I'm so fascinating. You would be so very lucky to know me. Anyone would be so very lucky to know me. If only people could find more pictures from my life and more information about me....

  

THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY:

*Other Netflix users saying my review of a movie helped them, or naming me a 'favorite.'

*Fantasizing that I could afford to collect all kinds of neat things--like 18th- and 19th-century English caricatures, fine embroidered silks, netsuke, rare books, etc., etc.

 

FAVORITE MOVIES:

*'Apocalypto.' Mel Gibson may be a scuzzy crackpot, but this is one incredible movie -- these ancient people and their mighty temples live and breathe again.

*'The Fallen Idol.'

*'Liquid Sky.' To watch it, you should probably be stoned and 16 years old.

*'The Magic Flute' by Ingmar Bergman. A joy to watch--and Papageno is tops!

*'P'tang Yang Kipperbang' -- The ending is so romantic!!

*'Raise the Red Lantern' -- Maybe the most perfect movie ever.

*'Ugetsu.'

 

FAVORITE ARTISTS:

*Bronzino.

*Richard Dadd.

*Lotte Laserstein.

*Wright of Derby.

*Yoshitoshi. (His depiction of draperies!!)

 

PET PEEVES:

*People who don't pick up wind-blown or drunk-thrown trash from their own front lawns or the curb in front of their house.

*Hard caramels sticking to my teeth--for decades, I've had hideous hard caramel nightmares about the candies sticking to my teeth and filling my mouth, and I just pull glob after unending glob out of my mouth.

*Little bits of foil that stick to the rims of vitamin and other bottles.

*Clear film on TV dinners that can't be pulled off in one sheet but just shreds into pieces.

*.Rar files with passwords.

*Scratching my chest and getting my hand coated with sweaty hairs. Yuck.

*'Private messages' that are really just system messages, or dopey crap sent to all by administrators at Web sites.

*English people pronouncing 'shone,' long 'o,' 'shawn' or 'shon.'

*Little bits of wax stuck to Coke cans that come in the 12-pack boxes. How can that be? It shouldn't be allowed!

*'Snap-case' DVD boxes--those cardboard ones, you know? I HATE them. They drive me CRAZY.

*Bags of frozen food that promise they are resealable and come with zip-loc strips. Then, after they are 'resealed,' they are NOT 'unresealable' or even 'openable,' and you have to cut off the whole top of the bag to gain access.

 

REVOLTING CANDIES I HATE:

*Jelly beans.

*Lemon drops (the gummy kind).

*Snickers.

*Hard caramels (see above).

*Three Musketeers.

*Rancid 'English toffees' that are nothing like the delicious chocolate treat we enjoy in the U.S.--they're more like hard-caramel-textured car oil flavored with chemicals masquerading as fruit--SO NASTY.

*Gummi-anything.

*Licorice.

 

FAVORITE CHOCOLATES/CHOCOLATE BARS:

*Fifth Avenue.

*Reese's peanut butter cups.

*Little Debby Nutty Bars.

*Cadbury's Fruit & Nut--it's better in the U.K., right?

 

FAVORITE PIZZA:

Beef and Pineapple!!

 

FAVORITE FOODS:

*Croissants: (1) the ones filled with chocolate or jam and cream cheese; or (2) savoury ones full of ham & swiss, etc.; or (3) the ones you cut in half for sandwiches. I don't care.

*Danishes, golden, yellow, flaky, and tender.

*Pizza.

*Fried Shrimp. I would be happy to eat nothing but fried shrimp for the rest of my life.

*Scotch eggs.

*Big slabs of chicken and ham pie with bits of aspic.

*Yoghurt.

*English chutneys that are totally inauthentic. No heat or Spices of the East, please.

*Australian meat pies.

*Pork pies.

*Strongbow cider.

*Pork buns.

*Mousse pate.

*Archway Christmas nougat cookies.

*Napoleons--the layered treat with apricot jam.

*Custard slices.

*Down Under Apple Pie, with the hard cheddar crust on top doubled or tripled or quadrupled.

*Wiener Schnitzel served with ginger ale! (The Berghoff, where are you???)

*What the heck, other schnitzels.

*Filet mignon.

*Cheese souffle with tuna sauce.

*Spaghetti carbonara.

 

FAVORITE BOOKS:

Proust. You have to read Remembrance of Things Past. The last good translation was the Moncrief-Kilmartin-Mayor one, circa 1981. The continued tinkering since then has damaged the language, making it coarse, stupid, and ugly. Anyway, read the book. Give it your all. Do not give up because the first 50-80 pages of tiny print concern how hard it is to fall asleep at night when you are a little boy. Because once you finish the whole of Proust's work, you will find that you have LIVED the lives contained therein, you will have become an old man, or a disabused man in late middle age, and you will look back at all of the characters from your past and see their complete transformation, their complete metamorphosis. The upstart grasping socialite will have become accepted as the soul of culture, the finest flower of the aristocracy of the ancien regime. It all ends in a party, a swirling whirl of the passing, ever-changing scene.

 

Evelyn Waugh--mostly for his two early classics Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall, and to a lesser extent his flawed masterpiece Brideshead Revisited. I love his vicious, take-no-prisoners satire. All of his other books from the 1950s and 1960s are way over-rated.

