Tell us about your personal "canon"

Have we done this before?

We must all have favourite books, films, pieces of music, or perhaps even hobbies or ideas/concepts that transcend mere "favourites" and have come to form part of a personal anthology.

I'm talking about works whose appreciation has come to make-up part of your character, or stayed with you for so long it's an intrinsic part of who you are, or acts as a marker to which you measure and compare other things?

Maybe you were introduced to these at a young age and they left a major impression on you. Or you came across them later and they seemed to slot into your world like a puzzle piece. Or maybe you were just so enamoured by them that they inspired you to make a significant change in your life or outlook.

Tell me about your personal canon.

thank u for making this thread dl, i think a lot of the responses are gonna be fascinating. mine constitutes a lot of stuff and i will inevitably forget a lot of things

pachelbel's because he's my great great great (etc) grandfather

I should really go first on this one, right? Sorry, got busy suddenly and need to think a little first

Right-o! Publicly stating one's canon is not slapdash matter. It goes on your permanent record.

In college I bought the DVD set of Sledge Hammer, which I probably watched a dozen or so times. idk how it would hold up today but the show was so over-the-top insane & stupid that I became obsessed with it.

anyway I wanted to show it to a friend, so I brought it over, but we never wound up watching it so I left it there. this place was a party house and at one point 2 other friends got bored, saw the DVD and started watching it, and the next day said to me "this has got to be yours, this is the most frogbs shit I've ever seen". so I guess that would have to be in mine.

Almost all of Sledge Hammer! is on YouTube. I binged it last year and it was still very enjoyable.

I think I must have been about 7 or 8 when I watched Alien on tv one night. Of course it scared me shitless and I never even managed to watch the very final scene but it still managed to manifest inside me a complete adoration for the alien creature (and good movies).

This obsession though lay dormant inside me until the sequel appeared some years later and all of a sudden Alien and Aliens became the inspiration for most of my art that was produced even to this day.

I can't even count how many I've drawn an alien for other people in one form or other, my favourite is the one I painted on a mates basement wall way back in 1992 which he enjoys telling me that even though he no longer lives there, his mum still does, and refuses to let her paint over it. (and I enjoy him telling me this too)

90% of it is off the Internet since a French house published it as a book but Darcy Padilla's Julie project/'Family Love' - two decades of photographs of a single mother in San Francisco and the tragedies of her life.

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/darcy-padilla-family-love

when I was 12 or so I was huge into Dilbert. this would've been 1998 so Dilbert was a legitimate phenomenon and even though I obviously knew nothing about the office I still thought the writing was funny, and I liked how the strip had sort of a nihilist streak to it. I used to doodle Dilbert characters all the time and my own cartooning style was pretty heavily based off his. I wound up buying his books and they influenced me a lot in a way that in retrospect was probably not so great for my development. I guess looking back the signs were always there that this guy was nuts but it still hurts to see.

Lol at Sledgehammer being in one's personal canon. Good stuff.

I'd have to give this a lot of thought to come up with a complete list, but my canon would start with:

- the novels of Raymond Chandler, Bret Easton Ellis, William Gibson, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald
- the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Dixon, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, Henry Threadgill, Amon Amarth, Earth Wind & Fire, Grand Funk Railroad, Metallica, Motörhead, Napalm Death, Iggy Pop (with and without the Stooges), and Slayer
- the films of John Carpenter, Alex Cox, David Cronenberg, Sam Fuller, Walter Hill, and Whit Stillman

anything with an ilx thread i occasionally bump with nothing but lines from it

Here are a few of mine:

Goscinny & Uderzo - Asterix
Another French/English family had a bunch of these in their house and as soon as I could read a few words I started devouring them in both languages. They taught me to read. They had their own lore, their own internal self-referential sense of humour. I don't think I spent much time between the ages of 6 and 9 without my head buried in an Asterix book.

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy
While other kids were either playing football or cops'n'robbers, my small but perfectly formed group of nerds would spend playtimes arguing about who was going to be Ford Prefect, who had to be Arthur Dent and who would be the Vogon Captain. We lobbied our teachers to get the four books into our primary school library. I think they conceded on the first book. I don't think I realised at the age of eight, that they were supposed to be funny. I knew they were sci-fi and they were for people who were a bit older than me. Nevertheless, HH achieved a Biblical status in my purview. I've revisited it at regular points in my life, either via the book series, the TV show or the radio play, and I notice something else. A concept like the Infinite Improbability Drive was just absurdist nonsense to me for a long time, until I actually looked up Brownian motion and realised the science had actually been thought-through to an extent. How the hell did he write this at such a young age? Still confounds me.

Laurie Anderson - O Superman
My Dad bought this in 1981, not long after I was born. It still gives me a warm, amniotic feeling like nothing else. There are points in this song that take me back to before I can even remember and instil indescribable emotions in me. Of course at the time I didn't really understand how remarkable this piece of music was - it was just music like any other bit of music. It remains one of my favourite songs of all time.

Alasdair Gray - Unlikely Stories Mostly
My Dad found an original hard cover copy in a secondhand shop and bought it mostly because he liked the cover. I liked the cover too and plucked it off the shelf. I liked the content even more. These short, pithy, whimsical, hysterical short stories with these marvellous illustrations. Gray shares a Glaswegian sense of absurd mundane observational humour with artists as diverse as Ivor Cutler and Stuart Murdoch. The humour is never mean or laughing at anyone's expense - it is funny in and of itself. It laughs at the skewed absurdity of the world, not at its people. A couple of years ago my Dad and I visited his home town of Glasgow. I had never been and he had not been since the seventies. We made a pilgrimage tour around the city to admire Gray's murals in the various pubs and underground stations. I felt at home there.

The Boo Radleys - Giant Steps
A weedy, underdeveloped teen. Friendship group going through puberty and throwing their collective physical and verbal weight around; I was often the whipping boy. There wasn't much to do in suburban Hertfordshire than to get up to no good. We dared each other to break into an abandoned garden nursery and start smashing things up. Then we went to the local music shop and I bought Giant Steps on cassette (I already had their more recent, Britpoppy Wake Up material). I went home feeling bad, guilty, frustrated that I could be so easily cajoled into doing bad, destructive things. It was a miserable time in my life. I lay on my bed and listened to Giant Steps and it felt like everything made sense. It was everything I wanted to hear. It sympathised and thrilled. It still thrills me every time I hear it. I'd never heard ambient music, dub, jazz, shoegaze, psychedelic music, but it was all unfurling here. This album turned me into a music fan and it's the dragon I've been chasing ever since.

The Beach Boys - Smiley Smile
I couldn't take my friend seriously when he played me the Beach Boys Greatest Hits compilation he was so proud of having bought. Up till then, he'd almost exclusively played me black metal, hard techno and dub reggae. But these saccharine Mum'n'Dad songs about sunshine and cars? Was he serious? Curiosity got the best of me though and for some reason my first Beach Boys album was the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey twofer. Smiley Smile is like Giant Steps and like Unlikely Stories Mostly - it is sublime, ridiculous, hilarious, diffuse, and extremely peculiar. I love how unabashedly uncommercial it is, creepy too. Just this weird little oddity with snatches of laughter, sped up singing, windchimes, lyrics that sound like they were written in the bath.

The Wicker Man
I was into horror movies, heavy metal, rollercoasters, anything that could buy a dark, vitriolic thrill. But I hadn't come across a horror film so gentle yet filled with so much potential dread. It's a musical too, and that's part of what makes it so iconic. I think it's my favourite film.

Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
I was in my mid-twenties, working in an office. An older colleague, an ex-punk, said I should check out Talking Heads. I tried listening to some of their music but it sounded dated; I didn't really get it. Nevertheless I bought SMS on DVD from Fopp as it was going cheap. I watched it, spell-bound. I watched it again. I went out and bought a bass guitar and started a band. I read "How Music Works" and it blew my mind, completely changed my attitude to how music can be approached. Must have watched SMS at least twenty times all the way through and still notice something new each time.

Ummm... just a few I would put in the "Essential Library of Dog Latin"

sade, sweetest taboo
the colorado plateau
pete kuzak (colt beefcake)
parts of the ouvre of willa cather
los angeles faultline and eagle bars 2006-2009
larry levan
my cannon iykwim (sorry)

this didn't really take off did it? I guess "Personal canons" are just not part of the ILX canon...

I started making a list, but it got out of control immediately, turns out I like too many things.

Twin peaks, mdma, crosswords

A canon kind of makes me think about Patti Smith laying flowers on the graves of dead writers. It’s a personal curated list of where you come from in terms of your influences and artistic background and where you see yourself fitting into the artistic landscape.

It can be a bit overdone: “My influences? Oh Lautreamont definitely. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet, Jim Carroll, Jim Morrison, Burroughs, obviously”.

here are a few things, by no means a comprehensive list but i was trying to think of the media that's hung around me since childhood and adolescence at least:

terminator 2: fascination with science fiction, time travel, cyborgs, etc. all originates here
shitty or non-shitty adjacent '80s action movies either starring or not starting arnold schwarzenegger
ray bradbury, martian chronicles and dandelion wine
james bond films
the smashing pumpkins and radiohead
the american films of paul verhoeven
f. scott fitzgerald, tender is the night: harder to pin down exactly the sway this novel had over my life and writing but i've reread it three times (rare for me) at three vastly different stages (adolescence, late teenhood, and late-20s) and i think its effect on me is more profound than, say, me attempting to read ulysses when i was way too young (even though that had a real lasting effect as well)
sylvia plath, the bell jar: not a perfect novel or anything but yet another that's put an extended spell on me that i find difficult to put into words
neon genesis evangelion
nu-metal: it took me until adulthood to become a full-blown horror movie fanatic but recently i've discovered that nu-metal was leading me down the path all along
fleetwood mac, tusk

