by Jim.


Reading Ariana's coverage of Sundance only made it more clear, more pressing - I needed to get out to film fests - why hadn't I done this sooner? After all, I'm a filmmaker, right? So, off to NYC for the New York Underground Film Fest - it intrigued me because it was a fest initially begun by Andrew Gurland, although as I looked into the fest that became less and less a deciding factor - it was in New York, after all! So, in a somewhat spontaneous turn, I put some green aside and took the week off. Off to New York, that is...

For me this trip signified many possibilities - I was going to New York, for starters, not the town around the corner. But moreover it was the chance to open up my acceptance of other forms of visual expression - perhaps the "underground" nature of this film fest would expose me to new forms and I'd find little pockets of dedicated auteurs plying their craft. I was looking forward to pressing flesh and looking this band of outsiders in the eye, sharing with these looks a mutual understanding that two people travelling the same road, the road of a small, independent filmmaker would only have walked.

Day 1 -- Wednesday

7:30 My train leaves 30th Street Station in Philly. This puts me in New York by 9:30. I had been up the night before tossing and in general not getting much sleep, and so in a bid to sleep a little later I skipped the shower. Because of this, I'm relieved when I get to sit alone on the train, as I'm sure any would-be Single Serving Friend.

9:30 New York! Not as brooding or rude as some people try to make it out to be. After all, I'm from Philly - we have the highest crime rate and purest heroine in the States, which places us high in the running for each title worldwide! I get to AYH - The American Youth Hostel - by 9:45, and I'm told check in isn't until 12 noon - great. I park in the little café they have, and I pick up a muffin and some coffee. In what seems like some sort of cruel conspiracy, every time I turn to talk to any number of the attractive Euro women sitting alone (they don't speak much English - bonus!) their (almost always male) travelling partner shows up. One thing I can say for the men of Europe - they have no shame wearing shorts that would have given Cheryl Ladd a run for her money in her heyday.

1:00 After an hour in line for check in, I finally get to my room. Like an overstuffed college dorm, my room accommodates myself and nine (!) visitors from around the globe on five bunks. And I look down to see someone had already claimed my bunk - so I take the nearest available. By 1:30 I'm out the door - I've decided to take a walking tour of New York.

4:30 I'm somewhere in midtown, having walked from 103rd to 32nd by the end of my little trip. The side streets here put the main drags of Philly to shame! Every third corner or so sports these roasted nut shacks - Nuts 4 Nuts - and at a dollar you get this hot to the touch little bag of honey roasted nuts - peanuts, cashews or almonds. I've stopped along the way at every book store, music store and technology outlet. The Whiz has an Apple Cinema Display on show and it's amazing - at $3,000 it's a little too rich for my blood. I take the 9 train back to 103rd once I've decided my feet have had enough abuse. Hop into the shower and decide to go down to the Village to check out the Anthology Film Archive, where the fest takes place.

6:30 I'm walking my way up Broadway, incorrectly assuming it would take me to a 1 or 9 train stop, when my phone rings - it's Ariana, and she tells me she's "crashing" a Young Republican party somewhere closer to midtown. Republicans, and young at that? So a cab ride later, I'm at a cowboy themed bar at 33rd and 3rd Ave. So, I finally meet Ariana... here I thought she had some standards, but she's necking with some young Republican guy who doesn't have the decency to wear his Milton Friedman tie. As for Ariana...

Who would have thought that someone so "luxuriously loquacious" (as she puts it) would be wrapped in the body of a five foot two girl whose appearance evokes equal parts Meg Ryan and Katie Couric. She tells me it gets her jobs all the time, coupled with "lapping" the executive producer - whatever that means...

Her large vocabulary ("verboseness," she would correct) fooled me into thinking that she might help make my stay in New York tolerable. It wasn't until later that I found that after only 15 minutes of our talking, for some reason I couldn't shake the image of a Barbie Doll with a broken string, carrying her side of the conversation with repeated bursts of "math is hard."

Actually... in truth Ariana's more Katherine Hepburn than any other Katie. In platforms she stands eye to eye with me, fitting stature for someone who I soon learn isn't likely to wax demur. Conversation with her are anything but annoying, and it's all I can do to keep up - there are times when I can see the conversation coming to a point where I can whip out some sort of snappy retort or witticism, only to beaten to the buzzer by Ariana, like that Far Side with God on Jeopardy! "And ending round two - Ariana with 1350, and Jim our returning champion, has yet to get on the board!"

This really is a young Republican party, and before Ariana stands one of the young minds of a new generation of up-in-coming conservatives. I make my bid to talk politics, something my father's life in that very business has taught me to never do, and I drop some names --Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek and William F. Buckley - all three no less than the Conservative Pantheon, and all three strike this guy between the eyes with a sort of dull thud. For a moment Ariana turns to me and it's then that I look down to catch a glance of her making the "L" with her fingers.

Leaning in, she asks "Do you wanna catch some sushi or something and come back later?" And so we do.

