The Alphabet

An exploration of the consummate American coming-of-age ritual as it is observed in middle America.

Arriflesh is a diary film recording a period I spent, very much at loose ends, dividing my time between Vermont and New York City. During those months I was also filming Horseflesh, so they are companion films. Various friends filled my universe in that confused, interim period: Cindy Revel, Margery Cohen, Tony Heath, and a bearded neighbor who was perpetually collecting scrap wood and who eventually made me a very complete astrological chart. In imitation of Jack Kerouac's Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums, I would walk up into the snowy hills every afternoon to meditate alone among the trees, with the same results as Kerouac…nada and a sense of the stony muteness of nature. This whole period was colored by memories of a teenage cousin who’d shot himself in a house just a few miles away, two years before. Like my bearded neighbor I was collecting scraps in the hope that they would someday come together into a cohesive whole.

Alaska is the visual artifact of a two-week trip, in 1976, to Homer, Alaska, where my sister was marrying the son of a homesteader. Many of the issues that drove Concern for the City are present in this film, which preceded and inspired it. As compared to New York City, the setting for Concern, Alaska is a place where nature still overwhelms and has to be respected, where man and his works remain just a tiny dot on the rugged landscape. This is changing, of course, and the Alaska mindset is to try to control, vanquish and feed from the natural environment. Yet it is a far more even contest in the north.

A diary film, recording the summer weeks I spent with Robin Hill at her cousin’s house in Vermont where she’d been hired as a baby-sitter.

Influenced by Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests” I set about recording some of the artists who populated my world in Kansas City during the 70s.

This is a diary film shot at the same time as my edited sound film, Alaska. The film reflects my awe as I accompanied my sister, Olga, a marine biologist, and her research partner Beth as they conducted whale research in Prince William Sound, among ice floes and cetaceous beasts larger than our small inflated boat.

A cat climbs a screen, men squat on the pavement to gamble behind a 7-11, solarized film warbles in and out. A personal, quiet diary film, portraying an early apartment, an early cat, an early relationship in Kansas City. Uses self-conscious Eisenstein cutting to convey the indolent, charged air-before-a-storm atmosphere that pervaded that era.

I have little recollection of filming this except for reacting with a kind of instinctive horror to the subjugation of these large animals, and to some extent the people, to tawdry entertainment. It was a small, shabby, improvised outdoor circus somewhere in Long Island under harsh lights at night. Even back then, it was rare to find such a display without camp or self-recognition of any kind.

"...contains a cacophony of visual imagery, taken from personal life and imagination, set to the Mother's of Invention Song which is cynical about love. An early film containing hints fo later imagery and concerns." P.Z.

Wheels/Trails draws inspirations from John Cage’s cut-and-splice sound collage, “Williams Mix,” which he composed using chance operations by throwing I-Ching sticks. Wheels/Trails juxtaposes actors speaking inane commercial dialogue that was randomly gleaned from television by means of a recorder programed by weather statistics, with film projection of native beans, feathers, and squash in slow motion, to make the point that the roads and highways of our urbanized civilization are built over ancient footpaths worn by Native peoples. Ultimately, the performance expresses the idea that we live in a mashup of cultures, where the present is a thin veneer stretched over the past. A droning electronic soundtrack by the band Short-Term Memory also suggests a missing presence. - P. V. Z.

Horseflesh is an artifact of a year spent living on a horse farm in Vermont listening to Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. A meditation on country living, and our weird, anthropomorphic relationship to horses.

The Earth is warmed by the Sun, then cooled by the Moon. A Horse is rounding the corner.

A diary film, the record of an interim period, winter with two cats at the bungalow at 4111 Oak Street in Kansas City, Missouri. Practicing slight-of-hand magic, a congruence of film magic, the back yard where I used to study the ethnography of cats and park the car on Sunday, listening to gospel music on the AM radio.

Based on the idea of Indonesian shadow puppet plays, which combine popular songs and Hindu mythology with political satire and broad comedy, None Saved satirically plays off of the events and mass emotions surrounding Jimmy Carter’s drive for the presidency in 1976. In the film, a Javanese-style monster rises up through several incarnations until it reaches a kind of shadow-cultural Nirvana. I often made paper shadow puppets based on images of white people I found on Chinese and Japanese toy packaging, thus reversing a trend in American animation to stereotype Asian features. None Saved was strongly influenced by Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, which presented similar tactics of disassociation and, according to the artist, a trek to heaven and back.

A short documentary by Hali Lee and Peter von Ziegesar.

Daily life in an alien city. This is an early diary film trying to formalize my sojourn in cold, naked Chicago in four chapters, presented as four 78 rpm records dropping one by one.