Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Happiness, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 28 Days, The Usual Suspects, I Heart Huckabees, American Beauty, The Virgin Suicides, eXistenZ, The Ninth Gate, Cradle Will Rock, Boogie Nights, Naked Lunch, Harold and Maude, The Apprecticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Lies My Father Told Me, Easy Rider, A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now
Watch John Cassavetes punch out Ronald Reagan:
Television
South Park, Chappelle Show, Daily Show, Colbert Report, Reno 911, History Channel
Books
I read dozens of biographies every year for my astrology research, too numerous to list.
As far as fiction goes, I'd say Valis and A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, Slaughterhouse Five and The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, On The Road and The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac. Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame is my current fave author, someone I'm sure is going to grow in stature over the years.
As far as astrology books go, I gave up reading them about six or seven years ago, mainly because they just weren't taking me far enough. You reach a point where the only way to go is to dive in and do your own work.
IMO, the best astrology books have nothing to do with astrology: biographies, history books, cultural anthropology, etc. Okay, sermon over.
Heroes
A selection in alphabetical order: Cannonball Adderley, Muhammad Ali, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Antonin Artaud, Chet Baker, Jello Biafra, Bjork, Art Blakey, John Bonham, David Bowie, Marlon Brando, James Brown, John Brown, Lenny Bruce, Bugs Bunny, William S. Burroughs, Brendan Canty, George Carlin, Jimmy Carter, Johnny Cash, John Cassavetes, Charlie Chaplin, Ray Charles, Don Cherry, George Clinton, Kurt Cobain, Jean Cocteau, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, Chuck D, Salvador Dali, Charles Darwin, Miles Davis, Claude Debussy, Philip K. Dick, Bo Diddley, Eric Dolphy, Tommy Douglas, Frederick Douglass, Robert Downey Jr., Nick Drake, Ken Dryden, W.E.B. DuBois, Robert Duvall, Bob Dylan, John Entwistle, Bill Evans, Perry Farrell, Federico Fellini, Flavor Flav, Aretha Franklin, Buckminster Fuller, Vincent Gallo, Mohandas Gandhi, Dizzy Gillespie, Greg Ginn, Allen Ginsberg, Crispin Glover, Jean-Luc Goddard, Dexter Gordon, Matt Groening, Che Guevara, Woody Guthrie, Buddy Guy, Gibby Haines, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, John Lee Hooker, Dennis Hopper, Jack Johnson, Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones, Frida Kahlo, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Lemmy Kilmister, Martin Luther King Jr., Rahsaan Roland Kirk, KRS-One, Stanley Kubrick, Joe Lally, Hedy Lamarr, Fritz Lang, Ring Lardner, D.H. Lawrence, John Lennon, David Lynch, Ian MacKaye, Bob Marley, Groucho Marx, Paul McCartney, Russ Meyer, Arthur Miller, Henry Miller, Charles Mingus, Joni Mitchell, Mitch Mitchell, Thelonious Monk, Marilyn Monroe, Keith Moon, Morrisey, Jim Morrison, Jack Nicholson, Frederich Nietzsche, Anais Nin, Sinead O'Connor, Ian Paice, Chuck Palahniuk, Charlie Parker, Sean Penn, Pablo Picasso, Guy Picciotto, Sidney Poitier, Iggy Pop, Bud Powell, Richard Pryor, Maurice Ravel, Lou Reed, Dannie Richmond, Arthur Rimbaud, Diego Rivera, Max Roach, Chris Rock, Gene Roddenberry, Henry Rollins, Erik Satie, Bon Scott, Nina Simone, Todd Solondz, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Pete Townshend, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, Francois Truffaut, Dalton Trumbo, Mark Twain, McCoy Tyner, Tristan Tzara, Vincent Van Gogh, Sarah Vaughan, Paul Verlaine, Kurt Vonnegut, John Waters, Muddy Waters, Orson Welles, Joss Whedon, Oscar Wilde, Howlin' Wolf, Malcolm X, Neil Young, Frank Zappa
Nick Dagan working on my next great astrology video. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates: http://lnk.ms/4RkBsPosted at 3:31 PM Nov 14 view more
About me:
....
I was born in Montreal, and grew up in an urban commune full of hippies on DeBullion in the Plateau district until I was eight, when we moved over to Outremont and lived as a nuclear family for the first time. My first memory is being on my dad's shoulders at a big anti-Vietnam war protest, and everyone was chanting, "Nix-on assa-sin" in French.
I read my first astrology book on January 14, 1995 and within a couple of months had read dozens more and decided that I would devote my life to learning as much as possible about the subject.
Jump ahead two years and I moved to NYC to study with the N.C.G.R, passing my Level III Certification exam in March 1999.
In November 2000, I moved to Europe (first the Netherlands, for a year and a half, and then Brighton, England, for a year). While living there, I began giving consultations full-time for the U.K.-based astrology phone service, Astro Livelink, on October 1, 2001, and I still work for them today.
I've got an encyclopedic knowledge of the transit histories of hundreds of notable lives and events. Mention someone famous and I can tell you about the major transits that coincided with big changes/events in their life. Mention a Western nation (working on a full geopolitical study), and I'll give you the astrological timeline of its history.
Learning astrology this way has allowed me to bypass a lot of the more abstract elements to the craft. Many astrologers emphasize the esoteric perspective to astrology, but I proudly call myself an exoteric astrologer - I really am mostly interested in how it reflects life on earth and not so much in trying to fit it into a pre-supposed moral or spiritual paradigm. Which is not to say I'm not interested in spirituality (far from it).
Bad things happen to good people and good people do bad things. I'm far more interested in understanding people than in judging them. While self-discovery is a very important part of learning astrology, I often feel that astrological culture is focused a little excessively on "navel gazing". Ultimately, if you really want to learn what there is to know, you've got to learn from the world around you, and not just the world inside you.
I want to make myself available to astrology students for any questions or observations they may have. That being said, I will always be a student myself and am always open to learning from others as well. Please don't ask me for a free reading if you are not a student, cause that's my day job and I do enough of that, LOL.
I am available for readings and classes, though I didn't specifically join this group to promote that. If you ARE an astrology student, please don't be too shy to say "hi".
Apparently, I resemble hot Japanese and European women. Damnit!
Who I'd like to meet: People who like to discuss astrology. I'm such an astro-zealot that I have a hard time relating to muggles. That being said, I'm really into music, cinema and history and am open to conversations on those topics, as long as they are with reasonably intelligent people. I have a hard time with superficial values and attitudes.
Hi Nick just dropping by to say I kinda quoted you in my latest myspace blog about the importance of doing your own research in Astrology study. Hope that's ok. Thanks for the inspiration.
