This is a trailer for Phenomenal World Cinema's first feature-length documentary. I'm proud to now offer it on DVD. By 1997, I'd been a traveling musician for 5 years. May thru October were spent on the road, hitchhiking, street-performing as a one-man-band, criss-crossing the USA & Europe dozens of times, In winters, I'd stay in New York City, often at the apartment of poet Allen Ginsberg. He was a good friend, a great teacher, & I'd accompany him on guitar for various performances. In April of '97 I witnessed his passing. With a mind now pondering Death (and my other usual obsession, sex!), I hit the road again, only this time I brought a videocamera!

Get on the road and discuss deathbed manners with urban speculator Geoff Manaugh (mastermind pioneer of bldgblog . blogspot . com) in Chapel Hill, sample drunken ecstatic southerners at the Memphis Blues Festival, stay the night at the World's Most-Cluttered Home in Oklahoma City, visit close Ginsberg friends Steven Taylor (of The Fugs) and poet Anne Waldman in Boulder, share in a titillating liaison in Pocatello, Idaho, alight upon naked hippies singing in an Olympia, Washington shower, savor the vibrant musical flavors of Seattle's Folklife Festival, verse yourself in drug-addled philosophy from Portland street kids, discover the true identity of Bigfoot in Ashland, then head to San Francisco to meet Frank Harrison, a man intent on blowing up the White House. Back east in Vermont, spend a month in group retreat at Karme Choling Buddhist Meditation Center before returning to the Big Wormy Apple. All this, while getting to know a multitude of car & truck-driving cattlemen, immigrants. prostitutes, river rats, paleontologists, ex-cons, & reg'lar blue-collar men who tell often-hilarious stories to filmmaking hitchhikers!
Music by Marc Israel.
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