From: Joe Portale (jportale@gci-net.com)
Date: 07/06/01-09:11:25 PM Z
Damn Judy,,,,, write that book!!!!
Joe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Judy Seigel" <jseigel@panix.com>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca>
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 9:37 PM
Subject: alternative film maker (Maya Deren)
>
> Joe wrote:
>
> > > Maya Deren was an avant garde film maker in the '40's. Not
> that obscure of
> > > a reference, m'lady. ;-)
>
> Actually, it seems to be. Younger Americans unless they are film buffs
> never heard of her..... though hardly a season goes by I haven't found a
> film crew from Hungary or wherever camped on the front stoop of "the
> shrine" (ie, our house), or begging the current top floor tenant for a
> peek at the hallowed ground.
>
> Stop by if you're ever in town & I'll show you the "Maya Deren Memorial
> Wall," that is, the curve in the hall where they had to remove and replace
> the sewer stack down through 5 stories after Maya filled it with solid
> concrete -- from flushing paper towels, newspaper, kitty litter and drano
> down the toilet. Happened before we acquired the premises, but I got the
> story from the plumber. She insisted she hadn't done anything wrong --
> she'd been flushing that stuff for years and it just stopped up now. "Must
> be something wrong with the plumbing."
>
> When she died suddenly and her young husband (married again before you cd
> say "Meshes of the Afternoon") left for Japan with new wife, I had to go
> in & clean the place up -- spent a day on the bathroom floor scraping cat
> shit out of the cracks between the tiles with a nail file. The male
> pherome spray had soaked into the old wood floor of apartment AND halls
> (the boys were always trying to go out to play). Sanding & a coat of
> varnish tamped down the stench, but for years we got eau de kitty litter
> and fish cat food when the place had been closed up for a while.
>
> While cleaning up, I found a picture of Maya provocatively posed in a
> bubble bath on the top shelf of a closet, and in one of my greatest life
> mistakes -- THREW IT OUT! I was frazzled & just wanted to be quit of her,
> but .... the Maya cult (there's a 2 volume book even, detailing how she
> built "The Myth of Maya Deren") would have died for it. Imagine selling
> that on ebay !
>
> To bring this back to "alternative photography" -- I tried several times
> to like (or even *get*) Meshes of the Afternoon & a couple of her other
> films. Perhaps my lack of sensitivity, but I thought they were obvious,
> boring, pretentious, and artsy-fartsy. Of course the French thought Jerry
> Lewis was a genius. And speaking of French, Maya has been given the
> epithet "first woman experimental film maker," but there was at least one
> other before her -- a French woman.
>
> cheers,
>
> Judy
>
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