Daily Loaf

Routes Music is a documentary film acting as a roving music census, taking in the true musical passions (and disgusts) of the American people. We’re traveling all across the country, stopping along the way to interview local bands, take footage of live performances and chat with anyone and everyone. Learn more about the documentary here; check out all previous entries here.

It’s 8 p.m. and Phil is driving through a torrential rainstorm in an abandoned part of New Orleans’ West End. He’s running his hand through his hair, bent over the steering wheel, trying to find Magellan Road. The GPS isn’t working and every street seems to lead back to the interstate we just exited. A tiny brown Chihuahua looks lost, too, as it darts across the road and between two houses.

It’s enough rain to make a New Orleans native nervous.

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The Bernie Madoff body count keeps on rising. Earlier reports had named Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick as victims of the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme. Now his client list has been made public, revealing more famous patsies, including Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax and the developer behind the World Trade Center. Read more here.

We’ve been in Park City for two days now, learning the ropes and exploring.  It’s always tough to get tickets for the first weekend, and while we started out with about 8 or 9 tickets a piece, purchased online, I’ve encouraged the group to push their boundaries, see films they have no ideas about going in, meet and talk to people in line and on the free shuttles, try new things.  Most seem quite eager to take me up on that.

After a flurry of blogging to complete assignments for our class before they got on the plane for Sundance, the group has slowed down a bit, focusing a bit more on taking things in.  Here are just a few excerpts from the things we have written in these two busy first days at the Sundance film festival.

Lizzie Kirkham on her first day and her first Sundance film:

Lizzie Kirkham

My first day at Sundance is extremely incomparable to my first day doing anything else. It wasn’t as drug-induced as getting my wisdom teeth taken out, nor was it as fun as my first race in alpine skiing. It was, despite the overuse of the word, unique. I have the largest collection of tickets, one of which was to the most beautiful movie Before Tomorrow… Read the rest of this entry »