your influences
 

on your art, music, whatever. on your creativity.

halloween, animals, beautiful unusual colours, SPACE, childhood, impending death, glamour, women, banalities of life
i'm not influenced by other artists or musicians. i do what i want to do.

how about YOU mr. magoo?

Color, Los Angeles, people, socialites, death, depression, pop culture. This is what I can think right now.

- the films of Shinya Tsukamoto and Alexandro Jodorowsky plus the films Begotten and Pinnochio 964.
- the writings of William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard.
- the music of Don Van Vliet and Sun City Girls.
- the art of Giorgio de Chirico.
- codeine.

That's about it.

magoo???


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no way i can post my own shit after this ha. hm 2nd try.

Rape & murder

ok so

many many books

greek mythology

science

sex

gluttony

the potent effects of music on mood (i don't make music. but music is often playing in my head)

pain

those who question bravely

memory & time. but i haven't read proust.

an oversensitive nervous system that amplifies sensations to the point of nausea.

delicious smells

the sea! the sea! the smell of the sea.

all manner of traumas

beautiful women

desire of the kind that gives you a lump in your throat or a weird thing in the solar plexus

good poets

good writers

light-- the kind you catch in mid-air, dust suspended in errant sunbeams

vision, in general

the impossibility of ideals

yes, this one, the last one, is maybe the strongest of all.

My attempt to understand any given medium for myself.

Noise, I forgot to add that. Not noise like wolf eyes or somewhere in that realm. But just regular noise.

Gus Van Sant, freedom, the idea of Portland Oregon in my head, everything Doughlas Coupland/Daniel Clowes/Adrian Tomine have ever written, people at my school/college/university, the massive park in my town, the 70's house i grew up in, the generation X and their legacy, music videos made by bands that i like.

My Childhood (which i'm extremely fond of, for some reason)
Females
My trip to Canada and the US when I was younger (I absolutely loved Canada)
Then musically I have a whole range, but at the moment it'd be like Boards of Canada, Slint, Pavement and Flaming Lips.

Musically - Sonic Youth, Television, The Smiths, The Verlaines, Haunted Henschel.
Artistically - No one really, I haven't seen many works in the same medium as mine (lino print).
Others - My current life (obsession, quietness, loneliness (not that I'm lonely, I just don't have many friends)).

DRUGS.

Music: Pussy Galore; The Cramps; Lisa Suckdog; Ramones

Film: Kenneth Anger; Richard Kern; Jack Smith

Art: Nan Goldin; Warhol

Writers: Hubert Selby; W. S. Burroughs; Kathy Acker

You want honesty? The desire to maintain a decent standard of living.

I'd post a photo of my house here if I had one to hand.

The Punk DIY ethic
Medium format negative film
Celluloid
Tape hiss
Lens flare
Xerox collage
The Mamiya RB67
The 70's
New York

Oh come on, of course you are. If you raised in a small room with no communication with the outside world until now and then thrown into a field with a musical instrument, and paint set, and a camera, you wouldn't just be doing the same thing you do now. What you want to do are based on the things you like, be it music or art or whatever, and those things you like are your influences. That doesn't mean you straight up copy them, but all of those things have influenced you, whether you realize it or not.

music (punk, free jazz, hip hop, electronic, whatever), sex, memories, dreams (mine are always vivid), skateboarding, drugs (alcohol, acid, prescription painkillers), charles bukowski, basquiat, lester bangs, john peel, nick cave, lydia lunch, hardcore porn, jesus i duno, i def didnt wana mention any bands cuz id prolly end up writing thousands.

^^this

i'm not influenced by anything, merely withheld by my own limations

technicolor, pool parties, hollywood in 40s/50s, child stars, 1990s, DIY, tropical locales, Veronica Lake & Lana Turner, sports, Sesame Street, Batman, Lo-fi pop, shoegaze, hip-hop, electronic sounds, distortion, space [in sounds], time [in sounds], pomegranates, Christian Slater, neon colour

i have a foot fetish

I am influenced by my environment and upbringing, and behave either in concert with or by reacting against various stimuli derived from societal or aesthetic sources.

^^this too

did you put this on yr resume?

It does help people relate to you when they feel like you have things in common.

so much:
people with personal manifestos
shakespeare
all of the poets on the bookshelf in front of my face right now (left to right): Ron Silliman, Lyn Heijinian, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Marina Tsvetaeva, , Mina Loy, Robert Kelly, Andre Breton, Jackson MacLow, Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Charles Bernstein, Robert Creely, Charles Olson, Walter Abish, Martine Bellen, Peter Gizzi, Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach, Joan Retallack, Hirata Toshiko, Rae Armantrout, Tan Lin, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, Maureen Owen, Barbara Guest, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, William Shakespeare, Edward Dorn, Peter Cole, H.D., Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Fanny Howe, Emily Dickenson, Joseph Massey, Federico Garcia Lorca, Joseph Ceravolo, Jennifer Moxley, David Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Jimmy Shuyler, Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Rachel Blau Duplessis, J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Peter Riley, Forrest Gander, Larry Eigner, David Chaloner, Andrew Crozier.
Beautiful light.
Religion.
Real thinkers - George Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodore Adorno, Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Ferdinand Saussure.
Travelling in Europe.
Islamic Art.
Sound scapes.
Free improv.
Cello music.
Mark Rothko.
Picasso.
Jean Luc Godard.
Sonic Youth.
Language.
The potential of the species.

the weather. henry miller. colours. distant sounds. seeing things on a wider scope. love. the female form. nature. things that i could never comprehend or fathom but amaze me to no end, like infinity and beyond, animals.

curiosity, flashing lights, misery

films, other peoples lives, music, art, colours, shapes, body language

I'd say the idea of having no boundaries is something I can keep in mind. At least, it keeps me motivated.

