The audience and jury picks for best film at this year's Hamptons International Film Festival were announced at Sunday's awards brunch, held in the V.I.P. tent at Nick and Toni's restaurant in East Hampton.

The festival's top prize, the Golden Starfish, went to not one but two films - the jury was hung, so to speak - "Mugshot," directed by Matt Mahurin, and "Puddle Cruiser," (which had its world premiere), directed by Jay Chandrasekhar. They were among 10 American independent films chosen by the festival to compete for the award, which included a prize package worth more than $100,000.

Mr. Mahurin's film, for which he also served as the cinematographer, editor, and screenwriter, is a darkly humorous look at racial relationships. "Puddle Cruiser," a collaborative effort of the Broken Lizard Comedy Group, uses improvisation techniques and stars members of the group, including Mr. Chandrasekhar.

Documentary Honors

The festival's juries also honored the Russian documentary "Anna," which had its U.S. premiere, and the American short "Winterlude," which had its world premiere at last week's festival.

"Anna" is the director Nikita Mikhalkov's chronicle of his eldest daughter each year between the ages of 6 and 18, interwoven with footage of changes in Russia. "Winterlude," directed by Carlton Prickett, tells the story of two disaffected people who find solace in each other's presence.

The audience's choice for best feature film was Nancy Meckler's "Indian Summer," a British film that had its U.S. premiere at the Film Festival. It tells the story of a young HIV-positive dancer and his relationship with an older therapist.

The audience awarded top documentary honors to "Queens of the Big Time." It was clear the film was an audience-pleaser when its director, Adriana Trigiani, enjoyed a standing ovation from a full house at its world premiere at Guild Hall Friday night.

Best Short

Ms. Trigiani's sense of humor showed through in the film, which documented the 100th anniversary of an annual festival honoring Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the patron saint of Roseto, Pa., a small town settled by immigrants from Roseto, Italy. Interspersed was footage from the 1930s through the 1960s taken by the director's grandfather.

The 27-minute "Shoot the Moon," directed by Tom Hodges, an American, won the audience's honor for best short. The film tells the story of a 15-year-old Atlanta cheerleader who "shoots the moon" out of the back window of a school bus.

A special student prize for the "Best-Told Story," sponsored by RKO Pictures, was awarded to a graduate student, Patrick Sisam, for his film "Love Child," a look at the American generation which enjoyed adolescence in the mid-'70s.

Speculation about who the surprise guest for the A Conversation With . . . presentation Friday might be was rampant among Hamptons International Film Festival patrons, and the most common guess, Anjelica Huston, turned out to be right. Ms. Huston recently made her directorial debut with a film about the horrors of child abuse, "Bastard Out of Carolina," which had its U.S. premiere at last week's Film Festival.

The identity of the guest of honor has been kept a closely guarded secret for all of the festival's four years, unlike the identity of the individual chosen for the Distinguished Achievement Award, which this year was Alan J. Pakula.

Ms. Huston began her career as an actress, following in the successful footsteps of her father, John (an actor and director), and grandfather, Walter (an actor). She said she hoped to direct again, perhaps even write a screenplay, and though she hinted at possible future projects she wouldn't offer any specifics because she's "superstitious."

Acting Debut

Growing up with a father so heavily involved in the film industry had a great influence on her, Ms. Huston said. "Life with my father was an adventure in itself," she said, though there were negatives, including the fact that "he was away most of the time."

Acting is, however, "a glamorous and interesting life, and one in which you could invent anything." When she was a teenager, Ms. Huston recalled, "I longed to be an actress. I remember meeting Ava Gardner, and the sun did rise with Ava Gardner."

Her acting debut came as a teenager in a movie her father directed, "A Walk With Love and Death," which she said ended up being a bad experience. After a period in which she did not want to act again, she read for a part in "Hamlet." Although she did not get the role, it gave her a taste for acting again.

Choosing Roles

When she met Jack Nicholson, she said, "I remember he used to bitch because he had so many scripts. I wanted just one." Ms. Huston was surprisingly willing to talk about her relationship with Mr. Nicholson, despite their acrimonious breakup.

Ms. Huston, who has appeared in such films as "The Addams Family," "The Witches," "The Grifters," and "Prizzi's Honor," usually plays strong, often mysterious, women.

"I love to be a handsome leading woman," she said.; she allows her roles "to choose me." A role has to speak to her, or she can't speak to it, she added.

Ms. Huston also described her pleasure in helping to create the physical look of her characters. Once she knows her lines, she said, she wants to know what her character will look like. "Putting on a character - that's one of the funnest things I do," she said, noting later that such details as shoes can make a great difference in how a character is portrayed.

"The heels will dictate how you walk," she said.

