Interview meme from tashmania

[fpb]

1. Leave a comment saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I'll reply and give you five questions to answer.
3. You'll update your LJ with the questions answered.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You ask other people questions when they want to be interviewed. And it just keeps going, and going, and going....



1. Is there a particular work (book, song, play, poem, painting, anything vaguely creative) that you can say has influenced you in your life?
2. Are you a day bird or a night owl?
3. How far do you resemble your star sign, if at all, regardless of whether you believe in astrology or not?
4. Is there any one ambition that you can single out which you want to achieve, over and above all the others?
5. Rice Krispies chocolate cakes... good or bad? :p

1. Oh my goodness... many, many. The work of Georges Dumezil, the greatest historian in the twentieth century, determined the direction of my own research; and that of generations of great comics artists, a mountain range crowned by the titanic peaks of Jack Kirby and Hayao Miyazaki, made me a cartoonist. Then there are the great classical musicians: Beethoven, Schubert, Verdi, Mozart, Bach, Haendel, Rossini, Pergolesi, Vivaldi, Palestrina and so on and so forth and so following. Popular music: Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Francesco Guccini, Edith Piaf. Movies... Oh my God, where do I begin? And then Keats, Virgil, Dante (the greatest poet I ever read), Goethe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dr.Johnson, Sappho, Aeschylus, Homer, Thomas Mann, Kalidasa, Horace, Rabindranath Tagore.... I do not think that there is a place at which I can stop. I have read and seen and listened to and watched many, many things that I have loved, and I have learned from everything I have loved. And yes, there were Cathy, Ruth, Clare and Debbie, too. They do not count as works of art, except of course from God's hand, but they taught me what life was about.

2. Hard to tell. It depends on how much I ate the previous day, really.

3. Quite a bit, especially if you take in the Chinese year system. I was born in the month of the Lion of the year of the Tiger. Figures, does it not?

4. Depends what you mean. That I would like to achieve and think I can: to become well known as a historian (preferably without prostituting my views or my professionality). That I dream of: to marry the woman I love.

5. Good: for the taste. And bad: they probably have the nutritional value of dirty water.

Comments

4. Show business

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

I started my acting career in third grade, right about the time I learned to type. I pursued it fiercely, mostly training myself by observation of others. By the time I was in college, I'd been in over 100 theatrical productions and a few tv movies (as a walk-on or extra). I also wrote, directed, and produced plays. I gave up the theatre life for family once the twins were born, although I am in a show here and there from time to time. I still have many friends in the business, and I get to live, with some measure of nostalgia, vicariously through their exploits. I have often thought of re-entering the business, but I'm not sure that would work, mostly because I don't know if I'd want to put up with the shit all over again. There was a lot of bullshit, and I believe I weathered it quite well. I just don't think I'm at a point in my life I'd be willing to sacrifice anything of myself at the alter of someone else's ego like that.

Alas, I have very few smutty stories to tell. I may post them later on their own. :)