 

John Cheever. I met him once when I was a young boy and he tried to chat up my mother. A scuzzy, seedy guy in a raincoat, and he mentioned that he used to talk like me and that his mother was English--which I took to be an arch comment about my clipped, jumped-up accent. Someone came up to us afterwards and said, as if it was a big deal, 'That was John Cheever!' We shrugged. My mother and I were very unimpressed. Years later, I discovered his stories and novels and was crazy about them.

 

Aldous Huxley.

 

'Penrod' by Booth Tarkington--probably the ultimate book about a boy growing up, along with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's 'The Story of a Bad Boy.'

 

The single work of literature that I love more than any other is the short story 'The Lovely Lady' by D.H. Lawrence. It encapsulates my view of the world--beauty, cynicism, avarice, and guilt, all wrapped up in a glossy package.

 

FAVORITE TV SHOWS:

*'Hollyoaks: In the City' (Frothy fun--moving at the end. And the characters grow and change.)

*'Kingdom' with Stephen Fry

*'Pasadena' (Masterpiece of tone and atmosphere. Riveting intrigue!)

*'Hotel Babylon.'

*'Due South.'

*'Strangers With Candy.'

*'Strip Mall.'

*'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'

*'Supernatural.'

*'The X Files.'

*'Flight of the Conchords.'

*'The IT Crowd.'

*'Stella.'

*'Twitch City' (Charmion King was hilarious!)

*'Seven Periods With Mr. Gormsby' (I cried keenly at the end of the first season--it was so moving!)

*'Stupid, Stupid Man.'

*'Summer Heights High.'

*The Russell T. Davies iteration of 'Doctor Who.'

*'Parker Lewis Can't Lose.'

 

(I wish the characters Benton Fraser from 'Due South' and Buffy Summers from 'Buffy' were real people.)

 

SHOULD BE OUT ON DVD BUT AREN'T:

*'Jake 2.0';

*'It's Like, You Know....';

*'The Wayne Manifesto.'

*'Cover Me: Based on the True Life of an FBI Family.'

*'Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left.'

*'An American Family'--the original 1970s reality series about the Loud family.

*'My World and Welcome To It.'

*'The Great American Dream Machine.'

 

FAVORITE MUSIC:

Jim Croce (maybe the best American songwriter ever?). Umaturman / Uma2rman. I love the musical group Cake. All of their songs are so interesting, musically and lyrically. The Gin Blossoms. The Bloodhound Gang. The Lemonheads. The Hidden Cameras. Half the songs on Kirsty MacColl's 'Tropical Brainstorm' album.

 

FAVORITE SONGS:

*'Parachute' by Something Happens.

*'Sunburst' by Picturehouse.

*'Everybody Loves My Girl' by Picturehouse.

*'My Sharona' by The Knack.

*'867-5309 Jenny' by Tommy Tutone.

*'Jerk It Out' by Caesars.

*'Still Alive,' Portal credits song.

*'Your Woman,' White Town.

*'All I Want (Is a Cute Blond Boy),' Whore's Mascara.

*'Bad Touch,' the Bloodhound Gang.

*'Hamster On a Piano.' The guy who did this on YouTube apparently has deleted the good version, so you'll have to find a less popular clip archiving the version with the lyrics 'keep on eating that popcorn,' etc.

*'The Roswell Incident,' Suzanne McDermott.

 

OPERA EVEN?

*Cyril Auvity--what a stunning tenor / haute contre voice. Clear and pure. And he can act and perform on stage with simplicity and grace. He isn't all 'opera singer.'

 

FAVORITE CLASSICAL MUSIC:

Yes, I love cliches:

*Boccherini, Minuet.

*Mussorgsky, Pictures At an Exhibition.

*Pachelbel, Canon.

*Schubert, Trio op. 100.

 

FAVORITE COMEDIANS:

*Stephen K. Amos

*Mike Birbiglia.

*Jimmy Carr.

*Ricky Gervais.

*Stephen Lynch.

*Nick Swardson.

 

FAVORITE COMEDY ROUTINES:

*The 'Honest Dad'/'Father and Son' sketches from the Australian sketch show 'Comedy Inc.'/'The Late Shift.' Check out 'Honest Dad on Monsters' at YouTube.

*'Doctors and Diets' and 'The Italian Lesson' by Ruth Draper.

 

ABSOLUTE TOP FAVORITE ACTOR:

*Brendan Fletcher.

 

FAVORITE ACTORS:

I'll list actors and actresses 50-50. This list is by no means complete--hardly! Probably, most share a certain soulful sensitivity that appeals to me.

*Cate Blanchett.

*Christian Brassington.

*Coral Browne.

*Guy Burnet.

*Anna Chancellor.

*Karl Davies.

*Rita Davies.

*Lucy Davis.

*Luke de Lacey.

*Loren Dean.

*Marsha Fitzalan.

*Anna Friel.

*John Garfield.

*Nicole Kidman.

*James McAvoy.

*Heather Mitchell.

*Paul Muni.

*Katherine Parkinson.

*Parker Posey.

*James Purefoy.

*Delphine Seyrig.

*Fiona Shaw.

*David Strickland.

*Tilda Swinton.

*Russell Tovey.

*Zbych Trofimiuk.

*Margaret Tyzack.

*Jeffrey Walker.

*Frank Whaley.

 

PERSONAL HEROES:

*Julian Assange.

*Paul Mellon.

 

FAVORITE TELEVISION PERSONALITIES:

*Jonny Benarr.

*Cat Deeley.

 

FAVORITE CHARACTERS:

*Marmaduke Brooks, 'Carpoolers.'