Riding with Jesus: Event Recap

Jesus Angel Garcia performed elements of his debut transmedia novel badbadbad at the Antenna Gallery on June 25, along with Hannah Miet. His performance was cringe-inducing and creepy at times, but always entertaining. Miet’s short reading was touching and funny. Garcia has been keeping a travelogue of the tour he’s embarked on in support of badbadbad at Electric Literature and recently posted about his stop in New Orleans:

New Orlins (don’t say New Or-leans, nor N’awlins) was a good badbadbad town for the full-blown multimedia jam. I shared the mic with the irrepressible Hannah Miet, Brooklyn native interning at the local daily newspaper, and we went with the “Live Nude Words, Music & Movies!” bill at Antenna Gallery, a sweet space in a quiet neighborhood where all the seats were filled with artists and art lovers, one of whom, Leah Meltzer, joined me on stage for a cold reading of a romantic scene from the novel. When she came to the word “pussy,” she said, “It.” When I asked her about this later, she said she wanted to say “cunt.” She gave me her phone number.

Ms. Miet opened the show with a piece from a book she’s writing about her brother who suffers from a complicated relationship with reality. He’d be right at home in New Orleans, I thought, as she described teaching him as a teenager how a penis goes in (and out) of a vagina. On second thought, the city would eat him alive. Not his sister, though.

Make no mistake, Hannah Miet is a goddess: poet, essayist, journalist, fearless grad student in a discipline that’s on its way out as a viable career choice. Her intellect and eloquence will always trump any hair she may shed in the shower. She’s one of the first real-feeling people I met on Twitter way back when. I’m doing this tour, in part, to see if the digital personas match the flesh-and-blood. So far, not bad at all.

Read Garcia’s full post at Electric Literature.

The crowd was as colorful as Garcia's language