Vintage clothing (obviously!) including but not restricted to ÃœBER-chic dresses, fancy pocketbooks, mod jewelry, and OH, the shoes....(*happy sigh*), music of all shapes & sizes, acting, singing (solo, choir, @ weddings, in the shower, car, etc....), theatre (including opera & operetta), screaming with pundits, anything 80's (within reason) - this month, I am loving horizontal stripes, one-shoulder shirts a la Flashdance, patent leather, bright colors, bold jewelry, and more than one watch at once! - traveling, finding fun things to do outdoors, adventures of all sorts, foreign/exotic foods (esp. Indian & Thai), yummy, frothy, perfectly chilled BEER (no domestics allowed), learning to cook things that do not have the word "fried" in the title (or if they do, at least in another language), wandering freely through bookstores with a coffee and all day, Murphy's Ice Cream (of Dingle, Ireland), zippy cars & motorcycles, testing my limits...! Clearly, I also have a thing for parentheses...actually, I think it's more of a love affair with punctuation in general. Eh, whaddya gonna do?
I tend to be attracted to things that are generally regarded as unusual or not necessarily great, such as: thunderstorms, the smell of gasoline, change, weird socks, tent caterpillars, hot dogs from street vendors, smart-assedness, cheesy 80's movies, extremes, a good challenge, and copious amounts of optimism, Pollyanna-style. I'm not good with picking 'favorites,' so the following lists are just things currently popping in and out of my head!
Waaay too many to list, so I'll edit this as my mood shifts:
♥Tried & True Favorites♥
U2, Gershwin, Barenaked Ladies, Sheryl Crow, Van Halen, Flesh for Lulu, The New Pornographers, Sondheim, Sinatra, Def Leppard, Bob Marley, Cyndi Lauper, John Denver, Paul Simon, Madonna, Etta James, Queen, The Ramones, Dire Straits, Cole Porter, A-ha, Ella Fitzgerald, kind of becoming a Beethoven groupie, The Cure, The Eels, Bernstein, The Beatles, The Cars, Abba, Enya, OMD, Feist, dance music (mainly Latin & swing), many a Broadway show! As far as genres go, I love reggae, New Wave, big band, glam rock, opera/operetta, Celtic, torch songs, 'world music' (I hate that expression, but you get the point), and classic rock that leans heavily towards hair bands.
♥Current Obsessions♥
With the rest of my life in such crazy flux, I have been eagerly escaping to a musical happy place, and the past few months have fortuitously provided lots of great new stuff - a new album from Annie Lennox, a new big band collection, some Pärt, Eric Whitacre, the soundtrack from Juno...I'm still awaiting the new Cure CD with bated breath (because obviously I must have the songs committed to memory before the concert, haha) and also have been renewing my affections for some older Cake, Fleetwood Mac, and Beatles (I'm in a White Album phase again - it goes in spells). Hopefully all of this will prevent my head from exploding before graduation!!
Another category that will need frequent updates - there are just so MANY!!
OK, let's see - When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, Master & Commander, Harry Potter, LOTR, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, (actually, basically anything Monty Python), Always, Charade (the Hepburn/Grant one), Operation Petticoat, Pirates of Penzance (ah, Kevin Kline, how I love you so!), Arsenic and Old Lace, the 3 original Star Wars flicks (I know, I know), Say Anything (John Cusack being a crucial part of my 80's experience - and beyond), Grosse Pointe Blank, Shawshank Redemption, The Cider House Rules, Practical Magic, Some Kind of Wonderful, Contact, The Wedding Singer (I am, after all, a JuliaGulia), Young Frankenstein, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pride & Prejudice (any & all but esp. newest BBC version), Labyrinth, 7 Brides for 7 Brothers, Clue, Dream for an Insomniac, Stranger than Fiction, A Beautiful Mind, The Fifth Element, Little Miss Sunshine, Stardust, ridiculously cheesy disaster/creepy creature movies e.g. Day After Tomorrow, Lake Placid, what's the one about the asteroid? Bring 'em on, I love 'em - I have to counter all the deep, intellectual stuff somehow.; )
Jon Stewart (fellow W&M alum!), Bill Maher, Big Love, Extras, Law and Order, Entourage, Flight of the Conchords, any cheesy Bravo challenge show (Project Runway, Top Chef) - what can I say?, So You Think You Can Dance, periodically randomly mesmerized by the Weather Channel (I swear they use subliminal messages). I love trivia/quiz-based game shows but don't watch 'em anymore cause I can't deal with all the manufactured drama & ridiculously long pauses fraught with anxiety (zzzzz).
I love to read anything I can get my hands on - my mags run the gamut from Cosmo to the Economist. That said, I haven't had much time for reading lately, so my list will be woefully short:
Harry Potter, Jane Austen , Al Franken, anything Tolkien, Bertrand Russell, To Kill a Mockingbird, Memoirs of a Geisha, Bridget Jones' Diary, lots of Mark Twain, Candide, Thomas Paine, Oscar Wilde, Tristram Shandy, love to relax with James Patterson, Michael Crichton, Patrick O'Brian, and whatever else catches my fancy while wandering through the bookstore. Being an English major obviously precipitates extensive reading of things you might otherwise never pick up - but that's the point, isn't it?
Oh, lord, I don't think I'm going to have time to read anything but schoolwork this semester..!! Just finishing up rereading the Pullman Dark Materials trilogy, and would also like to get through Three Bags Full, The Dept of Lost and Found, and The Nine before I am thrust at light speed into a course on Austen, late 19th/early 20th century American Lit (Alcott, Twain, James), history of western music, and español (eek)...
My current heroes are the sadly unheralded designers of some of my favorite vintage finds: