Tell us about your personal "canon"

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.

I like this question! I like the distinction between “favorites” and “personal canon”. Engaging with some special things is like lighting a votive candle.

Krazy Kat and the Clientele are the only things I can think of off the top of my head. And maybe like 25-30 songs that would heavily overlap a lot of ilxors’ best evar lists.

oh, in addition to everything i mentioned, three different comics that had an untold (and in some ways unconscious) effect on what i consider good storytelling: watchmen, cages by dave mckean (no idea if this holds up), batman black & white

also my canon was missing sailor moon, somehow

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),

It's such a tough question! I don't know if there's any answer that doesn't somehow feel false or reductive.

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?

To me = 'bottomless reflecting pools I have plumbed in search of myself only to find that I do not exist.'

The best/only way i can see to approach this quesion is as one of those Buzzfeed quizzes like 'which Pokemon are you?', just mindless fun. And i feel like that would be somehow disrespectful, given the thoughtful responses of others idk

Canadian TV PSA's, the California Raisins, and Bazooka Joe comics

To me = 'bottomless reflecting pools I have plumbed in search of myself only to find that I do not exist.'

Love this, can I steal it?

Tangerine Dream - Love on a Real Train

I'm genuinely quite touched by the answers so far and it's making me want to delve into everything everyone is talking about.
Funny really that ILX has been such a massive font of knowledge, culture, inspiration and (yes I'll say it) excellent taste that in many ways ILX has been a bigger influence on my canon than anything else in my adult life. Biggups all of you x

Appreciate this isn't the easiest question to answer because of course influences come from other places. And we all get obsessed by small things as much as big things. I wonder if I'm still susceptible to some new thing coming along and changing my worldview. I hope so

I wonder if I'm still susceptible to some new thing coming along and changing my worldview. I hope so

I definitely am. I only started listening to South African jazz in 2018 and now I'm aware of a whole network/ecosystem of artists down there, doing absolutely phenomenal stuff. And because the social/cultural/political context is so totally different from the one in the US, it makes me think about the music in ways I never would have if the artists were from Chicago or Detroit or L.A.

books: albert camus, james kelman, raymond carver, the big 3 irish modernists, raymond chandler, vargas llosa, bolaño, dfw (big red flag on the top of the very male sundae)
tv: as with ian above - star trek tng and ds9. x files, sopranos, columbo, weir's way.
films: taiwanese new wave, pre-terminator 2 james cameron, the road to movies, gattaca, italian neorealism, godard's 60s and 70s work. groundhog day, 70s altman
fashion: ivy league preppy stuff - chinos, oxfords, penny loafers, polo shirts. west coast outdoorsy - patagonia shorts, sensible footwear, sandals with socks, fleeces. 80s truck driver: beaten up lee storm rider, old pendelton and woolrich flannels, old oilers hat, old levis 501s
music: beethoven, ecm, albert ayler and ornette coleman, sophistipop, reggaeton, jaco pastorius, disco, neil young, west end records, balaeric, midwest emo and indie of the 90s
comics: mafalda and condorito (sublime and the ridiculous here), o. schrauwen, dash shaw

This idea of a canon, as opposed to favorites, is interesting. Louisa May Alcott isn't a favorite, but she's in my canon because she's part of a shared language and set of references among me and my aunts and cousins on my mom's side of the family. Springsteen is a current favorite, but it feels a little early to put him in the canon.

It turns out to be a complicated process, testing things to see if they belong in my canon or not. I've been thinking of one work after another, asking not "Do I love this?" but "Is it part of me?" "If it didn't exist, would I be different? Would I write differently? Would I think differently? Would my context for understanding the world be different?"

And it gets even more complicated when I come to all the works I've added to my canon as an adult, because there I'm talking to some degree about choices I have consciously made. There's something weirdly revealing about saying, "With all of the vast artistic and cultural offerings of the world to choose from, I have chosen to shape a substantial part of my adult identity around Rudyard Kipling, John Prine, and Homicide, Life on the Street.

So hard to grapple with this, but some things come easily to mind. I don't love all of these quite as much now, but at the time I would have died for any of them. Music-heavy because I am, and because I have my library to look at whereas my film collection is all over the place and my books are mostly in storage.

Arthur Getz Hamilton Duck
George Selden A Cricket in Times Square
Madeleine L'Engle A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind at the Door
Tove Jansson's Moomin books, esp A Comet in Moominland
1970s Doctor Who TV and books
The Goodies
Robert A Heinlein
Arthur C Clarke
first two Star Wars movies
Billy Joel The Stranger
Jeff Wayne The War of the Worlds
Fleetwood Mac Tusk
Susan Cooper The Dark is Rising sequence
David Lynch The Elephant Man
ITV Children of the Stones
John Wyndham The Day of the Triffids, Trouble With Lichen The Midwich Cuckoos
Michael Jackson Off the Wall, Thriller
Spike Milligan's war diaries
INXS Shabooh Shoobah, The Swing
George Orwell 1984
Michael Radford 1984
Eurythmics 1984 (well, 1982-85 I guess)
Prince Purple Rain, Parade, Sign "O" the Times
The Cure 1979-1989
Cocteau Twins 1982-1990
Alfa-Romeo cars
Bruce Robinson Withnail and I
Pao Hsueh Li Blooded Treasury Fight
Eric B and Rakim Paid in Full
De La Soul Three Feet High and Rising
The Breeders Pod
New Order Power, Corruption and Lies, Substance, Technique
Stereolab
Kraftwerk Computerwelt
Throwing Muses Throwing Muses, House Tornado, Limbo, Throwing Muses
My Bloody Valentine You Made Me Realise, Isn't Anything, Glider, Tremolo, Loveless
Palace Music
Will Oldham Arise Therefore, Joya, The Broken Giant
Slint Spiderland
Slowdive Pygmalion
Autechre
Broadcast
Bedhead
The New Year
Seefeel s/t
Stanley Kubrick
Paul Thomas Anderson Magnolia
Clint Eastwood A Perfect World
Mazzy Star So Tonight That I Might See
Opal Early Recordings
Boards of Canada In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country
Radiohead Kid A
Cat Power Moon Pix
Mary Margaret O'Hara Miss America
Underground Lovers Rushall Station
Neu! Neu! Neu! 2
The Breeders Title TK
Glenn Gould The Goldberg Variations (both recordings)
The Mighty Boosh
Michel Gondry Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Sufjan Stevens (Come on Feel the) Illinoise
David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest
Talk Talk Laughing Stock
Joni Mitchell The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira
Bill Evans Sunday Afternoon at the Village Vanguard, Waltz for Debby, The Last Waltz
Gillian Welch Time, the Revelator
David Chase The Sopranos
Matthew Weiner Mad Men
David Simon The Wire
Tina Fey 30 Rock
Hideo Nakata Dark Water
Kelly Reichardt Old Joy
Kendrick Lamar good kid, m.A.A.d. city
Grouper A I A: Alien Observer, A I A: Dream Loss, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, Ruins, Paradise Valley
CAN Future Days
Lynne Ramsay Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Akira Kurosawa High and Low
Yasujiro Ozu Late Spring
Hirokazu Korēda After the Storm
Perfume Level 3
The xx xx
David Bowie Hunky Dory, Low, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), ★
Yukio Mishima Patriotism
HTRK Psychic 9-5 Club
Frank Ocean Blond
Charli XCX Pop 2
Tyler the Creator Igor
Tierra Whack Whack World
Chloe Zhao The Rider

oh god sorry it didn't look that long in the "compose" box

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.

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