details
Last Edit 12/23/2007 12:20 PM
Status No Answer
Hometown England
Interested In No Answer
personal
Smoke No
Drink No
interests
Music
Singer/songwriters who sound as if they mean what they are singing.
Check out Brendan Croker's vocals on 'Feel Like Going Home' (from Missing...Presumed Having a Good Time by The Notting Hillbillies) See YouTube link below. Includes marvellous Mark Knopfler guitar solo.
While you're at my links, make sure you watch Jon Roniger's two videos - Only Human, and The Way I Feel. Wonderful music.
Want to see Robert Reynolds in yet another fantastic outfit, and Scotty Huff's sharp haircut? Click on the link below for a video of the Mavericks from the Royal Albert Hall.
I've just found a new video of Will Kimbrough and Pat Buchanan performing "Piece of Work" at the AMA conference last year - see YouTube link below left.
Movies
Love Mark Knopfler's soundtrack to Local Hero. The slower Wild Theme is best witnessed being performed live in a stadium with people hanging on to every dragged-out note. The regular version, Going Home, is a killer live too. See YouTube link below for the version of the Wild Theme from the Royal Albert Hall Concert for Montserrat with Guy Fletcher.
Does the stage version of Les Miserables count as a movie? OK, it's a musical, but anyhow, it's brilliant. And long. Best with Colm Wilkinson as Jean Valjean. See YouTube link below for a clip from the 10th Anniversary Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. (The Royal Albert Hall is popular, n'est-ce pas?)
TV
Since doing three weeks of jury service, I now have a strong desire to work for the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA)... or at least Her Majesty's Courts Service (HMCS). Anyway, I've consequently developed a fondness for legal/crime dramas - Spooks (this is MI-5 in the US, I believe), NCIS, CSI, Law and Order, Kavanagh QC., Judge John Deed, etc.
Archaeology programmes like Time Team. Programmes on astronomy - such as The Sky at Night. Anything on geology (Journeys into the Ring of Fire, etc). Programmes which make you think.
Oh, not forgetting The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. And Futurama.
Books
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables; Emile Zola's Germinal, and The Ladies' Paradise. Anything by Professor Richard Dawkins (my hero), but to start with The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene; Three books by Carl Sagan - Cosmos and Contact (the book is much better than the film) also Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors - A Search for Who We Are; Chris Bonington's Boundless Horizons (think of all that space up in the mountains away from the seething masses); John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath; Bob Harris' The Whispering Years; Knut Hamsun's The Growth of the Soil (the inspiration for Mark Knopfler's Telegraph Road).
Anything by Patrick White; John Grisham, H G Wells, Joseph Conrad, Arthur C Clarke, Wilkie Collins, John Buchan, Daphne du Maurier, Iris Murdoch, Frederick Forsyth... Currently reading Churchill's autobiography, My Early Life. (Houseful of books, but many still awaiting attention.) Also... Gary Larson's The Far Side cartoons. Should I have just put "yes"?
Quotes
You only have a limited number of days on this earth: the fewer you spend wishing you weren't, the better. - Andrew Solomon in the Noonday Demon (2002)
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