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Beltmann

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Posts posted by Beltmann

  1. I've been listening to Wilco for so long these older songs are so ingrained in my mind, it's hard to listen to them objectively without 15 years of memories and feelings associated with them.

     

    Same here. Today, though, I'm going to pick "Poor Places," if only because I heard it this afternoon and loved it as much as the first time.

  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XeK0rc_9a0
     
    Joaquin Phoenix plays another damaged soul--this time he's Joe, a child-retrieval professional imploding under the weight of his own childhood terrors--in Lynne Ramsay's dense and surprising character study. "You Were Never Really Here" is a thriller in name only, as the usual genre conventions are completely swamped by Ramsay's fractured layers of memories, flashbacks, fantasies, and confounding tension. There's plenty of blood, but the real violence occurs inside of Joe's mind. His heart is filled with tender circles but his head is filled with harrowing diagonals.

  3. Over the course of the year I do a solid job of seeing eventual Oscar nominees--the result, no doubt, of being a ravenous cinephile--so when the noms finally arrive I usually have few gaps to fill. This year, my initial reaction to the announced nominations was, "Dammit, now I have to see Ferdinand."

     

    Crossed that one off tonight.

  4. I saw 50 feature films and 24 shorts at the 15-day Milwaukee Film Festival. My favorite? "Faces Places," a collaborative documentary-essay-poem-memoir by Agnes Varda and the street artist JR. I also thought highly of "Lucky," with Harry Dean Stanton in one of his final roles; "The Summer Is Gone," a Chinese drama about how a young boy perceives China's privatization reforms; "The Blood Is at the Doorstep," a documentary about the aftermath of the killing of Dontre Hamilton; and "Maliglitut," a revenge tale set in 1913 on a small Inuit island in northern Canada.

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKbjnLpxv70

  5. People here in the board use to report the number on "nothings" as part of their review of the show.

     

    My wife and I still count the "nuthin's" when we hear the song live. Many years ago Jeff crossed 50 at one of our shows, and the crowd went crazy.

  6. canoa_07.jpg

     

    Canoa: A Shameful Memory / dir. Felipe Cazals / Mexico / 1976

     

    One of the key works of Mexican cinema. In 1968, several university workers are killed by a rural mob convinced they are Communists in a movie that effectively combines docudrama with ethnography and horror. By relaying the real-life incident through several unusual structural methods, including allegory and an occasional mock documentary style that partly functions as parody, director Felipe Cazals goes beyond analyzing mob mentality. He indicts much larger cultural and political dynamics. Watching it as an American in 2017, it’s hard not to recognize current topicality in its comprehension of how easily fear can be exploited to provoke fact-free hostility—especially when that evil is perpetrated in the name of God and country.

  7. On a brief personal note, I definitely missed some of those neighbors last night. 

     

    Missed you, Paul. We were there, but didn't see you... afterwards Stacy said she thought she glimpsed you from afar but wasn't sure.

     

    Our seats were on the first floor (Row S) and it was indeed weird with the sit?/stand? awkwardness in the middle. I've seen Wilco in Milwaukee plenty of times and I don't think the floor has ever been so reluctant to stand. (We like to stand, and were grateful when people finally were up on their feet.)

  8. Good read at the AV Club: "A great time to be alive and own a guitar": Chicago's 1990s alt-rock explosion

     

    This era of Chicago alt-rock was formative for me. How can it be that it's already time to reminisce? Wasn't all of this happening last week?

     

    The piece also contains minor Wilco connections, as Lounge Ax is mentioned and at one point Joel Spencer of Menthol says, "I remember being at Lounge Ax and Jeff Tweedy showing up with his son, and we were sound-checking, and he came up and asked [drummer] Colin [Koteles] if he could let his little boy get behind the drums for a second. Colin’s like, 'Sure.' Even though we weren’t friends with him, I think he knew who we were. There just wasn’t any weirdness. It was all supportive.”

  9. If Brian Wilson is still doing the Pet Sounds show, I would recommend it.  I saw him a few months ago, and while Brian is a bit scattered and his (phenomenal) band does all the heavy lifting, it's still a marvelous show.  I was on a high for days afterwards.

     

    Good to hear. I'm taking my 12-year-old daughter to the Pet Sounds show in April. Her favorite band is the Beach Boys; she's seen the Mike Love version of the band, but never Brian. She knows what to expect, though... she saw the movie "Love and Mercy" and read a biography about Brian.

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