No better day than Friday to ponder pop culture, especially the Friday when Sundance begins. I ran into my friend Bilge Ebiri, director of New Guy (like Office Space, but weirder), who uttered the following sentence, a sentence one could not have known would be possible just a few short years ago: “I’m on my way to Sundance to blog for Nerve.com“. Of course you are.

Screening at Sundance at midnight tomorrow is a flick I can’t wait to see—Awesome: I Fuckin Shot That. The Beastie Boys gave 50 fans (and five pros) Hi-8 Sony cameras during a concert in Madison Square Garden and essentially said: go nuts. A year of editing later, Awesome was born. Equally as genius: after they uploaded all the footage, the band returned the video cameras to the stores where they bought them. A producer of the movie calls it, “the democratization of filmmaking.” Sounds like a perfect hybrid of amateur meets professional, fans meets stars, a mix we at SMITH whole-heartedly support and will be doing with the folks that read and write for this site and future print magazine.