The usual immature male pursuits. And licorice ice cream and coffee pavlova. Which could be genderless pursuits, who would ever know. Learning new things so long as they aren't hard to understand, music, writing, e-mailing, eating at restaurants, people-watching, especially people-watching, and talking to people who don't keep everything hidden, which tends to be women far more than men, i guess it's a Kiwi Male thing.
Music
Anything without a drum, no, that's not true really, but sort of. 60s music still sounds great, post 1980s NZ Indies stuff. Judee Sill, Kate Rusby, The Byrds, Tim Hardin, once every year, passionately, like having rediscovered an old friend, Leonard Cohen, Lucinda Williams, the Beach Boys, Tori Amos, and The Indigo Girls. Harmonies and jangling guitars, King Loser with Lou on drums and Shayne Carter guesting, any song with great lyrics, the first line of The Who's Happy Jack, the greatest first line in rock - "Happy Jack wasn't all but he was a man" - howling Stoogian garage rock, TV's Alt TV with Adrienne on Sundays at 11.00, her heart appears to be in the right place, the third movement of Beethoven's Appasionata which is pure rock music, heaps of stuff really, especially live right in front of me with a big fat speaker stack battering me to a grinning death. Have never danced to music in my entire life and would rather drive carpet tacks into my gums than do so.
Movies
Mean streets, Snow Cake, Trainspotting, Shortbus, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Harold And Maude, Garden State, Beautiful Girls, Withnal And I, The Graduate, Stranger Than Fiction, Smoke, and 71 others that have just gone right out of my head right now. That Bjork one, um, Dancer In The Dark. Cunnamulla. The Last Picture Show. June Bug. Just about anything by Scorcese. Actually there are 2394 not 71 I just counted them - who remembers ALL their favourite movies?. Have written a screenplay that is sitting cobwebbed in someone's drawer in Auckland, I get a call every now and then and they say "Let's make this suckah", which I think is Hollywoodspeak for "it's still in the drawer with all the others.".
Television
Trailer Park Boys, Entourage, Project Runway, The Sopranos, Green Wing, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, Beavis And Butthead, NBA basketball, Weeds, Extras, The Office, even the American Office, Back at The Y, Flight of the Conchords, and Coronation Street when there's a good plot-line running.
Books
Have only ever read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. I presume all books are like this. Actually I lie like a dog, I have been a book reviewer many times. But Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas did change my (writing) life. My recreaional life was already like that. No it wasn't, I just tried to make it like that. Three Men In A Boat by Jerome.K.Jerome was the first book I read that I loved, I was 3, and now, David Sedaris makes me cry with laughter the most, genius.
Heroes
Vermeer, Brian Wilson, Madeleine Viennet, Homer Simpson, Judee Sill, Tim Hardin, Tanya Carlson, Michael Jordan, Tori Amos, The Everly Brothers,Kate Rusby, Rima Te Wiata, John Daly, Jane Horrocks, The Gideons, Mary Weiss of The Shangri-Las, Anna Leese, Peter Cook, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Saunders, John Belushi, Beavis, the Scottish actress in Extras and Ugly Betty who is stunningly good, the Dark Books/Green Wing woman, you know, thin, dark hair, and the face of a woman born to lose, Bob Dylan in the 60s, the woman psychiatrist in Green Wing - the one who has sex with anyone and any thing, my FUCK she is all woman - Lucinda Williams, Ricky Gervais, the creator of Trailer Park Boys, Dusty Springfield, especially Dusty Springfield, the guy who invented peanut butter, and, of course, my wife.
About me: Me? Well, I have two legs the same length and someone else's kidney, my details here say I am the metric equivalent of 5ft 7in which is bollocks, I'm only 5ft 5in, maybe a quarter inch more, but I had to estimate metrically when I filled in the form and was wrong and I can't be arsed changing it, though I do have some shoes whose heels are I swear at least half an inch high, italian, premiata, look like saucers according to my wife, so I'm heading towards 5ft 7in, slowly, which segues naturally into ur car, which used to have leaking oil till we changed to the proper type, but now we have a fucked radiator so we will have to buy a new one according to my brother who knows about cars but I don't drive, which is neither here nor there, where was i, oh yes, did i say we have a toyota marino which my literate friend margo said was a single woman's car, which makes me feel great riding in the passenger seat, in fact often i just lie on the floor, i do have my standards, but we're not here to talk about cars, oh no, so yes, I cannot ride a bike or swim, and spell my first name two different ways for reasons I cannot begin to understand, and I ran a music store for 35 years and learned a lot about life there, good, bad and surrealistic, and now I just write nonsense, most often for the The Sunday Times, well, it's not all nonsense, tho right now i am writing the odd skit for TV's Facelift, and I lurk about cafes and lunchtime slophouses, theatres and a prestigious Dunedin womens fashion design workroom which is very educational and often screamingly hysterical in the nicest possible way, which segues naturally into the fact I wear jeans every day because I wasn't allowed them as a child because my parents thought that would turn me into a juvenile delinquent, but I became one anyway in a safe middle-class jeanless sort of way, and I play golf, generally not with other people unless they are very close friends, often just by myself, and write about that every month for New Zealand's number one golf magazine The Cut, which is of course a recreational drug term, but that's anothe story for another time, and for that i use the french spelling of my first name, which confuses a lot of people and also gives me two separate Google identities and causes me a degree of strife banking cheques, tho not many people write cheques any more, let's be perfectly frank about this, and i honestly believe i could be one of the laziest people in the Southern Pacific Basin, completely ambitionless, and yet at times not without a Protesting Work Ethic, and even a whisper of ambition, and i could write another 15,000 words and enter the Guinesss Book of Records for The Longest MySpace Sentence and maybe even enter Wikipedia, gosh, that would be a thrill, but I have far fatter fish to fry.
Who I'd like to meet: Brigitte Bardot, still, even though she's old and wide and daft, Jennifer Saunders, Kate Rusby, Larry David, Kimberly Massengill, the entire cast of Trailer Park Boys, the actress who plays Annie in Extras, Princess Rose of Tasmania, the actress who plays the woman in Black Books who is also in Green Wing (Caroline), Bob Dylan if it was 1966, Mary Weiss of The Shangri-Las any time at all, and the guy who invented peanut butter.
Welcome home from your holy-day! Your friend Adrienne has good taste in music.. She has introduced me to gamine -just beautiful if you like that sort of thing! (and I do) Oh help I'm just watching Casanova on t.v. which may have influenced the "tone" of this comment... Things rub off on me like rocksalt on a salmon fillet!
