Up to Speed, an original show produced by the online video service Hulu, is a series of half-hour American travelogues directed by the indie superstar Richard Linklater and featuring Timothy “Speed” Levitch as himself. For those who don’t know him, Levitch is a tour guide extraordinaire. Each episode of Up to Speed, now in its first season, provides an astonishing, even touching renewal of the covenant Levitch seems to have signed in his youth: an unbreakable bond between his psyche, his viewers, and the urban-symbolic mythos that humans construct in cities. But it is also something else—something unexpected, and layered.
Levitch and Linklater first worked together in the director’s fully animated feature, Waking Life (2002). There, Linklater’s fluid, rotoscope-based animation captured the psychedelic verbal wonder as he articulated his nonstop, discursive elaboration on cities, signs, and significance, liberally sprinkled with quotations from and allusions to Federico García Lorca, Thomas Mann, and Alberto Giacometti. Linklater’s short film-meditation on Sept. 11 titled Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor featured Mr. Levitch discoursing into the camera at Ground Zero and Wall Street and won the award for Best Documentary Short-Special Jury Mention at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.