The first time I saw him, he was half-animated, rotoscoped, as the techies call it, a combination of live action video and superimposed drawings. He was strolling along the Brooklyn Bridge spewing poetry to an impressionable young dreamer in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, which anyone who saw the movie knows, is a dream. He told the young boy, and by extension, me, his audience,
“…this entire thing we’re involved in called ‘The World,’ is an opportunity to experience how exciting alienation can be…”(click here to watch the 2-min. scene).
The second time I saw him was a month ago, which was about ten years later, though it was some time before I made the connection. This time he was in the flesh, and yet he was nearly just as animated. He was still in New York, but in a different capacity. He was working as a tour guide behind the microphone of a double-decker tour bus belting out the words of the George Gershwin song, But Not For Me, to a befuddled tourist audience, exchanging forgotten lyrics with tone deaf hums. When he gets to the end, he gives credit:
“Written by a young, ambitious, desperate New Yorker, named, Gershwin, who lived three blocks up on the left.” After a moment of confused silence, a delayed clap slowly emerges from the bus. “Thank you, now,” he says, “Welcome to New York City.”
And welcome to Bennet Miller’s documentary, The Cruise (available on Netflix-On-Demand), an urban romance story in which the male lead, tour guide extraordinaire Timothy “Speed” Levitch, has a wild affair with the female protagonist, The City, looking nearly as lovely in this film as she does in Woody Allen’s movies. And it’s not even film, it’s black and white digital video, one of the first movies to prove to critics and audiences alike, that DV was a viable format, not restricted to fathers videoing their firstborn’s first footsteps. A decade or so later, the Oscar for best cinematography would go to a movie shot mostly in digital, Slumdog Millionaire.
Click here to watch scenes from the film.
In case you had any doubts about Speed being anything more than a goofball, a few minutes into the film, Speed’s double-decker floats down 7th Ave, his high-pitched expressive voice providing a lyrical narration for two floors of tourist riders as his words build in momentum to a rapid clip.
“This is 7th Avenue South in front of you, the modern semi-expressway of Greenwich Village, one of those rare districts that occurs throughout human history. Four and a half blocks from where Edgar Allen Poe has a short-term residence, deep in the heart of his opium addiction. Although he has many residences during that delusional time, he writes “The Raven” at 61 Carmine st. Six blocks from where Henry Miller decides he hates New York City forever and moves to Paris, two blocks from where Willa Cather lives, three blocks from where E.E. Cummings lives, 3 blocks from where Sherwin Anderson lives, 4 blocks from where H.L Mencken lives, 4 blocks from where Theodore Dreiser lives, 5 blocks from where Nathaniel West lives, 5 blocks from where D.H. Lawrence lives, lasciviously…”(and on and on he goes).
After re-watching the film for a third time a couple weeks or so ago, curiosity got the best of me and I googled Speed and saw that he had moved to Kansas City to, among other things, try and start a touring company, but would be appearing in New York to do a few select tours on Mother’s day weekend. The tours were a bit out of my poor man’s price range, but for $20, myself and a guest could see Speed live at some yoga studio in the East Village where he would be doing a performance of some kind on what was last Saturday night. Naturally, I dragged the lovely Shula Ponet with me.
It had been some time since I had set foot in a yoga studio. As a stiff man, I felt alien, out of my inflexible element; and was further dismayed to find out it was a sit-on-the-floor event. But when Shula and I found a spot in the corner of the room next to a pile of jumbled notes sprawled across the floor, I was happy.
Not only did this lead me to the deduction that I would soon be sitting right under the man himself for the duration of the performance, but more importantly that his chaotically strewn about notes were an indication that the freewheeling guy I witnessed in The Cruise had not been compromised or worn by whatever a decade and a half of life, post mid-twenties, can do to suppress a man’s soul. Though I had just seen Speed in the film, I had seen the Speed of yore. The Cruise was shot over a decade ago; a fact that is made strikingly clear by the presence of the World Trade Center towers--Speed's interaction with them is unforgettable.
He is a man who seems to age like a bottle of wine, the older he gets, and the older you get, the more refreshing he is, and this is mirrored in his physical appearance. Since seeing him last, his Jew-fro had more life, and his face had rounded, not as a marker of lethargy, but rather as a testament to his fluidity, and suspicion of all that is square. Unfortunately, someone had an ill-conceived idea to allow the 3-man accompanying electro-band to take the center-stage, stashing Speed into the corner next to nobody’s like me. Though his spoken songs were driving the room’s energy, I don’t think I would have been alone had I started a chant, less music, more Speed.
Though his poems, songs, and ramblings, cross numerous forms and form many crosses, if there is a unifying theme to the chaos, he is challenging his audience, his tourists bus riders, cult-followers, moviegoers, fellow-pedestrians, and I imagine everyone who is fortunate enough to meet him, to awaken to the extraordinary madness of the world; to wrestle with, acknowledge, absorb, and inhale it, until it its fragrance intoxicates the blood and makes it boil to a point of awakening.
My writer’s voice does not do his sonic one justice, but among his repeating words last weekend (bracketed by improvised spacy music): “…Any Bodhisattva will tell you that matter, just doesn’t matter, and yet, it does, and that’s just what’s the matter with matter…Don’t let those going through the motions, get out of this night alive, without having emotions….” In a scene in the cruise, as he watches his audience board the double-decker he tells the camera,
“I am learning slowly in my cruising career that you cannot expect people to transform in an afternoon. They are not going to rewrite their souls, and re-tool every day that they’ve lived thus far before they come onto the double-decker bus, and yet I expect that, I expect the total transformation of their life, an entire rewrite of their souls, I am fighting minute to minute, every moment that they’re on the bus, to make everyday they’ve lived thus far seem as some abstract wreckage that might have happened but is probably a delusion, and that this is the first real day of their lives.”
Having a front row seat allowed me to hang with the man himself over the course of the night. After finding out he had given tours on buses in San Francisco I asked him which he liked doing better. He said San Francisco was a breeze. He could do 6 tours in one day. Here, a double-decker bus loop of the city could take over 3 hours, he said, and just crossing the narrow island of Manhattan to go through Rockefeller Center often took 45 minutes.
"In New York, that loop made me feel like I was in one of Dante's layers of hell."
N (sarcastically): So you preferred New York, then?
Speed (seriously): Exponentially.
