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By Benjamin Wachs, May 20, 2011
"Burlesque and a bullhorn: Jesús Ángel García at the helm.
Jesús Ángel García had intended for the launch party of his underground novel BadBadBad to be a "transmedia" extravaganza that would change the notion of what a book launch could be. He didn't quite get there.
"This is a transmedia novel by a Luddite writer ... so we might have some issues," he said.
And issues there were. The Fivepoints Arthouse projector wouldn't acknowledge García's laptop for a while. There was supposed to be an album that went along with the book. (There is none yet.) There was supposed to be a movie, too. (Only certain sections have been completed.)
"I have a complicated relationship with technology," García said.
So what he ended up with was just a kickass book launch party -- the kind that opens with a woman passing around whiskey shots in Dixie cups from a platter. But he's working on it. And although "transmedia" might not be the clearest vision, whatever it ends up being just might be the future of literature -- if the damn projector will work (which it did eventually).
Here's how he describes it:
"The kids are really into the YouTube, but they don't read books. So I had the idea that I'd write a book and extend it over all these platforms, so that even if people don't read underground books they'd find the novel. It started out as a basically a publicity piece, and it just kept extending until the transmedia publicity was influencing the book in important ways. So this documentary about the themes of the book has really changed the way it developed."....
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