{"id":4644,"title":"The Beat Among Us: Jud Yalkut","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/beat-among-us-jud-yalkut","version":"398186506bd47e6f8d79b8342437d63e0eb7d5929eb5834509793c0ef4d56336","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9240235+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Keith Pandolfi"}],"authorKeys":["Pandolfi, Keith"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Impact Weekly","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Yesse Ohio","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"April 13, 2000","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Dayton, Ohio","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"8","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"15","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1064","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Jud Yalkut","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022The Beat Among Us: Jud Yalkut.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/beat-among-us-jud-yalkut.","publication":"Keith Pandolfi. The Beat Among Us: Jud Yalkut. Impact Weekly. vol. 8, no. 15. Yesse Ohio. April 13, 2000.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4644.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":19220},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":766}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Visiting Jud Yalkut\u0027s Five Oaks home on a Thursday morning, I am greeted with congenial warmth and an air of distraction. Although he seems gracious for the opportunity to sit down and discuss his life and work, his nervousness indicates that he would rather be doing something else - working. When it comes to his work, as I have found out, Yalkut is tireless. After a cup of coffee and some brief chitchat, we head upstairs to the attic where Yalkut\u0027s office is located. On the floor lays one of the small Persian rugs that Yalkut and his wife, Peg, collect. The pattern of this one, he notes, resembles the vibrant static of a television screen on the blink. In a work space that is both complicated and snug, he points out the various machines he uses to create his art. There are somewhere between five and eight monitors, a couple of mainframes, several VCRs and a gaggle of miscellaneous components. It seems as if Yalkut\u0027s hi-tech tools are as complicated as his multifarious \u0027mind. Realizing the scope of his work as a filmmaker and the breadth of his life\u0027s experiences, it\u0027s hard not to feel just a bit intimidated by him. \u0022I\u0027ve been a bohemian, I\u0027ve been a beat, I\u0027ve been a hippie, I\u0027ve been whatever you want to call me,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022But I\u0027ve been the same person throughout the whole thing.\u0022 But there is a lot more to Yalkut than stereotypes. During the course of his 62 years, Yalkut has found himself playing pivotal roles in not just the world of avant garde film and video, but in America\u0027s cultural history. He has accumulated such unforgettable experiences as chatting on a Big Sur beach with Henry Miller, belting out poetry with Allen Ginsberg, and turning off, tuning in and dropping out with Timothy Leary. Along the way Yalkut has cultivated relationships with such legendary icons as Leonard Cohen, Wavy Gravy and Nam June Paik. In case you haven\u0027t heard of him, Yalkut is an experimental filmmaker, videographer, educator, painter, poet, jazz aficionado, art critic and all-around renaissance man who, by being one of the first people to ever transcend the barriers between film and video, has secured a place in the canon of 20th century American art. Through his work with artists such as Paik, Yayoi Kusama and others, Yalkut is seen by many in the art world as a pioneer of the avant garde. Yalkut has been garnering a lot of feathers in his cap lately. In December 1998 he completed a documentary about jazz clarinetist Pee Wee Russell and, last March, several of the films he made with Paik, including Cinema Metaphysique and Videotape Study No. 3, were featured at New York\u0027s Guggenheim Museum. This September, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York will feature a one man retrospective of his work and the Intel Museum in Santa Clara, Calif., is presenting his film Turn Turn Turn as one of the earliest examples of technology in media. And Yalkut will premiere his latest project, a documentary film titled Walking the Nickel, on April 14 in Dayton. Before choosing the mediums of film and video for his career, Yalkut traipsed the country in search of the true American experience. Along the way, his path crossed those of several icons in the fields of poetry, literature, music and film. In retrospect, Yalkut\u0027s life on the road bore a striking resemblance to the lives of many beat generation legends such as Kerouac, Cassady, Snyder and Ferlinghetti. Remarkably, after making his mark on the beat scenes of New York and San Francisco and after establishing himself as a pioneer in film and video, Yalkut ended up right here in Dayton. A resident of the Miami Valley since 1973, Yalkut has worked hard to make his hometown a better, more culturally diverse place to live. \u0022Jud has been a tireless advocate for contemporary art in the Miami Valley,\u0022 says Alexander Lee Nyerges, director and CEO of the Dayton Art Institute. \u0022He has been a great friend to the visual arts. The Dayton scene would not be as vibrant without him.\u0022 Born in 1938, Yalkut grew up in a Jewish/Italian neighborhood in the Bronx. He says his mother was a teacher and \u0027a Sunday painter\u0027 and his father was a dentist and \u0027weekend classical pianist.\u0027 \u0022He started teaching me at the age of 6,\u0022 Yalkut says, \u0022so I had a pretty detailed training in classical piano.\u0022 While classical music filled the rooms of his house, jazz was literally right around the corner. While growing up, Yalkut\u0027s next door neighbor was venerable jazz pianist Johnny Guarnieri, who played with jazz and big band legends Benny Goodman, Arty Shaw and Lester Young. \u0022Our families were very, very good friends,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022He had a studio in the back of the house where he had two pianos, and my father and he would often play classical piano pieces together.\u0022 Yalkut was a precocious child whose adolescent interests were primarily divided between science and the arts. \u0022When I was 5 or 6 years old people would ask me what I wanted to be and I had two choices,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022I either wanted to be an inventor or a cartoonist.\u0022 The cartoons Yalkut drew quickly introduced him to more advanced art forms. \u0022It got to the point that when I was 12 years old I had an art portfolio that enabled me to get into the High School of Music and Art (HSMA).