I love music, and I love books. I can’t get enough of either, and I’m also pretty opinionated about both. Which is why I recently watched the two documentaries Other Music and The Booksellers, both released this year. I actually started watching Other Music because I thought it would be about CBGB, the club in New York’s Bowery whose name also includes the acronym “OMFUG,” which stands for “Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.” But it wasn’t. It was about a great independent record store that shut down in this digital age of streaming. 

The other documentary I had heard about because it was supposed to show at The Capri, our local independent movie theatre, the week the pandemic shut everything down. I’ve written before and complain regularly about how there’s too little programming (films, TV shows) about books, literature, and especially poetry, and was glad to see this 99-minute homage to those who love books even more – much more! – than I do. 

I don’t know why but the term “material culture” has been coming up a lot lately in conversations that I’ve either been in or been privy to. Maybe the pandemic has had us all at home staring at all the stuff we own, causing us to wonder why we own it. Maybe I just hang out with people who like to let the latest intellectual jargon drip off their lips. Either way, these two were good movies about material culture, welcome discoveries in the endless “Watch Next” scroll.