Tell us about your personal "canon"

I think this is just Bunnicula and Eerie, Indiana for me.

The book and the TV series respectively. Def not the other way around.

canonicity intersects too much with my mortal enemy, nostalgia, maybe, for me to want to think about it

Yep, that and "identity". Ugh

Plus it's all too easy to canonize a building with a couple of nice bricks.

*cannonize

Twin peaks, mdma, crosswords

irish times cryptic crosaire when derek crozier still set them

Formative stuff that has influenced me both aesthetically and ethically:

The first 5 or so books of Jeff Smith's Bone. Robert Wise's 1963 version of The Haunting. The Legend of Zelda series, but Ocarina of Time and its grotesque twin Majora's Mask particularly. The Sega Dreamcast and its library of strange and colorful games, especially Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, Crazy Taxi, and Skies of Arcadia.

Continuing on the videogame tip, the entire written & video'ed corpus of tim rogers, from the early 00s Insert Credit era on.

Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. The collected work of Jorge Luis Borges.

There's lots more, but that's about all I can care to think of right now.

I won't be exhaustive, I'll just focus on some important shifts in my life.

Steve Ditko was a massive deal to me as a teenager. I learned that heroes didn't have to be all extreme bulging muscles to look cool, backgrounds could be a joy, smiles could look like real muscles were being used, the creepy stuff was great, inking your own drawings is better.

Bernie Wrightson, Graham Ingels and Richard Corben got me fully into horror after a too long absence and shattered my overly sanitized ideas about beauty.

Moving from men's magazines to actual top shelf naturally-hyper-voluptuous stuff and finding that it wasn't just more nudity, it was worlds apart in multiple ways and again shattered my overly sanitized ideas about beauty and they glorified things that are often considered ugly.

Getting into Slowdive, Low, Red House Painters, Cocteau Twins, Lycia, Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Yes, Genesis, Frost etc... discovering that the received "wisdom" I got from the major british music magazines was almost worthless. Things that seemed taboo and embarrassing are actually often the best.

Getting into Goya, Bosch, Fuseli, Dore and seeing more modern artists like Albin Brunovsky, Remedios Varo, Ernst Fuchs, Andrzej Masianis, Robert Venosa and more as the next levels above my teenage favorites.

books

pat mccabe's bog gothic
trainspotting
douglas coupland - girlfriend in a coma, microserfs

film

alan clarke in the 80s
hitchock in the 60s
scorsese in dudes rock mode

music

cult american rock
house music all night long
the smiths

I typed up a really cool list but it was so “cool” and I just felt lame... so I’ll just say

Luniz - “I Got Five On It”
IOcean of Sound by David Toop
Calvin and Hobbes

Print the list!

I got five on it is a great shout tbh

hitler

piss christ

morris minor & the majors

Apocalypse Now (& Mark Baker's 'Nam) /The Stand
Dune /Arthur Clarke's 'Childhood's End'
the Good, the Bad & the Ugly /Godfather I & II
Double Nickels on the Dime (WATT) /Who's Next
Electric Ladyland & Maggot Brain
Bitches Brew & In A Silent Way
The Incredible Hulk

Oh yeah and Rush.

Well, not mine - but Bobby Gillespie's:

The singer lets us into his cultural life...

I’m having a fantasy dinner party, I’ll invite these artists and authors...

Jean Genet, William Blake, Francis Bacon, the poets Thom Gunn and Anne Sexton, photographer William Eggleston, Huey P Newton from Black Panther, Karl Marx, James Connolly the Irish radical socialist, Raquel Welch (around the time of One Million Years BC and Myra Breckinridge), Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, the poets John Donne and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Claudia Cardinale, Jane Fonda, Jennifer Lawrence, Angela Davis, Camille Paglia, Ash Sarkar, Diego Maradona, Klaus Kinski, Nastassja Kinski, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the actress Hanna Schygulla, Valerie Solanas, Hank Williams, Yuri Gagarin, Divine, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Philip Roth, the director Bill Douglas, Chico, Harpo and Groucho Marx, the Cockettes (San Francisco radical multisexual dance and street theatre group), Germaine Greer, Lucian Freud, Anita Pallenberg, David Litvinoff (1960s cultural guru and underground facilitator), the film-maker Kenneth Anger, the director Nicholas Ray, the actresses Jane Russell and Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, the novelists Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, Slavoj Zizek, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht.

And I’ll put on this music...

The music would consist of compilation album CDs on the Soul Jazz label such as New Orleans Funk Volumes 1-4 and Saturday Night Fish Fry.

Poor Zeppo…

Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret.

UK art rock of the Roxy/Ferry/Cale ilk.

A school of female-fronted American R&B.

Wallace Stevens' late poems.

Olivier Assayas.

I love The Long Secret! One of my favorite books.

I wouldn't fancy being in the same room as Zizek and Greer

fender rhodes, vibraphones, coffee, white graph patterned shirts, cypress trees, fog/cloud covering, john varvatos vintage, “the seventies”, marijuana, bowling alleys, red light, nighttime

Books
Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L Frank Baum
Small Sacrifices - Ann Rule
Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris
Homer - The Odyssey
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
It - Stephen King
Oscar Wilde - Picture of Dorian Gray
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Flannery O Connor - The Violent Bear It Away
Carson McCullers - Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
Neal Stephenson - Cryptonimicon
William Gibson - Neuromancer
Raymond E Feist - The Magician
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Don DeLillo - Libra

Movies
Sound of Music
James Bond movies
Spielberg esp Close Encounters
Scorsese esp Goodfellas
John Carpenter esp The Thing
Hard Days Night, Alien, Star Wars Trilogy, Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, Die Hard, To Live & Die In LA, John Wick, The Long Goodbye, Point Blank, Silence of the Lambs, Little Women (90s), When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, Julie & Julia, ok Nora Ephron everything
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
Repo Man
Night of The Comet

Music
Johnny Cash - Live at San Quentin
Olivia Newton John - Greatest Hits 1&2
Cyndi Lauper - She’s So Unusual
Madonna - Like A Virgin
Michael Jackson - thriller
Billy Joel - Innocent man
Def Leppard - Hysteria
Metallica - Ride the Lightning
Enuff z’Nuff - Enuff z’Nuff
Bon Jovi - New Jersey
Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell
Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion 1&2
Icehouse - Man of Colors
Australian Crawl - Sirocco
INXS - The Swing
Cold Chisel - East
Pearl Jam - No code
Nirvana - In Utero
Chris Cornell - Euphoria Morning
Patti Smith - Easter
Nick Cave - Tender Prey
Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street
Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
Nine Inch Nails - Downward Spiral
White Stripes - De Stijl
The Beatles - Abbey Road
Rush -2112
Saturday Night Fever soundtrack
Iron Maiden - Number of the Beast
AC/DC - Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

i will hate this tomorrow but it’ll do for now