The arcane and useless, the beautiful and wretched, 19th century maritime stories, eating well (manger bien)...
Bas Jan Ader, Jean Painlev, Federico Garca Lorca, Jonathan Richman...
Jonathan Richman, the Modern Lovers, Cub, Al Green, George Jones, Leonard Cohen, The Talking Heads, Belle and Sebastian, Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel, Robyn Hitchcock, Fela Kuti, the Decemberists, Mates of State, Joanna Newsom, A.C. Newman, The New Pornographers, the Kinks, the Zombies, Elvis Presley, Elvis Costello, Ronnie Specter, The Shaggs, Egghead., Junior Varsity, Boris the Sprinkler, The Ergs, Dirt Bike Annie, The Unlovables, The Happy Bullets, Of Montreal, that kind of stuff...
Wes Anderson, Martin Arnold, Busby Berkeley, Jacques Cousteau, Alex Cox, Jacques Demy, Werner Herzog, Guy Maddin, Chris Marker, Erol Morris, Jean Painleve, Alain Renais, Jean Renoir, Douglas Sirk, Jacques Tati, Francois Truffaut, James Whale, Caveh Zahedi, you get the picture...
My television viewing habits are pretty indiscriminate... some favorites, though, are: Arrested Development, The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dead Wood, Strangers with Candy, Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, Popular, Six Feet Under, Get a Life, Swan's Crossing, Fifteen, Degrassi Junior High, Ren and Stimpy, The Simpsons, and so on...
Since I'm a student I spend most of my time reading scholarly things. Here are the writers who give me the most pleasure: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Jacques Lacan, Avital Ronell, Deleuze and Guattari, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, etc. I rarely read fiction due to all the time I spend reading the above out of obligation, but love Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'connor, Nathaniel Mackey, and pulpy LA stuff by Raymond Chandler, James Elroy, and that gang... Plus silly stuff like David Sedaris. I need to read more fiction as I am an unwashed philistine...
A hero ain't nothing but a sandwich... but I love sandwiches