Jonas Mekas — I Seem to Live: The New York Diaries 1969–2011, Volume 2

The second and last volume of Jonas Mekas's diaries of his life in New York, covering the years 1969 to 2011.

The first volume ran from 1950 to 1969. This one opens in the 1970s, a decade in which the Chelsea Hotel served as a meeting point for artists and, for a while, as Mekas's home. In 1970 he founded Anthology Film Archives with Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, P. Adams Sitney and Jerome Hill, and he later bought the old courthouse at 32 Second Avenue, where the archive is still based. The entries record, in close detail, a crowded life at the centre of the city's underground art world.

Mekas finished editing the diaries when he was past ninety, and they were published after his death. Born in Lithuania in 1922, he reached New York in 1949 after time in displaced persons camps in post-war Germany, and worked as a filmmaker, critic, writer and poet. He died in 2019. This volume closes with a full index of names, a filmography and a biography. Edited by Anne König, designed by Fabian Bremer and Pascal Storz.

Spector Books, 2021. 736 pages, 350 black-and-white illustrations, thread-sewn softcover, 16 x 21.5 cm. In English.