Favorite song: “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)” by Type O Negative. “The goth-doom behemoth Type O Negative has been my favorite band since middle school, and I could list my 25 favorite Type O songs. I’m selecting “Black No. 1” because it’s the quintessential example of Type O’s sound: slow-rolling, Black Sabbath-influenced funeral dirges combined with left-field Beatlesque pop melodies, spooky keyboard lines, and vocalist/bassist Peter Steele’s ironic treatment of goth’s depressing subject matter. Compared to other art forms, music is strongly tied to memory, so another reason why I selected this song is its ability to call to mind images and memories of autumn, my favorite season. More specifically, it evokes a harrowing car ride from Minnesota to Ohio with a screaming 2 year old, a pregnant wife, and a very abscessed tooth (my wife’s, not mine). Not an unqualifiedly good memory, but a milestone in my journey to becoming a father-husband.”
Favorite book: “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon. “The narrative centers on the design, production, and dispatch of Germany’s V-2 rockets at the end of World War II and the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secrets of the mysterious “black device,” which is planned to be installed in a rocket with the serial number “00000.” The novel is typically classified as “postmodern,” but the main function of the term “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is, I think, to avoid dealing with the weapons-technological aspect of the story. It is because of this aspect that the novel is my favorite book. Pynchon convincingly presents WWII as a crucial episode in the conspiracy between the needs of technology (plastics, electronics, aircraft) and the ruling elite who alone understand them. It’s a world in which almost all human players are minor appendages in a story that culminates on a trans-human scale of technological synthesis.”
Favorite movie: “Blue Velvet” a 1986 American neo-noir mystery thriller film directed by David Lynch, arguably the greatest living avant-garde director of cinema. What I love about this movie is what I love about several David Lynch movies: the way it articulates the noir genre with elements of the grotesque, the surreal, and the quasi-supernatural in order to say something about human nature and the potential for human evil. From a severed, decomposing ear lying in a field to a bug-like gas mask and an unsettling lip-sync of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” Lynch deploys grotesque and surreal imagery and sound to signify the eruption of reality, of evils that cannot be ameliorated through social progress and social engineering but that nevertheless call for decent people to face outward toward all the bad stuff and defend against the really dark things in the world, things like Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth. ‘Now it’s dark.’