Southpaw Jones

Hey, this old site registered 935 visitors on Saturday. That’s a record! On a weekend! Thanks for stopping by, and please continue to spread the word.

Can I get a witness for my documentary phase? Witness! Sometimes, I just get my fill of plot and fiction, and I have to retreat to the world of on-location interviews and archival footage.

I was able to catch two fresh docs over the weekend with my sweet Maggie: one in the theater, one via the ol’ DVD player.

Saturday night, we headed to the UT campus theater to catch Pete Seeger: The Power of Song. I like Pete Seeger, I like songs, and I like power, so I simply had to see it.

The film was so many things to me: a humanized history of the 20th Century, a collection of wonderful, warm musical performances, a portrait of a hard-working, no-nonsense, old-fashioned liberal, and a journey from urban to rural, New England to Mississippi, sunny rivers to snowy mountainsides, log cabins to Carnegie Hall.

If you don’t know who Pete Seeger is, perhaps you’ll know Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Martin Luther King, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Clinton, among other legends who appear in the film. Perhaps you know the songs We Shall Overcome, The Water Is Wide, Erie Canal, If I Had a Hammer, or Turn, Turn, Turn, which Mr. Seeger either wrote, adapted, or helped to popularize.

If you love folk music, 5-string banjo, peace, singing, or that wonderful brand of patriotism that expresses itself in dissent and questions, you really need to see this film. It will surprise you, inspire you, and move you to tears.

Sunday, we popped in a Netflixed DVD of Home Movie and enjoyed the heck out of it. Chris Smith, director of the wonderful American Movie and the alright Yes Men, created this film out of left-over footage from a series of homestore.com commercials. It’s better than it sounds, trust me.

Home Movie profiles five unique American households. One couple lives in an abandoned, underground missile base. Another lives with a dozen cats and radically adapts their house to suit their “family.” One man lives in a houseboat amidst the swamps of Louisiana, while another inhabits his dream house of sort-of futuristic electronics and gadgets (if your vision of the future sprouted in about 1956).

My favorite of the bunch was a woman who hit it big as the American star of a Japanese sitcom. She found a beautiful, isolated valley in Hawaii and built a treehouse there. Seriously, the trunk of the tree rests in the middle of her living room. She’s an elderly woman, but she is filled with life and wisdom and mischief. She has a beautiful dialogue with nature, she talks to dolphins, and her entire house is powered by a next-door waterfall!

Home Movie is only an hour long, and it, along with Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, sure beat the numbing numbness of network television. Two paws up!

Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn’t even the star of his own Halloween special.
Chris Rock

Skull-A-Day




One clue whose answer consists of two rhyming words:

No, I dislike her for two good reasons. She is too skinny, and she is a fraud. Jagged on the outside, jaded on the inside! I’m not the only one who thinks of her as a…

Highlight here for answer: [bony phoney]

Thursday, November 1st, 2007
8:00 PM
Matt the Electrician & Southpaw Jones
Flipnotics at the Triangle
4600 Guadalupe
Austin, TX
(512) 380-0097
flipnotics.com

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2nd, 2007
9:00 PM
Matt the Electrician & Southpaw Jones
Anderson Fair
2007 Grant
Houston, TX 77006
713.528.8576
www.andersonfair.com
Doors open at 8.