Cultural
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I probably should amplify post-bohemian.
I’ve never felt a need to dress colorfully: much of that being rooted in a sense of aesthetic inadequacy. I love inventive dress and strong stylization.
Nor -aside from looking like a bit of hippie in my acid-dropping days - have I dressed emblematically. None of the styles of my lifetime - punk, goth, etc. - have seemed like something I need to adopt. I’ve never defined myself in the context of a subculture. Goth, I do think is very sexy: for both sexes.
I’ve never felt a need to wear my difference from the majority on my sleeve. I’m comfortable with my distinctiveness: looking ordinary is fine. That is what I meant by post-bohemian.
Let us talk about culture, mostly pop (of a sorts).
Music. What can you say of people who take no conscious delight in artfully constructed sounds?
I like so much
My pantheon: Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, The Boswell Sisters, James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Pet Shop Boys, Sarah Vaughan, Hank William, Sr.
I like jazz vocals, traditional pop vocals, r&b, jump blues, hot jazz, big band, honky tonk, western swing, vocal harmony, girl groups, rockabilly, golden age gospel, disco, dance pop, all manner of electronica.
Rock as well: The Beatles, Beach Boys, T-Rex, Velvet Underground, Roxy Music. Plenty more but once I discovered all the other kinds of music rock receded into the background.
Movies.
I’m a hopeless cornball.
Busby Berkeley movies, screwball comedies, musicals (until some point in the 1950s). Some indy movies - Park Posey’s early movies, a scattering of Sundance movies that fits no pattern. Though back in the day I watched art films - Fellini, Visconti, Bunuel - I haven’t in years.
Anything with Fred Astaire or Jackie Chan (preferring what the latter made before becoming famous in the English speaking world).
Recent mainstream movies I tend to follow by performer if at all: Hugh Grant, Reese Witherspoon Ben Stiller to a degree.
Schlock.
Yum.
I grew up during the days of Hammer Studio and American International Pictures. I’ve probably seen every science fiction and horror movie made through sometime in the 1990s. No matter how bad or obscure. Like Joe Bob Briggs I tended to award points for pointless shower scenes. I didn’t care about seeing a bit of tit. I valued the exploitation for its own sake.
I liked to see almost anything with John Carradine (David’s father), Lon Chaney, Jr,, Vincent Price. And to look at Barbara Steele and Caroline Munroe.
My favorite directors in these genres are Roger Corman, Herschel Gordon Lewis, Ed Wood, and the Hammer directors like Roy Ward Baker who remembered to tell a story and not just focus on he actresses bosoms.
Russ Meyer is best appreciated as a great comic director. I like his black and white movies more than the sex filled later movies.
Reading.
For a long time I was addicted to finding the worst hack work in the history of science fiction. Authors often forgotten and pursued by people with a similarly demented fixation on seeing how low prose could sink. This was stuff from the 1930s through the early 60s not, say, movie tie-in crap.
The only print magazines are the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books.
I like English social comedy: Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis. My favorite living novelist is Alan Hollinghurst.
P.G. Wodehouse has added countless hours of laughter to my life. Similarly the less well known Tom Sharpe.
My literacy is so idiosyncratic - I’ve read stuff that few have but have tended to skip most of the authors normally though to be read by literate persons that I could never have much of a discussion about it. Why it went that way I have no idea.
This is very spotty and not terribly coherent. But you can see how long it would be if I tried to go into this theme in depth.