add

dave brubeck quartet, time out
tlc, crazysexycool

I read Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point at the age when my peers were reading The Bell Jar or Flowers in the Attic. There was a time when I expected to write a dissertation to be titled something like "Rave New World: Drug Use and Abuse in...."
Music: I used to listen to oldies radio (in the days before the "classic rock" format, so I got a fair grounding in top-40 soul/R&B and early rock). This led me to fall hard for Chris Isaak, Marshall Crenshaw, the Smithereens, and later the Afghan Whigs, when I finally got access to MTV.
My idea of masculine good looks (tall, broad and strong in the shoulders, round rather than pointy in the face) seems to stem from a Charles Dana Gibson cartoon I looked at as a teenager.

also

thomas harris, red dragon
r.e.m.
aaliyah, "are you that somebody"

xp

I read Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point at the age when my peers were reading The Bell Jar or Flowers in the Attic. There was a time when I expected to write a dissertation to be titled something like "Rave New World: Drug Use and Abuse in...."

i nearly listed huxley! i read and was obsessed with point counter point in high school. unfortunately i remember very little about either it or brave new world except for some surface level stuff

It can be a bit overdone: “My influences? Oh Lautreamont definitely. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet, Jim Carroll, Jim Morrison, Burroughs, obviously”.

This cartoon can be permanently scarring once you start carefully reading the stuff on the wall behind her; be warned:

https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2011/hate2back.jpg

Larger, brighter, more legible version (didn't want to image-bomb the thread)

Cracked magazine (yes, Mad is "better" but Cracked was only available at the grocery store in my town for many years and was more formative)
The Hobbit
The Empire Strikes Back
Calvin & Hobbes
Salk Institute in La Jolla (photos of this building I was little were v v striking to my mind)
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
AD&D Monster Manual II

I'm struggling to think of much more that I could say than my previous examples above. It feels like almost everything else I think of either relates back somehow to those few examples in some way, or it's stuff that I no longer appreciate in the same way. Barring Talking Heads, all those examples are very formative, all first experienced in childhood through late-teens.

Here's an attempt at a few more:

Scott Walker - The Drift
Well, I count the trilogy of Tilt/Drift/Bish Bosch, but The Drift was the first one I heard. That first time, I didn't really know what to think. It was music that sent me into an absolute horror-movie jump-scare panic. I couldn't work out if I liked it or not. It took a few years to dig-in. I'd dust-down The Drift occasionally, put it on, scare myself and put it away. It wasn't until I watched 30th Century Man that it all started to click into place. Soon, I became quite obsessed with Scott and his work, in a similar way to Tom Waits a few years previously. This macabre, arcane, gnomic poetry that hinted at black humour without being necessarily funny. And the depth of the music, long silences followed by great walls of orchestration, unusual sounds, weird ideas. Each song was a stroy, but one which only made sense in a dream-state way.

Alfonso Cuarón - Children Of Men
Not sure what to say about this film that hasn't already been said. Another example of something I wasn't sold on the first time, but kept coming back to and finding more disturbing and intriguing each time.

xp Calvin & Hobbes is definitely one of mine, much like Asterix above

this didn't really take off did it? I guess "Personal canons" are just not part of the ILX canon...

― Party With A Jagger Ban (dog latin), Tuesday, 30 March 2021 12:14 (three hours ago) link

I found my full answer kind of a daunting process to write down and a little worried it might make me sad to reflect on places and traditions associated that I'm currently nervous are slipping away.

So I'll keep it short and say that classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes have an incredibly cozy effect due to the nostalgic associations + general recommended use and will probably never grow tired of revisiting given the qualities like that that transcend it as merely a funny show.

On the music side, 00s era The Clientele is somehow permanently the perfect score to relaxed memories of sunny family gatherings in the backyard of my parent's lakefront home where I grew up, which remains the center of my entire universe despite my desperate desire to be able to not be so emotionally attached to any "place" in such an intense way. Especially as things change. I am no good at changing.

But overall "personal canons" is so very much an idea that resonates with me. I've always been inclined to live in my very own unique universe of interests in such a mixture that I barely meet anyone that is passionate about all the same combinations of niche things I am. Sort of a lonely thing sometimes.

I also tried to write out a full answer and then found myself sort of paralyzed by the bigness of the question. I think the word "canon" makes me nervous because of the connotations of gatekeeping associated with it, like posting about personal canons on ILX is suddenly going to turn me into F.R. Leavis or something. So I took a lot of time thinking about what would or wouldn't be included, and then I got embarrassed by how overwhelmingly white and male my personal canon turned out to be and deleted the whole post.

