Beltmann

No kiddin'. I was talking with a colleague this afternoon about the album and observed that OSM is twelve minutes but feels like four.

Yeah, but 800 of those were just me.

I was happy to see your screen name again!

I loved reading every word of this. Thanks for sharing!

I've been listening for the last six hours. Can't stop.

Welcome to VC! Nice first post--and I'm totally with you regarding "Born Alone." I think it's one of best power pop songs in the Wilco catalog. Love it.

Yes. That song has sucked me in, perhaps because I have a father similar to the one described.

I thought of Yo La Tengo while listening as well.

Me too.

Which return to form has been more surprising today? Wilco, or TheMaker?

I tried to locate this last month after reading a write-up in London's Sight & Sound, but it's not yet available in the U.S. and my region-free player hasn't been unpacked since we moved. I'm eager, but I can wait. Last night I watched the first half of Monte Hellman's Road to Nowhere. Fascinating so far.

Some memorable openers: Heartless Bastards (for The Gaslight Anthem) New Pornographers (for Belle & Sebastian) Crooked Fingers (for Neko Case) St. Vincent (for the National) Fruit Bats (for Son Volt) Dr. Dog (for Wilco) The Dodos (for New Pornographers) The Greenhornes (for the White Stripes) The Antlers (for the National) Merle Haggard (for Bob Dylan) Riviera (for Jeff Tweedy)

Salt of the Earth / dir. Herbert J. Biberman / USA / 1954 Biberman was one of the Hollywood Ten jailed for contempt of Congress and then blacklisted. Made outside of the Hollywood system, Salt of the Earth features real workers and their families in a fictionalized recreation of an actual miners' strike in New Mexico. (The backstory of its production and distribution would make for a terrific film, too.)

Never heard of that before, but just looked it up. Sounds incredible. Thanks for the tip!

Welcome! This is a great place.

I plan to wait it out, too. What's a few more weeks?

In A Screaming Man, which is set in Chad as civil war and globalization tear apart the country, the screaming is almost exclusively internal--the rage simmers underneath the characters' wounded eyes.

In my house, that JHamm DVD has received more play than any other.

I liked that one, too, but not quite as much as Ceylan's earlier Distant. Have you seen that? If not, let me rave: Out of obligation, a professional photographer invites his unrefined country cousin to stay with him in Istanbul, and we watch, slowly and silently, as these two spinning wheels fail to connect--to each other, to others, to anything beyond their apartment walls. You've seen Climates, so you are already primed for Distant's unrelenting mood of melancholy and loneliness. Frankly, the tone is borderline inhospitable, but I was still engrossed by the way Ceylan contrasts the grung

Don't sell Joe Dante short--underneath the familiar genre trappings, his movies often contain a genuinely subversive, sharply satirical intelligence. Consider something like Small Soldiers, which on the surface appears to be a commercial for toy tie-ins yet still scorns the practice of selling war toys, or more specifically, the practice of selling war imagery as spectacle. By exploring the relationship between violence and entertainment, Dante suggests that sometimes the "play wars" boys play turn out to be real wars, like the first gulf war. He suggests that in terms of motives and lies,

I was at the Friday show, too. Those shows were indeed recorded for the aborted concert DVD. The director, Sam Jones, gave me a dollar for looking cool while standing in line on the sidewalk.

I've spent a lot of time with By Brakhage: An Anthology Volume Two over the last few weeks. Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage is a particular favorite of mine, especially the hand-painted films that look like dancing Pollock canvases. (Boulder Blues and Pearls and… (1992) really sticks to the ribs.) Of the films with regular live-action footage, I most admire The Wonder Ring (1955), which studies how light functioned in an elevated train system that was about to be torn down.

Eels in Milwaukee.

I feel the same way. I'm willing to buy the deluxe CD without even thinking about the price, but I don't want to have to re-purchase a lot of songs just to get the one song needed to complete the set. Give me an option to buy all of the songs under one umbrella, and I'll gladly pay for it. I'm not glad to buy things twice. When I buy The Whole Love, I want to know that I got the whole Whole Love.