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New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Man Who Made a Brooklyn Cemetery the Place to Be
Do you remember Roy Smeck, guitarist and banjo legend from the 1930s? 'We have him here,' said Richard J. Moylan the other day, in a cluttered office that looked about three weeks from moving-out day. It is a phrase Mr. Moylan — 70, with a robust head of white hair and a pleasantly chatty manner — uses often, or did until recently. Last Friday, he retired from Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he had worked for the last 53 years, first as a lawn cutter and since 1986 as president, and thus de facto mayor to the grounds' 570,000 permanent residents. Around the office were a half-dozen Roy Smeck signature guitars that Mr. Moylan had collected for the cemetery, along with books, CDs and artwork associated with other people interred there. 'We have Leonard Bernstein,' he said. Also F.A.O. Schwartz (toys), Eberhard Faber (pencils) and Samuel Morse (code). But of the filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who was cremated at the cemetery in 2019, Mr. Moylan lamented, 'I don't think we have him.' (It is a sore spot with Mr. Moylan that so many families choose to scatter their loved ones' remains rather than entomb at least some of them at Green-Wood, where future generations might gather to visit them.) Green-Wood, which sits on 478 rolling, tree-filled acres in a semi-industrial neighborhood that real estate agents call Greenwood Heights, occupies a distinctive place in New York City and in the development of American cemeteries. First opened in 1838, it was in the 19th century the second-most-popular attraction in the state, after Niagara Falls, and inspired the competition to design Central Park and Prospect Park. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Jonas Mekas, Master of Avant-Garde Film, Shows His Tender Side
For 70 years Jonas Mekas, widely seen as the godfather of American avant-garde film, created nearly daily visual documents that showed elements of his life. He called them 'film diaries.' They were recorded on film reels and tapes that were stored in cardboard sleeves with labels like 'angry dog,' 'small memorabilia' and 'Warhol." Those were stacked throughout Mekas's loft in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, organized in a way that only he fully understood. After Mekas died in 2019 at 96, a re-creation of the cluttered loft was installed on the fifth floor of an arts center in New Jersey, including the recordings and other possessions: Mekas's old film editing equipment. A cardboard box with trimmings from the beard of his longtime friend Allen Ginsberg. A scarf he brought when fleeing his home country, Lithuania, in the 1940's and held onto while surviving a Nazi labor camp. In the summer of 2020, the filmmaker KD Davison started sifting through those archives to create a documentary about Mekas. That film, 'Fragments of Paradise,' will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on March 13. The documentary draws heavily from Mekas's visual diaries, which Davison said seemed to reflect the rootlessness he experienced as a refugee during World War II and his enduring search for moments of beauty or calm. 'I began to see this melancholy that I think isn't often associated with Jonas,' she said. 'It was like watching someone through the course of their life reconcile themselves with loss and begin to find freedom and joy just in the present moment.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