Possessed, Obsessed

After years of working successfully as an actress, Ms. Huston said, she enjoyed her first directorial job. Directing, she said, "completely possesses you. How you dream about it . . . it's a truly obsessive thing to do, but fun, and arduous."

Her first experience in the role of director was not without controversy: "Bastard Out of Carolina" was rejected by the TNT channel, which gave her the script in the first place, because of the graphic depiction of child abuse. She said she felt that "it was such a powerful story. So true, and so brave."

The violence they objected to - primarily two scenes, one of rape and the other of molestation - Ms. Huston said was necessary for the film to have impact and make sense.

"I don't like watching them," Ms. Huston said of the violent scenes. "I don't expect anyone to like watching them."

Quality Tax

The film had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where Ms. Huston said it was "very well received," and screenings at the Toronto and now the Hamptons Film festivals followed. It has been picked up by Showtime.

The first-time director lamented the decreasing quality and increasing sensationalism of Hollywood-backed motion pictures.

Money is the driving force behind the movies that receive wide theatrical distribution, Ms. Huston said. Of the big studios, she said, "That's the old guard: beg, borrow, and steal. That's how movies are produced." Were she offered $30 million for an acting job, she added, she wouldn't turn it down, but afterward she would want to "do a few for the love" of filmmaking.

Why not take $1 million of the $35 million that Bruce Willis gets paid for a "Die Hard" flick and give it to another, less established filmmaker? Ms. Huston suggested. This prompted the moderator of her talk, Jeanine Basinger, the chairwoman of film studies at Wesleyan University, to suggest what she called "a quality tax" on studio movies.

Robert Harney of East Hampton normally would have been stationed in the projection booths at East Hampton Cinema during the Hamptons International Film Festival. Instead, he was outside with a handful of picketers protesting layoffs and cutbacks for United Artists projectionists.

Mr. Harney, a 15-year employee of the cinema, has been driving a school bus and cab since he and 35 other United Artists projectionists were locked out of their jobs in February.

Out Of Work

The lockout was the second in the past two years, stemming from stalemated contract negotiations between U.A. and Local 640 of the Motion Picture Projectionists Union. Picketers also marched outside the festival in 1994 just days before the first lockout.

Projectionists in half of Long Island's U.A. theaters were out of work for six months following that, until a National Labor Relations Board judge sided with their complaint and ordered U.A. to reinstate them with full back pay. They were back on the job until this latest lockout.

U.A. has been phasing out the projectionist's position in many of its Long Island theaters, largely to save money. The role of operating the largely automated projection equipment has, instead, been transferred to theaters' managerial staffs.

"We'd just like to make people aware this is not the typical union situation, where the union just wants more money," said Robert Gottschalk Jr., the Projectionists Union's business representative. "We just want our jobs. We just want fair pay for a fair day's work."

The Projectionists Union would have assigned five projectionists to handle the Film Festival's busy four-day schedule. Because of the lockout, the theater had to bring in five projectionists from out of state.

Festival filmgoers pointed out numerous projection-related difficulties throughout the weekend, from minor volume and framing glitches to films stopping dead on the reel. Will Markert, the theater manager, said there are bound to be technical difficulties with some 70 films being rotated over four days.

"These guys were all pros," he assured. "They were the top of the crop."

The Projectionists Union this spring filed a second complaint against U.A. with the National Labor Relations Board. A new hearing is being set on the matter.

Terry George, the director of "Some Mother's Son," which opened the Hamptons International Film Festival last week, denounced an article in last Thursday's East Hampton Star during a festival panel on Friday.

The film is based on the hunger strike of Irish Republicans imprisoned by the British and the death of their leader, Bobby Sands, and nine others in 1981. The film premiered at Cannes and won the audience awards at the Edinburgh and San Sebastian Festivals.

It is the first feature directed by Mr. George, a journalist, playwright, and screenwriter, who also wrote the screenplay with Jim Sheridan. Mr. Sheridan collaborated with Mr. George on "In The Name of the Father" and made his own directorial debut in "My Left Foot." Both men were panelists at a discussion of screenwriting and directing.

Wrong Group

The Star article, by Simon Worrall of East Hampton, a British journalist, was an opinion piece about what he considers the film's political agenda.

Unfortunately, it stated incorrectly that Mr. George had once been a member of the Irish National Liberation Army, a group that has a history of violence. It therefore counted him among those who had, in the past, condoned "the killing and maiming of innocent people in the name of a united Ireland."

The Star regrets having published these statements, as well as any misimpression the reader may have gained because Mr. Worrall did not disclose the fact that he had not seen the picture before writing the article. Mr. Worrall has now seen the film and said he plans to write a letter to the editor next week about his response.

Past History

Interviewed Saturday by telephone from his home in Westchester County, Mr. George reported that his participation in Irish Republican events had been as a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, a political party, which, he said, did not advocate violence.

