Bill Daniel is a one-man force of filmmaking, touring, self-promoting, and screening. After he creates some documentary or another—on obscure freight train hobo culture, bike messengers, water squatters, radical environmentalists, and, most recently, old Austin punk bands who’re now legends—he hops in his biodiesel “Sailvan,” a monster machine with sails hoisted atop on which he projects his films, touring the country with his moving pictures.

This summer till now he’s taken a slightly more traditional approach, hosting his screenings indoors. Sonic Orphans, as it’s called, “Is a program that is straight from the heart,” he says. “It's media geekery—you know, really rare pieces of 16mm film. I tend to talk about the clips in pretty technical terms, like ‘emulsion position’ and ‘high speed reversal, with bad processing.’ The early Austin punk footage is pretty dear.”

The tour was supposed to end yesterday, but he tacked on one more show in Bisbee, “the freakiest town in the USA,” he says. He stopped off there one night on tour and had to go back. While there, he took a break to write to us about the Sonic Orphans tour. Take it away, Bill…

The tour has been epic from the get go; for example, on the first night on the road the charging system for the Ford diesel smoked out, so I've spent all summer nursing the electrics in the van trying to keep it going. For the last month I've simply had to take the batteries out of the van and put them on a charger in order to drive the next day. This is not the right way to go. However, I haven't missed a show yet.

Oh yeah, how are the shows... the program has been a blast, it's been getting funnier as the summer has progressed and I keep pushing my spoken presentation more towards the PT Barnum. This is the first time I've been out showing things on actual film in a long time. Being that it is 2010, there are a lot of people at the screenings who have never been in a room with a 16mm chugging away. Dead media revival tent show. Step right up kids, what you are about to see will probably blow up in the middle of the show!

At the end of these tours I usually get the feeling like I want to keep going. There is a certain comfort to knowing what you are supposed to do: get there, set it up, run it, sell some stuff, pack it in the van again, and drive to another town. But I have no idea what I'm supposed to do once I get home, which happens to be a new town for me.

When [sometimes-collaborator and tour partner] Vanessa Renwick and I would get back home after a month on the road we would pull up and park in front of her house and then just sit there in the van, like we were already home sitting there in the comfy van seats, staring out the windshield, like that was the most natural place to be.

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