ponch1028
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Posts posted by ponch1028
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I thought last night's episode was probably the best one since the series premiere. There was more tension and inner conflict between the surviving group members and the entire group as a whole was having to contemplate decisions about the future and their fate, along with the fate of other group members.
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Seven Swans by Sufjan Stevens is the first thing that comes to mind.
Johnny Cash music also pops into my head, specifically "My Mother's Hymnal" which was one of his American Recordings.
Both top notch in my book.
For me, nothing surpasses Dylan's work, Slow Train Coming is the obvious, but you almost have to make a compilation that gather such songs from all of his recordings, whether it be Lay Down Your Weary Tune to Every Grain of Sand.
Good luck. I'm looking forward to all the recommendations myself.
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Great topic to discuss. I love it.
I'm really impressed by the responses from everyone. The variety of people's philosophies and approaches reinforces what was the biggest hurdle for me, which was finding what would work for me that I could sustain and maintain at the beginning. I've been curious and a little intrigued by the P90X for awhile, but what I've been doing seems to work, so I'm sticking to it for the time being.
Five years ago at age 28 I went in for my annual physical and it was the first time I ever registered "overweight" for my age and height and all that stuff. I had slowly begun adding weight over the years, usually 2-4 pounds every year but never taking any off. Then all of the sudden, ten years after you graduated high school you weigh 35 more. I wasn't pleased with the weight gain, but I was not super sensitive to it. However, I did recognize that my stress level seemed elevated, the quality and quantity of my sleeping had deteriorated, and the cost of all my gains (mid sleep sedatives, mid anti-depressants, $$ for larger clothes, $$ for increased food costs) was becoming a problem. So I decided to do something about it, figuring that they are all interconnected.
The first thing I did was adjusting the things that were unnecessary and not too difficult to let go of. I quit drinking sodas. I also limited my alcohol to one glass of wine or one beer per day, small adjustment but something that would accumulate over time. I used to drink heavy stouts or porters. Now, if I have a drink at all, it'll be a Peroni or Amstel Light with an occasional ale or stout once or twice a month.
At first, I did not adjust my portions of what I ate, just what I drank. I figured at some point, the exercising would require adjustment in the food department, but I didn't start there.
I started to exercise in the morning. At first it had to be the morning. By the end of the day, I would be too tired and have too many distractions and excuses to put it off. But early in the morning, I didn't face those obstacles. So I started working out at the YMCA in the early mornings and would run for 30 minutes and then do 20-30 minutes of various weights. I started going 3 times a week. Soon, I noticed that the gym was full of guys playing basketball on Monday/Wednesday/Friday mornings. So I joined in on that when I could instead of the actual workout. Eventually I started going about 5 times a week, mixing workouts with playing ball. Eventually, once the healthy habits moved past the "struggle to maintain" stage to "intuitive behaviors" my diet began to change, both quantity, quality, and the time of eating. I didn't keep track throughout the time, but by the end of the year I had lost over 20 pounds.
My stress decreased, my quality of sleep dramatically improved, and I was left with shirts and pants that no longer fit. Exercise also became one of my primary methods of dealing with stress and anxiety, both professionally and personally. Eventually I stopped playing ball because I appreciated more the solitude and the time to get lost in my own thoughts and meditations. I've since moved outside whenever possible, running in nature rather in a exercise room. I stopped going to the Y after 1 and 1/2 years, realizing the people parading around were becoming a visual distraction for me and the super buff and fit people were demoralizing me and filling my head with unrealistic and unhealthy comparisons. At some point, and I can't point to when, my workouts became something I looked forward to rather than dreaded.
So shift to the present, I do some form of exercise or stretching pretty much everyday. I run probably 4-5 times a week, usually 4 miles. I do minimal weights. Mostly, I do push-ups when I'm feeling lethargic and crunches when I'm feeling bloated. I also try to swim once or twice a week as a substitute for running, give my knees a break and just listen to my breathing under water, which I find very peaceful and reassuring.
I'm not as strong as I'd like to be, and I'm not as muscular or ripped as I would like to be, but I feel healthy and generally at peace in life, which is all that really matters in the end - it makes me a better person and certainly a better husband and father. Plus, by focusing on achievable goals and lifestyle adjustment, I've been able to sustain my healthy living. Over the past 4 years, I've lost an additional 15 pounds, but for the most part it's been adding a little muscle here and there and cutting out the fat, so I really don't look too different than I did after that first year, other than the additional 3 inches I've taken off my waistline.
My goal this year is flexibility and core strength. So instead of adding time for more exercise, I've added more time to stretching and breathing exercises.
