The excessive consumption of literature,music and films be it the talkies or just still celluloids (what else could/would/should a self-professed, prolific sofa tuber be "interested" in apart from -engaging in self-serving biblio-audio-video philic activities?); defacing private property; indulging in the endeavours of pseudo epicures; go on ear-popping -claustrophobia- inducing journeys (think planes,trains and automobiles!); politics (my constant battle...to be apolitical and sod it, or to care?); the Palestinian Issue or rather their "Intifada" (may God bless Edward Said); and yes... "profiteering from life whilst retaining my complacency". And you thought I was devoid of interests "boo! hiss!". ( the latter extracted from a profile in the competitor's). Quelle horreur!!!
Other "strange fruits"...
To be generically challenged is to err(?) so, bollocks to that ( I say!) Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Waller, P.Ramlee, Canonball Adderly, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Stan Kenton, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Shirley Horn, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Edith Piaf, Eliane Ellias, Omara Portuondo and Members of the Buena Vista Social Club, Tom Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Stan Getz, Joseph Poulenc Sade, Jill Scott, Aretha, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Barry White, The Commodores, Muddy Waters, Pat Metheny,Sting, Prince, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell, Carol King, Joan Baez, Puccini, Charles Trenet, Jim Morrison - the Lizard King and The Doors, The Beatles, The Who, The Clash, Coldplay, Blues Travellers, The Brian Setzer Orchestra, The Flying Neutrinos, Jeff Buckley, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Duke Ellington (and the D.E. Quintet), Frente, Radiohead, Finley Quaye, Zero 7, M.Nasir , Kopratasa, The Roots, Erykah Badu, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ravi Shankar, Bob Marley, Ursula Rucker, Common Sense, Les Nubians, India Arie, Les Ecrocs, The Streets, Tally Hall and Damien Rice.
Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You, Annie Hall and Bullets Over Broadway, The Birdcage, Breakfast At Tiffany's, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life Of Brian and Meaning Of Life, Seniman Bujang Lapok,Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Vol. 1 (yes, it is a pretty movie!) Amelie, Singin' In The Rain, Les Girls, Pedro Almodovar's "Hable con Ella";"Todo Sobre Mi Madre";and "La Flor Di Me Secreto", City Of God, Baran, Children of Heaven, Jogho, Mat Som (cue: guffaw!), Gandhi,Man Who Would Be King, In the Name of the Father, Oliver Twist, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Wit, Love Actually, O.Welles’ Othello, The Colour Purple,East Is East,L.V.(Little Voice),Brassed Off,Howard's End,The Remains Of The Day,A Room With A View,The Ballet Shoes,Fahrenheit 451, Kandahar, Akira Kurosawa's "Ran",Delicatessen, O’ Brother Where Art Thou, An Ideal Husband(1999), The Importance of Being Earnest,Pride And Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth!), Iris, Secrets and Lies, The Wedding GIFT, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, The Van, Trainspotting,The ACID HOUSE, To Kill A Mockingbird, High Society, Philadelphia, RKO, Nuremberg, An American In Paris, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, A Raisin’ In The Sun, Sleepless In Seattle,Alfie, What Rats Won't Do,Animal Farm, Angela's Ashes,Beautiful Creatures,A Fish Called Wanda,Funny Girl,GreenFingers,The BFG,The Witches,A Hard Day's Night , Rugrats In Paris and Go Wild, Aristocats, Akira,Finding Nemo, The Godfather I & II, Casino, Goodfellas The Kid Stays In The Picture (Robert Evans' "bobumentary"),The World of Suzie Wong, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,Tootsie, Kramer Vs. Kramer,Gigi, The West Side Story, I Capture The Castle, and Maurice.
Animated Series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(COWABUNGA, DUDES!), Jem and the Holograms (jerrica benton's a goddess!), Thundercats (i was deprived of a Bo-Staff!), Smurfs, Care Bears, Peanuts, Garfield, Ewoks, the animated series, She-Ra, The Simpsons, Teddy Ruxpin, Transformers, Beast Wars, X Men, Paddington, Madeline, Angela Anaconda, As Told By Ginger, Rugrats, The Wild Thornberries, Invader Zim, The Angry Beavers, Courage The Cowardly Dog, Samurai Jack, The Grim Adventures of Billy And Mandy, Dinosaurs, Evil Con Carne, Metropolis, Boys Be, Eek! The Cat, Sakura Wars, Lilo And Stitch, Sagwa, Daria, Bugjuice, Committed, Brace Face, Recess, Extreme Ghostbusters, Happy Tree Friends, Gregory and Peck, Dilbert; Sitcoms:The Cosby Show, Cheers, Absolutely Fabulous, Whose Line Is It Anyway, The Wayne Brady Show, Saturday Night Live, Stark Raving Mad, Fawlty Towers, Yes, Minister, Black Adder, French And Saunders, Alf, The Munsters, Punky Brewster, Murphy Brown, Two Point Four Children, Becker, The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, Frasier, Friends, Will and Grace T.V. Dramas/Series: Monk, CSI (Las Vegas), L.A. Law (even though I understood nought), Law And Order S.V.U, The Practice, Rebus, Poirot, Sex And The City, Ally McBeal, Third Watch, The West Wing, The District, Judging Amy,Oshiin, Coronation Street (hehehehehe),Children's Hospital, ER, Chicago Hope, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Chronicles of Avonlea Documentaries/Series/Current Affairs: A Cook's Tour, Nigella Bites, Oliver's Twist, The Naked Chef, Bebe's Italian Kitchen, Trading Rooms, Trading Spaces, Oprah, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, Antonio Carluccio, Two Fat Ladies, Designer Guys, How Clean Is Your House, Taste Of Travel (Planet Food), Lonely Planet/GlobeTrekker, Avventura, Exhibit A, Crime Night, SpySchool, EyeDrops, Surfing The Menu, BBC's Hot Spots, Dateline London, Diplomatic License, BBC Parliament, HardTalk (Tim Sebastian), BBC2's Restoration (how I miss it), Flog It!, Top Gear! (not for the cars), Talking Movies, Music Room, Middle Eastern/African Correspondence (only if it's Rageh Omaar!!!), Ready Steady Cook, Ainsley Harriett(sic), BBC2's Horizon, Inner Spaces, The World In Art, The World, The Money Program and Trouble at The Top.
