Flinging my ass over the ocean so I can see really really old things. Stuffing my mouth with the delicacies of every culture whose cuisine has moved beyond beatle grubs. Breeding another eRiC baby so my daughter is not alone when I'm dead. Tracing my family tree back to a specific cave dwelling grunt monkey so I really know who I am. Learning other languages so I can order freaky forbidden food from secret menus hidden from the eyes of most Americans. Listening to great music and imagining what it would sound like if I still got high. Speculating the future based on a model from the past. I also love numbers, the cosmos, Halloween, the Ren faire, my family, my friends and MAKING MOVIES. I LOVE MAKING MOVIES.
I'd like to meet:
Movie makers, theatre people, Artists, writers, poets, mystics, historians, believers in the civilizations of pre-antiquity, followers of alternate realty theories, anti-Bush-liberals, SCA's, Rennies, Gamers, Indie publishers, philosophers, film makers, composers, Tolkien freaks, Wicca, dark art socerery acolytes, blood fest film orgie fans, gore fun Goth metal modificators, screaming fans of films that screw your brain...
Music:
My earliest music influences were Vivaldi, Bach and the Beatles. I grew up on the wall of sound groups like Yes and Genesis. But I was mostly into my own musical discoveries such as Mike Oldfield, David Bedford, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno. In my twenties I fell in love with the sounds of Enigma, Dead Can Dance, Deep Forest and Ali Khan. The Peter Gabriel world music label has yielded some exceptional works as well. I am most taken by the wild folk music/rock fusion that has been going on in Finland in the past decade. I spent many years working in musical theater as a writer and a director so I also have a long list of musicals that I love with Les Miserables and Aspects of Love at the top of the list and Sweeny Tod, West Side Story and Fiddler of the Roof definitely on the list. I also love opera, with Puccini being my favorite composer and Wagner my second favorite. Music is important to life, like air.
Movies:
I love movies and I see as many as I can. A brief list of favorites include, The Godfather, Goodfella's, Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, Jacob's Ladder, Angel Heart, Alien, Braveheart, Pretty Woman, Working Girl, Witness, The Year of Living Dangerously, Airplane, Cinderella Man, Closer, Dune, The Conversation, The Good the Bad and The Ugly, The Man Who Would Be King, Patton, Schindler's List, Field of Dreams, The Hunt for Red October, The Last Samurai, Far and Away, Zoolander and the list goes on and on...
Television:
When I make an effort to watch something special it is usually the Science Channel, The History channel or a movie channel. My favorite shows are Boston Legal, Iron Chef and anything about early humans and the dawn of civilization. Otherwise I accidentally watch whatever my wife or my daughter put on. Or I just flick on a news station in the background while I am doing other things and it just stays on for hours melting my brain.I have a few cool shows that I pitch around town and one of my films is on the Sci Fi channel so maybe I will start watching that. television has a lot of unrealized potential.
Books:
I used to read far more books as a single man as I do now as a husband and a father. My first love was learning books, especially Paleontology, entomology and archeology (as a boy pre 9 years old). When I was nine I began reading Tolkien and I was hooked. I read the Lord of the Rings five times cover to cover before I picked up another book, then it was The Chronicles of Narnia. By the time I had graduated High School I had read everything that Tolkien and Lewis had written plus most of LeGuin, Peake, Zalazney, Lovecraft and Williams. I stopped reading fantasy and sciece fiction in the middle of Issac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (I threw the book across the room and never picked up another fantasy again). I then read historic novels such as a Distant Mirror, Shogun, Creation, and Pillars of the Earth. I did my stint with Carl Sagan and I read all of the Jurassic Park novels (even Sphere). I began reading anthropology and philosophy after all that (Camille Paglia and such). Now I just read the junk rags that my wife leaves laying around and the occasional industry book and how to manual. But I did start reading good books to my daughter recently (we did Great Expectations last month and the Prince and the Pauper the month before. Our next book is the Secret garden). But I love to read and I will do it more as soon as I learn how to turn off the television again.
Heroes:
Anyone who will fling the Republican dictators from their offices and return this nation to a state of peace.
