art books food music theater

1. Nikosi Sikelele
2. kora music of Mamadou Diabate
3. “any good pipe and drum band” (eg. Edinburgh Military Tattoo!)
4. Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings
5. San Francisco Saxophone Quartet
6. Opus the penguin^W from Bloom County
7. watercolors from the original The Story of Babar books
8. paintings and sculptures of George Lilanga^W
9. perfectly fried okra
10. Angels in America, Tony Kushner

part 1: books from childhood

1. The Sailor Dog
2. My Father’s Dragon, Ruth Stiles Gannet
3. Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne
4. Wild Animals I Have Known, Ernest Thompson Seton
5. Just-So Stories: For Little Children, Rudyard Kipling
6. The Story about Ping, Marjorie Flack

part 2: … as a young adult

1. Narcissus and Goldmund, Herman Hesse
2. Heart of Darkness^W
3. Siddartha

part 3: … as an adult

1. The River of Doubt, Candice Millard
2. The Big Burn, Timothy Egan
3. Visible Bones, Jack Nisbett
4. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quamman.
5. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, Jonathan Weiner
6. The Odyssey, Homer
7. The Iliad, Homer
8. Plutarch’s Lives
9. The Traveler’s History of France, Robert Cole
10. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Peter Grubb is my uncle; read about Family First Friday’s in the Magpie Blog!

1. The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
2. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
3. “Hit ‘Em Up,” Tupac Shakur*
4. silence, e.e. cummings
5. Verdi’s Requiem, Guiseppe Verdi*
6. Bedroom in Arles^W, Vincent van Gogh
7. Check Your Head, Beastie Boys
8. Charles Bukowski^W
9. The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway
10. Ode to Joy, Ludwig van Beethoven*
11. Presto (Summer) from The Four Seasons, Antonio Vivaldi*

*watch and listen! (especially Ode to Joy…)

“I put eleven, because I could not retract anything, but I also didn’t want to add anything after eleven. So, I think my magpie list has eleven. I hope that doesn’t break any rules. And if it does, please let me re-do it, so I can subtract the one that really should be retracted, which could take several hours of epic self scrutiny.”

1. Venus de Milo^W, Alexandros of Antioch (attributed)
2. “Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Opus 67,” Ludwig von Beethoven
3. The Original Star Wars Trilogy
4. The Stranger, Albert Camus
5. Christa, Edwina Sandys
6. Thousand Roads, David Crosby
7. Ghostbusters
8. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
9. All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2
10. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Andrea Smith

1. The Calvin and Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book, Bill Watterson
2. LEGOs
3. Desiderata, Max Ehrmann
4. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan
6. “The Problem of Those Who Wait ” (from Beyond Good and Evil), Fredrich Nietzsche
7. When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, Walt Whitman
8. The Hubble Deep Field^W image*
9. “Sleeping with One Eye Open,” Mark Strand**
10. The Colbert Report

*follow the link. seriously.

**listen to Mark Strand discuss his poem on “Weekend America.”

1. bicycles
2. Maira Kalman
3. The Black Stallion
4. Balint Zsako
5. knitting
6. Tanya Davis
7. the short films of Sadie Benning^W
8. the website of Miranda July^W
9. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver
10. skinny dipping

“Thanks so much for the nice words about my work. It’s lovely to know that it reaches people in far away places.”

Read about Andrea’s work, “How To Be Alone,” and my own experience with self-induced solitude, in The Magpie Blog!

1. “This Must Be The Place,” Talking Heads
2. Wrecking Ball, Emmylou Harris
3. Raising Arizona
4. the first chapter of “East of Eden,” John Steinbeck
5. estuaries
6. an empty truck
7. the term “civil twilight” and the actual civil twilight
8. national brand narrow ruled eye-ease paper
9. Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
10. pinon

“this was the quickest this floodgate ever opened…back and forth between the things that feel like they’ve ALWAYS been there and the things that MOST RECENTLY arrived. it feels like what i would stuff in my bag immediately pre-apocalypse. …now i wanna put the word ‘apocalypse’ on there.”

1. The Coen Brothers^W (especially Fargo, No Country…, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski…?)
2. The Wire^W (especially seasons 3 and 4)
3.  Wendell Berry^W (essayist/poet/farmer… How cool is that?)
4. Radiohead
5. The Office (BBC)
6. Kurt Vonnegut^W
7. Catherine O'Hara^W
8. Steve Martin
9. Warner Bros. cartoons (especially Chuck Jones stuff)
10. Michael Chabon

Watch John and his wife, Celia Keenan-Bolger, try to collaborate on a list on MagpieTV: Episode 2! (sometimes magpie lists are best kept… separate.)