Realized my canon has categories: from my dad, from my mom, shared with my brother, discovered for myself as a teenager, discovered for myself as an adult.

Comedy is something I should include. More than music, comedy seems to be something that shows our ages, and there's not much I can think of which makes me laugh as much as my favourites from the late-90s/early-2000s.

Monty Python's 'Life Of Brian' was probably the first thing outside of Friday night family sitcoms which I'd encountered as adult comedy. But I'd never seen anything so funny in all my life. It was like having my senses directly attacked by absurdity, humour that seemed to fly at me from all direcitons and this feeling that anything could happen next, and it often did.

The League of Gentlemen
I'm not sure how well TLOG has aged, but that's comedy for you. What I admired about it wasn't the gross-out humour or the oft-quoted catchphrases, but the fact a whole world seemed to have been created in order to hang a sketch show from. The sketches themselves were weird, gross, often brutally violent; but TLOG was all about the characters and the world they inhabited. I enjoyed the little conspiratorial references to things happening in other parts of Royston Vasey which tied the sketches together. It was a considered show with its own lore and internal working. I even loved the third series and will continue to vouch for the deft way they weaved the events of each episode into a single story, littering each one with references to obscure horror movies and cult TV. TLOG might have aged, but I'm just as big a fan of Psychoville and Inside No 9. "12 Days of Christine" from the latter, is one of my favourite episodes of anything ever.

A lot of my humor canon comes from my dad: Rocky and Bullwinkle, the radio show Bob and Ray, Pogo comics, Calvin Trillin humor columns.

I don't know how I forgot Autechre, but I don't need to go into them yet again

haven't thought deeply about this but off-top, a canon of mine would have to include

the band's self-titled album
outkast's aquemini
the pharcyde - "passin me by"
elvis costello - this year's model
the films of mel brooks
the books of douglas adams
it's always sunny in philadelphia
the venture bros.
monty python's flying circus
season 5 of angel
season 2 of justified
season 3 of hannibal and the "hamibal" web series
the lord of the rings
his dark materials
catch-22
coming through slaughter
the beatles' yellow submarine film
the onion's our dumb world atlas
the baseball sequence in the naked gun

come to think of it, a more fruitful exercise for me might be to think about individual moments in songs, films, series, etc., as i was starting to towards the end

A lot of my humor canon comes from my dad: Rocky and Bullwinkle, the radio show Bob and Ray, Pogo comics, Calvin Trillin humor columns.

Me too, but it was Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons, Cheech & Chong (my dad dragged my mom, and my younger brother and me, to see Up In Smoke at a drive-in; I couldn't have been more than seven), Laurel & Hardy (it's family lore that the endless flight of steps they had to haul the piano up was attached to my paternal great-grandmother's house) and W.C. Fields. He also hooked me on Formula 1 racing as a kid, which I think may have also inspired my later love of extremely loud music.

I think my canon is basically "old stuff." Motels, diners, neon signs, mid century modern, wartime musicals, film noir and pulp fiction, The Great American Songbook and its singers, jump blues, rockabilly, jazz before it gets noisy...

I mean, started a podcast two years back on an author I've loved since I was six so there you go. I appreciate how I reread/rethink Tolkien each time, though, it's shifted in ways that would take too long to detail but definitely reflect my own perspectives on life, literature, society etc. as it goes.

Here is the list as it stood before I gave up, if anyone want to talk about any of this stuff I will be annoyingly keen.

Emile Zola Rougon-Macquart novels
Later Richard Brautigan novels
Kafka's The Castle
Samuel Beckett's Molloy
Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud A Solitude
Unbourne puzzle adventure books (the first three)
Pulp (esp early 90s Intro compilation)
The Soft Machine / Robert Wyatt / Kevin Ayers
Mid-90s bands on Guided Missile & Vesuvius labels (The Yummy Fur / Lungleg / Dick Johnson / Male Nurse / etc.)
Miss Kittin's mix CD from a 2002 Musik magazine
A drum & bass mix CD from a 2003 Czech music magazine
Tigermilk
Abbey Road
Bonzo Dog Band's "Let's Make Up & Be Friendly"
Alan Plater tv series (esp. Beiderbecke Trilogy)
Dennis Potter tv series (esp. The Singing Detective)
Nigel Kneale tv films
Mike Leigh tv plays
Willo The Wisp
Early Louis Malle films (esp. Zazie Dans Le Metro, Les Amants)
Jubilee
Tetsuo The Iron Man
Clue
The Addams Family (90s film version)
The Wicker Man
Chris Morris BBC Radio 1 shows
1980s Radio 4 production of Agatha Christie's The Sittaford Mystery
Original radio series version of Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Patak's brinjal (aubergine) pickle

My dad was super into Brautigan. My favorite as a kid was The Hawkline Monster (had monster in the title!), but later I really liked The Tokyo-Montana Express. I read Willard and His Bowling Trophies but didn't love it, and a few others made minimal impressions on me, though the poem "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace" has lived in my head almost verbatim for ~35 years.

