SXSW Diary 2008: Day 6
Monday, March 17th, 2008Day 6: Wednesday, March 12
Today was unusual, and I have very little to report. Finding myself grotesquely behind in my writing assignments, I had no choice but to forsake most of the films I’d planned to see today and devote myself fully to writing. It may sound odd to hear a writer complain that he has been forced to write, but the truth is that most writers spend about 90 percent of their time looking for excuses not to. That is probably why so many of them are driven to drink.
As it happens, today was going to be a light day anyway, as most of the films on the schedule either didn’t interest me or were movies I’d already seen. I did catch “At the Death House Door,” an impressively well made documentary about a man who was the chaplain at a Texas penitentiary for many years and as such ministered to 95 inmates on their final days before being executed. It invokes important questions not about the rightness or wrongness of capital punishment, but about the haphazard way it is administered in the United States.
This screening was at the Convention Center, and as I walked across the main pavilion afterward I saw people gathered around the Dell Lounge, a glass-encased room built by the people at Dell Computers. I do not know what the general purpose of the Dell Lounge is; one assumes it was built cheaply and flimsily, and that we won’t be able to get tech support when it collapses. But at this particular moment, everyone was gawking at the event occurring within the Lounge, which turned out to be Billy Bob Thornton being interviewed. So you can add that to your list of celebrity sightings.
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