Hanging with Michael Moore (+ Other Influences)


William Lessard (left) with Michael Moore, 2nd Annual Webzine Conference, NYC, July 2001

Writers: Charles Baudelaire, Charles Bukowski, Hemingway, Richard Yates, Hart Crane, Anne Beattie, William Butler Yeats, John O’Hara, Whitman, Studs Terkel, Philip Larkin, Mishima, Murakami, Raymond Carver, Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Along with Shakespeare, Dostoevsky is the Lord Almighty of Literature.)

Recent Books Worth Reading :

The Elementary Particles/Michel Houellebecq – Take Camus and toss him in the pot with a healthy dash of Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Boil until the smell of burning metal stinks up your kitchen. Truly nasty – and nastily brilliant – stuff.

Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing and the Marketing of Culture/John Seabrook – Before fellow New Yorker scribe Malcolm Gladwell blew up with “Blink,” his follow-up to “The Tipping Point,” Seabrook penned this truly remarkable look at postmodernism in action. Part memoir, part participatory journalism, part scholarly rant, Seabrook explains the role of art and commerce in the context of a culture that has brought us Biggie Smalls, the iPod “Shuffle” and camera phone porn. The result: Jean Baudrillard without the snoozing.

Musicians: John Zorn, Glenn Branca, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Bach (particularly the cello suites as played by Pablo Casals), Biz Markie, BDP, Monk, The Dead Kennedys, Motorhead, Mojo Nixon, Dead Milkmen (RIP Dave Blood), Charles Trenet, Edith Piaf, Skip James, Hank Williams (the “Hillbilly Shakespeare,” indeed), ODB, Fred Astaire, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Sun Ra, Serge Gainsbourg, Stereolab.