Movies
I went to film school at NYU and the University of Colorado, so when I talk about movies it's usually in reference to the filmmaker rather than the film itself... So here's my big pretentious list of favorite filmmakers: Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Wong Kar-Wai, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Terry Gilliam, Wim Wenders, Stan Brakhage (my professor at CU), Robert Altman, Godfrey Reggio, the Brothers Quay, Jan Svankmajer, Nicolas Roeg, PT Anderson, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Stanley Kubrick, The Coen Brothers, Terence Malick...
Music
Man, I love music. Anything and everything eclectic and ecstatic. I listen to lots of music and I don't discriminate by genre--if it's pure in intent and if it has a groove, I'm down. Among my favorite artists are exploratory jazz guys like Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Pharaoh Saunders, Weather Report, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Steve Reid, Roy Ayers, and on and on...icons and influential artists like Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Brian Eno, George Harrison, The Dead, Traffic, The Band, Roxy Music, The Velvet Underground, Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Fela Kuti, Beck... Newish type shit like Radiohead, Massive Attack, Money Mark, Air, Boards of Canada, Tortoise, GYBE!, Super Furry Animals, Four Tet, Wilco, Tricky, The Beta Band, David Holmes, Sonic Youth, Groove Armada, Jim O'Rourke, Stereolab, The Flaming Lips, Zero 7, Plush... Fucked up 70's German Krautrock like Neu!, Can, Faust, Kraftwerk, Popol Vuh... Creative hip hop new and old like The Roots, Tribe, Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakeem, Kanye West, J-Dilla, Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, DJ Shadow, Quasimoto, Madlib, Beasties, The Streets, Roots Manuva, The Herbaliser... I've come to bow down to the art of the DJ...reframing and resurrecting music by framing it in different context...my favorites include Gilles Peterson, whose BBC Radio 1 show has helped open my ears to a lot of amazing hip-hop and dance music I would otherwise have ignored...Garth Trinidad, who hosts a SICK show called Chocolate City on KCRW...the labrats at Dublab.com...WFMU is one of the country's most legendary freeform radio stations. Increasingly, I'm finding labels like Ninja Tune, Warp, RopeaDope, BBE, and k7 to be very reliable.
Television
Books
I spend a lot more time these days reading magazines instead of books. My new favorite magazine is Wax Poetics. I want to like The Believer but it veers off into precious, annoying, cuteness far too often. I've been a subscriber to The New Yorker for years and I love it. I used to read a lot of books, but it's increasingly hard to find the time. For the most part, I'm into people who aren't afraid to play with language. Henry Miller is probably my favorite writer. Here are my other favorites: Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Bowles, Rick Moody, Yukio Mishima, Haruki Murakami, Martin Amis, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, JD Salinger, Peter Handke, Roald Dahl, John Barth, Orhan Pamuk.