Pavement, Mazzy Star, Beck, Robert Wyatt, Radiohead, The Mars Volta, Erland Oye, Rufus Wainwright, Bright Eyes, Ben Folds, Rilo Kiley, Sigur Ros, Bjork, Clearlake, Blur, Jeff Buckley, Lamb, Nick Drake, The Concretes, Rage Against The Machine, Arto Lindsay, Pulp, Kathryn Williams, John Egdell, The Rentals, Talking Heads, Stevie Wonder, Bing Crosby, Julie London, David Bowie, Randy Newman.
The Princess Bride, Fargo, Donnie Darko, Rope, City of God, Don't Look Now, In the Mood for Love.
Spaced, 6 Feet Under, The Sopranos, Firefly, The Mighty Boosh, Discovery channel documentaries on how they make stuff, News 24. I don't have a TV, so any moving image pretty much hooks me immediately.
Catch 22, The Brothers Karamazov, The Periodic Table (Primo Levi, not the actual periodic table), The Alexandria Quartet, Foucault's Pendulum, His Dark Materials, Iain (M) Banks, The Time of Our Singing, House of Leaves, and secretly any trashy novels you can buy in airports that you can read and forget in 2 hours. One-night-stand books.