Filmmaker Jonas Mekas has a drink at Cafiero Lussier on East Second Street.
Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

Now 90 years old, Lithuanian-American filmmaker and archivist Jonas Mekas has spent a third of his life drinking at the Mars Bar in New York. The dive at the corner of Second Avenue and First Street opened in the early 1980s, when Mr. Mekas was busy renovating the future site of his Anthology Film Archives, a block away.

"We came into existence together, so it was friendship," Mr. Mekas said this week, chatting over Lithuanian beer and vodka shots at the Anyway Cafe, one of several East Village bars he frequents more often since Mars Bar closed last June (and was subsequently demolished). The demise of the bar, a refuge for the neighborhood's old-school bohemians, artists and rogues, prompted the filmmaker to edit more than 15 years of casual video footage into "My Mars Bar Movie." It will open a weekend run at Anthology today, Friday 13 April.

Watch the first five minutes of Jonas Mekas’s Mars Bar movie, opening today, Friday 13 April

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