Diary

This time, the call of the west sends me packing to Oregon, California and Arizona. You too can experience the dizzy delights of a whirlwind tour and witness wonders seen through the savage eye of a Sony camcorder. Actually, the adventure is rather mellow in mood and should spare the viewer a need for the ever looming and inevitable barf bag. See Phoenix in all its rocky royalty! Relish in the student clogged ivy halls of Portland! Immerse yourself in a technicolor rendering of Irvine, California.

A chance encounter with a sober student reveals the mystery of a woodland wonder that has left a mark on his youthful psyche just as it leaves huge footprints on the forest floor. A short meditation on a tall terror in the trees that shade shadowy giants from the glare of sanity.

A mother sews; a son yearns for meat; a friend relives the past via glamour shots of a forgotten slab of cheesecake that ferments off-camera. A slice of life with the bowl of cherries missing. A brief visit to a corner of the world that locks itself away with crunchy carbohydrates and six-inch protein protuberances.

Tippi the she-devil gets a little playmate of the feline persuasion while I dangle about the puppet populated premises with a head full of scholastic memories that delineate several teaching gigs featuring the fruits of our intercourse.

"Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there—you just don’t have to bother reading it!"
—New York Video Festival (2002)

George visits underground filmmaker Robert Nelson in Milwaukee, and they brave the cold on Lake Michigan.

The viewer meets a grab-bag of gabby folks from here and abroad as I drop by to see them or they come to my apartment for tea and sympathy. You also get to visit endangered film showcases and see people who are now either deceased or divorced.

A combination birthday/going away party proceeds at its own shallow pace, while revellers reminisce inwardly amid a paralyzing atmosphere of mixed drinks and emotions that choke all but the young at heart and body.

Male escorts and crytozoologists battle behemoths and bulemics in this student-teacher collaboration about undying evil and those that escape it via the LOVE CANAL.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. 

"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."

— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018

This final weather diary travels through some rough inner and outer domains.  Social interactions blend more smoothly than the clash of air masses which threaten to clobber a prairie town in a vortex of violence.

Flashbacks and flashpoints flare-up along with thunderheads that loom and boom with vibrations of doom, their every move charted with vivid vibrancy on videographic maps which detail developing devastation.

Desire and death are in the air along with some aromatic wisps of ethnic edibles, so be sure to sniff it all.

A collection of literary and visual art is exhibited in the home of a noted author who displays great hospitality to the horrors and kinks of artistic expression. The viewer gets an up-close look at things best left behind the sofas of decent housing.

An ex-student of mine opens up in the privacy of her home and shows me her etchings (watercolors) as we talk of art and things that slip under the fabric of daily attire. - George Kuchar

Attempting to apologize for the lack of good weather in Weather Diary 3, George arrives in Milwaukee only to find the drought back in full swing. Since there’s not enough good weather, the tape becomes a social diary against the backdrop of the Motivation Of The Carcasoids project.

A self-help speaker encourages self-reflection. Friends in Chicago hang out.

This title is also available on Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008, A collection of Minax's early videos that together create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s.

A quickie side trip to the Virginia Film Festival highlights some nice, fall foliage and a few fleeting faces as the camera probes a sculptural artifact or two before abruptly shutting down.

The police phoned. They left a message on the machine. They said he was dead. The video unwinds through stories of sex for rent, unclaimed bodies, cigarette burns, and other monuments of life’s long run from wall to wall. Cut the Parrot is three grotesque comedies in one: the stories of Gerry, Susan, and Albert. Songs of hope and heartbreak spill from the mouths of the performers. The order of impersonation rules.

An epistolary, musical reimagining of Wuthering Heights by Branwell Brontë — the tubercular, alcoholic and opium-addicted brother of Emily Brontë. When Branwell — the ne’er-do-well, tubercular brother of the Brontë sisters — discovered that Emily was writing her first novel, he offered to be her editor. Once he realized that he was the model for the alcoholic Hindley Earnshaw character, he reimagined the story as a musical memoir of his own life with Hindley as the hero.

Love is in the air as newlyweds chomp on cake, brides marry werewolves, and hatchets fall on adulterous heads. Amid the real-life romance is mixed the real-life business of directing my film students in a tale of run-away passions for the silver screen. 

This is a journey to El Paso, Texas, where the Super-8 filmmaker Willie Varella and I have a dialogue amid domestic routines, motel accommodations, and emotional baggage, indicative of life on the road. 

Making art and movies becomes the overall thrust of this foray into hives of humming wanna-bees being all that they can be thanks to the magic of chalk and cinema. Through it all there trudges the arthritic frame of he who samples the honey pot along with gobs of eggplant parmigiana, etc., etc., etc.

LYNDALE is a story of shifting family dynamics, told through the relationship of two brothers. Shot on ten different video formats, this experimental documentary is both the story of a Chicago family, and a record of the digital revolution in the early 2000s. The piece takes place over a six-year period during which filmmakers Oli Rodriguez and Victoria Stob shared a house with Rodriguez’s brother, Jeff.

Alone in an Oklahoma motel room with a mute companion, the talkative one speaks the language of memory as pussycats feast from a canned cornucopia. Murals plaster the vacancy intrinsic to American angst as horse tails whip from annoyance the nagging gnats of tomorrow’s dung: a heap of uncertainty made impotent by the swashes of chipped paint that depict a netherworld of faded dreams and nostalgic neurosis for the future impaired.

In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody.

— Jeremy Hoevenaar

Kuchar makes it to the Isis Oasis resort just in time to catch the marriage vows of his friends Rebecca and Steve. Transposing the myth of Isis in their union, Kuchar tries to make sense of this recreated paradise, this gathering of God’s creatures, and the fates of Rebecca von Hettman and Charlie Sheen—in this humid, steamy, stained story of the transmigration of souls.