One week in

Resfest was great. Today they showed a ten year retrospective of the festival's best videos since the beginning, and a collection of Radiohead videos directed by past festival-featured directors. The very first video was one of my longtime favorites, Street Spirit. There were several I had never seen, including one from Thom Yorke's solo album. I think I've seen at least twenty videos altogether today, so I'm fairly overloaded.

There was an after party at a club a couple of miles away, so I took a couple trains to get down the street and walked a block, nearly missing the Lilliputian club sign above Sonotheque, a video/tecno club that by all rights, I had no business being in. As I presented my festival ticket stub to the doorman, I felt like George Costanza using a picture of his pretend model girlfriend to gain access to an exclusive hangout for beautiful people. Picture the inside of a pencil sharpener designed by a Swedish hipster, and add thumping techno music and a bar. A bearded fellow at the bar beckoned to me by way of the person next to him after he noticed me standing there admiring the video projector. I introduced myself, he gave the customary double-check that I actually said my name was "Loyal," and that was most of the exchange. He introduced me to the co-founders of Resfest, a 16mm enthusiast and a graphic designer, and I explained who I am and what I study. They seemed to get it pretty well, and the subject turned to hypertext narrative and video. They seemed to agree that interactive narrative didn't really work as advertised. I'm not the strongest advocate for nonlinear story (I'm dubious of it at best), so I offered no rebuttal. I left after about thirty minutes in order to catch the brown line in time.