This American Life @WBZN Chicago public radio, Joe Frank, A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor---My kitty Cat, Selected Shorts at Symphony Space in NYC--National Public Radio... The Diane Rehm Show... walking around the city late at night and finding stray kitties to play with... motorcycles, vampire slayers, air conditioning, indie films, Manhattan, San Francisco, public libraries, indie book stores, empty coffee shops and quiet baristas... sushi, fresh basil, fresh mozzerella, olive oil, the spicy potatoes and veggie dumplings at Cafe Shambala...creative non-fiction, crossword puzzles, Basquait, Edward Hopper, Picasso, Henri Matisse, shy people, opinionated people, active imaginations, the smell of sage after a rain storm...lilacs... black coffee and camel ciggarettes and sun rises and empty pages and clicky pens and sighing after a long talk with an old friend...the sound of waterfalls, distant crowds, city sidewalks, and sincerity...a voice cracking before a sob and the quiet breathing of a sleeping loved one... the Oregon coast, haystack rock at sunset with pants rolled up and toes in the sand, pacifica news, democracy now and Howard Zinn... Eaves dropping, drunk dialing, volvos and saabs and mopeds and vespas, giving directions, long lonesome drives and solo road trips and youth hostels... old bridges and collonades and roof top gardens... the long way home, Mythology, Psychology, Sociology, Ontology and all manner of ologies, weeping willows, electric grandmothers, giving tree's, enthusiasm, authenticity, fearlessness...the smell of pine needles, romanticism, modernism, dadaism, existentialism, shades of gray, ambiguity and humanity.
Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian decor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, "Wallace Stevens, eh?" But it wasn't just intellectual experiences---they were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could "relate without getting close." For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have diner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to Public Radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing---the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town. New York. ---Woody Allen, from "The Whore of Mensa"
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Woody Allen's stuff... especially Manhattan, Annie Hall, Interiors, Husbands and Wives, Alice, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, and The Mighty Aphrodite.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer! ----proudly and with enthusiasm... Sopranos--I like Six Feet Under...of course Sienfield... I try and avoid television and usually check these titles out from the library or video store.
By Author--Poems, Novels, Plays, Short Stories, Essays and Philosophies--but in no particular order: Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Raymond Carver, Vladimir Nabokov, Woody Allen, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Galway Kinnell, David Sedaris, Sarah Vowel, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, James Joyce, William Blake, Gustave Flaubert, Stephane Mallarme, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Authur Miller, Bill Shakespeare, Sophocles, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee (the playwrite--not to be confused with the Southern Utah enviromentalist writer...) Edna Ferber, Graham Swift, Henry Miller, John Locke, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jane Austin, E.L. Doctorow, Sherwood Anderson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Judith Kitchen, Cynthia Ozick, John Gardner, Bernard Cooper, David Mamet, Shel Silverstein, Tony Kushner, Rainer Maria Rilke and many more whose names I can't think of right now. Favorite recently read novels include: Pride and Prejudice, Lolita, Picture of Dorian Grey, Catch-22, Franny and Zooey, and To The Lighthouse.