Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

Their legs must get tired. Little Howrah Beach. October 2011.

Another Sunday means another Top Five. I have had the chance over the past month to give Chicago experimental rock combo Wilco's latest album The Whole Love, and it is a cracker.

All this has got me thinking, how might I narrow down their records thus far to a top five? Thus I have today's list, My Top Five Wilco Albums!

First up I am ruling out a host of collaborations that are extremely worthy in their own regard. The two albums with Billy Bragg - Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II - working over some found Woody Guthrie lyrics are quite the achievement. I am a Bragg fan, but the Wilco efforts blow his away. Well worth tracking down.

I am also excluding Down With Wilco, the collaboration with The Minus 5 and the very interesting The Sun Came Out with Neil Finn.

This leaves nine. The elimination was easy, as 2005's Kicking Television was immediately ruled out, as I'm not counting live albums (however good). I am unsure whether having babies about the place at the time had an effect on my enjoyment of 2007's Sky Blue Sky and 2009's Wilco (The Album); but for whatever reason these two failed to connect with me. Sorry lads! Rounding out those that missed the cut was the debut effort A.M.. It's a top little record, but very much straight Alt-Country that doesn't quite challenge conventions of the peak periods.

Which gives me to Top Five:

The Whole Love. I'm putting the latest one fifth. It could rise higher, but it has done very well to crack the five and signals a real return to form.
A Ghost Is Born. Number four seems very low for what is an extraordinarily good record. Really, I could shuffle picks 4 through 2 and still not get it right. If you don't own it, please get it.
Being There. A very different Wilco here, and probably their most conventional. Very much country in flavour, there is a fair bit here to signal the diversions to come.
Summerteeth. The bridging effort in many respects. Classic country-flavoured pop with experimental diversions, this would be the album to introduce the newcomer too without scaring them off with the experimental noise.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. My tip for "greatest album ever". It just is. Just accept it.

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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