Thursday, 04 April 2002 | Full frame

So I have a pass to the entire festival, but for a frustrating portion of it I have to sit in my cubicle one block away, looking over citizenship questions and changing names to make them sound more international while there are documentaries being shown about Jasper, Texas and September 11th and memory loss as captured by recorded answering machine messages.

This afternoon I walked over to pick up my pass, just before the festival actually began, and I could feel the anticipation descending like a cloud over the concrete patio in front of the theatre. There were only about thirty people there, picking up passes and buying tickets and sitting behind folding tables wearing friendly badges, and, oddly enough, I ran into the DJ whom I photographed last night in Chapel Hill. Actually, I didn't quite run into him; I was at the top of the stairs and he was somewhere in the middle of the patio below me, and we both glanced toward each other at the same moment, paused for recollection delay, and then offered a timid wave before continuing on our respective paths.

All day long I've been trying to fill in every spare moment of time I have, not even wasting stoplights. It's almost 1 a.m. now, and I'm back at home after regrettably skipping out on the end of Yo La Tengo's live accompaniment to French underwater documentaries. But I kept wishing for my bed and to throw away my contacts, and my mind started drifting when the music was mellow and the sea urchins' spines were waving in the water. There's more to tell, but maybe tomorrow.