MODERNISM, MADNESS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
As a boy Pali Weidlinger was forced to take fencing lessons. He was never much of a sportsman… and he absolutely loathed fencing. In the 1930s duels were still frequent in Hungary. Being good with a foil or a sabre ensured that you would be able to defend your honor. Among university students dueling […]
I am in possession of two curious drawings made my by father in late 1939. They are cartoon sketches of Pouqui and Mouqui, the love names my parents gave each other. The drawing shows them settled into their apartment in La Paz, Bolivia. Furniture and personal effects are carefully labeled in French. By naming these […]
When I went to interview Mira Nakashima, the daughter of the famous craftsman, George Nakashima, I had the sense of stepping into another world, completely removed from the bold urban sculptures and structures I had been documenting. A small woodland hamlet, informed by the Japanese aesthetic, is the site of the George Nakashima […]
When I was a boy my father shaped human figures out of sand on the beach in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Sometimes I asked him to cover me with sand and shape it around my body, so that I could be a part of the Sand People family. There was something magical about this and […]
January 22nd was my mother’s birthday. Born in 1912, she would have been 109-years old. Also, at 9:00 AM it started to rain in Calaveras County on the western slope of the Sierra Mountains. It was a welcome event in what, so far, is turning out to be a pretty dry winter. At 9:05 AM […]
I have been struggling to write you a seasonally and COVID-appropriate letter for several weeks and not coming up the words to express how I feel, and how we are experiencing life in this time. Last night I was listening to an audio book of Viktor Frankel’s lectures, just published in English for the […]
My father’s earliest memory is of lying on a red Persian carpet under a brown dining table. He is three years old. He is trying to decipher the symmetrical patterns in the carpet… as if they signified something; something hidden, yet knowable. He tries to explain this to his mother but he lacks the words. […]
Imagine returning to the place of your childhood and, half a century later, finding it completely unchanged; the land, the house, the furniture, the light and the smells. Such was my experience in the summer of 2014, when I had just started working on the Restless Hungarian book and film. I had been given a […]