Jeff Beck Group - Let Me Love You - on the album Truth. After listening to Kiss and Ted Nugent as a pre-teen and teenager and poised on the edge of Styx and Foreigner, having a substitute math teacher turn me on to the whole album introduced a new world of electric blues. He also brought some BB King, Hendrix, Cream and other stuff - all of which I loved - but this song is still the one that does it for me. The most articulate, beautiful guitar leads I have ever heard.
Marvin Gaye - What’s Goin’ On - I love R&B and funk and Motown, but had never been touched by such intelligent, beautiful music. Can listen to it on a Sunday morning or over dinner or giving into it completely with headphones. Opened my eyes to the power of music.
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee. Truly beautiful, simple prose that tells a powerful, wonderful message. Both real and myth. Opened my eyes to what the best kind of writing could be.
Blade Runner - the movie. I had no idea that a movie could be so cool and also try to make such a meaningful point. It seems a little heavy handed now, but I still find myself giving into the power of it.
Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallicies In the Name of Science – got rid of my teenage credibility about the paranormal and pseudoscience.
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom – got rid of my teenage credibility about Marxism and similarly dubious economic therories.
Robert Heinlein’s Double Star – The one line “Brother, until you’ve been in politics you havn’t really lived!” pretty well determined my undergraduate major.
James Burke’s Connections – The final episode of the series, which discussed, more or less “Where do we go from here?”, finally got me off my ass and back to school to learn a marketable skill.
Today I work in a position that nestles very nicely between my BA (Political Science) and my MS (Mathematics & Statistics.
While reading Richard Leakey’s “Origins Reconsidered” I had an eye-opening moment when I realized what he was saying about human evolution and what has driven it. Specifically, what was the natural selection that drove the evolution of big brains. A very insightful book, overall.
**Farenhiet 451 ** illustrated to me how media can be used to manipulate the masses and to divert their attention from important matters.
Other works like** Blade Runner**, Harold & Maude, Shirley Valentine and especially** Joe Vs The Volcano** have given me a perspective that make life bearable, but F-451 was for me probably the most important book I’ve read.
Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, and it’s sequel Schroedinger’s Cat. I read them way back in 1980, when they were published as three seperate novels.
Mighty mind blowing to a 16-year old under the influence of the evil weed…
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: I had been in a pretty deep funk in the several months before I saw this movie. Not depression, mind you, but I had gone through a nasty break-up that involved me being cheated upon for the first time ever. This had left me harboring a lot of anger I couldn’t let go of, and it was kind of like a cancer on the rest of my life. It colored everything, especially my relationships with women, all of which had just been (futile) efforts to get laid without seeking any sort of real emotional connection.
After seeing this movie, I realized you can’t let bad memories dominate how you remember certain parts of your life, because you’ll end up doing things that are incredibly unhealthy. I haven’t let the bad memories go completely, but now they’re balanced by the good ones, which I refuse to let be tainted by the bad. Since then, I’ve been back to trying to have relationships that have an actual emotional element, and not just a physical one. Basically, I’m the person I was again before I got cheated on (though a little more wary of long-distance relationships).
Pretty much all the PBS series. Nova, Frontline, American Experience, Masterpiece Theater, American Scientific Frontiers, POV, News Hour, Austin City Limits, Nature, Liberty, The American Presidents, Mystery!, all the PBSKids shows… TV can really be a good thing if left on the right channel.
Ditto on Jeff Buckley’s “Grace”, too.
Homebrew beer. Opened my eyes, then slammed them shut!
Do you remember Connections with James Burke? Not the SciAm column, but the hour long program from the eighties.
That used to be my favorite PBS program… I remember how, when the program ended, I could feel the blood flowing back out of my brain as the result of so much stimulus being removed.
When I was 13 or 14, Van Halen’s first album came out and I heard “Stairway to Heaven” for the first time. Those two things blew my mind and solidified my life-long love of guitar.
Sometime later, Jonathan Livingston Seagull really touched me.
John Gribbin’s “In the Beginning” cured me of Christianity. I had, of course, heard everything in it before in various places, but I had never seen it brought together in such a way that all the pieces fell into place and I had the blinding revelation that although there might be a God, he wasn’t a necessary being. I don’t think that’s what Gribbin intended for the book to do specifically, but that’s the effect it had on me.
I read this as two events that occurred more or less simultaneously for YellowTail. I fully remember VH’s first album release. It was enough to get my little kid self into the rock & roll genre for good (Boston actually got my ears onto the radio). Once turned on, our little Bel Mar poster likely bugged into Stairway.
'Course that’s just a WAG, but what would you expect from Inigo, eh?
I think Inigo’s right, although I misread it the same way you did. Notice he(?) says “those two things blew my mind.” One thing being hearing Stairway for the first time, the other thing being Van Halen’s first album.
However, what I can’t wrap my head around is someone who was tremendously moved by both “Stairway to Heaven” and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. That’s like saying your two favorite authors are Anne Coulter and Noam Chomsky. How can someone like both of those things without violating some sort of fundamental natural law?
Most recently, the movie Adaptation. First, because it just restored my faith in the artistic process, that a couple of creative people could actually make a movie with new ideas and actually see it released.
But more importantly, it convinced me that all my self-doubt and insecurity is keeping me from getting what I want professionally and personally. It drove home the point that self-doubt is just another form of egomania, and it’s no more excusable than having an over-inflated self-image. And, that turning your nose up at those who are happy and those who are actually producing something, just because you think they’re overly simplistic and/or deluding themselves, is nothing more then petty, self-deluding, elitism.