\u0022 Promoted three years ahead of his class, Yalkut was pragmatic in choosing his major. \u0022Everybody said you have to make money with your art, so I majored in graphic art,\u0022 Yalkut says. Through HSMA, he attained a $3 student membership to New York\u0027s Museum of Modern Art, where he often went to see exhibits and hang out at the members\u0027 penthouse. And then there were the movies. In the 1950s, New York was brimming with wondrous movie houses on the Bronx\u0027s Grand Concourse. Yalkut says that he spent many an afternoon inhabiting the Valentine Theatre, the RKO and \u0022the great, big Loew\u0027s Paradise with three balconies.\u0022 What proved to be an influence on his future film career was Cinema 16, an avant garde theater that regularly presented foreign and experimental films. Realizing his son\u0027s love for motion pictures, Yalkut\u0027s father gave him a gift that would subtly alter the course of his life. \u0022The present from my father for my Bar Mitzvah was an 8 mm movie camera,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022Of course, the first thing that happened with the camera was that my father filmed the Bar Mitzvah, then he gave it to me. I actually made a few films with it that are now long gone ... more like expressionistic kinds of films,\u0022 Yalkut says. Soon after his Bar Mitzvah, at the age of 13, Yalkut lost both of his parents in two devastating weeks. \u0022My mother had been sick with breast cancer and then lung cancer,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022The last few months of her life I never saw her because I was too young to be allowed into the hospital, so I didn\u0027t see her during those last days. I found out she died one day when I was walking to school. My father had been at the hospital; he was on his way home and we ran into each other. That\u0027s how I found out that she had died. Two weeks later my father had a heart attack; he died in my arms in our apartment.\u0022 Despite having suddenly been orphaned, the following year Yalkut enrolled as a freshman at City College of New York. He was 15. I was growing up fast but (my parents\u0027 deaths) certainly didn\u0027t slow me down. I just kept doing stuff. When I went to City College I just got totally immersed in the activities there. I got elected to student council that first year and I worked for the student newspaper.\u0022 Although, at the time, Yalkut was the youngest person enrolled at City College, he maintained an academic ranking in the top fourth of his class. Convinced that the next big \u0027glamour profession\u0027 would be nuclear physics, he took an unlikely turn from his arts-oriented interests and registered as a math-physics major. After only one year at City College, Yalkut transferred to McGill University in Montreal. He explains that his transfer to McGill was fueled more by wanderlust than academic pursuits. \u0022It was great getting out of the country,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022At that time, Canada was realizing that they had to get their own identity and move away from being absorbed in American culture and English culture. They were starting to appreciate what they had and there was also a big renaissance going on there in the Canadian poetry scene and Montreal was the center of it.\u0022 At McGill, Yalkut befriended fraternity brother Leonard Cohen, the poet and musician. \u0022There were all these fine poets around me,\u0022 Yalkut says, \u0022Poets all over Canada were coming to Montreal because that\u0027s where the center was and I was the young American poet in the middle of all this.\u0022 Yalkut says that his early poetry was influenced by outsiders such as Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings. \u0022I liked cummings because his words were visual; he was a painter and a poet,\u0022 As Yalkut\u0027s love for poetry blossomed, his love for physics dried up. \u0022We had to take our physics classes with the engineering students in big lecture halls with these professors who were like staff sergeants in the army. I got very disenchanted,\u0022 Yalkut says. Beginning his second year at McGill, Yalkut registered as an English literature major. Along with his poetry, he also became involved in McGill\u0027s drama department, writing plays that were occasionally directed by fellow students. \u0022That\u0027s when writing became preeminent in my life,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022The visual arts sort of faded out.\u0022 In 1956, after two years in Montreal, Yalkut dropped out of McGill. Knowing that he had money from his family\u0027s estate waiting for him when he turned 21, he moved back to New York where he found an apartment in Greenwich Village. The New York Yalkut returned to was pulsing with bohemian energy and artistic creativity. \u0022It was the early stages of the beat scene,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022I knew a great many of those people - I knew Allen Ginsberg. Hugh Romney, who later became Wavy Gravy, was one of the poets; he and I and a number of other people used to read in the coffee shops down around MacDougal Street. There was one place called the Gaslight that was a regular hang out; there was another place across the street called the Fat Black Pussycat where people like Moon Dog and Tiny Tim played. It was a crazy scene going on all over the place. Things would go on all night long.\u0022 After spending two years in what Yalkut calls a \u0027Canadian renaissance,\u0027 the emergence of the beat scene in New York did not take him by surprise. \u0022I was in a scene like that when I was in Montreal,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022I would go to school every day and at night it was the whole bohemian life. You had a lot of people - you had French-Canadian painters, Dutch Flamenco guitarists and other people who would hang out in the coffee shop scene there . ... I had already been through all these changes, so moving into the village was just a natural for me.\u0022 Despite the creative energy of the city Yalkut was bored. He and a traveling companion left New York in 1957 on an un-intrepid journey toward the West Coast. \u0022I wanted to travel,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022Go \u0027on the road\u0027 as it was.\u0022 They got as far as Louisville. \u0022Louisville was undergoing an art renaissance at that time. The Louisville Symphony was commissioning important works by contemporary composers; they had art festivals and all those other things,\u0022 Yalkut says. If it was, in fact, a bluegrass renaissance, Yalkut became the quintessential renaissance man. While working as a model for art students and in frame reconstruction, he tried out for a play and was cast in the lead of Ben Johnson\u0027s The Alchemist. \u0022I got pretty involved in the whole scene there,\u0022 Yalkut says. After five and a half months, Yalkut left Louisville for his original destination. Along with a friend, he went back on the road determined to make it straight through to California. After a two-week stint living in Hollywood, Yalkut hitchhiked up the coast alone toward Big Sur, Calif. \u0022I knew all about Big Sur because I knew all about Henry Miller from way back when,\u0022 Yalkut says. \u0022I","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":19220,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}