Saved!
Some Like It Hot
200 Cigarettes
The Nutty Professor (w/ Jerry Lewis)
The Last Unicorn
Beetlejuice
V for Vendetta
Network
It Happened One Night
Silent films like Nosferatu and Daddy-Long-Legs
The Strange Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Adventures in Babysitting
Gaslight!
The Ladies' Man (w/ Jerry Lewis)
Etc. And more.
And does anyone else agree that Gene Hackman is completely underrated as a comedic actor?
On Boston Legal - This show is so refreshingly absurd, sweetly neurotic, politically prescient, and astonishingly irreverent that it is worth an hour of your time each week. Plus, the character acting is phenomenal (and bizarre)!
Currently Reading: Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag.
Involved With:
Believers, "smart and well-informed" women, Gertrude Stein, Mary Wollstonecraft, Dolly Parton, Jane Austen, Miss Piggy, Sacagawea.