I can't guarantee that it'll work for you, but it worked for me.
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What a rich and powerful episode. This season for me is just getting better and better. One of the sadder episodes - the daughter storyline and her interactions with her father were heartbreaking to me.
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1. Like A Rolling Stone
2. Astral Weeks
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Thank you!
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The Wikipedia on Basilone is far more suspenseful and entertaining than anything I've seen in the series so far.
It doesn't flow the way BoB did in my opinion. Perhaps that's because I don't know the characters and don't feel particularly invested in their stories yet. Upon reflection, I think BoB's showing us Easy Company's bootcamp and training was a brilliant narrative tool. It allowed us time to get to know several of the key characters that would dominate the storylines for the whole series.
I'm going to keep watching it, hoping at some point it captures me, but so far it is a big letdown. I'm just not confident in the screenplay and where they are focusin their time. I mean, Basilone fights for 48 hours, and they capture it with 10 minutes of the episode, but one whole episode focuses on Melbourne, Australia. Doesn't make sense.
SPOILER ... SPOILER ... SPOILER !!!!!
Having read the Wikipedia on Basilone, and knowing that he'll spend the majority of the series back in the states, I can't help but worry that one of the main storylines of the series is going to tread familar territory of Flags of our Fathers, which I thought was a great film. I want the series to show me more about what happened in the Pacific, and how the Japanese thought and fought. I want to know how our soldiers responded, adapted, or struggled with fighting in the Pacific.
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oh man that is so so great!
WOW!!!
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oh my goodness, is it me, or did most of the acts shown here completely suck!!??!!!
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I know you've already decided on ALTWYS or Sunken Treasure, but these few songs immediately jumped out at me as intriging possibilities:
Ashes of American Flags
One True Vine
Radio Cure
Reservations
Sky Blue Sky
Please Be Patient With Me
Country Disappeared
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I did this too. Good stuff, and makes donating seem like an easy "win-win."
Dear Wilco,
Thank you for your generosity and your continued support and advocacy for humanitarian causes. The shows were an added bonus. I bet each time you released new shows to download, you would see continued donations for both the Haiti relief or other causes important to the band. Just to put that out there!
On a more sobering note, anyone else been to Haiti? I was fortunate to be able to go three times in the 90's before Port-au-Prince became increasingly more dangerous for Americans to travel through. Just got an email from an organzation in Haiti that listed all the personnel, teachers, and sponsor children that have been confirmed killed in the earthquake. Very sad. I had never been able to fully commit to sponsoring a children long-term, but had agreed to pick up children short-term when their sponsor families stopped sending funds.
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I'm really surprised at the number of people who don't like the Billy Bragg stuff on the Mermaid discs. That's some good stuff. Walt Whitman's Niece, Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key, Ingrid Bergman, Eisler on the Go, Hot Rod Hotel, All You Fascists, etc. Great songs.
YHF is Wilco's highpoint as far as I'm concerned, especially since Jeff and the gang wrote all the lyrics and stuff, but Mermaid Avenue to me is the greatest album that Wilco has been associated with. I just think it is flawless.
Overall, I could take or leave Billy's voice. I don't hate it. I don't swoon over it. The album just works for me from start to end.
From time to time I've made mixes that excluded Billy's MA material, and from time to time I've made mixes that excluded Farrar's material from UT. And at some point when I've done this, I get this feeling that the music is incomplete. Whenever I hear California Stars, I immediately think of Way Over Wonder and want to hear it. It's the same with a lot of the UT material. I can't get the sequencing out of my head.
I'm more of an album-oriented listener, so this might not jive with some others. To each their own. Having said that, I think there are so many albums that Jeff or Wilco have been associated with or have collaborated with others on that I fear you might miss out on some incredible music and songs if you only focus primarily on the songs Jeff wrote, or sings on, rather than what the album as a whole has to offer. Mermaid Avenue, UT, Golden Smog, Loose Fur - man, collectively there is a lot of GREAT music where Jeff is not the primary vocalist / songwriter.
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Not entirely sure if it was technically released this year or late last year, but so far, Elvis Perkins In Dearland has been my favorite recent release.
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Here it is for download at Owl and Bear:
http://wilcoarchive.com/Wilco%202009-08-28%20Carsten%20Source/
Instructions here---> http://www.owlandbear.com/flacshndvd-faq/
I am very grateful for the taper who captured this show with his audience recording. I have it and it sounds fantastic for an audience taping.
That being said, my original request was for someone to capture and share the Roadcase version, which is a compressed soundboard version.
