I met the Helsinki-based artist couple Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen in early June 2008, during the opening of Arctic Hysteria at P.S. 1, an exhibition of sixteen artists (or artist groups) from Finland. It remains on view through September 15.

I was overwhelmed by Mika Ronkainen's documentary of the Screaming Men's Chorus, a huge screen placed at the entrance to the show with a video projection of exactly what was advertised (men in black trekking over a glacier and screaming), and entranced by the flying saucer-like Futuro Lounge, a streamlined homage to utopian architect Matti Suuronen. But of all the Hysteria, it is the Kalleinen's ongoing project, their organizing of Complaints Choirs throughout the world, that has inspired my most lasting affection and ongoing participation.

Although I knew he was also a painter, the Manny Farber I first encountered in back issues of Film Culture and in collected writings like Negative Space (1971) was a brilliant, spirited, clear-eyed, iconoclastic, no-nonsense film critic. Essays like "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962) were lean, mean, superbly on target and amazingly prescient, celebrating B-films and maverick, marginal auteurs long before they became de rigueur among cineastes. He was an early champion of Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Val Lewton and Don Siegel, and penned some of the first American appreciations of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras, Werner Herzog, Chantal Akerman and other 70s European avantgardists.