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! Featuring music by Marc Israel. For more info on Phenomenal World Cinema please visit: www.myspace.com/marcisraelfilms