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This show is on the Roadcase page of the Wilcoworld.net website:
oh, if someone could please capture this and share, I'd be so grateful.
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I would be careful, however, about building up this show too much. I think everyone here is hopeful that it'd be a great experience and a temporary relief from the challenges she is facing right now. However, please be sure to listen to her. If she continues to be resistent about the show, I suspect you'd concede and not go with her. Right now, she is beginning to ask the three great questions all early adolescents face:
"Who Am I?"
"Do I and My Choices Matter?"
"Where Do I Fit?"
Those are tough questions that trip up most if not all adolescents even with the more ideal and comforting family/life circumstances. Bottomline, she needs to know first and foremost, that it's about you and her, not you and her going to a Wilco show, or doing something that you really want to do. She is probably struggling with the rawness of the separation and how decisions that adults make (without the consent of the children) directly affect their lives forever. Taking her to a Wilco show against her protests might reinforce that negative impression she's already struggling with.
I hope that last statement does not come across as judgmental. I do not know your situation, but rather, I approach it as someone who has experience in pre-marital and marital counseling along with early to mid-adolescent outreach and counseling.
If I was to give you any advice - it would be the art of compromise and negotiation.
I think a great double outing would be to do a night out doing something she absolutely loves - with you and only you as her companion. Then, a night out at the Wilco concert doing something you absolutely love - and want to experience with her because you love her and want to share with her what you love.
Offer that idea. Let her think about it for a day or two (or a week), and then see if she'll agree.
Try it!
p.s. If by some chance Jeff was able to dedicate a song to her, I think a couple other songs you might want to consider for her would be:
In A Future Age
or
You And I
or Jesus, etc.
I just think some of the lyrics are pretty poignant for a 12 year-old dealing with what she's dealing with. Just my 2 cents.
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Man, I don't normally toot my own horn, but I got the top 3 correct and 4 out of the top 5. Overall, I think I got 12 out of the 20 on my list.
In Topic: Let's Do This Right
Posted 31 Jul 2009
1. Poor Places
2. Ashes of American Flags
3. Remember The Mountain Bed
4. Muzzle Of Bees
5. How To Fight Loneliness
6. A Shot In The Arm
7. Hell Is Chrome
8. Radio King
9. Theologians
10. Jesus, etc.
11. She's A Jar
12. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
13. Sunken Treasure
14. New Madrid
15. Please Tell My Brother
16. Impossible Germany
17. On and On and On
18. Long Time Ago
19. Gun
20. Hoodoo Voodoo
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There's also the issue of age at work here. Speaking from personal experience, and having observed the same in others i know, the music which means the most is the stuff that i was listening to or "discovered" between the ages of about 18 and 30. After that you are well on the road to codgery and get stubborn. Your tastes codify. And so certain things get condemned because they aren't listened to at the right time. this isn't to say that you can't discover and enjoy new music beyond the age of 30 (far from it) but that music tends to be by artists who are totally new: i.e., someone you have no initial expectations of and therefor you are able to listen to it with a completely open mind.
This is not the case when you get into Wilco's position. I know what Wilco means to me and i want it (them, he) to keep meaning it. But it can't, simply because the impression has already been made.
Which leaves Tweedy and company with two options: to fret about it and try to please, nay, to pander to their fans (which would be exceedingly lame) or to just say screw it and do whatever they want to do, which is what they do do and pretty much have always done. which is how it should be. Disappointing to the old timers.
I meant to address the issue of time in my original post but was interrupted by my work (how rude). In the end, despite the immense talent that Jeff and company have demonstrated over the years in their output and live shows, I think Wilco will always hold some special place in my pantheon of music because so much of their musical and creative arc has closely mirrored my own life's Trajectory.
I am younger than Jeff and company, and my family life isn't as long as his and sue's and their boys, but as a family man with two young daughters, I eventually came to place in life where, just like Jeff and perhaps also Sue, needed some music that wasn't as dark and unsettling. I needed music that even on the shallow surface was more hopeful and content. SBS had more obvious layers of those characteristics than ST, YHF, and AGIB did. When I watched the accompanying bonus DVD that came with SBS and Jeff talked about making a batch of songs that his wife would like and could appreciate - I connected with that as a husband and a father of two young girls.
Basically, Jeff's life and musical outlook seemed to have moved past those tumultuous periods that have been well documented. And what he needed to create in his art was exactly what I needed more of in my music taste at that time. None of my other favorite bands or artists have come close to mirroring musically what is going on in my life.
