I did a lot more talking today than I think I have done in a long time. With the benefit of a bullhorn I was mostly audible, but my relatively soft-spoken voice combined with the noise of Union Square made for a fair amount of yelling. I got some laughs out of the gathering, which seemed like a bunch of nice people. No reporters showed. I didn’t really think they would, even with the relative star power of Speed. But we have something here, I think. The audience was genuinely interested in the subject matter, which should have surprised me and would have surprised me except that as I’ve been talking to Alex and Speed his week I’ve come to realize that people really appreciate when someone talks about a subject they love or about which they are very knowledgable, no matter what that subject is. I got a shoutout at the Tribeca Film Festival after a screening of “Dead Ringers”, a short but effective film about a talking phone booth. I had no expectations for it but found it very effective, and it seemed like it was way longer than  4 minutes. I was having some breathing problems at the theater, which was completely filled to capacity. I sometims have issues with air in theaters and auditoriums, especially older ones. This is not an older theater — the Bow Tie Cinemas on West 23rd — but it was all those breathing faces generating CO2. It cleared up when the film started and the air conditioning kicked in, circulating bad air out. There were six films. I think the best was the opener, which featured some of Andy Warhol’s surviving superstars. The phone booth one was second best. A strange profile of Rod Serling’s daughter and an artist who painted carousel murals based on episodes from The Twilight Zone was third… and the others were just pedestrian as hell. I expected better of Tribeca, though I admit to being not in the most focused or empathetic frame of mind during the screenings.

I think we  are on to something with the guided tour, though, either with these guys or on my own. Alex said he would connect me up with a publisher to guage interest in my book outline. Part of me had fun with it all, another part of me felt like it was drowning and wanted to die. Story of my life.

…

Grain. Saturation. Clouds. Dogs resting their testicles on city sidewalks. The fluids of thought. Fluids of sound, the texture of a siren crawling through the air into square zeros. Difficulty teething. Insufferable paranois dropped like beanbags from a tourist moon. Skeptical drunks shouting asshole questions at Luddite jugglers. Dreary and drowsy the literate need not apply. Stretching my piss stream to its limits I feel tension at its landing, feeling the myth of disease connecting from tabloid footnotes.