He said he had been imprisoned for three years at the Maze prison (as Mr. Worrall pointed out), adding that his imprisonment stemmed from his having been arrested 23 years ago in a car in which a gun was found.

Mr. George and one of the producers of "Some Mother's Son," Ed Burke, also objected to the article's statement that "I.R.A. operatives [are] portrayed so sympathetically in this film." They said the film was a human portrait focusing on the mothers of two hunger-strikers and was critical of violence and duplicity.

Mr. Burke, whose letter on the subject appears this week, said Tuesday that the film was intended to "make people think."

The yearly slate of undergraduate films at the Hamptons International Film Festival has always offered an intriguing sneak preview of some of the country's best developing filmmakers. This year, the undergraduate program was particularly rich.

With themes ranging from religion and sex education to urban ills, the five short films in the program proved to be both quirky and provocative, a reflection of the film festival's overall content. The program also incorporated a range of approaches, including animation, drama, and humor.

Michael Dougherty's atmospheric animated film, "Season's Greetings," follows a ghoulish trick-or-treater who shows a would-be attacker a thing or two. Brad Abelson's mock 1950s sex-education film, "My Dingaling," had the audience laughing all through its five minutes. Mr. Dougherty studies at New York University and Mr. Abelson is from the University of Southern California.

It was the dramas, however, that proved to be the most gripping. David Ogden and Christopher Landon of Loyola Marymount University presented "Only Child," a disturbing, black-and-white look at a family in which a child is haunted by confusion over God, the Devil, and his dogmatic stepfather. Mr. Landon is the son of the late actor Michael Landon.

Lance Mungia, also of Loyola Marymount, drew from fairy tales with his cinematically fertile "A Garden For Rio," in which an old farmer turns his arid sun-burned field into a field of roses for him and his wife - at least in his mind.

Matt Mailer, a New York University undergrad and the son of the author Norman Mailer, captured lost urban youth in his 30-minute film, "The Money Shot." The film follows a documentary filmmaker whose indifference to the plight of his subjects - a young prostitute and her mugger friend - spells trouble for all three.

Mr. Mailer said during the question-and-answer session following the film that he had already been tapped to turn "The Money Shot" into a feature. That has already presented the requisite directorial dilemmas, he said. He loved the work of his actress, Aesha Waks, but "they want a star."

Each of the young directors received a $2,500 award from the Film Festival toward their next project - or perhaps to cover those maxed-out credit cards from the last one.

By late Sunday afternoon, most of the Hamptons International Film Festival press office and hospitality center at the Huntting Inn was in cardboard boxes and lines were forming for the festival's last official screenings. Later, as producers, filmmakers, and distributors talked at the closing night party, the question changed from "What films did you see?" to "Did you close any deals?"

Industry professionals say the still young Hamptons festival is beginning to find its footing among other American film showcases. "It still doesn't command the same kind of crowds as Toronto or Sundance," said Karen Levine Glasser, the East Coast director of creative affairs for RKO Pictures, "but it includes a lot of independent stuff, which is nice." Still, she said, the young festival "doesn't have its own voice - yet."

"It's gone through its growing pains, turned the corner, and has its feet on solid ground," said Linda Biscardi, a member of the festival's board.

More Mellow

Coming on the tails of the New York Film Festival and the New York Independent Feature Film Market, a stage for films in progress looking for finishing funds, its advantage is that it offers a mellower look at emerging directors and new films than its older New York cousins.

"As in the past and more so now, filmmakers like it here because everything is accessible. They can see everyone and do everything they want to do," said Toni Ross, the chairwoman of the board. A few people in the industry told her they would encourage acquisitions people to come to the festival next year because of this kind of accessibility.

In fact, despite opening and closing night galas, festivalgoers with a celebrity-watching agenda would have been disappointed. Sure, there were some well-known actors and directors - Angelica Huston, the secret guest of "A Conversation With...," Roy Scheider, and Spalding Gray - but the glitz level was low.

Perhaps it's an indicator that the festival has found its niche - an off-season event with the serious purpose of commingling industry, filmmakers, and fans.

Resource For Kids

Ms. Biscardi, who is an East Hampton Middle School teacher, sees another purpose in the festival - as an educational resource for children in the community. More than to museums, galleries, or local theaters, kids gravitate to the movies, she said.

"It's important to incorporate more of the art involved in film in kids' lives here, at all levels and all ages," she said.

The festival distinguishes itself by its emphasis on young filmmakers, even giving monetary awards for stuent films, unlike many festivals.

"There are a lot of young filmmakers out there, but here they are included in just about everything that goes on, there's not really a hierarchy," said Ms. Ross. "They will be the established filmmakers of tomorrow, that's why we chose them."

