Rest in Paradise, Jonas Mekas

Seventy years ago, the UN landed Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas in New York, after they had been captives of the Nazis and later endured years in a refugee camp. Before that, Mekas was a "farming boy" in the Lithuanian countryside. It strikes me now that he lived his whole life as a farmer--planting seeds that germinated everywhere he went, cultivating what would nourish and sustain us as artists and as humans. One of the founders of the Filmmakers' Cooperative (the world's oldest, largest distributor of independent media), as well as the incomparable Anthology Film Archives (the "cathedral of the avant-garde" as he called it), Mekas was a tireless fundraiser and radical champion of noncommercial culture. He cofounded (with Adolfas) Film Culture magazine and was the Village Voice "Movie Journal" column's self-proclaimed "raving maniac of the cinema."