While it's on my mind: the next CDs to get are Neil Young's Greendale and Warren Zevon's The Wind -- the latter will no doubt put me in an emotional state for obvious reasons. I hear it's doing that with everyone. Which reminds me: I have to find someone who has VH1 to tape the Zevon special tomorrow night.

Last night I had a bad case of insomnia, possibly complicated by what I think is acid reflux, or something. Anyway, I got up and watched an old tape of Fellini's I vitelloni, charming, wistful, and sentimental as only Italian Neo-Realism can be. I love the movie dearly and watch it whenever I am in a glum mood; maybe because it is set in a provincial Italian world that seems to me to exist in a dream world. I always love the opening credits, of all the young men dancing through the sleeping town, arm in arm -- which perfectly matches the ending, where all the young men but one are asleep, these wild young men who have now been tamed, and will proceed to have the bourgeois existences of their papas and mammas.

The DVD cover shown several posts below is of Ermanno Olmi's film The Fiances. I saw it two years ago at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Talk about sleeping and dreaming; I think the movie put me in a dream state, in so many ways. It's one of those small and extremely inspiring examples of slice of life cinema, one of those movies that make you think that is the purest kind of cinema known to man, one that just observes life as it is lived; something I suppose Olmi is still doing. Or maybe I just like the unpretentious personality of it; I don't know. Anyway, when we get a new computer and DVD player -- the goal for September -- a DVD of I fidanzati is the first order of business.