I spend the time scouting for strange books, reading things that I hope will make me brainier and then promptly forgetting every detail. Watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos too often and listening to enough music to give me juke box tinnitus. I also waste the end of the day when I should be sleeping staying up to watch any true story telemovie, anything from court room dramas to crazed right to lifers going off the rails, preferably with Richard Thomas (once of The Waltons)
Howard Zinn, James Randi, Christopher Hitchens, I wish i could have met Kurt Vonnegut and Carl Sagan
The Smiths, Nirvana, Mudhoney, any album where an entirely inappropriate band have been covered by a regional philharmonic, Jack, Hefner, Grandaddy, The Wedding Present, Giant Sand, soundtracks by Danny Elfman, John Barry or Michael Nyman, Nick Cave, Morrissey, Cyndi Lauper, The Fall, House of Love, Nick Cave, Yo La Tengo, the Kingsbury Manx, And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of the Dead, The Pixies, Billy Bragg, Mogwai (despite the fact they rudely heckled me once), Godspeed You Black Emperor, eels, Belle and Sebastian, Bright Eyes, Sufjan Stevens, The Shangra Las, The Ronettes, Love, The Kinks, Slade, REM, Elvis Presley, Cyndi Lauper, Kate Bush, The Delgados, laura Cantrell, Scout Niblett, Peter Gabriel, Lisa Germano, Neil Diamond, Ennio Morricone, you know, all that sort of thing, but having lost most of my albums to a deluge of sewage things are different now.
The films of John Waters, David Cronenberg and George A Romero (particularly Martin), The Dead Zone is the most melancholy film to be lumped in the horror genre ever, Strictly Ballroom, The Wild Geese, Who Dares Wins, all 70s sitcoms made into movies (especially ones on the Costa Del Plonka), The Old Dark House, most things with Alastair Sim, Murder at the Gallop or any other Margaret Rutherford Marples, Edward Scissorhands, This Is England, Blade, Saturday Night Sunday Morning, Muriel's Wedding, If, Taste of Honey, Don't Look Now, Harold and Maude, Lair of the White Worm, Hal Hartley stuff, Static, Salvador, Hana Bi and most Beat Takeshi, nearly all films with Paddy Considine particularly Dead man's Shoes and Room for Romeo Brass, and the same goes for Jennifer Jason Leigh, with some clear exceptions, you can work them out if necessary
The Sopranos, Steptoe and Son, GBH, Curb your Enthusiasm, Dennis Potter, Twin Peaks, Ren and Stimpy, Cosmos, Ascent of Man, Fry and Laurie as Jeeves and Wooster or A Bit of, Millennium, Hammer House of Horror, Tales of the Unexpected, most things from the eighties with Rik Mayall, Brideshead Revisited, Arena, Sunset Beach, Columbo, The Avengers, The Prisoner
Graham Greene (particlularly End of the Affair), Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Myla Goldberg's Bee Season, Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden, the novels of Martin Millar, Alan Moore, The Beast in Man by Emile Zola
John Peel, Carl Sagan, Kurt Vonnegut, journalists like Greg Palast, Thomas Huxley
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