OTHER PEOPLE’S DIARIES

CHICK STRAND MADE 20 FILMS AND TAUGHT CINEMA at Occidental College for 24 years. But she also freelanced for UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology, transcribing interviews with FBI agents and pot smokers. Later, she’d type policies for the State Farm Insurance Company and deliver the Los Angeles Times to homes that hadn’t received their Sunday editions. In Ohio, in addition to painting houses, she briefly served as a string news reporter, filming, among others, the American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. (“He mistook me for a Jew. I looked him right in the eye and told him that I was—and then proceeded to use my telephoto lens right on his fucking mouth.”) Her collaborator, the painter Neon Park, worked as a taxi driver, often transporting drafted soldiers down to the Navy ships, and then doing forestry work, before illustrating album covers for the likes of Frank Zappa.

The brief end credits of her films usually list two years—one for when she shot each film, the other, typically many years later, for when she had gathered the time and resources to complete it. Filmmaking took as long as it took, another in the variety of engagements with the world that we call work. “We realized that we had no ego about our work, that I could paint the paintings and he could sign them and we didn’t care,” she said about her years-long working relationship with Park in a 2006 UCLA oral-history interview with Jane Collings. “Or that he could get the sound and never get any credit for it.” She continued, “The whole act of doing it was what was so thrilling and marvelous, and it had nothing to do with any of the trappings of fame