Il faut des rites ..Fare Baccano (trans. being like baccus, painting the town), Being Ruthlessly Myself, Insanity, Innovation, Theatre & Film, Forward Thinking ART ART ART, Modernism, The Avant Garde, Surrealism, Dada, Human Rights, Foreign Lands, Audacity, Absurdism (hence le nom), Cafes, Salons, Paris, Rome, Firenze, Barcelona, Cinque Terre, Latin America, Trastevere, Wine, Sex, Cabarets, Torch Singers, Acrobats, Camels
Leonard Cohen. People who share my aesthetic: think Petra Von Kant and Helmut Newton. People who don't share my aesthetic, but like beautiful and meaningful things. Modernists. Post Modernists. Gastronomists. Critical Thinkers. Warren Beatty (20 years ago). Members of the avant-garde. Artsy Fartsy people. Keen observers. A partner in crime. Intelligent and communicative human beings. Emotionally aware people with some humility, kindness, and a flair for living. I believe all is fair game in art and humor, do you?
Bach (Goldberg Variations and Air on the G String), Mozart, Puccini, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Jon Brion, Thelonius Monk, Johnny cash, Oscar Petersen, mmmmm Django Reinhardt is sweet sweet sweet, Stephane Grapelli, Serge Gainsbourg, Leonard Cohen -- the ultimate modern day bard, ludwig Van, opera, caruso, Arvo Paart (watch "menilmontant" (early silent film) with Arvo Paart -- it's simply divine), Astor Piazzolla, Carlos Gardel, Jason Collett, Daniel Johnston, Herbie Hancock, Marcos Morinigo, Honey Brothers, Dina Washington, The Platters, Otis Redding, and perhaps you.
Modernist Cinema and the Time Image (see Deleuze for reference), "Pandora's Box", anything Fellini ("Nights of Cabiria" and "Toby Dammit"), Passolini, Silents, Degenerate Art, French New Wave ("The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", "The Soft Skin", "Alphaville", "Band A Part", "Jules et Jim", "Breathless"), Almodovar, Antonioni ("The Passenger," "Blow-Up"), Louis Malle ("Murmur of the Heart," "Elevator to the Gallows" -- fabulous soundtrack, too), "Fassbinder, anything with Hanna Schygulla (as an actor I look to her for my prototype -- I particularly love the Marriage of Maria Braun which I think is Fassbinder's masterwork, Maria Renee Falconetti gives a STUNNING and unexpected performance in Carl Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc."
Telemundo, Daily Show, Ali G, Entourage
Want to start reading "Ulysses," "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole as both an affirmation and critique of the eccentric, Shakespeare (particularly Hamlet and Twelfth Night), Being and Nothingness by Sartre, The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzche (as a counter to Socrates), The Poetics by Aristotle, Boleslavsky's book on Acting, Larry Silverberg's Meisner Books, Marx for his commitment to humanity, Chekhov (particularly the Seagull), Tenessee Williams, currently reading the Bohemian Manifesto (quite amusing and enjoyable) and The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (whom I am making a film about-- Hitler's favorite actress and stalin's favorite spy and Anton Chekhov's niece), Ah! the Symposium by Plato -- I particularly love Artistophanes rendition of love -- it is quite beautiful, Baudelaire is luscious, Pablo Neruda, Nabokov's Invitation to a Beaheading (I simply love the man's writing style, one of the few books he first wrote in Russian, it goes perfectly with cafes and lingering hours), I have a large collection of literature in Spanish -- I am fond of Garcia Marques, Reynaldo Arenas, Miguel de Unamunos, and Jorge Luis Borges. Just acquired a giant collection of Cervantes works. I have all of Don Quijote in Spanish, and it's terribly overwhelming and exciting. . . I think I'll have to work up to that.
Cindy Sherman, Hanna Schygulla, Lenny Bruce, Anton Chekhov, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Sartre, Dali!, Baudelaire ____________________________________________________________ _______________Windows by Charles Baudelaire__________________________________________________ _________________________ Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers. ____________________________________________________________ _______________Across the ocean of roofs I can see a middle-aged woman, her face already lined, who is forever bending over something and who never goes out. Out of her face, her dress, and her gestures, our of practically nothing at all, I have made up this woman's story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep. ____________________________________________________________ _______________If it had been and old man I could have made up his just as well. ____________________________________________________________ _______________And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in some one besides myself. ____________________________________________________________ _______________Perhaps you will say "Are you sure that your story is the really one?" But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?.. .. ..