If you are a friend on Facebook, and not relegated to being a fan, feel free to skip this post. It’s well-traveled turf if you’re in my mix like that.

Tomorrow I go back to L.A., sort of as a changed man. But not really. At this point, I feel more transformed by the shit that went down inside Sundance cinemas than I do by the rather profound shit that affected my career.

Where to begin? A good place might be at the first screening of our animated short about Dock Ellis. That was Sunday, my second full day in Park City. It was cool to chill out with Reggie Miller in the green room.  I got him to sign a promo dealie for Winning Time, Dan Klores’ fantastic ESPN dock about Miller’s rivalry with Spike Lee’s New York Knicks. Ever gracious, Reggie signed the thing for Forrest and Wyatt, who are Hoosier-connected sports fanatics but don’t know a damn thing about the Pacers-Knicks donnybrooks from back inna day. Reggie wrote “Boom Baby!” and I think they know what that means.

Sunday wore my ass out, emotionally. It felt redemptive to sit behind my old ESPN bosses and biggest NY supporters and see/hear them lead the gales of laughter that would follow our film around Park City like herpes or a stalker or some other (perhaps more positive) such shit. Then, unexpectedly, at ESPN’s party, my mood crashed. Seeing Terrell Owens and Adrien Brody didn’t bum my ass out, but waiting to get a word with Bill Simmons in V.I.P. totally sank my shit. I was like, Man, I was supposed to be that nigga. What the fuck? How am I waiting behind these fools to talk to him?

Then I went home with my girl and creative partner and drank and bitched and argued for approximately 36 hours. (”Your negativity is turning people off!” “Isn’t that ironic, coming from you?” Coat grab. Door slam. Elevator wait. James Beach matchbook strike. Cigarette burn beneath falling show.) We did awesome work on our Dock Ellis feature film treatment though.

On Tuesday came the short film awards. Our collaborators, artist James Blagden and No Mas impresario Chris Isenberg, convinced me to grow the fuck up and actually attend the event. To make a long-ish story nudge the neighborhood of brevity, we almost won the jury prize. I ain’t going into particulars about the HBO-sponsored short that beat us, ‘cuz I’m told the film is very good. But hella juror grumbling made its way to my ears and, as mentioned earlier, I didn’t leave my room unless I had to. The general tenor of the rancor had something to do with the award’s  intended spirit and our joint being the the embodiment of guerilla filmmaking.

Crowding the awards party stage with Neille, Chris and James — “Look how sad they all are,” I whispered to Chris while looking out at the also-rans — I understood that we were smack-dab in the middle of an indelible moment. Here are this week’s honorable mentions for most unique moment:

Reggie Miller joking from the podium that he might have performed better in a certain iconic loss to the Knicks if he’d dropped LSD beforehand; feeling compelled to “snub” Manohla Dargis on a bus headed to a screening of Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child; hot-tubbing with my girl and Ondi Timoner and her hell-bent on diving (and beautiful) son; telling a Sundance TV interviewer that I was on acid and desperately needed to touch her furry hat.

And there was the signing of an autograph and the photograph with a black tourist couple from Atlanta on my first whole day in town. They’d not seen that soon-to-be-renowned piece, but treated me like a celebrity presumably because I’d crashed the supremely white world of Hollywood independent film. (Park City during Sundance makes Chico look like Harlem. [The old Harlem.] It intermittently sickened my gut to know that my town’s biggest industry is apparently comfortable with such a degree of racial exclusivity. And I know it hurts my career to say this — if you’ve been reading this far and long, you know I am quite careless about that — but controlling the world narrative is a crucial component of maintaining white supremacy. That goes whether you actively approve of racism or not.)

Not to be too deep for disco. That’s an expression I learned from my man Michael Wharton, on the Internet this week.  It’s officially my favorite shit. A credo, if you will. From now on, I’m easing back. Taking things as they come. Jumping back on my bike and MTA to hang on the Eastside with my boys and Sol, in hopes that (among other things) they’ll one day know how great the Knicks-Pacers thing was, back inna day. Ain’t a damn bit of it more complicated than disco, my peeps, at the end of the day.

Thank you, Robert Redford, for a beautiful collection of memories. And thank you, Howard Zinn, for writing the playbook.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 7:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.