I'd like to meet:
Dr. Paul Farmer. And Ganga Stone (for the second time.)
Music:
Aaron Copeland, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, The Boys of the Lough, Lunasa, The Chieftains, Clannad, The Clancy Brothers, Cocteau Twins, X, The Knitters, The Smiths, Kay Hanley, Laura Nyro (with LaBelle), Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Dan Zanes and anything by Stephen Sondheim.
Movies:
Fanny and Alexander, On the Waterfront, And the Ship Sails On, Hannah and her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Adaptation, Burnt By the Sun, East West, The Player, The Deer Hunter, John Huston's The Dead, - too many to name. (Months later-) Forgot the documentaries! The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Capturing the Friedmans, When we Were Kings, The Thin Blue Line, Hoop Dreams, Brother's Keeper, Spellbound and Age Seven in the USSR are among my favorites.
Television:
None. Though I loved The Three Stooges when I was a kid, and still do. And if Chris Elliot's "Get a Life" was still an option, I'd find a way to watch.
Books:
The books I return to again and again include: Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Master and Margarita, Anna Karenina, Fathers and Sons, First Love, Moby Dick, Lolita, Pale Fire, Love in the Time of Cholera, Alexandria Quartet, Charming Billy, Remains of the Day, Howard's End, Revolutionary Road, The Collected Stories of William Trevor, any short fiction by Cheever, Richard Yates, Alice Munroe, Chekhov, Gogol, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, James Joyce. Any book by Raymond Chandler, love Michael Chabon's books too. Loved Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Also read Treasure Island and Mary Poppins each year. Seriously. Non-fiction includes Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, Leni Riefenstahl's autobiography, Nabokov's "Speak, Memory", any of Neil Postman's great books, Katherine Boo's investigative reporting, True Notebooks by Mark Salzman, Common Ground, American Prometheus, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer, and Michael Patrick Macdonald's amazing All Souls. - As of early October must add David Long's latest novel, "The Inhabited World" - beautiful. And for non-fiction, Michael Patrick Macdonald's haunting "Easter Rising". As of late December, am once again in love with "Please to the Table" - an amazing collection of recipes from the former Soviet Republics.
Heroes:
Dr. Paul Farmer and all the amazing people at Partners in Health, Temple Grandin, Dan Zanes and the musicians at Festival Five Records, Frederick Law Olmsted, Ganga Stone and all the good folks at God's Love We Deliver.