I Seem to Live [vol.1] The New York Diaries. vol. 1, 1950-1969 Jonas Mekas/Anne König Review
wrote during juice cleanse too crass, delete or rewrite
Fluxus to the Factory, significant art collectives slip by the pages alongside bagels, ham, and parks, a promising affair for those sensitive over old new york. The delivery is transparent and open hearted. Jovial moments are jovial for reasons one expects, and sorrowful ones like. A very predictable nature of articulation and sentiment.
Aphorisms too. The likes of Matisse comparing good art to a good armchair, or Ezra Pound calling artists the antennae of our race, which are not bad lines in themselves, but perhaps the feeblest lines left by these men.
"Roots of trees in the park; a woman walking along the park road with a child on each side; flowers on the roadside. I walked across the park. There was this fantastic smell in the air of summer noon and flowers. I filmed a few white bells on the roadside. The sun remains our aim. The artist believes in the aristocracy of the spirit - the Establishment of the spirit. Man's spirit is eternally in avant-garde-that is true avant-garde (...) LSD, everybody wants to take LSD. (...) Both LSD and learning are illusions."
Perfectly innocent incipient buds of phrases that might yet promise depth of spirit but are then closed bathetically with platitudes, and then even the aforementioned flower becomes limited in its beauty only to the meaning that the subsequent phrase allows, and in short wilts.
There are many beautiful passages, and there are perhaps very few diaries that describe partaking in bacchanals with Tennessee Williams, but the issue is the prolonged matter that one has to go through in order to reach them.
There are photos too of Jonas Mekas who has the congenial face of innocence looming with latent innocence, and if there is anything that may soothe an uneventful read is the provisional communion with such a decent man. At least he wasn't a communist.