Joel Fendelman - Nashville, Louisville, Augusta

The latest update from filmmaker Joel Fendelman, touring his film David:

---

Scarritt Bennett Center

My first Day off was fantastic, it was spent in Nashville, Tennessee. I found this old women's missionary training center called Scarritt Bennett Center which has since been converted to a retreat center with inexpensive, peaceful rooms. I was fortunate to go to the BlueBird cafe to hear some of the best singer song writer music I have heard in a while.

Clifton Center

My next stop was Louisville, Kentucky where my film was shown at the Clifton Center, another beautiful historic building. It was a cold, snowy night but a good 20-30 people bared through the cold, all very appreciative of the film. We had a wonderful talk back afterwards.

Clifton Center

After Louisville was Augusta, Georgia where I am now. The storms have come in even stronger and there is about 2 inches of snow on the ground. This started last night near the time of the screening at the Morris Museum. We weren't even sure anyone would show because there were emergency warnings on the news. But as we neared the screening time, a handful of brave, committed souls showed up. It was a small but intimate showing. Kevin Grogan, the museum director introduced me and we had a passionate talkback after the showing.

Morris Museum of Arts

Now I'm siting in the beautiful Lookaway Inn, preparing for the drive tomorrow to screen at the Wallace Community college in Hanceville, Alabama.

Me and Kevin Grogan at the Morris Museum of Art

Augusta

Vivienne Roumani - Hanceville, Serenbe, Louisville

The latest update from Vivienne Roumani, who recently completed touring her film Out of Print:

Birmingham's one night stop on the way to Hanceville, AL

Welcome to southern hospitality. After a short stroll I found myself at Brick & Tin, a warm and casual restaurant where I had a delicious Rio Grande Panini (wilted kale, queso fresco & pickled peppers) and an autumn vegetable salad with lots of root vegetable – hungry just thinking about it.

The (not-just-a-bookstore) Jim Reed’s Bookstore attracts visitors from all over the world.

This is a place where books and memories live side by side.

Jim has done it all: arts, films, writing, and more. Books should be displayed the way you see books at home, he says, not alone but amidst “your favorite blanket” and things.

Across the street at the Museum of Art for a brief tour and the Rushton Annual Concert with Antonio Polpa-Baldi.

I love good piano music.

Just one evening of beautiful lodging, great art and architecture -- basking in all the senses before heading to Hanceville.

Hanceville, AL

Serenbe – An idyllic place, where people are “conscious” and engaged, caring about each other, the arts and the environment.

It was wonderful staying in Clare Martorana's beautiful home.

With my wonderfully hosts, Julie and John Kappas.

Serenbe’s artists and their clever rendition announcing the event at the Blue Eyed Daisy Bakeshop.

Delicious food as well as friends dropping by to join you or leave you to your work.

Ever present Serenbe audience.

Serenbe Q&A moderated by the eloquent Sam Harrison, a creativity in business expert.








Last stop: Louisville, KY

Hopping Carmichael’s Bookstore on a Sunday.

Q&A at the Clifton Center.

The magical grand finale, the Brown Hotel.

Mint Julep in Bourbon City.

Cheers and thank you for an informative, inspirational trip. Thank you Southern Circuit and all my wonderful hosts, for the opportunity to be reminded that individuals transcend all preconceived notions.

Lucky in Louisville

First screening in the tour (or rather, my first screening in the tour) tonight and it went off swimmingly. After landing in the lovely city of Louisville and getting lost on a number of identical looking industrial bridges (someone later in the evening told me they are thinking of adding MORE, which really seems unnecessary unless one has an irrational fear of riverbanks) we checked into our hotel. I am traveling this leg with the Marvelous Kathy Fletcher, a colleague and partner in crime who has come along to help with the driving and inappropriate smirking for a few days.

The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts is a beautiful soaring space in a cute built up downtown area, and the volunteers there are worth the visit alone. There was a terrific turn out for the film, almost a full house, and everyone stayed around for a lively and engaging Q&A. I love these audiences - smart, interested, all with their own interesting backstories. After the screening Tom, the Programming Director at the Center, took us to the most fabulous bar/restaurant/hotel/art space, 21c, which not only would not have been out of place in Tribeca or Notting Hill - it would raise the bar considerably. There we were wined and regaled by Tom, an assortment of darling Dans, Ted, and a charming and gracious local filmmaker, Stu, who took us under his wing for much of the evening. My favorite thing about Louisville so far is that everyone has a fascinating origin myth -- how they ended up in Louisville from NY, CA, Alabama, DC, why they stayed, and what they're doing. Clearly an interesting place and one in which I need to spend more time (especially in the 21c Bar.)

