David was trained in the theater and was an actor all the time I knew him. He was an outsized presence with a mighty laugh. He was my closest friend in the Videofreex, and our conversations were always stimulating and visionary. He had a vibrant intelligence, and was capable of great leaps of imagination that others sometimes could not follow. That was their lack, not David's. David had a fine grasp of argument and a prescient understanding of the consequences of any line of action.
Our whole relationship with NYSCA, for example, was the result of David's efforts. He had worked with them before Videofreex and knew the rules of the game. He knew that we would not long survive without them, and he was the one who propelled us in that direction and gave us the insights that could make NYSCA work for us.
David and I were drawn together at the start, probably because we were older, and had come to the Videofreex from already full lives of marriages, divorces, jobs, politics, earning a living, and all the slings and arrows. There was no innocence about us. We stayed friends because we could talk to each other without fear of being misunderstood. I cannot say that David always approved of me; he thought I was a cavalier among puritans, his words.
David was man of many appetites; he loved good food, good drink, and good company. He was an extremely generous man, and courageous, sometimes beyond prudence.
Having said all these good things about David, I suppose, for balance, I should state some of his faults. As Pedro Lujan would say, 'No chicken fried steak was safe with David around.' He was terribly accident prone. If there was a deep hole somewhere, David would fall into it. I remember the time he dropped the camera into a rushing stream. I wasn't there, but I saw the tape. There was the stream, and David's voice, and then the stream rushed up into the picture, and David's voice could be heard, moaning, just before the camera died, 'Oh, God…'"
DG/end