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I meet a lot of people. It's not always the ones you would expect who turn out to be the most interesting. You could ask me to prepare a list of four people I would like to have dinner with and I might find myself suffering through a dry piece of salmon and cold steamed vegetables with Gregory Crewdson, David Lynch, Joel-Peter Witkin and David Cronenberg where I might have a very unexpected good time with say a big plate of hot wings, Bobby Knight, OJ Simpson, Mike Tyson and Jesse Ventura. You just can't predict these things in advance.
I shoot a group or an act and if I hit it off pretty well with them, I get a CD to see what their stuff's like. Some examples include David Banner, Dialated Peoples, Defari, Mitchy Slick, Phil the Agony and Krondon -- the whole Strong Arm Steady crew, Busta Rhymes, Chino XL, Mobb Deep, Dirty Birdy, 8Ball and MJG, Lil' Jon, Twista, Planet Asia, Cypress Hill, MadLib, Dem Frachize Boyz, Warren G, C-Bo and Yukmouth who started this whole thing with me nearly three years ago.
Vonnegut, Bellow, Bukowski, Dostoevsky, Celine, Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, Nabokov, Kafka, Camus, Tolstoy, Robertson Davies, Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- I've read pretty much all their stuff. Others I've had good luck with include Steinbeck, Durrell, Updike and Cormac McCarthy. New stuff I like is Richard Russo, Richard Ford, Larry Brown and this crazy fantasy Marquez-like short story writer Kelly Link. Add to those the poets Robinson Jeffers, Anne Sexton, maybe some Wallace Stevens.