En route, on the second leg of my journey, to the 2001 Chicago Underground Film Festival having just left Pittsburgh over an hour late. I don’t care myself, but I am concerned about my picker-upper at O’Hare. Hope she has the intuitive nature to be fashionably late, as most airplanes are, or at least checked my flight # on the web or over the phone. I detest being an inconvenience to anyone, which I am already so doing by staying in her apartment for the next 4 days. But I am thoroughly pleased to have a chum to pal around the city with, a city I am only familiar with in theory, not in practice, as I’ve never been to Chi-town before today.

But I find the CUFF people to be pleasant, encouraging people, members of my mailing list since the Underground Film Journal’s review of the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival and drivers of traffic to my site by spreading word of its existence to indie filmmakers. I look forward to meeting the fest’s director, Bryan Wendorf, in person. He’s good people.

The CUFF actually started last night, opening with James Fotopoulos‘ brilliant Back Against the Wall. It’s no big deal as I already saw the film back in March, but I don’t know if I’ll ever have the opportunity to see it ever again, a thought that saddens me to a degree. I check James’ website periodically to see if his films are available on video, but not yet.

This has been a rather monotonous, pointless introduction, unfortunately, this has been a rather unremarkable flight. Clear weather, no grossly obnoxious passengers, no hassles at either airport. No good stories to be told as of yet. But soon! Soon I will be in Chicago visiting the famed theater outside of which Dillinger was gunned down, the Biograph, taking in a variety of thrilling and exotic, and hopefully deliriously offensive, underground films.

Continue on to 2001 CUFF: Coffin Joe & Inside The Eye Of Scorpio Rising.