Family and friends. Music and Art. Humor, intelligence, and inquisitiveness. Photography and fast prime lenses. Art films. Bicycles. Food and cooking. Used bookstores. Libraries. Museums. Thrift stores. Diners. Black coffee, dark beer, and red wine. Walking. Cities. Nature. Skin. Scars. Tattoos. Movement. Coincidences. Night.
Music
Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Nick Cave, Gillian Welch, Mark Lanegan, The Clash, Black Flag, The GC5, Pegboy, Ramones, The Pixies, Jawbreaker, Bob Dylan, Ray LaMontagne, Roy Orbison, The Talking Heads, At The Drive In, Social Distortion, X, Small Brown Bike, Reach for the Sky, The Damned, Fugazi, Avail, Hot Water Music, Sunny Day Real Estate, Dead Kennedys, Minutemen, Bad Religion, The Pogues, The Cramps, Propagandhi, Planes Mistaken for Stars, The Black Angels, My Life in Black and White, The Starvations, Company Flow, El-P, Aesop Rock, Alkaline Trio, The North Atlantic, Jets to Brazil, The Smiths, Iron Maiden, Crystal Skulls, Sea Wolf, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Veils, The Comas, The Spinto Band, Cloud Cult, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Chet Baker, Freddie Hubbard, Cyrus Chestnut...
Some of my favorite local bands are: Git Some, Bad Luck City, Monofog, Kingdom of Magic, Planes Mistaken for Stars, Gregory Alan Isakov, Nightshark, Ghost Buffalo, Red Cloud West, Astrophagus, Munly, Black Lamb, Widowers, Porlolo, The Knew, Mustangs and Madras, Born In The Flood, Hello Kavita, Tim Pourbaix, Jason Cain, Ian Cooke, Hearts of Palm, Reno Divorce, The Wheel, Bad Weather California, Bela Karoli, d.biddle, American Relay, Gasoline Lollipops, Tiny Television, Vaux...
Movies
Werner Herzog (Aguirre: Wrath of God; The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser; Even Dwarfs Started Small; Fitzcarraldo; Heart of Glass; Nosferatu the Vampyre; Stroszek; Woyzeck, Lessons of Darkness), Bela Tarr (Damnation, Almanac of the Fall; Werkmeister Haromonies), David Lynch (Blue Velvet; Eraserhead; Mullholland Drive; Wild at Heart; Twin Peaks), Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), Coen Brothers (Big Lebowski; Barton Fink; Fargo; Miller’s Crossing; Raising Arizona; O Brother, Where Art Thou?), Woody Allen (Annie Hall; Bananas; Broadway Danny Rose; Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex; Love and Death; Sleeper; Take The Money and Run; Zelig),Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev; Solaris; Stalker), Stanley Kubrick (2001; A Clockwork Orange; Dr. Strangelove; Full Metal Jacket; Lolita), Jim Jarmusch (Coffee and Cigarettes; Dead Man; Down By Law; Ghost Dog; Night on Earth), Christopher Guest (Best in Show; This is Spinal Tap; Waiting for Guffman), Akira Kurosawa (Hidden Fortress; Madadayo; Ran; Rashomon; Sanjuro; Seven Samurai; Throne of Blood; Yojimbo), Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles; High Anxiety; The Producers; Silent Movie; Young Frankenstein), Monty Python (all of it), Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth; The Devil's Backbone), Misc (El Topo; Repo Man; Napoleon Dynamite; The Usual Suspects, Wings of Desire, Hard Boiled, Resevoir Dogs; Manos: Hands of Fate; A Fish Called Wanda; The Science of Sleep; Being John Malkovich; Ed Wood; Freaks; Pecker; I (heart) Huckabee’s; Borat; Rushmore; American Beauty; Catch-22; MASH; Taxi Driver; Apocalypse Now; To Kill a Mockingbird; Empire of the Sun; Betty Blue; La Double Vie de Veronique; Europa Europa, Arthouse / Foreign / Black & White / Independent / Surreal / Absurd Comedy / Weird.
Television
Peep Show (UK), Arrested Development, The Office (UK), The IT Crowd (UK).
Books
Jack Kerouac (On the Road; Desolation Angels; Dharma Bums), Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea; The Wall; The Flies; No Exit; The Age of Reason; The Reprieve; Troubled Sleep; Existentialism is a Humanism; Dirty Hands; The Condemned of Altona; The Words), Albert Camus (The Stranger; The Plague; The Fall; Exile and the Kingdom; The Myth of Sisyphus; The Rebel; Resistance, Rebellion, and Death), Charles Bukowski (Run with the Hunted; Post Office; Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame; Love is a Dog from Hell; Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit; Dangling in the Tournefortia; Ham On Rye; Hot Water Music; War All the Time; Last Night of the Earth Poems; The Laughing Heart; Bone Palace Ballet; Sifting Through The Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way; The Flash of Lighting Behind the Mountain), Hunter S. Thompson (The Rum Diary; Hells Angles; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72; The Great Shark Hunt; Generation of Swine; Songs of the Doomed; Better than Sex; The Proud Highway; Fear and Loathing in America), John Fante (Ask The Dust, The Road To Los Angeles, Full of Life), Henry Miller, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Herman Hesse, Gunter Grass, Knut Hamsun, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Nietzsche, Anais Nin, Salinger, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Edward Abbey, William Least Heat Moon, Cormac McCarthy, “A Confederacy of Dunces”, “Catch-22”, “Naked Lunch”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Brave New World”, “Lolita”. Anything History or Philosophy related. Music books like "Please Kill Me" and "We've Got the Neutron Bomb".
Heroes
"I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man." [Camus]
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman
There was a time, there was a place where everybody knew my face
And everything I touched would turn to gold
But now I've come to realize that to see through all their fucking lies
Is to refuse to be bought or sold.
- The GC5 (Between Aspirations)
"I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck any more what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy, incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le bel aujourd’ hui!" - Henry Miller
Miller: A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.
Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
"A wholesale grocer’s cart came by, and I saw it was filled with potatoes, but out of fury, from sheer obstinacy, I decided that they were not potatoes at all, they were cabbages, and I swore violent oaths that they were cabbages." - Knut Hamsun (Hunger)
"I’m 34, regular looking, but in my jeans and eerie outfits people are scared to look at me because I really look like an escaped mental patient with enough physical strength and innate dog-sense to manage outside of an institution to feed myself and go from place to place in a world growing gradually narrower in its views about eccentricity every day – Walking through towns in the middle of America I got stared at weirdly – I was bound to live my own way….But I was determined to be glad! – Dostoevsky said “Give a man his Utopia and he will deliberately destroy it with a grin” and I was determined with the same grin to disprove Dostoevsky!" – Jack Kerouac (Desolation Angels)
"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that." - Lloyd Dobler
What a great band the GC5 was! I got to play a couple of shows with them and the Hudson Falcons almost 10 years ago! Check out Jim McTurnan & the Kids that Killed the Man today at 4:30 in the Goodwill Parking Lot and the Pseudo Dates Sunday at the TS Board Shop at 3:30. Take care Doug!
Please check out the new video for "How Long's It Been?" from RENO DIVORCE!
This is the first single from our new album, "Tears Before Breakfast," coming out June 12th in Europe, July 21st in the U.S. on I Scream Records!
