Playing with competent musicians, cynicism, The Teaching Company, Rick Roderick, Robert Greenberg, poetry (nothing containing pointless references to ancient Greek culture), Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Schumann, Arvo Part, Eric Whitacre, Reich, Gorecki, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, etc.
Insecure assholes who want to crush my soul. I'm generally suspicious of Composition department faculty members, because I believe by-and-large they're a bunch of tin-eared toddlers desperately attempting to justify their profession by unjustifiably elevating concert-hall music. Listen to smug, beard-ridden assholes like Jim Svedja on KUSC: "Johann Blah blah, a composer of SERIOUS music," as if to imply classical music somehow requires more intelligence and effort than hip hop or rock. As if to imply taste and genre haven't become fragmented to the point where you're just a fucking crazy person if you honestly believe a development in a single genre (ESPECIALLY one as irrelevant as classical music) revolutionizes the greater musical world. Classical music relies entirely on it's own well treaded systems and formulae. Anyone that's taken a counterpoint class is aware once you write the subject, you've written the fugue. Kiss my ass, you elitist pigs. Because you control music institutions and seem to have no reserves about beating naive students over the head with your narrow attitudes. Because after all these years you still can't admit to yourself that the the vast majority of the world could give a fuck about process and wants goddamn melody. Because you can't recognize beautiful music. Because Brahms would sock all of you assholes in the face if he were alive (after laying down his latest hip-hop track). Because you genuinely believe forcing yourself to listen to immobile, tedious crap all day makes you superior to people that just want to hear some fucking beats. KISS MY ASS, YOU ELITIST PIGS!
Anything that isn't intellectually insulting or a clusterfuck of genre-ific cliches.
Anything by Richard Linklater, Kubrick, written by Charlie Kaufman (other than that god awful "human nature"), most movies about some aspect of music history (Wagner mini-series with Richard Burton is pretty terrible, though), Woody Allen, Fellini, Bergman, Fernando Meirelles, Spike Lee, Coen Brothers, Michael Moore, Hitchcock, Gerard Corbiau (Farinelli is so fucking good), easily the equal of Amadeus), Truffaut, Christopher Nolan, John Waters, Bernard Rose (Immortal Beloved, but fuck him for claiming Solomon's candidate for the immortal beloved, Antonie Brentano, was "just another theory." Read the fucking book before you talk shit), Milos Forman, Lynch, Dogme 95, John Carpenter, Star Wars (Episode 1's faults aside, Darth Maul vs. Obi/Qui-Gon is the coolest fucking saber fight in Star Wars).
House, X-Files, Jericho (great premise, 7/10 execution), Lost, Weeds, Californication (much better than the eponymous chili peppers album), Breaking Bad, Rome, Firefly, Buffy (Joss Whedon is awesome, fuck you), Deadwood, Stewart & Colbert, Golden-Age Simpsons, South Park, the apolitical episodes of Penn & Teller (their episode on gun control was fueled by the same paranoid delusions they accused the apocalypse crazies of in that episode), The Awful Truth, TV Nation, Alton Brown (informative nerd), Ali G, fuck the history channel for cancelling History's Greatest Battles.I appreciate a lot of retarded television too, but I cut off at Melrose Place before descending to soap opera.
Lotta music history books, esp. Alan Walker's Liszt & Schumann bios, Jon Finson, Robert Greenberg's myriad biographies & period expositions, Berlioz's memoirs (unbelievably hilarious), Richard Crawford, Mark Prendergast, Charles Rosen, Thayer's life of Beethoven, Maynard Solomon's Beethoven, Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective and Music Since 1900, Eduard Hanslick, Modest's Tchaikovsky, BOOK OF THE SYMPHONY, Garry Mulholland's FEAR OF MUSIC, Simon Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy, Yvonne Bynoe's Encyclopedia of hip hop, Prendergast's Ambient Century. Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Bradbury, William Gibson, Peter F. Hamilton, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (even if you don't buy it, you have to admit it makes for a hilarious interpretation of the old testament), Cormac McCarthy, Most of the hipster cannon, including Bukowski, ee cummings, Irvine Welsh, David Sedaris, Palahniuk, HS.T, Burgess, Chuck Klosterman, Hank Moody, Easton-Ellis, Nick Hornby, Nietzsche, lit crit shit, DB Weiss, Jean Baudrillard, Zinn & Chomsky, Dawkins, Robert Nozick (No, I'm not a libertarian, not that is not all Nozick writes about), Colleen McCullough, wikipedia.
In the nineteenth century, during the battle of Sevastopol, a Zouave (a soldier in a French infantry unit) had his clay pipe broken by a bullet. He got the brilliant idea of rolling tobacco in a piece of paper torn from his bag of gunpowder. By so doing, he invented the world's first cigarette.Also, Rick Roderick and Brahms.