Arty Farty Meme

I’m stealing this from Konagod. Because it’s a fun one, and I like how some of the questions are phrased:

1) Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies:

I can’t afford to buy copies to give away, but I’ve lent out my copy of Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine so many times that pages are now falling out.

2) Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music:

I’m not a big music person, but I’ll never forget the first ballroom Samba class I took at DanceSport, my first studio, with this extremely fun, but somewhat crazed 🙂 Greek woman named Roula Giannopoulou. I’d never heard Samba music before, nor had I ever taken a Samba dance class, and I have no idea now exactly what piece of music she played, but with the wildly intense percussion produced by several kinds of drums, intriguing sounds of other musical instruments I didn’t recognize, the different timing, the beautiful, poetic flow of the Portuguese (which of course I didn’t understand), and just the overall mad-fun atmosphere the music created, I knew I was going to love the class before Roula even made her way back from the stereo to the front of the mirror to show us the basic. As I learned the dance (and the other Latin dances as well), I had to concentrate really hard to hear the beats, so I wouldn’t be off-time. It also made me interested in the culture which produced it, which I knew from from the foreignness of the music alone, must be quite different from my own. So I guess it is in these ways that I learned to listen to and think about music differently: not just to get lost in it, but really to hear the drum beats, the rhythm, the way it was all put together, and view it as a window into another place…

3) Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue:

In the Name of the Father — for the music, the story, Daniel Day Lewis, the setting, everything…

4) Name a performer for whom you suspend all disbelief:

On screen, Sean Penn; on stage, Jose Manuel Carreno.

5) Name a work of art you’d like to live with:

Pot Head, by Paul McCarthy. People accuse him of being lewd, bawdy, and prone to sensationalism, but I think the man tells it like it is 🙂

6) Name a work of fiction that has penetrated your real life:

Just one? — impossible. Middlesex, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Native Son, The Grapes of Wrath, Howard’s End, Crime and Punishment…

7) Name a punch line that always makes you laugh:

This one’s hard for me. I don’t know if I know any punch lines, but I’ve always been humored by the movie line: “Dear Diary, my teenage angst bullshit has a body count.” From Heathers.