Diary

Small-town friends watch fuzzy TV, play music, and venture to the video store. Mom bakes a cobbler. The filmmaker fucks his boyfriend in the bedroom above the kitchen.

This strange, lyrical performance video diary is a millennial reflection on the impossibility to "reveal" one’s self in stormy times such as ours. The piece is also about the intricate connections between performance and everyday life; about language, identity, love, nostalgia and activism amidst the California apocalypse.

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.

This video diary visits two sites that exhibited my visual works this past year, culminating at the VOLTA ART SHOW in N.Y.C., where I sold some paintings and a photograph.

The underling theme of the diary deals with some bloating, scarring and beefcake exposure while on the road to an acting gig where I'm scheduled to play a BI-SEXUAL, paraplegic in heat.

There are some in depth scenes of me working out the romance/sex routines with a young and attractive, male co-star. The all-girl crew appears to be getting off on the whole thing and I don't blame them!

A short atmospheric tour of a movie star’s mansion and a glimpse of the living things within the chambers: things that cook, feed the sharks, and gnaw on bones.

The question, “Who am I?” has been asked over the centuries in many different ways. Videomaker Carlos Nader adds another approach in his investigation into the nature of the individual by taking the work beyond self-examination and asking it of others. What is revealed is the impossibility of rational thinking to understand the essentialism of human identity. Nader describes this work as a “non-autobiography-video” about its author; a video about nothing.” Exploring notions of the irreducibility of identity to one’s color, nationality, or politics, the tape “wants to be anyone’s biography.

George stays in San Francisco for this video about local filmmakers and their future projects.

Summer and smoke (from pork chops) filters into every rip in my tee-shirt as legs and souls are bared for the infra-red-hot digital camera that's ON THE PROWL!

Addressing the camera, Segalove confesses to plagarizing her 5th grade report, The Story of Coal.

Legendary filmmaker George Kuchar, in between trips to the bathroom, visits three Bay area friends: an eccentric filmmaking couple who produce zombie movies, and performer Billy Nayer.

A poetic meditation on distance, Come Closer is a short and peripatetic film, casting an affective web between the locations of Lisbon, San Francisco and Brazil. Focusing on Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, musician Derrick Green –– the filmmaker’s brother and lead singer of Brazilian band Sepultura –– and her own work produced in Lisbon since 1992, Come Closer can be thought as a meditation on friendship and saudade.

A stay in Fairfiled, Iowa reveals the American dream being riddled with that which dwells on distant planes and the need for our nation’s people to express the forces of good and evil via videography and pyrotechnical vomit.

The fragment contains within it an implied reference to something that was once whole. It suggests damage and violence, time and distance. These qualities I found were integral to my own constitution, and it was with the making of Cooperation Of Parts that this became clear.

“Misfortune makes and breaks you.” I have the misfortune of a history of disruptions, and the fortune of having that history to work with.

A party of past students illuminates this diary of boxed dreams, as those enclosed face the real world and nurture into existence the future people of the next millennium.

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.

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.

A prop-filled encounter with a young fantasy filmmaker eventually becomes muffled by an earwax problem I develop; but not before the viewer is dragged through Studio 8 where my class and I are concocting a sordid, high school melodrama. 

Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.

Performers: Anna Yu, Shu Xia Zhao
Cinematography: Steve Cossman
Voice: Joanna Lin, Shu Xia Zhao
Music: Ikue Mori
Production: Xiao Li Tan

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.

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. 

Christmas is here again in this diary of glittering gifts, furry friends, underground movie making, and grotesque greetings. A veneer of good cheer coats the surface like thin ice, so proceed with caution!

A sprawling look at chunks of our country as I travel back east to present some programs, and a peek at the venues that screen underground movies to the youth of today. The video also opens up big vistas of the West as I daydream about recent trips to mountainous terrain while admiring a plaster diorama of the Pacific northwest which I purchased at an all-you-can-eat restaurant in Pennsylvania.

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.

A trip to Boston to visit a local filmmaker in his studio is followed by a journey to the cinematic facilities of SUNY College in Purchase, NY, and then to the kitchen and living quarters of my mother in the Bronx. My mother is in her most candid mode as we relate and debate. My brother Mike suffers dental woes, too.

We are what we eat, and we talk about what we are; so, naturally, we get hungry all the time. Join my friends as we not only hear, but see what they are and taste the essence of each one without the fear of emotional attachment. A leisurely, if somewhat "lazy Susan" of chewable tidbits that can be spit out if so desired (or undesired). A session of chowing down and chewing the fat with an assortment of gobblers that break bread, but no wind, with me.