Hallowe'en

Thursday evening Mary Beth and I went to see a movie in the Indie Memphis film festival thingie. It was a documentary about going around the country and recording people playing old songs with a portable 78 machine. It was OKAY. It COULD have been pretty good. There were good things about it, primarily the more documentaryish stuff where they'd interview people about the machine itself or the people who make the blank vinyl disks, technical kinda things. The music felt a little like white people trying to give themselves authenticity with this other music and means of recording it. Not everybody in it was white and I wouldn't say that describes all of it, but it felt like it did for too much of it anyway. I think it would have been more interesting if they recorded people playing current music or some sort of update. In that way it sort of misses the point of what Alan Lomax was doing back in the day, capturing music of the time. Maybe there's a point that it's much easier for anyone nowadays to capture their music. Still, the approach this film took was a little precious. Anyway, kind of interesting idea but the execution fell flat. I graded it a c. And there was a short film before it called Lomax (completing the theme of being about Alan Lomax). It was pretty good, I gave it a b. Yesterday was Halloween. Didn't do much, got up pretty late (we'd ended up going to bed real late the night before). I did carve a pumpkin! Not as good as the one I did last year, tried something new with the eyes. Anyway, most of the should-be-fun day was spent back at work. At least I got a "long" "weekend" this time.