But not now sadly, as we have 8 hours of driving ahead of us, if we're lucky, tomorrow, to get to Cullowhee NC. Which I can't yet pronounce correctly, but I will have hours to practice.

Onwards.

Random pix from the Random Lunacy experience

Charlie Smoke, our great host in Mobile, who introduced us to the brilliant Eugene Walter. (His gravesite below, right, with his eloquent epitaph.)

Charles Scavullo runs the Imperial...

...and is also a Rory Gallagher fan!

Hank Williams' grave

Stef w/ "Godfather of Soul"


In Mobile, gracious and historic lodging...........>

Who says barbecue is bad for you?

Montgomery, Alabama



4-H Clubbers enjoy the screening in Montgomery!

A rainy night in Georgia...

This image now appears often in our dreams...
in an endless loop.

Self -Portrait in men's room. Lousiville KY.





The memories will be enduring. We loved every minute of this tour. Thank you to Allen Bell and all our wonderful hosts.

Finally, our video finale.

Do Brad and Angelina travel this way?

These city kids are pretty impressed

We wish we could spend more time in Louisville. As we blog this we are in the Galt House Hotel, twelve stories above a sweeping river view. We felt the vibe of this town as soon as we drove in. History, art, culture, and character galore. Horses too, or at least portraits and statues of them!

The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts is a magnificent venue, architecturally impressive, and a grand -- in every sense of the word -- place to screen.

After the screening, our gracious hosts took us to a bar/restaurant/art gallery which rivals anything in Soho or Chelsea. At that point we were definitely considering a move to Louisville, but we were pressed for time in terms of looking for a permanent place to live, since we have a six hour drive ahead of us for the next screening in western NC!

VVRRROOOOOOOM!

The Midway Point.

It's 10:00pm in Montgomery, Alabama, and after a good week on the road, I've at last managed to carve out a bit of time for some long-overdue blogging. Seven days of movies and long drives and fall leaves and good conversations, all topped off by a rather monumentous sea change for America. These are exciting, heady times, indeed.

I left Chicago, IL last Monday for Jacksonville - a 16mm projector, 80:00 of films, a rubber mask and a vocoder, and my Surinamese friend Benjen Pansa in tow. An actor in my films DAUME and TJUBA TEN, this is Benjen's first visit to the USA, and it's been quite an experience trying to translate the intricacies of the American election, the history of the South, and the vagaries of experimental film into Saramaccan for him. I'm certainly getting better at it.

After landing under grey and windy Florida skies and taking a brief turn towards the Atlantic ocean, we set up for our show in the auditorium at the Florida Community College in Jacksonville - a rather formal space with podiums, wood paneling, and a tall ceiling. The space proved a bit tough to fill, but those who traded my Experimental Ethnographies for pre-election night festivities seemed to be totally excited to be there. There was talk of documentary and ethnography and DIY ethics, among other topics. An indication of things to come.

Tuesday found us en route to Louisville, Kentucky, a town that I'd never visited but that my Southern friends seemed to be rather fond of. The streets smelled of horse and hay and the light was orangeish, all tall buildings and 24-hour skate parks and an electric charge that seemed to have everything to do with Obama vs McCain. We were staying in the Galt House, a two-tiered hotel that faced the river steamboats and was the site of a Republican celebration. Happily, we didn't have a show in Louisville until the following night, so Benjen and I wandered the city streets and drove to the (relatively) Bohemian quarter, drinking red-and-blue microbrews as the election results crawled slowly across TV screens and radio speakers. Back at the Galt House, we tried to check out the Republican party but were handedly rebuffed by security - an initial strike against Southern Hospitality, I suppose...

While I was setting up for the show in the upper floors of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, my co-director of TJUBA TEN, Brigid McCaffrey, was arriving by airplane from Los Angeles. She'd recently been in Suriname with myself and Benjen and an Irish Steadicam Operator working on a rather long 16mm film, and it was totally great to find ourselves reunited under Kentucky skies. Our first screening as a trio went down quite well - in addition to the tech details, I've been performing live narration to THE RED AND THE BLUE GODS (in the aforementioned rubber mask and _____), and still felt a bit nervous about standing in front of a relatively unfamiliar audience, but everything was all right. The crowd was enthusiastic and inquisitive, and the three of us began to figure out our own Q&A dynamic - who answers what, how much Saramaccan do I translate, etc.

