J. Michael profile picture

J. Michael

About Me

Summing-up isn’t exactly my forte, but… I’m a classically trained amateur musician/composer, writer, adman, and sometime voice actor with a silly predilection for paradox –or, if you like, a shiftless dilettante with the lion’s share of ironic detachment. I read more than is defensible, but less than I ought, attempt every day to unlearn accumulative years of piano technique, and generally gravitate to those whose personal mode of expression makes little concession for the obvious.

My Interests

Literature, Music, Theatre and the Plastic Arts; allegory, impenetrable polyphony, self-replicating social memes, "...free artists of the self," and ice cream.

I'd like to meet:

...faces in the crowd like pink petals on a black bough.

Music:

If brevity be the soul of wit, my tastes are the half-life of perpetuity.

Movies:

Lawerence of Arabia. Ichi the Killer. El Topo. Eyes Without a Face. The Baby of Macon. Blue Velvet. Rouge. Gods and Monsters. The Ruling Class. Gummo. Fitzcarraldo. The Piano Teacher. Lost in La Mancha.

Television:

Deadwood. Doctor Who. Cowboy Beebop. The Prisoner. Samurai 7. Speed Grapher.

Books:

Blood Meridian. The Boy. Crash. Eden, Eden, Eden. Querelle. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Don Quixote. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Riverside edition). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Naked Lunch. I, Lucifer. Madness and Civilization. Gravity's Rainbow. House of Leaves. Satan Burger. Moby Dick. The Man in the High Castle. Labyrinths. Dhalgren. The Book of the New Sun. Choke. The Name of the Rose. The Prose Edda. The Baphomet. Geek Love. Arcadia.

Heroes:

Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Ian McShane, William Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, Harold Bloom, etc., etc...