Thomas' Promises - ProfilesArchive

About Me

Originally I hail from "Brumfus" (aka. "Guns-wick" or New Brunswick), NJ, but currently reside in that ambiguous free-love zone that is West Philly. I play sick for a living as a Standardized Patient - it keeps me "in groceries", as they say...Would like to call myself a musician...but vinyl collector scum-come-deejay is a more apt description. I'm my own template for good taste, but not immaleable. Have values, but I'm no idealogue. Highly aware, but hardly an activist bone in my body (TO MY SHAME...). I try like hell to understand from where people are coming. I believe in urban places and lateral mobility (versus up or downward). Minutae will often trump the bigger picture (TO MY DETRIMENT...) Gregarious enough, but don't be surprised if I drop out of sight from time to time (I REQUIRE IT...) Androgenous, but I don't strive to define my sexual type in the codified sense. I like people who are fun, outgoing, and discerning but don't take themselves too seriously. I don't care for: unmitigated bullshit, one-upsmanship, mob mentality, scenesterism (in its more insipid varieties), people who obsess over celebrity...

My Interests

(Topically-speaking, if not in practice): Records, DJ-ing, screen printing, documentary film, cultural punditry, non-stop ecstatic dancing, dandyism (of the old-line gent variety), flirtation, free-ganism, interior desecration (apolgies to Christiane), trans-European disco ethics, ethnography, Russian Constructivism and Sots art, Italian futurism, Dutch/Scandinavian design, urbanism, history, quantum physics (I don't pretend to understand it), zodiacal signs (only recently gave any credence to it, I'll take my time warming up to astrology in the broader sense), cooking (still painfully novice...)

I'd like to meet:

Looking for: musos and muse-ettes (be they DJs, musicians or just enthusiasts but especially DJs) to chew the proverbial fat over rarefied and wonderful leftfield dance sounds -- the zeitgeist from afrobeat and dub via krautrock, ambient, soundtrack, prog, etc. through to new/cold wave, italo, new beat, the nascent strains of industrial, proto-house and on to minimal tech, abstract disco, glitch business and beyond; prospective DJ cohorts steeped in the aforementioned sounds; people who get off on hearing well-mixed sets of deep stuff they don't necessarilly know -- I importune, "take me to school! How else can I hear music the way I did when I was 18?").People who can teach me how to cook; people to hibernate with...

Music:

Supremely decadent ITALO DISCO business -- your men can't sing, but fuck - we'll overlook that (or just skip to the instrumental side!)...Ago, Android, Azoto, Automat, Bazooka, Cellophane, Chrisma, Creatures, Calaestium, Rafaela Carra, Tony Carasco, Esavu, Feli, Florio Time D.J., 4M International, Fockewulf 190!, G.A.N.G., Ganymed, Hivoh, International Music System, David Keaton, Doris Norton, Kirlian Camera, Klapto!, Liasons Dangereuses, Los Angeles T.F., Loverde, Massimo Barsotti, Marzio Dance, Gina X, Giorgio Moroder, Mono Band, Mike Mareen, Mya & The Mirror, Nera Veroni, Nexus, Novaga, Nite Lite, Pierre Perpal, Scotch, Simonetti/Pignatelli/Morante, Sphinx, Steel Mind, Styloo, Stu Phillips, Sun La Shan, Tapps, Tantra, Harry Thumann, Venise!, Vivien Vee, Zwischenfall...Yeah, after a while, it's like being a nerd for fag music...

Movies:

Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon; Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Legend; Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels; Gattaca; Tarkovsy's Solaris; Withnail & I; The Honeymoon Killers; Billy Liar; The Naked Civil Servant; Rumble Fish; Over The Edge; River's Edge; Cronenberg's The Brood, Dead Ringers; Jan Svankmajer's Instituta Benjamenta, Conspirators of Pleasure; Hans Richter's Rythmus Cycle, Dadascope; Dziga Vertov's The Man With The Movie Camera; Mathew Barney's Cremaster Cycle; Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos, Scorpio Rising, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome; John Water's Desperate Living, Polyester; Pistol Opera; Pyongyang Robo-Girl; more to follow...Documentaries!!! (I don't know why I'm attracted to bleakness -- Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent; Peter Watkin's The War Game; Children of the Decree; Tierische Liebe; East Side Story; Brother's Keeper; Devil's Playground; Mann Helden und Schwullen Nazis (this one's a hoot!); Absolut Warhola; Paris Is Burning; A State of Mind; The Architecture of Doom; to be continued...

Television:

I think most TV sucks, and I could live without it. But on those rare occassions of viewing better cable: I'll go with NOVA, Antique Road Show, HBO series such as Deadwood, Six Feet Under...more to follow...

Books:

Not so-much a fiction buff, but sundry topics pique my interest: Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs & Steel, Collapse; Anna Politkovskaya - A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya; Joseph Kastner - A Species of Eternity; Jon Ronson - Them; Erin Cosgrove - Love's Other Shoe, The Baader-Meinhoff Affair; Paul Scheerbart - The Grey Cloth; Gary Zukav - The Dancing Wu-Li Masters; Feodor Doestoevsky - The Idiot, Notes from Under the Floorboards; Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow; more to follow...

Heroes:

Maybe more like people I appreciate, or who inspire me: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Brian Ferry, Brian Eno, Marc Bolan, Iggy Pop, David Johannsen, Stephen Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker, Wendy Carlos, The Mael Brothers, Genesis P. Orridge, Klaus Nomi, Ronny, Quentin Crisp, Romy Haag, Dorian Corey, Peppa Labaija...