Guitar, comedy, history, tragedy, politics, pathos, and the fine art of the jape. (Oh yeah, and pie...)I also fancy myself a bit of a writer (in much the same way that Crispin Glover might, for example, fancy himself a paragon of impeccable mental stability). Here's one of my more recent aimless rambles (others are there as well, just check through the Archive)http://www.keepgoing.org/issue18_flake/would_you_car e_for_a_rolo.html
Somebody with a prosthetic torso, real limbs, but with fake nails, eyelashes, and kneecaps. Holding a Dagwood sandwich on pumpernickle.(Barring that, however, I wouldn't mind meeting a nice young lady with the mind of a philosopher, the eye of an artist, and the libido of a Tennessee leg hound.)
The Grateful Dead; Neil Young; the Beatles; Miles Davis; Leo Kottke; Peter Rowan; bluegrass; you know... yer basic hemphead music. I also have been known to dig on a nice bit of Mahler in my time.
Others, in no particular order, Johnny Cash, the Who, the Doors, Lee Perry, Gabor Szabo, CSNY, Hendrix, Wizards of Kansas (no, not the band Kansas either!), Gong...
(Favorite local band: Swing Gitan... best damned gypsy jazz you're gonna hear without actually going over to Europe.)
Also, while not technically being "music", I'm also a big fan of the Firesign Theatre.
The Big Lebowski; The Blues Brothers; Seven Samurai; Lord of the Rings; Play It Again, Sam; The Saragossa Manuscript; Star Wars (the original one); The Duellists; Planes Trains and Automobiles; Sleuth; Tommy Boy; Being There; The Great McGinty; Captain Blood; Kelly's Heroes; The Party; Office Space; J-Men Forever; Tombstone; A Hard Day's Night; Swingers; Patton; High Fidelity; Shine; Arsenic and Old Lace; Strange Brew; Koyaanisqatsi; (should I keep rambling on, or does this give you a good enough handle on what the inside of my head tends to look like?)
Well, let's see... As far as I'm concerned, Fawlty Towers is still one of the funniest damned things ever committed to videotape. There aren't many TV shows these days that I watch on any sort of regular basis, though I definitely got hooked on Deadwood before the rat bastid suits at HBO killed it. Family Guy is great, as are the Simpsons. I also always enjoyed Mr. Show. Rome was such a blast, but they rushed the ending so badly. My Name Is Earl is just an odd, brilliantly-written blast (and far better to watch on DVD than in its original commercial-riddled form on network TV.) And, of course, Bill Maher and the Daily Show are good for a larf at the expense of the horseshit-slingin' yahoos in "Warshington". Generally, though, when I do turn the TV on, I end up going right for the movie channels.
Okay, let's see here... I dig the poems of Rumi, for one thing. Also biographies (I recently re-read "Lennon" by Ray Coleman, and highly recommend it), Christopher Moore, Philip K. Dick, Tom Robbins, Carlos Castaneda, Jean Shepherd, the book Shadow Divers was a hell of an unexpected ride too... that's all just off the top of my head, of course. If a book is compelling, I'll get sucked into it.
On a slightly more off-beat note, I have a fairly extensive library of books and materials relating to my long-time interest in Zeppelin/airship history. I'm slowly working on a reference book of my own dealing with the Hindenburg and the people who flew her, but that's more of an ongoing hobby than it is any sort of deadline-based thing. But it's certainly a corner of my book world that I enjoy diving into on a fairly regular basis.
Well, I don’t tend to have heroes per se, but there are certainly people whose work and/or art I admire. Here’s a few of ‘em:
John Lennon
Bill Hicks
Rumi
Hugo Eckener
Jerry Garcia
Preston Sturges
Terence McKenna
Stan Laurel
Philip K. Dick
Ken Kesey