MODERNISM, MADNESS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
When I was very young, on my first job as a producer and director, I was dispatched to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to produce some dramatic recreations from the life of the 17th century astronomer, Johannes Kepler, for the PBS television series Cosmos. The year was 1978 and Czechoslovakia was firmly under the thumb of communist hegemony. […]
On New Year’s Eve day I put my chainsaw in the back of our old pick-up and drove over to our neighbors to cull some firewood from a huge pile of branches and small trunks that Vicki and Dave cleared from their land. I wrote to you about Dave’s sudden passing a couple of […]
Sharon and I are taking the twelve days of Christmas as a stay-at-home retreat. We’ve been talking about what we are going to do with these twelve precious days and there’s the rub. We are so conditioned to “doing” in our world… buying presents, making dinner for friends, getting and decorating the tree and getting […]
SNOWIN’ ALL OVER THE WORLD Music, lyrics and performance by John Whitehead.
1937 and 2018. Two creative communities, then and now. In the next post Paul finds a creative home in the London atelier of the man who become his mentor, László Moholy Nagy. I discover one in Richmond, California. Back in the day when I completed the final cut of a documentary film, I took the […]
Paul Weidlinger died of a stroke at eighty-five. At sixty-five I have been having intimations of mortality. I wrote about the passing of our dear friend, David, quite unexpectedly three weeks ago. His brain bleed started with a slight headache, nothing he thought he should be worried about until it was too late. I thought […]
Some of you may have noticed that my posts are not impeccable. You may have found a typo here and there. Some short-circuit in my brain causes me to often mix up the words “you” and “your,” as well as “and” and “an.” Maybe it is genetic. My father, when he was enrolled in school […]
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 […]
Where does a story begin? Did The Restless Hungarian begin in New York in 1996, when I sat down and interviewed my frail, eighty-two year old father about his life? Or after he died, in 1999, when my stepmother mailed me a huge box of his letters, personal papers and photographs? Or did it begin […]
Lately I have been spending my days in a cave. As a child did you ever throw a blanket over a table or some chairs and crawl into the dark mysterious space that was created? My cave feels a bit like this. Its walls are grey soft blankets, especially designed to absorb sound. The space […]