So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, The Abortion and Revenge Of The Lawn are the ones I've read the most, The Hawkline Monster is loads of fun and I will usually recommend it as a first Brautigan. I don't like Trout Fishing In America or In Watermelon Sugar so much, and those are the only books people seem to talk about.

Hmm.

Literature:
Richard Stark/Donald Westlake
Dashiell Hammett
Gene Wolfe
The first half of Cerebus by Dave Sim
Stray Bullets by the Laphams
The Postman Always Rings Twice

FIlm & Television:
Star Trek: The Next Generation & Deep Space Nine
Blade Runner
Winter Light

Music:
Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music
Michael Hurley (especially Armchair Boogie & Hi-Fi Snock Uptown)
Charalambides; Bardo Pond; Loren Connors
The County Records 400 & 500 series of LPs
The Liberation Music Orchestra
Max Roach "We Insist"

Interesting xp, I got a load of brautigan books, read trout fishing & didn’t really like it so didn’t read on - will check out the others at some point

Mid-90s bands on Guided Missile & Vesuvius labels (The Yummy Fur / Lungleg / Dick Johnson / Male Nurse / etc.)

― Bastard Lakes (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, March 30, 2021 1:49 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Tell me about these please. I just stumbled on Maid To Minx by Lung Leg and I really like it.

this didn't really take off did it? I guess "Personal canons" are just not part of the ILX canon...

From my mom I got a lot of 19th-century lit: The Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Trollope, Charles Reade. Also Antonia Forest, a brilliant and little known 20th century YA writer. My mom also gave me a taste for classic mystery novels (mainly Sayers, Tey and Rex Stout) and a particular kind of Good Bad children's/YA book from back in the day: stuff like Louisa May Alcott, A Little Princess, the Katy books (What Katy Did, What Katy Did At School, etc.), A Girl of the Limberlost, Flambards.

From my dad, I get Pogo comics, the Odyssey (Fitzgerald translation), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bob and Ray, and Tom Baker Doctor Who.

From both parents: Bob Dylan, Rudyard Kipling, the Marx Brothers, thirties screwball comedies, James Thurber, P.G. Wodehouse.

I read a lot of classic children's lit that's still with me - E. Nesbit, Rosemary Sutcliff, Arthur Ransome, Kate Seredy, The Long Secret (sequel to Harriet the Spy).

Added to my personal canon as a teenager: Orwell (essays only), Ursula Le Guin, the X-Files, The Plague
Added to my personal canon as an adult: John Prine, Homicide, Life on the Street, Karel Capek, The Rolling Stones, Russell Hoban, Powell and Pressburger, Edna St. Vincent Millay

Tell me about these please. I just stumbled on Maid To Minx by Lung Leg and I really like it.

― Evan, Tuesday, March 30, 2021 7:51 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

You mean the song or the LP? A strange thing about Lung Leg is that they have two LPs proper, Maid To Minx (97) and Maid To Minx (99), they re-recorded the LP and released it again on a different label. Second version is better but harder to find on the internet, the first is also wonderful but a bit caught between two phases of the group. I should make a compilation, they really did not record a lot, it will clock in at 40 minutes max.

I go on about The Yummy Fur on their own thread, but like sharp stuttering fall-esque stuff later on with these chiming guitar harmonies, insanely intricate lyrics mostly about arthouse cinema, they might be my favourite band. The Male Nurse were their lairy spiritual cousins featuring various Country Teasers related people, just a great concept / execution for a throwaway group, Dick Johnson were Jane from Lung Leg plus a couple of other women from the scene, they put out a few brilliant mostly-swamp-rock singles.

The Moomins are also in my canon, I can't think how I forgot them.
Also Spike Milligan's war memoirs, probably.

god, Velvets, Laurie Anderson, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, JAMES JOYCE, how can I bear to stop

Birthday Party Junkyard
Celtic Frost Tragic Serenades EP
Stockholm Monsters Alma Mater
Aja
Candi Staton "Young Hearts Run Free"
Yolanda Adams "Victory"
Bobby Womack The Poet
Mercyful Fate Don't Break the Oath
Summoning Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame
Joni Mitchell, at least three albums
Method Man "Release Yo Delf" remix from the Amp 2 disc
AbC How to Be a Zillionaire

I can't make a list like this, because I feel like my opinions on anything should be ready to change anytime. A canon weighs a ton.