Dylan, Van Morrison, R.E.M., they are all long before my time - and while their music speaks to me on many levels, we aren't experiencing the same life journeys at the same time - something Wilco has achieved.
I guess I just don't lyrically relate to some other music b/c of where I am in life.
Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Josh Ritter, The National, Elvis Perkins - all great music and I love it to death, but they aren't speaking into my life the way Wilco has for a number of years. It's not that I require that out of music - it's just that Wilco has been able to provide that, an added bonus I didn't realize was so special until I recognized it.
Just some rambling thoughts.
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It's eerie how my thinking is similar to many people on this board. My immediate thought upon reading the opening post was Dylan's John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. I can't imagine what some of Dylan's diehard fans were saying and how they were dealing with these albums so close to Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. I'm not ready to put Jeff Tweedy alongside Bob Dylan, but both are great artists.
I don't agree with what you're stating about Wilco per se, but I understand your feelings. I really haven't connected with Ryan Adams' recent output and have basically given up on him since Rock 'n' Roll. It probably has just as much to do with me as his music. In my mind, I hold his Whiskeytown material and Heartbreaker as the height of his musical output and judge all of remaining material in light of that era. Now, it very well may be that in time, the general consensus may be that his Whiskeytown material and his early solo output to be his creative peak, but he's proven too talented to dismiss his other output.
I agree with those that mentioned Jeff's lyrics continue to evolve and change, both in tone, subject matter, and switching more between first, second, and third person. Their sound continues to change. Yes they seem more polished now, and if that's not your thing, I understand jumping off the bandwagon.
More than anything, I think the repeated posts speculating about Wilco's creative decline (this seems to have been going on more frequently since SBS was first leaked right?) shows the passion that many Wilco fans have for what each considers "the Wilco sound they believe most encapsulates their talents" - it obviously has been harder for Wilco fans to change with their evolution of the band than it has been for the band to continue to change, grow, and take risks.
I think I'll always have a special place for Wilco because with or without me, they are true to their vision, they push themselves and don't rest on their laurels, and they have a sound track record of combining melodic music with sophisticated lyrics.
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I've amended my previous post on page 2 or 3 from the original forum regarding Top 20 Jeff Tweedy Songs to add Mermaid Avenue songs. Overall, I am still very pleased with my list.
1. Poor Places
2. Ashes of American Flags
3. Remember The Mountain Bed
4. Muzzle Of Bees
5. How To Fight Loneliness
6. A Shot In The Arm
7. Hell Is Chrome
8. Radio King
9. Theologians
10. Jesus, etc.
11. She's A Jar
12. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
13. Sunken Treasure
14. New Madrid
15. Please Tell My Brother
16. Impossible Germany
17. On and On and On
18. Long Time Ago
19. Gun
20. Hoodoo Voodoo
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guarentee i am trying to break your heart is #1.
guarentee you it is not.
my bet is that it is a YHF track, but Ashes of American Flags seems to be the likely choice.
My #1 is Poor Places
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love josh's music and love him live. it's a nice change to most of my concert-going experiences. he's authentically corny and extremely affable.
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I'll take it the way it is. I love the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and The Band, and I immediately connected Summerteeth to those three bands when I first heard it (back when it came out). It was my introduction into Wilco (other than Mermaid Avenue). Because I didn't have any other point of reference, I could simply appreciate it for what it provided, and I loved it.
I love the live and solo versions as well, but I think solo versions would eventually weigh me down with its naked, dark lyrics. The sugar sweet music and production helps me cope with the depths of darkness that Jeff plunges into with the lyrics.
Also, since I didn't have any point of reference to Wilco's story at the time of hearing ST, I loved and still to this day love Can't Stand It - what a jolt!
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Far Far Away
I Got You (At The End Of The Century)
Please Be Patient With Me
Leave Me Like You Found Me
Everlasting Everything
Those are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head
Any Love Here for "The Walking Dead"?
in Tongue-Tied Lightning
Posted
Overall, I enjoyed it for what it offered and I think it has potential if it continues to take the subject matter seriously and explore how humans may realistically respond in such crises.
Having said that, I am a little disappointed that they've chosen not to follow the storylines of the graphic novels. I have not read the entire comic series, but everytime I'm at Borders I continue to read the series, and having gone through the first five collection books, I have to say there are some really quality storylines that are absolutely fantastic, much better than what the first season presented. Other than the first episode, pretty much nothing else about the first season was in the graphic novels I've read. Some of the same characters died, but other characters aren't even in the original comics. I don't know why they chose to adapt the series but then neglect what I feel are ready made storylines for weaker orginal storylines.