Across the street is a small Chinese restaurant. I've had a Long Island Ice Tea and a half, and on a now somewhat empty stomach this is making for interesting conversation. When I tell the waitress, who offers me my choice of white or brown, that I'm not really "all for rice... but I guess this isn't the place to say that," she doesn't even give me the pity laugh. Nothing. Ahhh, I "heart" this city.

So for the next hour or so Ariana and I talk - and it's mostly movies. Did I mention I've been in New York for all of a day and already I feel like I'm doing nothing productive with my life?

After dinner we check in with Ariana's friend back at the Republican ho-down, and with that we decide to hop around looking for desert. Being the socialite she is, Ariana has a mental checklist of cool places we can hit in just about every corner of the city - this will come in handy throughout the rest of the trip. We stop at, interestingly enough, a 40's Hollywood themed bar. The service is beyond poor - it's nonexistent. It takes us all of five minutes to decide to get on to the next place. After what seemed like too long of a walk, we hang out at a Greek diner and do some people watching. An hour or so passes during which I do my best to stomach the pie and the two middle-aged men hitting on the two under-aged girls, and with that, Ariana and I head out. I come home and do my best imitation of a guy sleeping for about four hours.

Day 2 - Thursday

9am! I awaken to the sound of one of my roommates jumping off his bunk with a loud THUMP. As I crack open my eyes, I'm met with a too-close-for-comfort face of a young Japanese guy, who says in somewhat stilted English, "Good morning! It is... nine AM!" Mark this the first time in a long while that I had to actually restrain my urges to swing my fists at someone... I shuffle into the showers, which look straight out of Apt Pupil. Showering's pretty uneventful, and so I return to my room to find my favorite roommate/alarm clock sporting his "Extreme Pornografiti" jump suit. We exchange a few nods, and I head out the door.

10am City Diner, 90th and Broadway. Simply the BEST diner I think I've ever been to - the pickle's are crisp, and I even dared the complimentary coleslaw -- delish. I sit at the bar which runs from the door to the kitchen, eyeing the fresh baked pastries along the bar's length. Mmm... thick veins of blueberries cut through glistening muffins which look like the pastry version of a nuclear mushroom cloud. I order the usual - scrambled eggs and bacon, cup o' joe - and an impeccable plate arrives in a flash!

11am I've made my way down to the Anthology Film Archive (2nd Street and 2nd Ave.) again, where the screenings will be held. I pick out my first screenings - Bill Plympton's latest, "Mutant Aliens." I'm absolutely clueless about tickets and press packets and whatnot, so I actually buy my ticket. The fest organizers seemed mildly interested when I told them I was press and had been trying to get a pass for quite some time. More on this later...

12noon I make my way around NYU's campus, looking through vintage record stores, book stores and in general thinking I'd like to date just about any of the girls walking past :) By 3, I'm hungry again, so I make my way into the Slaughtered Lamb and sit down to pub food that's actually quite good. To my right sits a group of three 20-somethings who I'd soon find out were - Lauis, Sam and Reg. We chat, they tell me where to score a good leather jacket and just about anything else I ask about. By 4:30, I'm back pounding pavement again, zig-zagging back to the Film Archive. I hang out before the screening at an Irish pub (the name of which I didn't have the sense to write down - Shamus's or O'Malley's or Murphy's...) actually run by Irish folks, just up from the archive.

5:45 First Screening - "Mutant Aliens" - Animation, Bill Plympton

Mutant Aliens screened at Sundance this year, and is Plympton's second go at a feature-length animation (the first being 1997's "I Married a Strange Person"). You may recall his short transitions on Mtv, which were curious jabs with humorously drawn men doing just about anything imaginable (and always impossible) with their faces.

Right out of the gate on this one I'm having a great time - Plympton's edgy, frenetic animation is putting his characters through every possible metamorphosis and site gag, and I wasn't alone in some of the more raucous laughing I couldn't help but let out. Twenty minutes in, however, and I'm starting to look around at things other than the screen. The film dissolves into a series of seemingly improv'd jokes which go from what had been somewhat grounded, cartoon takes on solid visual gags, to being reduced to gross-outs and a distracting obsession with sex, a Plympton trademark. Oh well.

After the screening, the man himself stands in front and does a Q&A session, detailing some of his experiences on the film and plugging his spot on atomfilms.com.

7:30 Second Screening - "Plaster Caster : A Cockumentary" - Documentary on Cynthia "Plaster Caster"

Maybe a week before heading up to New York, I'd picked up an issue of Guitar magazine with a blurb on the front - "How does Hendrix Measure Up?" Being a big fan of Jimi, I wanted to get someone else's perspective on the man, and so I opened to the appropriate page and found myself looking, not at a shot of Hendrix on stage, but rather of a young woman standing behind a plaster cast of Jimi's, err, "rig." Apparently Jimi measured up just fine, as the article discusses at length (Hah!) Well...

As coincidence would have it, here at the NYUFF I see a listed screening of a "cockumentary" on Cynthia, the then young woman I saw in the photo. Now, if I'm going to watch a documentary, it had better have an interesting subject - and what could be more interesting than the story of a girl who, in an act of defiance against her parents (her Mom is referred to as "The Warden" throughout the film) decides to get her way into rock concerts by offering to "cast" members of the band? What started as a silly gag became this girl's calling card, and incidentally got her backstage, and in the pants, of some of the most famous rock bands to tear up a stage.