Giving more than they had
The process had begun
the tape cassette was spun
'Ready for the 80s' by YMCA was the one

I started writing a song about Chris Gentry and ended up writing about Dennis Hopper, Johnny Cash... Norman, Norbert, Funky Donnie Fritts, Billy Swan, Bobby Neuwirth, Jerry Jeff Walker, Paul Siebel…and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott had a lot to do with it

At swim-two-birds
Rhapsody in Blue
Stardust
Fear of the dark (live)
The blacksmith (late late show b/w)
Angel from montgomery (bonnie)
Catch-22
The wire
Tinker tailer (book, series & movie)
Whole of the moon
Mirror in february
Clough to revie
Greenstreet to bogart in falcon
Raines to everyone in casablanca
The lust for the drink in the thin man series
Kerrygold adverts about toxic parenting
Richard harris mocking frank mccourts memoirs
Burton's elegant defiant regret looking back on it all
Young tina
Julie london lounging around the beat
One more try for the schmaltz and execution
cant find my way home for the posh falsetto rock
the aul triangle acapella in germany from the dubliners
the parting glass at the goilin singers club
Sally o brien and the way she might look at you

Short stories of kevin barry
Lord of the rings
Every second of oasis first two albums
Elvis going quiet on suspicious minds live
The painted sets of willow
My rifle, pony and me
Ten cent westerns (strange, edson, lamour)
The volleying technique of david ginola
Brandos singing, sinatras acting
Billy flynns ethics and valjeans life decisions
Yeats precision and tennysons drama
Etta

The sheer playful felinicity of darin doing beyond the sea live

Rather than make a shopping list of my entire canon (not that there's anything wrong with y'all doing so just that I'd be on this all night), I'll stick with things that entered my life up through let's say age ten and which had such a seismic impact upon me at an impressionable enough age that they've maintained some degree of influence upon my tastes in the decades since:

the career of Jim Henson
The Monster at the End of This Book
also, the aesthetics of '70s Sesame Street
also, just mid-century modern design in general (orange and lime green 4-ever)
the recorded output of the full Monkees foursome
the G.I. Joe cartoon
The Beach Boys - Love You
Garbage Pail Kids
Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual
seeing Heavy Metal at way too young an age
Stephen King - Night Shift (yes, I was reading Stephen King by age 10)
Pee-wee's Big Adventure
the creature and production design in the Star Wars movies
The Making of Thriller
the b-side of Amii Stewart's 'Knock on Wood' single, entitled 'When You Are Beautiful'

nice, much better than me backing up the dump truck
and Jim Henson, my god yes

man, idk, what a question

I think the only thing on this list is FLCL

It's a good question, but the answers here seem are oddly unrevealing. I think it's difficult in sparse list form, and stripped of context.

I really love autobiographies where someone talks about their influences, as long as they do it interestingly. Quite often, if it interests me, I'll explore what they were discussing and appreciate it myself all the more from their enthusiasm and viewpoint. Sometimes it provides a way into areas that have previously been huge unexplored opaque areas to me, such as the Blues.

I quite enjoyed Adam Buxton's Ramble Book for that. For a mainstream funny-book he didn't ever seem to shy-away from getting super-nerdy about his love of obscure new wave music and horror movies. His impression of David Byrne's Knee Plays in the audiobook format was especially niche

Some obscure things from family lore:

- A cassette recording my Dad made of the chart countdown in 1982, announcer clipped-off by the pause button. Songs by Musical Youth, Yazoo, PhD, Shakin' Stevens, Culture Club, Men At Work, Dexys, Toni Basil etc.. Played on every family car trip from then until about 1992. Probably impacted my musical taste much more than I care to admit.

- Paul McCartney's "Frog Chorus", but more than that, the two extra video songs that came on the VHS, "Seaside Woman" and "The Oriental Nightfish", both sung by Linda and both featuring incredible animation. My sisters, my brother and I must have watched these till the video didn't play any more, and we even quote little snatches of the songs at each other today.

Fallen into recent lore:

Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa, a compilation of music from Somalia which I bought a couple of years ago and became a near-permanent fixture on the household turntable. It's already totally worn out and skips a lot. I think I need to buy it again.

Plustwo - Melody a fairly obscure Italo Disco song from the early 80s which I think I foudn out about through ILM and is p much my aesthetic in a 4 minute nutshell.

Mandy (Panos Cosmatos) Don't often go and see films alone. But the second the title screen came up and the opening chords of King Crimson's "Starless" started blasting out, it felt like I was watching something that had been designed especially for me.

Thinking of stuff that had a major impact at an early age, not just favourites: 

- Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Five Find-Outers series which led to a lifelong love of murder/mystery fiction (Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew etc.)

- Beetlejuice and Winona Ryder in particular was v important to 6-year-old me; ditto 90s The Addams Family and Christina Ricci, Terminator 2 and Edward Furlong, Edward Scissorhands and Johnny Depp (as you can see, I had a type even at a young age)

- I had two much older siblings and so, much of my early tastes were influenced by their adolescence. I cannot imagine my childhood without them playing Madonna, Janet Jackson, Prince, En Vogue, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Duran Duran, Smashing Pumpkins, Robyn, Boyz II Men, Guns N Roses, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Queen, Jamiroquai, The Offspring... Just so much pop music on, all the time.  

