for those celebrating the weekend’s holiday (or those who just like flowers) boxd.it/t2Fhe

drinking Fritz Lang’s favorite Riesling tonight

Just learned that Aaron Paul is not the brother of Jake and Logan Paul Next you’re gonna tell me that John Paul II ain’t their dad

I’ve already seen a number of very good films this year courtesy of the IFFR program. CHRONOVISOR is the best of them but also: THE KILLING OF MEGHNAD (Avikunthak) TYCOON (Zhang) ALL YOU NEED TO MAKE A MOVIE IS A GUN (Sein) XTENDED RELEASE (Solondz) FOR ONCE I DREAMED OF YOU (Solar)

Happy fifth birthday to my dog Waylon and happy twenty-fifth birthday to the song “Drops of Jupiter” by Train

ICE agents aren’t law enforcement who make mistakes or cross lines. They’re fascist thugs whose entire purpose is violence against racial and political enemies

Racism, safety for kids and migrant workers, the right of people to be in public without being assaulted by brownshirts, are all very obviously union issues Solidarity with the strikers in Minnesota, and may we all rise to the occasion when the time comes (which it will soon, if it hasn’t already)

I asked an artist about a screener for her film at IFFR and she told me that’s how she found out her film is screening at IFFR

I was very happy to interview Palestinian film and video artist Basma al-Sharif, who has been one of my favorite contemporary avant-garde artists for about as long as I’ve followed this stuff, and who made one of my favorite films of 2025, Morgenkreis toneglow.substack.com/p/film-show-...

Apparently my slightly silly and fully shameless effort to get people to watch some avant garde films was the second most popular list on Letterboxd of 2025

A filmmaker friend sent an email introducing me to another filmmaker as “one of the most important contemptible critics of experimental film” He blames autocorrect but I may add it to my byline…I would not have called myself either important or contemptible but if it’s a package deal, I’ll take it

In response to mass popular demand I’ve resumed my project of listing the best country albums by decade The best country albums of the 1980s:

Reasonable people can disagree about which states or political programs count as socialist or democratic, but the bottom line is there can be no stable form of socialism or democracy anywhere in the world until the American empire is dismantled

Cheers to opacity, anachronism, interruption, and the impossible thought of revolution. My favorite films of 2025, and a few words on each: notreconciled.substack.com/p/my-favorit...

turning the windshield wiper speed up when a heavier song comes on and thinking, yeah I can still hang

I interviewed Japanese avant garde filmmaker Shinya Isobe for Ultra Dogme. You can watch four of his films on their Patreon for the next week if you subscribe ultradogme.com/2025/12/22/s...

RIP Joe Ely, flatlander, honky tonker, and piano key clicker. This is one of my favorite albums of all time.

An updated version of my avant-garde Christmas movies list, with twenty films and videos and downloadable files for eighteen of them

I had assumed that the psychedelic horse sequence in Basma al-Sharif’s DEEP SLEEP (left) was quoting Malcolm Le Grice’s BERLIN HORSE (right) but she just told me it was created entirely by accident when her super 8 camera caught fire with that roll inside

Gwenifer Raymond’s third LP is one of the very best albums of the year. She recalls why Fahey’s style was dubbed “American primitive” in the first place—that mysterious, ancient-feeling, string-rattling tension shared by country blues, mountain folk, and Hindustani classical

Been catching up on a bunch of this year’s Americana/alt country songwriter albums. Anna Tivel is the best of them, SG Goodman and Greg Freeman also good, Lily Seabird pretty decent. Kelsey Waldon and Sunny Sweeney do the job if you want straight country

Film noir was “a kind of modernism in the popular cinema: it used unorthodox narration; it resisted sentiment and censorship; it reveled in the ‘social fantastic’; it demonstrated the ambiguity of human motives; and it made commodity culture seem like a wasteland.”

Opened Twitter to make a post about how we shouldn’t spend all our time on Twitter and now I’m trying to figure out what to do with all my time today since Twitter is down

If there are experimental films from the last year or so you think I should see please comment or DM with suggestions

I wrote about the third edition of one of the best local/regional film fests around inreviewonline.com/2025/11/12/f...

(f)Rankenstein

I didn’t like Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein notreconciled.substack.com/frankenstein...

I wrote briefly about this year’s Light Matter experimental film program

BREAKING: Mayor-elect Mamdani to rebrand New York as New Amsterdam “People just like it better that way,” a spokesperson says

Far and away the best fiddle-accordion duo album I’ve heard this year, and that would probably still be true if I had heard any others

On that note here are ten films screening at the fest this weekend that I recommend:

Dick Cheney has died, and as a result top Democratic officials are scrambling to rework their 2028 election strategy

manufacturer said this Chain Saw would make me a Man but instead I was castrated by deindustrialization and the disintegrating nuclear family. One star

Happy October—here’s a list of 100 avant-garde horror films I recommend, and links to watch the large majority of them.

we made a pumpkin-caramelized onion risotto with fried sage and hazelnuts

much respect to this guy hamming it up with a Donald Pleasance impression for a Librivox recording of Freud lectures

I wrote about Rhayne Vermette’s feature film Levers which just premiered at Toronto and will be at NYFF next month. My “analysis” feels wholly inadequate, but that’s appropriate for such a willfully hazy work. It’s really good. notreconciled.substack.com/p/levers-rha...

I wrote about Basma Alsharif’s latest film, which is one of the best of the year

I wrote about the films in the second Wavelengths program as part of this dispatch inreviewonline.com/2025/09/11/t...

@afields9.bsky.social, @joshuapeinado.bsky.social and I took several passes at Crossroads 2025. Ch-check it out. inreviewonline.com/2025/09/01/c...

Is there a worthwhile “best horror films” critics poll out there or should I conduct one before October

anyone have access to a digital version of any of these books? Pontormo & Rosso: Diverging Paths of Mannerism Noa Turel - Living Pictures David Ekserdjian - Parmigianino Lucy Davis - Rubens: The Two Great Landscapes Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer - Theodore Gericault

Michael Baxandall describes a form of cultural knowledge that was lost for over four centuries after the Italian Renaissance, until the films of Straub-Huillet:

I have not been keeping up with festivals or screeners the last few months, and I’m interested in anyone’s short lists of the best avant garde films of the year so far so I can prioritize catch up

It’s ironic that Kant specifically uses wine as an example of a merely agreeable/interested liking as opposed to beauty/aesthetic judgment, because the Critique of Judgment is the best book ever written about wine

Emerson on social media: “their every post chagrins us”

there’s something funny about the moment in an RPG when, after hearing for ages about some dreaded immortal being, you find out how many hit points they have

“From this, it can easily be seen that…” -Immanuel Kant after writing the densest, most abstract, most syntactically indecipherable paragraph in western history

I no longer have access to an academic library and can’t afford to buy every scholarly book I want to reference. If anyone has PDFs of any of the following I would be very grateful

Apropos the USA in 2025, I’ve been thinking of the passage in Minima Moralia where Adorno says (I’m paraphrasing) that the supporters of fascism are so desperate for a blow to be struck against their ill-defined enemies that when it happens they cheer it on even if it’s they themselves being struck