He looks as if he might begin speaking again, saying softly, "My friends." Then he plunges the camera down towards the apples in a Wayne's-World-style extreme closeup.

Fin.

Mekas is a voice from another time who has embraced the tools of the present moment. The random, decontextualized Internet is a perfect place to meet and enjoy Mekas' work. His style—direct, non-linear, narrated—exists everywhere on YouTube and Vimeo now.

But the spirit that informs his work is not so easy to find. Maybe it exists in the work of a poet like Steve Roggenbuck or Robin Sloan's media thingy Fish with its exhortation, "Look at your fish!" and its question, "What does it mean to love something on the Internet today?"

It's rare, though, to find a person who wants you to look at beautiful things because they are beautiful.

Looking at Mekas' work, the temptation might be to say: this work lacks coherence. It's not that easy to say what he's trying to do or "say" or create. But he offers us what I'd think of as a viewing guide to his work in this excerpt from his 2000 film, "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty."

Mekas says:

I have never been able, really, to figure out where my life begins and where it ends. I have never, never been able to figure it all out, what it's all about, what it all means. So when I began now to put all these rolls of film together, to string them together, the first idea was to keep them chronological. But then I gave up and I just began splicing them together by chance the way that I found them on the shelf. Because I really don't know where any piece of my life really belongs, so let it be. Let it go. Just by pure chance, disorder. There is some current, some kind of order in it, order of its own, which I do not really understand same as I never understood life around me. The real life, as they say. Or the real people. I never understood them. I still do not understand them. And I do not really want to understand them.

Let it go. I do not really want to understand them.

It reminds me of what the poet John Keats said Shakespeare's great quality was: "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

Keats called this, "negative capability."

In the great gaps of silence between Mekas' clauses, in the surprise of his cuts, in the dynamic distance between his narration and the images on screen, there's so much room for uncertainty, mystery, and doubt.

In this magazine, back in 1964, critic Pauline Kael took aim at Mekas and his friends as a group of rowdy, anti-narrative lazy bums who wanted to make films without ever learning how. Kael decried the way film had turned into "cinema," and that all plotting and rationality had gone out the window. She said the traditional forms of the adventure story and mystery were done for, all part of the disintegration of the arts. Perhaps TV was behind the death of story in film, Kael suggested.