I was at the Balagan screening of The Castle by Massimo D'Anolfi and Martina Parenti last night (a good film, though I think the concept might have been more consistently adhered to through the piece), and programmer Jeff Silva shared the news that Amos Vogel had just died at age 91.
Vogel, a native of Vienna who fled from the Nazis in 1938, was one of the leading figures in avant-garde cinema. He founded the influential Cinema 16 film club in 1947 to screen "films you cannot see elsewhere," and co-founded the New York Film Festival. Jeff mentioned that Vogel's curating work was one of the big inspirations for the Balagan series.
He also wrote the best-selling book Film as a Subversive Art, which I still enjoy 20 years after Juan Mandelbaum gave me a copy upon leaving my first job at WGBH-TV. And I hear that he also wrote a children's book called How Little Lori Visited Times Square, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. I'll have to check that one out.