Tom Trudgeon of the Kentucky Center proved to be an A+ host, and showed us the finer parts of the Louisville late-night food/drink/art scene. Cloud machines, Kara Walker prints galore, and a really well-made Manhattan or two. It was a great balance to the day's earlier encounter with a gregarious antique dealer and his impromptu tour of Lousiville architectural strategies - shotgun houses, camelbacks, etc.

The next day promised a long 6-hour drive from Louisville to Cullowhee, so we did our best to turn in early at the Galt, anticipating a sidetrip through the Great Smokey Mountains along the way...

What luck to be in this part of the world! The trees have been totally startling, a bold swatch of golds and reds and oranges, and our arrival in the GSM coincided just barely with the golden setting sun in North Carolina. Benjen was slack-jawed at the sight of rolling mountains and brilliant colors (the trees where he lives don't tend to lose their foliage), as was I. Less thrilling was the long stretch of Tennessee tourist traps that led up to the mountains - some sort of precursor to Dollywood, dinosaur rides and water parks and all.

Western Carolina University was on the other side of these mountains, past the Cherokee reservation and a great number of faux wigwams and Moccasin shops that I wish we'd had the time to investigate - the commercialization of culture is such a trap on any level, but given the particular histories at play here, it seems pretty vital to address these issues directly. Perhaps in the future.

After the Florida auditorium and the Kentucky screening space, I found myself thoroughly unable to anticipate what the next space/audience might have to offer. Touring with films and performance has been a significant part of my practice over the last few years (this being the 5th tour I've been on, but only the 2nd in the USA and the 1st that someone else has set up for me), so I'm a bit used to the unknown, but I usually get in touch with the venues myself so I have some indication as to what the set-up will be. Having said as much, it was a great surprise to find outselves in a campus theater equipped with stereo sound and a 35mm platter projector. More than we needed and were able to make use of, but certainly exciting nonetheless.

This was the third screening of this particular constellation of films and film-performance, and Brigid and I were beginning to get a good sense of What the Program Is. Questions in the after-moments tended to circulate around TJUBA TEN and issues/notions of representation, queries that I was becoming more skillful at leading towards Benjen so he could speak of his own experience as an actor/collaborator. Good stuff. The Anthropology Club sponsored the reception (though only their leader stuck around), and I found myself becoming more conscious of how my/our films were reading to audiences who were mostly unfamiliar with the terms of experimental cinema and contemporary art. Over the last decade of making films/videos, I've had a pretty good run of showing my work to people who are much more versed in its particular language, and it's been quite lovely to see these films vicariously through brand new eyes.

Okay. That's all I've got for now - more to follow...

Guerrilla Radio: Louisville, KY

Thomas and I hit a groovy little taco joint across the street from the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, which is a pretty hip and modern place. Entertainment was free and abundant at the little restaurant – with a full view of exhausted parents and their ecstatic children running late to the “High School Musical” performance that shared the arts center that night with Guerrilla Radio. It was kind of like watching a couple of Saint Bernards pull there skinny owners by the leash – parents were dragged across the pavement if they slowed down. The theater the arts center set up for us was great. Awesome seating layout, nice projector and some blue gel lights that hit the “interview stage." The crowd diverse and engaged, organizers super organized - who ended up taking use to a slick local spot that was part bar, part museum. Louisville Rocks! -- Simon

I love Louisville!

10/17 - All I can say is that Louisville is a very funky, progressive and hip town. I love it! It seems to have a little hot bed of production companies, independent filmmakers and all kinds of creative folks. Hart-Lunsford Pictures sponsored my screening at The Kentucky Center. It went really well and it drew an eclectic crowd - the Department of Labor and the Catholic Church were some of the folks in attendence. Gil Holland conducted the Q&A session and it lasted as long as the screening did!

Tom, Dan, Gil & I hit Proof on Main for dinner. they served excellent 'Tuscan influenced' American food. The restaurant was inside a really impressive museum hotel called 21c. I loved the concept. Gil took me on a tour of the city and in particular, the Gallery NuLu which was exhibiting the works of Vadis Turner - a pretty provocative artist. I also met Gil's family, which was really nice.

I'm in the Orlando Airport right now, catching a flight into Fort Lauderdale where I will then drive to Hollywood for my final screening of this tour. The flight in was a little uncomfortable since the cabin was filled with a group of children on their way to Disney World. Well, no surprise, but I'm pressed for time, so I'm off to catch my next flight.