Youth

[ateolf]

I started off by going up to Shangri-La for Sweat Fest. I was this a little early-ish, at least before any of the music started. I mainly wanted to check the bargain bin as a few years ago I got some very nice and unexpected stuff from their bargain bin. But this year it was all very much the stuff you'd expect in a bargain bin. Oh well, can't win 'em all. I went inside and looked at their regular selection and did find some cds worth picking up there: Mogwai: Kin soundtrack, Ui: The 2-Sided EP/The Sharpie (1993-1995), Do Make Say Think: s/t, Pan•American: s/t, Tindersticks: s/t, Unsane: Visqueen, and Unsane: Wreck. Then Mary Beth and I went downtown to the Indie Memphis Youth Festival. The first thing there for us was the national program and that had shorts that were submitted from around the country (and one from Ukraine) and a few of those were very good. Especially this one that was a satire in the style of a 50s educational reel about social media capitalizing on "negroes." There was another good one with stop motion doll animation about a teen metaphorically being in his room all the time in terms of being shut off from the world. And another good one that was in Spanish and with narration, something about birds (and I forget the details) and the video mostly of different wall murals. Then after that we stepped out and back in for the locals program. The national didn't have many people but this one was unsurprisingly quite packed. There were some pretty good ones, it took a bit longer to get to them. But I enjoyed this one animated one that was pretty much just a little video to Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" with a little animated Stevie opening his mouth in kind of a Peanuts fashion. Then my favorite was this one that was a cult mockumentary about a Tickle-Me Elmo worshiping cult. Most of the filmmakers came up for a brief q&a afterwards and the one who did the Stevie Wonder one talked about how he procrastinated and did it all in one weekend (and even had a file corruption issue when he hadn't saved his work!), it was just kinda funny the way he led with that and went right into the "uh, yeah, I procrastinated" thing. Then the girl who made the Elmo one was nerdy in that hyper-over-the-top way. While we were downtown we hopped over to Gus's for dinner and it was very good, of course. We got that tiny table right by the kitchen entrance as we sometimes seem to tend to as it's the only one available when we arrive. On our way there the weather had been horribly hot and muggy like it's been and with no sign of precipitation, but while we were there at some point a torrent of rain came out of nowhere along with some crazy-ass, blowing-shit-all-over-the-place wind. The first sign was a loud bang that made the whole restaurant go quiet for a second and I think it was something knocked around by the wind. By the time we were done and left it was a little less insane, but the rain was still coming down pretty hard. Though by the time we got home there wasn't any rain at all. But all that weather brought on coolness so we sat outside enjoying it and were shortly joined by Peanut so we hung out with her too. She even went behind my legs where I couldn't see her and I didn't tense up and she nuzzled up to me and didn't even attack me! I slept a whole ton last night and caught up which I guess I needed to do!