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.