WED FEB 27 3AM NEW YORK
I’m packing, getting ready for TRUE FALSE which I’ve heard so many good things about. Wondering though about Missouri. I really have no idea what it’s going to be like. Excepting Woodstock, small towns and I have a precarious relationship. Or should I say, small town bouncers and I have a precarious relationship. Well, given that we need to take a shuttle from St.Louis to where festival headquarters is (Columbia, to be exact), maybe this is going to be one bouncer-free town. I’ve resisted the urge to Google-image Missouri, and the excitement is killing me.

1:45PM DETROIT
Sitting at a Slapshotz in Detroit with Danielle and Jason. Just ate a chicken salad. Just realizing how silly the name Slapshotz is. What is this world? Apparently our flight is at 3:27. And also apparently, there is no time difference between Detroit and New York. Over lunch, we discuss SXSW. I gladly play devil’s advocate to the almost uniform adulation for this bro-fest of bro-fests.

3:30pm
Still in Michigan. Our flight’s delayed by 40 minutes and Danielle is nowhere to be found. Maybe she’s gone into hiding after I nearly flayed her alive for her overpacking fetish (“Why do you do this to yourself?!”). We looked at a dancing water fountain – I may have first seen something like this in Disneyworld over a decade ago – and I stood entranced. Luckily a mysterious dreadlocked boy got in the crosshairs of spurting jets of water and snapped me out of it. Jason and I then checked out the slim pickins at the airport “mall”. Nothing but mass-produced boringphernalia – it amazes me how much stuff this country should just jettison off into space. We then chatted about our oft-misconstrued National Film Board of Canada titles, which I hand-selected a year ago with tongue perfectly planted in cheek. I picked a whole bunch of bleak and dated after-school specials with titles like “Illegal Abortion” (self-explanatory) and “Love Taps” (about abusive boyfriends) with the intent to take a piss on the after-school special genre as a whole. In a light-hearted way, ofcourse – many of these films (most of them no longer than 30 min.) are actually pretty excellent. My favorite being “Wow” from the late 60s. Shot in stark black and white, the docu-drama takes a bunch of French Canadian students and lets them re-enact their fantasies on-camera. The range of scenarios – from a prettyboy dying to be a rock star to the quiet girl who secretly wishes to be a religious revolutionary – are downright compelling in their peace and love-era beauty.

THURSDAY 12:42 am COLUMBIA, MISSOURI

Columbia, Missouri. A land of short buildings not too vastly different from Poughkeepsie. Cute little shops abound, but there’s no one - no one- in sight. Welcome to college town. Just came back from a night on the town with Danielle, Spout’s Karina Longworth, and Jason. Sitting in my hotel room bed as Danielle, passed out, enters dreamland. King of the Hill and that Kenny Kenny cartoon is playing. Never really watched these shows, or had any interest in them. But it’s funny – I guess these play like graphic novels for kids. That’s not a novel assessment of the situation, but I’m starting to see why people outside of cities watch television. Mind you, I do not have cable TV. When bars close this early, the glowing box can really become your best friend, huh?

1PM
Sitting at a cafe across from Jason, writing my newsletter piece for the National Film Board of Canada. Intrepidly he picked up all our passes for us. Danielle is off to teach a class at an all-girl’s school. Her guests, Brian Liu, Pamela Cohn, and Alana Digiacomo, arrive later today. T/F went gun-happy with our passes – as there are about 10 Lux passes included in our packet.

Quote of the Day: “The most interesting segment of the prison population are the “Piezas.” (A “Pieza” is a Mexican Roadrunner. The term has been adapted to those that are here from Mexico.) Most of these guys had no prior criminal history. They were in jail for crossing the border — an imaginary line. We’ve decided that’s a felony. And they’ve been getting between three and five years in jail. And while they’re incarcerated, they have to work. And they’re often fined for their crime. They’re fined an amount that just happens to add up to the 12-cents-an-hour that they make while they’re incarcerated. So our government has time-share slaves. Instead of getting our slaves from Africa, we’re getting people that come to America to build better opportunities for themselves. And they end up spending three-to-five years building government furniture.” - Josh Wolf, from Anarchy for the USA: A Conversation with Josh Wolf

Graml, blogger of some renown, has just started a new site dedicated to what he’s called the art of american living. Fittingly called New Picnic Time and featuring “smashing” activities, Graml’s hopes for the new blogspot are high. “This is going to be the next big thing”, Graml quipped. With any luck, he may soon have to start accepting comments from a wide assortment of visitors…

Good friend and colleague AJ Schnack was kind enough to post my run-down of the 2008 Big Sky Film Festival on his popular blog. Read it and weep! Just kidding. I mean, read it and laugh and be inspired and learn and gain the audacity of hope. Or just read it — here.

…and that blogger isn’t me. I suppose I could’ve strung together three or four hundred words of gushing praise, but considering the fact that I acquired this fantastic debut feature of John Yost’s for IndiePix, I’m guessing folks might see through that.

But someone else gave it a try, so here it is.

Is it worth it, seeing a tiny movie like ‘Every Good Thing to Rust’? Well, as last night’s Oscar broadcast taught us, a stripper can write the best original screenplay of the year, and two unknown actors can run around with 100K and some mini-DV cameras and tell a story powerful enough to warrant an Oscar, and a congratulatory text message from fellow countryman Bono. Soo….

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT FILM! IT’S, LIKE, WORTH IT!

No thoughts on last night’s show really, other than a wonderful wellspring of joy as Tilda Swinton, one of my favorite art-house starlets, took to the stage for her little golden shiny man. I thought the Viktor & Rolf muse would’ve given a teary emotional speech, giving everyone in the audience a much needed refresher course on auteur cinema in the process. But she did something far better - taking the piss out of the whole event by completely having a sense of humor about winning and exposing the silliness of the ceremony in general.”I have an American agent who is the spitting image of this—really, truly the same shaped head and, it has to be said, the buttocks. And I’m giving this to him because there’s no way I would be in America at all,” she said, comparing the Oscar statuette to her agent, Brian Swardstrom.