January 23 marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Jonas Mekas, known as “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema”. In celebration of his singular life, Spector Books will release I Seem to Live: The New York Diaries 1950-1969, Volume 1, a whirlwind chronicle of the Lithuanian-American artist’s transformative impact on the New York art scene.
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“Jonas was a very open-minded person, fast, very sharp, and at the same time,” says publisher Anne König who edited the book, which picks up where I Had Nowhere Left to Go, his extraordinary account of survival in a Nazi labour camp during World War II, left off. Writing was an instinct Mekas always possessed, a way to chart his life and make sense of it.
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Working from a 2,000-page document spanning 60 years, Mekas shaped the diaries into a two-part series that offers a vibrant tour of the New York underground featuring stories of friends and colleagues such as Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, John Cage, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Barbara Rubin, Maya Deren, and Jack Smith, to name but a few.
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Read the Full Story at AnOther Man
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