(At which point I shall inhale- sharply)- Roald Dahl's "Charlie And The Chocolate Factory"; "George's Marvellous Medicine", "The Twits", "Boy", "The Vicar Of Nibbleswicke"; "Esio Trot"; "The Giraffe The Pelly And Me"; "Matilda"; "The BFG"; "The Magic Finger"; "Fantastic Mr.Fox"; "Witches"; and his collection of short stories- 'Henry Sugar", "Kiss Kiss", "The Great Automatic Grammatizator", "The Man From The South", et al, Dr. Seuss' "The 500 Hats Of Bartholomew Clubbins"; "Horton Hatches The Egg"; "Yertle The Turtle,Gertrude McFuzz and The Big Brag", "Green Eggs And Ham"; "Oh,The Thinks You Can Think!"; "Horton Hears A Who!"; "I Had Trouble In Getting To Solla Sollew"; (And of Course...) "My Book About Me", Agatha Christie's "The ABC Murders"; "The Adventure Of The Christmas Pudding"; "At Bertram's Hotel"; "By The Pricking Of My Thumbs"; "The Clocks"; "And Then There Were None"; "Death On The Nile"; "Hercule Poirot's Christmas";"Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side"; "Murder In The Mews"; "Murder On The Orient Express"; "N or M?"; "One Two Buckle My Shoe"; "Parker Pyne Investigates"; "Sad Cypress"; and "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?", Noel Straetfeild's "Ballet Shoes"; and "Theatre Shoes", Enid Blyton's boarding school stories; "St Clare's"; "The Naughtiest Girl"; and "Malory Towers", Charles Roger Hargreaves' "Mr Men"; and "Little Misses" series, Sheila Greenwald's "The Atrocious Two", Kay Thompson's "Eloise In Paris", Ludwig Bemelmans' "Madeline", L.M. Montgomery's "Anne", and "Emily" series, Jane Austen's "Pride And Prejudice"; "Emma"; "Sense And Sensibility"; "Persuasion"; and "Mansfield Park"( I'm a sucker!), Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", George Elliot's "Silas Marner"; and "Middlemarch", James Joyce's "Dubliners"; "Finnegan's Wake", F.Scott Fitzgerald's " The Great Gatsby"; and "Tender Is The Night", Dorothy Parker's Anthologies and Short Stories (i.e. The Big Blonde, et al), Oscar Wilde's The Penguin Classics Edition of "Lord Arthur Saville's Crime And Other Stories"; "De Profundis"; "The Happy Prince And Other Stories"; "The Picture Of Dorian Gray"; "The Selfish Giant"; his plays " An Ideal Husband"; "The Importance of Being Earnest"; and "Lady Windermere's Fan", Henry James' "The Turn Of The Screw", George Orwell's "The Animal Farm"; "1984"; "Down And Out In Paris And London" and ; "Coming Up For Air", Kazuo Ishiguro's "Remains Of The Day", Graham Greene's "Our Man In Havana"; "The Comedians", Wendy Cope's anthologies (poetry) "Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis"; "Does She Like Word Games?";and "Men And Their Boring Arguments", Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love In The Time Of Cholera"; and " One Hundred Years Of Solitude", Toni Morrison's "Sula";" Beloved"; "Paradise", "Tar Baby"; "Jazz"; "The Song Of Solomon"; and "Bluest Eyes", Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", E.M. Forster's "A Room With A View"; "Howards End"; and "Maurice", Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse"; and "Mrs. Dalloway", Simone deBeauvoir's "L'Invitee"; "The Second Sex", Jean Paul Sartre's "La Nausee"; and "The Age Of Reason", Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift", Jack Kerouac's "San Francisco Blues"; "On The Road" and "Visions Of Cody", J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher In the Rye", Allen Ginsberg's Anthologies (most notably HOWL), Albert Camus' "L'Etranger", Tom Wolfe's "The-Kandy-Kolored-Tangerine-Flake-Streamline-Baby"; "The Bonfire Of The Vanities"; and "A Man In Full", Hanif Kureishi's " The Buddha Of Suburbia"; " The Black Album", "Love In A Blue Time"; and "The Faber Book Of Pop" (co-edited with Jon Savage), Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"; "The Moor's Last Sigh", "Fury","East,West"; Non Fiction:"The Vintage Book Of Indian Writing" (I swear by this book! It's the bible for Indo-Anglian literature...which he co-edited with Elizabeth West); " Step Across This Line" (collection of essays), Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy", Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance"(AAAARGH!); and "Family Matters", Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things", RK Narayan's "A Malgudi Omnibus" (complete works of...), "A Letter From India- A Collection of Short Stories by Pakistani Writers", Zadie Smith's " Autograph Man" and "White Teeth", Che Guevara's " Motorcycle Diaries", and the late Edward W. Said's "Politics Of Dispossession".