The documentary opens with footage of, among others, Camille Paglia, proclaiming Cynthia to be quite the feminist, and then moves on to words from rockers like Jello Biafra and Chris Connolly, both having been immortalized by Cynthia.

Between laughs, there are moments here and there which are hints of a time gone by when rock and role was truly seen as the "work of the devil," threatening parents everywhere with an all but inevitable slide into some sort of amoral oblivion. Also worth a note is the role women such as Cynthia played in such a huge industry - while none of them were headlining at the time, all of the women of that era presented in the documentary seem to be more compelling characters than the bubble-gum pop-femmes of today. What went wrong?

The lights come up and Cynthia, dressed in a somewhat eccentric black and bright orange outfit, grants answers to a few eager audience members. The exchange which elicits an eruption of laughter comes when someone asks "Who was best, in the sack?" As the audience, we all lean in, knowing that she's had the pleasure of some of rock's Big Names, eager to hear which took the cake. She names someone none of us have heard of, and then offers "He's a local rocker, and I would have cast him but he was too young!"

Well hello Misses Robinson...

Day 3 - Friday

Third Screening - Day three... and already I'm getting tired of the festival. There are a few shorts here and there that I've screened that are just merciless assaults on my attention span, to say nothing of my ability to block out blood-letting levels of high pitched, random squawking. Open to new forms of visual expression I'm trying to be - not the victim in a series of films which test my gag reflex.

At Ariana's insistence, I finally get the fest to recognize me as press, and so I score a ticket to what seems to be the most promising screening of the night - 11:00 "That Burning Sensation," a documentary on the Burning Man Project.

If you're not acquainted with the project's particulars, I'll sum up - take a mix of 25,000 or so fringe artists, musicians and nerds, put them in the middle of nowhere and have them get together to create an experimental, nihilistic pocket of culture that is completely self-sufficient. For a week this disposable city thrives in the middle of the desert, existing as a lively riff on experimental social dynamics, oh and by the way most people are naked, and when it's over, everyone packs up everything (and do I mean everything - word to the wise, lay off the bran) and heads home. Personally, the documentary piqued my interests for the festival, but my enthusiasm was tempered by the feeling that washed over me by the documentary's end that the fest's time has passed.

Day 4 - Saturday

11:00am has Ariana and I attending a panel discussion on fundraising. Not much to tell as the panel essentially repeats the mantra - Script; Demo Reel; Budget; find rich people to pitch to. And you thought fundraising was hard?

Moments later, Ariana and I screen "Sonic Genetics," a series of shorts culled from the same 70 minutes of footage. The concept of Sonic Genetics sounds promising - take the same footage, give it to four different filmmakers, and have them cut it to music in their own way. What we're witness too, in actuality, is what is known in film theory circles as a "complete and utter waste of a portion, however small, of what was once your life." Amid painful sounds of gunfire and a series of images so random that I have no doubt were assembled to spite the audience, are whole scenes from both Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange. This gets Ariana and I chuckling our objections under our breath, in a bit of on the spot MST3K-like banter. But where we were casually laughing it off, after all, humor is the only medicine for terminally bad films, a woman sporting the look of an indie filmmaker and more than her share of tattoos goes head-to-head with the "artists" during the Q&A session. Her argument, that these filmmakers were leeches clinging to the creative efforts of others, was met with contempt by the artists who had participated in the experiment. Their answer?

"We feel assaulted on a daily basis by images and so our way of defending ourselves is to actually steal these images and throw them back out in a different form."

Riiiight. Theirs is grant money I need to get access to...

Ariana and I head into midtown to do a little shopping. At one point, Ariana gets us on the actual A train - I can now check that off my list of notorious modes of transportation which includes Car 54, the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, the Transylvania 6-5000 (??) and The Orient Express.

Just when I think I've filled my quota of pan-handling (one of the more engaging enterprises in New York), three black kids make their way past us and set up a small boom box sputtering out some old school break beats. "Don't try this at home," the group's leader insists, "we're trained professionals." At this point, skepticism like mine would make Carl Sagan blush. And suddenly my jaw drops - these kids are doing flips and handstands - on a moving train. More than once, our car full of awestruck onlookers is witness to their bodies literally brushing against the ceiling as they pull off a routine of assured gravity defiance and deft pop-locking! When it's all said and done I ball up five bucks and gladly thrust it into their opened bookbag - can I tell you how little I feel I'm doing with my life?

Day 4 - Sunday

There's a film or two I want to see but by now I'm not convinced of their merit. What had started out as a list of seven films that I felt good about had whittled down to the few that I had actually screened. With the best of those being just fair, and the worst being fairly abrasive, I decided to skip out on the rest and instead catch sushi with Ariana. It's a Sunday and I'm in the mood for a laid back meal. Nevermind the fact that our cab was hit on the way to the Go Sushi on the Upper East Side, when we get there and our fish arrives, all is right with the world.

Next time, Ariana tells me, we'll go to a higher tier fest. Next time will be much, much better. Next time…will be in Venice.


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