- The movies that were always on and that I could probably quote verbatim: Indiana Jones, E.T., The Princess Bride, Airheads, Top Secret!, Clueless, Star Wars: A New Hope

- Malaysian boyband KRU was the first act I really got into all on my own. I love boybands still (K-pop has been a godsend) 

- Would I be the same person without The X-Files, a TV show I loved so much that my friends and I used to pretend to be Mulder and Scully in our backyards, and every story we acted out would end up with one of us being abducted by aliens? Probably not. 

- Growing up in Malaysia, books were either expensive or limited in choice. My mother's American friend had a daughter who was around my age and they would send me so much 90s YA/kidlit: RL Stine, Christopher Pike, The Baby-Sitters' Club, Laura Ingalls Wilder, etc. A lot of this is pretty basic I guess, but it helped develop a very healthy love of reading that I will forever be grateful for, as well as a large amount of useless knowledge about U.S. culture and experiences than I know what to do with 

- My early teens coincided with peak TRL/MTV era, so music videos have always been integral to how I experience music (once again, Kpop has been a godsend). I was so obsessed with those late 90s/early 00s video directors like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Hype Williams, Sophie Muller, Jonas Akerlund. Collected all the Directors' Label series once I was old enough.  

- After a childhood diet of radio pop/rock, music videos also helped nudge me towards more electronic/experimental stuff - from Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx to Aphex Twin and Squarepusher

- I joined a dance club in high school, which led to choreographers: Bob Fosse, Fatima Robinson, Tina Landon

Loads of other things I'm forgetting I'm sure but these were among the most formative, I think

Roguelikes and their variants-- Moria, ADOM, Dead Cells, Dark Souls
Tetris-- and 8-bit era Nintendo music
2001: A Space Odyssey and its soundtrack-- and the Strausses, Ligeti, and the school of classical music from which Khachaturian sprung (Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev especially)
Eurythmics-- and other 80s synth pop-- and transmasc aesthetic-- Lennox, Sinead, Samantha Morton
Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette, Lisa Germano, Björk, PJ Harvey, Sam Phillips, Diamanda Galas
The Thin Red Line-- and any art that clumsily seeks for big meanings
Building LEGO projects and leaving them on display
Vatcharin Bhumichitr, Delia Smith, Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Yotam Ottolenghi
Mishima, Nabokov, Joyce, Joy Williams, Flann O'Brien
Anne Carson, Ted Chiang, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler
Xiu Xiu, US Maple, Brian Eno, Electrelane
Laurie Spiegel, Wendy Carlos, Pauline Olivieros, Mica Levi
Bill Callahan, Destroyer, Cass McCombs, The Mountain Goats
Crossword puzzles, Yorkshire tea, bridge, etymology, Wikipedia
Bach solo violin sonatas and partitas, Bach solo cello suites
Brass chandeliers, Le Creuset, candles and candlesticks, cloth serviettes
Let The Right One In, Peter Strickland, Jonathan Demme, Nicole Holofcener

Video games. Were important to me until I was about 15. Then just in the last three or four years, I rediscovered how great they can be. I can think of three which have taken-on an almost numinal aura for me:

Earthbound
It wasn't released in the UK, and I only discovered it in recent years. The offbeat humour and the whole aesthetic instantly clicked. I started putting together playlists and DJ mixes inspired by some of the settings in the game, and even started a boutique club night called Club Stoic, named after the beachside bar in one section of the game.

Chrono Trigger
Like Earthbound, I didn't discover this until fairly recently, but it really blew my mind that a 16BIT topdown RPG could be so involving and enveloping. I'm an especially big fan of the music, so much so that, to my embarassment, "Wind Scene" made it to the top of my Spotify most played tracks list two years on the trot.

Death Stranding
This is a Marmitey game, but to me it is sublime for so many reasons. I feel like this is one of the few AAA games aimed squarely at grown-ups as opposed to young adults. The story is arcane, surreal, frightening. The gameplay is less about shooty thrills and all about stealth, time, forward-planning, enjoying the view etc. The characters are not young or classically good looking. And there's a sense of duty, even drudgery throughout which appeals to the monochromatic mindset. There are other games. There are better games. But this is MY game that I am invested in and I don't care if other people don't like it.

gonna throw out a special mention to the stuff that aired on afternoons on comedy central during the mid-00s, which was mostly '90s saturday night live re-runs and heavily edited versions of movies like the big lebowski, office space, and coming to america

I don't think I've ever found anything more bracing and redolent of impending thrills spills + chills than this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9N9AByVnZ4

A masterclass in stoking anticipation. The fact that it was usually followed by something like Moscow on the Hudson is beside the point.

And just like the aesthetic/semiotics of old school previews and promos and interstitials in general.

