Just another water story
This is a memory from Jeffrey Perkins with Audio Recording recited by Manon Wada
A few years ago I got a message from a friend saying that my good friend Peter Mays, the filmmaker and artist in LA, was in a hospice and dying. So, given the importance of our long friendship in LA, I booked a flight to visit Peter. I found him in a private room in the hospice in Santa Monica, as he was laying in bed. He was weak and apparently the life force was vacating him gradually.
We talked about various things, about memories we shared. He suddenly asked for a glass of water to be brought to him. It was handed to him and he did not drink it but simply put his long finger in the glass and handed the glass to me and told me to drink it. To tell the truth, I refused to do that, and said to him that I took that as a kind of Directorial joke, that a movie director would do.
I once performed in 2 films that Peter made, which I still have copies of. They were “experimental” flavored movies, “Sister Midnight” 1969 & “Astral Man”, made a little later. I told Peter that I think that “Astral man” was “a masterpiece” in our personal history. The last scenes in Astral man were concerning water. It is a film that was a celebration of the late 1960s in Hollywood, when we shared a house there. Peter was a mystical artist, and his many films are treasured in the LA Underground Film history.
Peter was invited to show his films at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC, and stayed at my loft during that time. I remember that when I moved to my present apartment in Manhattan near Central Park, I used to go to the park benches at night to smoke a cig, and to call Peter in LA. We would talk about our lives and work. As a matter of fact, when I made the video of the Sam Francis “Edge Paintings” exhibition at the Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills, Peter Mays was the other cameraman, and his shots were obviously the work of a skilled filmmaker and artist.
Jeffrey Perkins • He/Him • NYC
Jeffrey Perkins is an artist and Filmmaker. He has been connected to a number of Fluxus artists since the early 1960s, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik in particular. Perkin’s feature-length films include a biographical documentary on the painter Sam Francis (2008) and GEORGE (The Story of George Maciunas & Fluxus) (2018).