1. This American Life
2. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
3. The Sound of Music
4. The Wire
5. Barack Obama (especially his “race speech…“)
6. Sufjan Stevens
7. Elizabeth Gilbert at TED
8. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
9. Laura Nyro
10. The Way the Crow Flies, Ann-Marie MacDonald

Watch Celia and her husband, John Conlee, try to collaborate on a list on MagpieTV: Episode 2!  (it doesn’t go very well.)

1. Ohad Benchertrit
2. red lipstick
3. raw milk
4. barm^W
5. synchronicity
6. asynchronicity
7. Frank Stitt
8. your heart within my heart (?)
9. Sista Nella Flo
10. Milo Minderbinder
11. Mac Wellman

1. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
2. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
3. “I Can Write The Saddest Verses,”* Pablo Neruda
4. “Bluebird,”* Charles Bukowski
5. The Princess Bride
6. Tombstone
7. Deadwood
8. Mad Men
9. Green Onions, Booker T & The MG’s
10. “Evil (Is Going On),” Howlin’ Wolf

*Follow the links to read the poems!

1. KCRW World Music Concerts at the Hollywood Bowl
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
3. Bacon^W
4. “September,” Earth, Wind & Fire
5. Stay With Me, Lorraine Ellison
6. “Post-screening kumquatinis, lobster rolls and french fries at the Hungry Cat in Hollywood”
7. “Good Luck,” Basement Jaxx featuring Lisa Kekaula
8. “Damn Your Eyes,” Etta James
9. McConnell’s Turkish Coffee ice cream
10. The Big Picture

“Very hard to cut this list to ten!”

1. It Takes Two
2. Marie Antoinette
3. “Anything ‘Wizard of Oz.’ …Anything.”
4. Pines of Rome, Ottorino Respighi
5. Pretend You’re Alive, Lovedrug
6. The Killers, Daniel P. Mannix^W*

MagpieTV: Episode 1 — Watch Zeb discuss his list!

*fun fact: the killers is a book about a cock-fighting rooster who battles a hawk, but daniel p. mannix had other interests as well; he co-founded the official munchkin convention of the international wizard of oz club!

1. The Dramatic Imagination, Robert Edmund Jones
2. Introspective, Pet Shop Boys
3. Deadwood
4. “Adagio for Strings,” Samuel Barber*
5. Babette’s Feast**
6. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7. Extras / The Office / Stand-Up, Ricky Gervais & Steve Merchant
8. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
9. The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler
10. A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle

*follow the link to hear an NPR story discussing the impact of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings!”

**why not watch it now?

“This was fun! I so wanted to be pretentious and intellectually superior. Hopefully I failed.”

1. The Cowboy & The Lady, Lee Hazlewood & Ann-Margret
2. Kill the Moonlight, Spoon
3. Jesus’ Son
4. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
5. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco
6. Innocent Man, Billy Joel
7. Almost Famous
8. Farewell Waltz: A Novel, Milan Kundera
9. Neil Young’s Voice (“especially “Heart Of Gold, live!”)
10. Townes Van Zandt^W

“I can’t believe Kalen Egan and I both have Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  WTF?!”

1. The Holy Bible^W
2. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
3. “Deathbed,” Relient K
4. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
5. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
6. The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkein
7. The Lord of the Rings ( The Motion Picture Trilogy)

1. Cancer As a Turning Point, Lawrence LeShan
2. Pride and Prejudice^W
3. Somewhere Over the Rainbow, IZ

1. Banksy
2. The Dharma Bums,  Jack Kerouac
3. Amelie
4. Julian Casablancas
5. Michael Pollan
6. Furr, Blitzen Trapper
7. Carla Bruni*
8. Dexter^W
9. Zach Galifianakis
10. National Geographic

*have a listen!

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey Soundtrack
2. The Gilded Palace Of Sin, The Flying Burrito Brothers
3. Atlas Obscura
4. Durango Boots
5. The Most Beautiful Songs of Africa, Orchestra Super Mazembe^W
6. Lisbon, The Walkmen
7. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
8. Collapse
9. Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

“awesome, Eve, just awesome”

1. Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
2. Continuum, John Mayer
3. Jane Eyre, Charlette Bronte
4. Gossip Girl, Cecily von Ziegesar
5. Sense & Sensibility
6. Cruel Intentions Soundtrack
7. “Green Eyes,” Coldplay
8. The Parent Trap (“w/Lindsay Lohan^W‘”)
9. …Baby One More Time, Britney Spears^W
10. Fight Club