My relationship with the stretch of Sixth Avenue running between West 3rd and West 4th Streets, on one corner of which stands New York City's legendary IFC Center, mirrors my relationship with cinema, bad tattoos, crushing hangovers, and a whole mess of memories that sit in the back of my brain like luggage stuffed in a collapsing mid-flight Ryan Air jet.
When Washington loses it, on September 15th-this day, two hundred and forty-nine years ago-it will stay in British hands for seven years and two months and ten days, because November 25, 1783, is Evacuation Day, the day the British finally fucking leave New York.
In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott's approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev's latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times,