Continually expanding still.
But some touch points put in by childhood and earlky to mid teens.
I love the music i was getting into at the turn of my teens still for the most part.
Mid 60s mod and garage as well as soul , r'n'b and jazz and stuff that I was becoming aware of at teh time but only touched on part of is still something I'm filling in a lot more. As is the psychedelia I was touching on at the time.
& the punk and post-punk stuff I had heard at roughly the same time. Still expanding what I know on that and the stiff leading up to it.
Velvet Underground are a band that I used to walk around singing songs by when I was 14 since I heard tehm through my elder brother though not sure he went beyond the 1st lp. Stooges too.
I got into the Brthday Party at 16 just too late to have missed tehm live. But couldn't get enough of them at teh time I picked up on them and they still have a large influence on what else I've listened to I think.
I was turned onto both Pop group and Pere ubu and possibly captain Beefheart through journalists association of teh bands. Still love all taht stuff.
& then I caught the New york wave of noise bands in late 83 and throughout 84 thanks to taht association too.
I was also rreading my way through a pile of turn of the 80s NMEs and related taht my brother had left behind when he went to University. & picking up from reviews at the time. I now have a number of thsoe papers here which i should peruse again. BUt definitely added to what I was picking up on.
I know I got given Sun Ra's Strange Celestial Road by my borther after having listened to a copy he had. So love that 78-83ish deep space funk stuff especially when it comes to him.
I hada love of preCountrypolitan country that I picked up somewhere which was probably enhanced by having artists named in relation to the Gun Club who I saw for the first time in late 83 though i may have actually met an earlier incarnation of teh band. I later woudn up goig to Son Of Redneck th eclub behind Selfrdiges though that is more 88ish. & I think there was more l;ists of country & blues artists from a book on influences on Bob Dylan taht I got from a local library. & for blues i also listened to the Alexis korner show when it was still on the radio.
I had listened quite heavily To David Rhodigan when he wa son capitol radio not sureto what extent I was picking up artists names though.
Not sure what point I really started picking up reggae stuff. I think I have mainly concentrated on 70s roots stuff throughout though.
Love the Sanctuary era trojan 2cd sets I think they are a really great starting point. Not sure if later simnilar sets have been anywhere near as good.
I had been driven around to morris events by one of my mother's friends asa preteen, not sure if taht was why I picked up on folk later or if it was just an earlier recognition of liking similar music. Did get pentangle's basket of light back in the late 80s and a coverless compilation thing of them a while earlier though hadn't really followed up on discovering who they were.
Did have a fantastic 2nd hand record shop that I would regularly scour , like go right through all the racks and try to get stuff from .
So got turned onto a lot of things that way but probably had that fed by the pile of NMEs, Christgau's book of the 70s, the Red Rolling stone Record Guide and probably at least a couple of other sources. & later things like Forcedexposure's record reviews.
Brother turned me onto Can in the early 80sd and possibly Hawkwind though I didn't pik up on them until a lot later. Certainly had most of Can since mid 80s though and picked up Funkadelic in a sale towards teh end of teh decade. Found almost a full run in a sale in teh 2nd hand record shop.
Somewhere also picked up a taste for a lot of African and other roots music. Especially love African psych

Style, I like clothing based on mid 60s rock styles and turn of the 20th century, possibly slightly earlier European fashion. I make it in waxed cotton for an African tinge. As well as some other colourful fabrics. S0ome drapery, upholstery and other sourced fabrics.
I ought to be in the middle of making a frockcoat but need to get started.

Films, pretty wide taste i think. I like film noir, documentary, sci fi, and several other genres.

Books
Very wide tastes. Currently reading a lot of decolonisation and stuff.
but doi read pretty widely. Across history of writing, need to get back down and actually read teh lucian that I bought recently.
NOt really read much fiction recently but do like quite a bit.
Mainly been reading BIPOC oriented non-fiction, & some music biographies and memoirs. Currently don#t have the temptation of going into charity shops and leaving with an armful of things that look interesting then not getting thropugh a lot of them but enjoying those I do.
Wonder if I will ever catch up with the backlog of books I have bought and not read yet. Always stress the yet.

not completely answering the questions but here are 10 songs that i will always be able to play on the piano no matter how long i go without practicing
debussy - clair de lune
randy newman - simon smith & the amazing dancing bear
steely dan - gaucho
allman brothers - jessica
stevie wonder - golden lady
brahms - ballade no. 4 in b major (at least the first bit before it switches to 6/4)
ray charles - hard times
the smiths - this charming man
the rolling stones - loving cup
zombies - care of cell 44

"golden lady" is also my favorite stevie wonder. i'm not all-in on classic stevie but that song is incredible.

and i was just thinking the other day that "loving cup" is now my favorite song on exile

get vaxxed up, we'll have a sing-along

🎵 just siDANG in front of the FIRE 🎵

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