Paul Vs. George

When I met George Cox he was producing an auto-documentary while at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999. At that time, it was the most interesting thing happening at the school that I knew of. I kept a safe distance to study George's behavior and artistic approach, I admired it. George and I had few intimate moments, I mostly sat back and awwed at what I was witnessing. Analogous to viewing this video, the cognitive responses are similar to those days at the Museum School.

The closest I came to living like a George Cox was when I rode my bicycle across the country; only a marginal fraction of what the George Cox experience could be.

George runs his own production company now: Cogs Industries. I ran into him about 3 years ago, he was thinned haired, still wiled eyed, but still spit fired. I don't know where he is. The city of Boston now has just memories and social sporadic residue of his occupancy. But Cogs Industries is out there still, and you too can keep an eye on his on goings as they are always fascinating and more interesting than the life you are living.

Oh, Dem Watermelons by Robert Nelson

From UBUWEB

Watermelons was commissioned by the San Francisco Mime Troupe as a short entertainment to be screened during intermission for its rather infamous 1965 Minstrel Show (Civil Rights from the Cracker Barrel), which assaulted racial stereotypes by wildly exaggerating them -- as performed by (mostly white) performers in blackface, yet. A relative latecomer to filmmaking, the 35-year-old Nelson had just begun fooling around with the medium, mostly in collaboration with then-wife Gunvor Nelson. To make Watermelons he drafted talent from the Mime Troupe and alma mater Mills College, where he'd also found a young composer named Steve Reich, later known (to his occasional annoyance) as the father of minimalism, and thus the person to be blessed or blamed for subsequent fellow travelers Philip Glass and John Adams.

Reich's raucously repetitive choral arrangement of a Stephen Foster oldie (in which a slave mourns his deceased master) adds another satirical dimension to the color visuals, which direct the campus era's mood of anarchy and impudence toward the watermelon. Aiming to explode stereotypes and their symbols, the film finds melons used as bombs, footballs, baseballs, shooting targets, even as sensuous love objects. Watermelons are cut-and-pasted onto existing images (from Superman to a NASA missle) and sometimes animated there, à la Terry Gilliam's Monty Python 'toons. Fruits are chased by white male hordes, then turn around (via the magic of reverse projection) to chase them in return."