My religion is astonishment ...
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Many things. But especially love; stories true or not; fervency; friends and laughter; metaphysical speculation; and faces, always faces, faces that show amazing things because they don't know you're looking at them and faces looking especially softly, intently or curiously, at you; dusks, sad as they can be; meadows, especially mountain ones, and the edges of forests; poetry and music; wonder-causing things; old photos, especially of people long gone but who feel alive to us even so; ancient gods we've sadly dismissed; the past, because more has happened there and maybe still does; the sound of leaves being played by the wind, and lying near this sound and slowly falling into a snooze, with a good daydream inbetween; pondering the simulation argument and other bizzare but perhaps true ideas; thinking about infinity but not for too long; imagining impossible things; trying to feel what another person feels, which probably isn't possible but you can a bit; touching things with my eyes, seeing things with my hands; and things that bounce, glide, or float ...
People who have an easy capacity for astonishment and delight. People who don't just know things but are wise. People who have passions even if very lightly held. People of sincerity and humanity and vitality. People of tenderness, who are soft-hearted and open and who reach, but also people who are hard-thinking. People of inner courage and laughter, or outer courage and humility, people who wonder and grow. Or any one of these things ... And gentle kooks ... Also seahorses and butterflies ... Here's a question: what is your favourite state of being?
Especially Bloc Party, the Stars, Projections, Sawhney, Jam + Spoon, Mansour Seck, Evora, boom bip, The Doors, DDT, Joni Mitchell, Santana, Bach, Band of Horses, K + D, The High, Stone Roses ...Byrds, Pretenders, Kinks, Fleetwood Mac, Free, Wedding Present, Dead Can Dance, Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, Elliot Smith, Aimee Mann, GS Heron, Neko Case, Cream, The Who, The What, The Where, The Why, The When, Zepp ...Tull, Purple, Nusrat, Marley, FYC, Clash, Portishead, Jonathan Richman, Orb, Jens Lekman, Richard Hawley, Joplin, REM, Billie-H, Iron and Wine, Zappa, CCR, BTO, CSNY, Nirvana, Van Morrison, Velvet U ...P-Floyd, Red House Painters, Ali Farke Toure, Makeba, Moby, Jane Siberry, Masekela, Air, Tom Waits, Gorecki, Part, Cave, Dead Prez, Wu Tang, Chem Brothers, B of C, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, both Buckleys, Leftfield ... ..Fischerspooner, Dr Octagon, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), early Springsteen, Bragg, M Ward, Stevie Wonder, Sinatra, Iron and Wine, Cash, Stompin' Tom, Bach, Dement, Waits, Franti + Spearhead, Badu, S & G, Costello, B52s ...Elvis, Smiths, Cooder, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Seeger, tons of motown and tons of stuff I don't know the name of or forgotten. Also Resonance FM baby! And KCRW in LA - the best music station in the West! And Galaxie 500 ... ..Loads of ambient, electronic, experimental, vocal stuff if not too harsh. I don't know many of the names of these people but they are doing some amazing work, interesting, arresting, beautiful stuff. Some of my friends are them if you are interested. Here's a nice vid-piece by Cheer ...
Especially films by Linklater, Jarmusch, Hartley, Altman, Cronenburg, Egoyan, Medem, Jonze, Tarr, Ray, Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Ophuls, the Cohens, Peckinpah, Gilliam, Lynch, Tarantino, Almadovar, Soderburgh, Fellini, Laconte, Sica, Capra, Scorsese, F-Coppola, Kaufman, Kubrick, Chaplin, Tarkovsky, some Wenders, some Allen, silent films, sci-fi, and any good doc. And tons more ...
It doesn't work for me very much anymore, it's a bummer ... but I've had more fun without it. Here's one person having tons of fun without it, Banksy, who makes very funny, important, and often beautiful agit-prop ... ..
It still happens ... Especially Kundera, Calvino, Borges, Delillo, Houellebecq, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Totstoy, Pushkin, Gogel, Zamyatin, Mistry, Munif, Mann, Murakami, Sebald, Auster, Baker, Homer, Ngugi, Rushdie, Coupland, Choukri, Sabato, Ovid, Carver, Sholokhov, Zola, Tim Parks, Hrabal, Camus, Pamuk, Amis and others. Some popular science and some history. Books about space inner and outer. Politics/Power/Society: Chomsky, Zinn, Fanon, Pilger, Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, Schell, Said, Mckibben, MLK, MalcolmX, the Unabomber, and others but mostly I go to various investigative news sources. Mass media is too owned to find the truth ... Poetry: Stephen Watts, Jorie Graham, Rilke, Rumi, Leopardi, Bukowski, Ritsos, Hikmet, C.K. Williams, Syzmborska, Cavafy, Kunert, Rattray, Ristovic, Pessoa, Brodsky, Supervielle, Aleksandr Kushner, Attila Jozsef, Kabir and others. Children's stuff: Sendak, Suess, Eastman, Reys. Despair Repair: Frankl. Philosophy/Psychology: hard to beat the visceral penetrative sway of Nietzsche.
People of sincerity and humanity and openness. People of inner beauty and outer grace. People who let people in and let out what is uniquely theirs. People who still laugh. People who still cry. People who go slow and listen to the hum of things. People of psychological and moral courage. People of artistic integrity.