I was recently tagged with this engaging little exercise on Facebook, as part of the now ever-evolving dynamic chain of notes. It made its way toward being cross-posted here because I spent a good 40 minutes writing it and am entirely strapped for content.

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

1. Nirvana – Nevermind
My favorite album when I was 11 and still my favorite album today. The CD that convinced me to grow my hair long (for a time), and unselfconsciously bring a yo yo to class. That was big time.

2. Public Enemy – Nation of Millions
I often wish I could go back and experience what it was like to first hear “Rebel Without a Pause” without already knowing what Public Enemy was all about.

3. Weezer – Self Titled (Blue Album)
Haven’t listened to it in years, nor had much interest. But this was the first album to really own me outright for an extended period of time.

4. A Tribe Called Quest – The Love Movement
After I went on to discover Low End and Marauders, I quickly became embarrassed that this was my first true introduction to Tribe. Not exactly keeping it real. It took another 6 or 7 years of digesting Jay Dee’s prolific production output before I was able to return to this semi-early work of his and really appreciate that natural brilliance.

5. Keith Jarrett – The Melody at Night with You
My Dad gave me this, after I had dropped out of college (the first time) and was fucked up on fruit snacks and jello snack packs. Jarrett’s solo standard stuff doesn’t really rake in the same love his mega 70s solo-improv concerts do, but this album is just unmatched in that personal and restful vibe.

6. BIG – Ready to Die
Because you have to, right?

7. Radiohead – OK Computer
Kind of a default, as well. First album I ever bought because everyone at the time was saying it was the greatest ever, and the first album to deserve the immediacy of hyperbole I puked all over it.

8. Elliott Smith – Either/Or
Never really realized how much I loved this album until an iTunes plug-in calculated I’d spent over 61 hrs listening to it.

9. El-P – Fantastic Damage
Come to think of it, the experience wished for in item 2 is probably similar to the adventure of first being hit with “Tuned Mass Damper” or “Delorean.”

10. Beatles – Revolver
The first album I ever owned containing the song “For No One” was actually a Rickie Lee Jones covers compilation. This is better.

11. DJ Shadow – Endtroducing
This is the only record I know with an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records not related to sales or chart positions. (“First Full-Length Commercial Album Created Entirely From Sampled Audio.” Or something.)

12. Eric B & Rakim – Follow the Leader
Paid in Full gets all the love for breaking the ground, but this is where I first really understood the legend of Rakim, one I had spent so much time reading about in bound periodicals at rural libraries throughout New Hampshire.

13. Dangerdoom (Danger Mouse & MF Doom) – The Mouse and the Mask
Not one of my favorite albums, though it’s excellent. Not particularly ground breaking or burning up the iPod, either. But this is the first hip hop album to ever shout out somebody I know personally, so it’s on here.

14. Iron & Wine – Woman King
Technically an EP, but this set, combined with “Mating” by Norman Rush, a 2005 Op-Ed by Patricia Bauer, and a series of columns by a feminist writer in the UNH student newspaper, had a huge impact on the development of my first script, Big Potato Dictator.

15. One Be Lo – S.O.N.O.G.R.A.M
The first album post-1997 to disabuse me of the notion that hip hop’s best days laid in its past, the LP that demonstrated the continued existence of a still golden post-Golden Era of hip hop left to be uncovered in real time.

Steven Seagal is a man clearly well versed in the fragility of the human condition skeletal system, an aggressive physical manifestation of some staggering personal depth.

For instance, where you aware that:

1. Steven Seagal began his career as an aikido instructor in Japan, the first foreigner to operate an aikido dojo in Osaka Japan.
2. Prominent Tibetan lama Penor Rinpoche has recognized Steven Seagal to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan religious figure.
3. While working in Japan, Steven Seagal was urgently warned by a “mystical dog” that his dojo was on fire, a dog he had never seen before and never saw again.
4. Most importantly: Steven Seagal is an international blues guitarist and multi-album World Music recording artist, from 2005’s Songs From the Crystal Cave to 2006’s Mojo Priest.

As such:

An unlikely and yet stunningly elegant Oscar acceptance speech Sunday night, in the category of Best Animated Short:

Incoporates the bare essentials of any great movie awards speech:

Barack Obama is all talk.

I know this because any number of prominent politicians have been telling me as much the past five or so years, and nothing Barack Obama has done so long as I have known about him has proved otherwise.

Every time I see Barack Obama, he is talking about something. Every time I read the paper, there are more words he has said in quotes all over the page. His answer for everything is to talk about it. New unemployment numbers? Words words words. Direct threats from a foreign dictator? Language language language.

John McCain has picked up on this as well. In a(n otherwise reasonable) letter to supporters expressing his opposition to the current economic stimulus legislation, McCain argues the following:

“I appreciate the discussions President Obama is having with my Republican colleagues, but the time for talking has come to an end and we must now begin some serious negotiation.”

And therein lies the rub: John McCain doesn’t want Barack Obama to talk to his Republican colleagues about the contours of the ever-evolving stimulus package; that time is over. What we need now is some “serious negotiation.”

But what’s that distinction?

Thing is, there really is none.

Politicians talk. A lot. They talk to each other. They talk to reporters. They talk to lobbyists and political contributors. They talk to experts. They talk to us, in political ads and supporter correspondence.

Words words words. Language language language.

The only time a politician accomplishes anything without the use of words is during a vote. Although even then, when not pushing some sort of button or lever, they’re shouting out “Yay” or “Nay,” a form of binary speech.

Talking is political doing. All political action is oratorical; a sport of rhetoric, an art of articulated persuasion. If you ain’t sayin nothin, you ain’t doin shit.

So keep talking, guys. The more you talk, the more you get done.

Extremely large dogs are dressed like small horses,
   dancing Norwegian Waltz in a Jane Austen novel,
   exchanging cautious pleasantries and the phone numbers of dentists,

In a pet store, on an airplane,
   chasing a rabbit from cloud to sky, kisses on Jesus,
   “Hello, good morning, welcome to my edgeless swimming pool.”

13 young daughters of tired French Diplomats
   piloting glass schooners to the center of the Mediterranean,
   above the ritualized mating habits of several large, legendary Sea Beasts,

Opening cardboard picnic baskets
   and removing chocolate covered strawberries,
   feeding each from mating Beast to mating Beast.

Extremely large dogs are dressed like small horses,
   with large red YoYos on 90 mile string,
   quietly plucking each young daughter off the top of the head.

13 young daughters of tired French Diplomats
   floating into water unconscious,
   transforming mysterious into handsome woodland sea nymphs,

Serenading their legendary Beasts
   with Mexican mariachi editions
   of monumentally righteous Metallica love songs,

On lutes and banjos and accordions;
   most wonderful whale song sung to a midnight moon,
   while legendary Beasts give legendary birth to legions of orchid sea plants,

Flowering into underwater blankets,
   upon which tired young nymphs lay rested heads,
   hold each other tight in underwater pillow talk,

Dreaming long of the earth and planes above.