Metropolis
cynicism
culture/cultural icons
women
rich, full colours
aquatic images
rainfall
lust for certain things

I mean, that's only for the moment

Oh yeah.. mysterious, dense forests

Drugs
Friends
Music
Stuff
Street life, nukka.

everything i like and everything i don't like.

if i like it, it might sneak it's way into my work.

if i don't like it, i'll avoid it in my work.

my hard on in my pants for hot steamy lovefucking and the hard on in my mind for good music, literature, film, and experiences- childhood, animals, nature, space, industrial shit, dreams, etc.

All the typical bullshit really.

LSD & THC (the former not in decades, but enough to last four lifetimes; the latter rarely these days but ditto)
Sonic Youth
Sun Ra
John Cage
Brian Eno
Zeb Andrews (a photographer friend both on Flickr and in my neighborhood, who has taught me many things through his photostream)
Derrick Tyson (another Flickr friend, though this one's in Georgia and we haven't met in person)
Phillip K. Dick
H.P. Lovecraft
Michael Moorcock
Fellini
being an only child
Salvador Dali (though I hope I never do art that cops his style0
Doctor Who
W.S. Burroughs (mostly the Naked Lunch)
iced tea
first two original Planet of the Apes movies
The Point
science fiction literature in general
The Fluxists
The Seattle music scene before it got called "grunge"
Negativland
musique concrete
Sun City Girls
comic books (though I haven't read or collected any in years and no longer own any)
Gertrude Stein
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Bowie/Reed/Iggy
role-playing games (though I kicked that habit completely decades ago)
photocopiers (I worked at Kinkos for 8 years and my biggest flyer art days predate even that)
Holga
computers (most specifically Macs, but both major platforms, and Phostoshop increasingly influences my art)
the quest for pussy
the frustration of creating music that made it less likely I would get any
radio
djing
the Olympia music scene circa end of '90s start of '00s
the Olympia bar scene of the same period
Please Kill Me
the early '90s zine scene
Hundertwasser
cats
Jackson Pollock
rain
I-5
my wife and her art
the Olympia Experimental Music Festival (which I started, but all the acts through the years have been hugely influential)
Amy Denio
Crank Sturgeon
Noggin (RIP Michael)
driving (especially influential to my photography)
Charles Peterson
the rest of the Dead Air Fresheners
Chuck Swaim
The Screamers
Suicide
Patti Smith
Ken Kesey
Ornette Coleman
The Dadists
message boards
Flipside magazine in the early '90s
The Wire
Wired
Wire
Melvins
Stanislaw Lem
digital cameras
strip clubs
never having left the North American continent
making a living as a mediator
Hinduism
Deism
Quakers/Friends
growing up without religion
Einsturzende Neubauten
Legendary Pink Dots/Edward Ka-Spel
The Orb
Beta-lactam Ring Records
The Boredoms
boredom
Portland
The PDX (Portland) Flickr Group
KAOS
KPSU
The Evergreen State College
Brian Cloudhopper (this wacked out Bellingham hippie/activist in the '80s)
The Seattle Peace Heathens
Harry Partch
Stanley Kubrick
Autechre
The Halfler Trio
softcore porn
The Soft Boys
silence

Wow, I must have been holding all that in by refusing to create a personal My Space profile. I feel much better now.

Dead-Air, you probably have some of the best influences on here.

I actively celebrate the entire recorded catalogue of Harry Partch, and I'm glad he influences someone else as well.

Thanks. I may have just thought about it a bit longer than a lot of the folks on this board (I've had a few more years to than most). I would really put Sonic Youth at the top of my cultural influences because they taught me in the '80s to embrace your influences while not trying to recreate them. So many of my influences I first heard about through SY, that I owe them two debts - one for their music, and one for everyone else's!

Harry Partch is such an important musician that I often feel guilty I haven't gotten hold of more of his recordings in my collection and listened to him more often. Weird how we don't always do that with some of our overall favorites (at least I don't, somewhat a side effect of having access to huge college radio libraries for much of my life). I didn't really make a New Year's resolution, so perhaps I will now, to buy more Partch and envelope my life with it. Might be good music for the baby too, once my mom has left from helping us get started. I'm sure she'd freak out if I started playing it, but somehow I think Partch's unique tones could be very soothing to an infant without a lifetime of traditional mainstream cultural biases to get in the way.

Dead air has some excellent artwork to go with those influences. The creativity and ideas he acquires are very blatent in his work. Definitely one of my favorite artists on the board. Some of those influences I share too:

Mind altering:
Past drug experiences
Caffine
Hinduism

Artistically:
David Choe
Banksy
Audrey Kawasaki
Jacob Bannon (Converge)

Musically:
Mouthus
µ-Ziq
Xasthur / Wold
Dr. Dre
RZA

Things:
Electronic Gadgets
Wood
Earrings
Arrows
Tenticles