I really didn’t do much for the first few days of my New York shows. I wandered around East Village a little bit; the whole thing with the reviews for my film being everywhere (I mean in every major publication) really freaked me out so much that I think around the second day I was wandering around the Virgin Megastore in Times Square and nearly had this crippling panic attack from it. I think that also had something to do with completely starving myself, maybe just a little. But after a while I calmed down and came to my senses.
As far as other movies went, on the second day I got on the subway and somehow found myself in Brooklyn – exactly how or where or why is still a little hazy to me and it got slightly hazier after I visited the bar down the street, but just down from that bar there was a theater playing The Departed so I caught that showing. The next day Tideland opened at the IFC Center so I was required by state and federal law to attend the 11 a.m. show. I have no idea what all this weirdo negative hype surrounding the film is all about because I felt it was very much your standard Gilliameseque warped fairy tale and it contained all those creepy and antisocial elements which he always flirts with but I guess in this day and age we’re so fucked up that we can’t allow ourselves to gasp or cry or laugh at anything like Tideland. I was in New York for my inscrutible film so I thought I might see another inscrutible film.
Saturday I basically hung around the theater and caught (half of) the late-night showing of LoveCracked, an interesting anthology of satirical Lovecraft adaptations all sewn together by some nice fellow named Elias. In any case I was really messed-up (yet surprisingly coherent) by the time I wandered back into the theater to see the Re-Penetrator segment but LoveCracked looked like a solid work indeed, a lot more crowd-pleasing than FBN in many respects.
I don’t remember Sunday – okay, that’s a lie, I remembered that I went to the FBN screening and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Then on Monday I found myself doing the dead tour, visiting both ground zero (again, just found myself there) along with the Dakota. There’s something about the twin towers site which is both very reverential and very disrespectful at the same time; the whole peanuts-and-balloon circus surrounding the whole thing just pissed me off so I ignored it. It’s like my friend in Hawaii right now who just visited Pearl Harbor and kept going on about the Martin Sheen voice-over and the multi-channel surround audio representations of Pearl Harbor with “enhanced” audio effects. It’s odd that people like my friend dislike the kind of surrealist world view that I try to cultivate in something like FBN because they’re living a far more surreal existance than any I can offer them.