Seeking Funding

"Filmmakers are interested in our festival for a number of reasons - its proximity to New York, its friendly atmosphere for the audience to look at films, and the number of creative people in this area," said Ken Tabachnick, the festival's director. That, and a huge increase in industry and press attendance this year, combined to create a promising stage for unsigned films.

Some came to show a finished product, others, like Breck Eisner, the director of the science-fiction short "Recon," came to give producers and distributors a taste of what they could do with better funding.

If you listened in on conversations among filmmakers and festivalgoers, the magic of film boiled down to stories of funding - how long it took to gather the money or who invested in the project.

Industry Buzz

The French animators Didier and Thierry Poiraud spent two years raising the money to make their 12 1/2-minute short film "The Wild Heels." It took them 10 days to film it. The brothers and their movie visited the United States for the first time last week for the film's first festival screening Thursday.

The day after the festival, there was no word as to whether some of the highlights had been picked up by distributors, Mr. Tabachnick said, but he talked to filmmakers over the four days who had been approached by many potential distributors.

There reportedly was a big buzz in the industry about the joint winners of the juried Golden Starfish Award, "Puddle Cruiser" by Jay Chandrasekhar and "Mugshot" by Matt Mahurin, even before the festival began.

As to which films will be big hits outside of the festival circuit, the festival director didn't even want to speculate. "It's impossible in this industry to predict anything. Nobody would have ever thought 'The Crying Game' would have crossed over and made millions, but it did," Mr. Tabachnick said.

Personal Favorite

His personal favorite of the festival, the Russian documentary "Anna" by Nikita Mikhalkov, may never make it into mainstream theaters here because the venues for documentaries are so few and far between.

In choosing films this year, the organizers looked for strong artistic and cinematic voices, Mr. Tabachnick said.

Many had provocative, even disturbing, subjects. The selection drew mixed reviews from audience members - some saying they found the films better than last year, while others thought they fell short - with general nods of approval for their boldness, if nothing else.

Many festivalgoers, whether casual filmgoers, serious afficionados, or film professionals, were also harsh critics. When the Golden Starfish winners were announced in one screening, an audience member was overheard saying she couldn't believe that "Puddle Cruiser" had shared the award.

"I call them like I see them, and I walked out of it," she said to her companion.

Immersed In Film

Rich Feleppa, a film buff from Amagansett who spent the better part of the past week in the movie theater, was enthusiastic about the roster of films. Though he saw a few turkeys, most of the 12 films he took in seemed better than last year's offerings, he said. He reveled in the chance to get immersed in the art of filmmaking. "It takes you to other places you're just not likely to be," he said.

Still, he didn't think his favorites were likely to be big box office draws. He liked "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame" by the Yugoslavian filmmaker Srdjan Dragojevic and echoed Mr. Tabachnick's praise for "Anna." "They should make it to the mainstream, but they probably won't," he ventured.

The hope of catching a gem that may never make it to a big movie house and a penchant for fresh visions in the medium brought film buffs from around the South Fork and farther afield to the festival. Once they were here, however, some were frustrated with the box office chaos. Problems with the ticket-printing machine forced many buyers to return again and again.

More Glitches

And yes, there were more glitches. On Saturday morning, while a ferocious northeaster was raging outside the movie theater, village police were called to the theater showing Greg Mottola's "Daytrippers." The screening had been full and the film about to run when friends of the filmmaker showed up to watch the film, too. Told they could not stand because of fire regulations, they were asked to leave, but refused. Enter the police. A second screening of "Daytrippers" was added Sunday morning to satisfy the demand.

Filmgoers also reported minor projection and sound problems at many screenings.

Outside the UA theaters there were picketers from the projectionists union, who were waiting for a deal between United Artists and their union. The East End Disabilities Group was protesting too, with signs urging people to boycott three local restaurants owned in part by Toni Ross, because, they claimed, the eateries were not accessible to the disabled.

Despite the troubles, Mr. Tabachnick said ticket sales were higher than any other year and "people liked it." Ms. Ross, who is one of the founders of the festival, agreed. "It went exceedingly well, I had an incredibly positive response," she said.

The East End of Long Island's being over-represented by histories of all types, I didn't expect to discover anything new in the Amagansett Village Improvement Society's reissue of "Amagansett Lore and Legend," first published in 1948.

Most of the written word about the East End's past, put down by amateur historians, including my prolific grandmother, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, has tended to the romantic, and this book is no different.

I am well aware, from experience in making historical documentaries, of how difficult it is to step beyond one's preconceptions and prevailing interpretations of long-past events. Consequently, I remain ambivalent about this book. I worry that this reprint, nearly identical to the half-century-old edition and with only minor editing, may actually be a disservice to contemporary readers in that its antiquated notions, especially as they concern the area's native population, may be perpetuated as historical fact.

Period Piece

In fact, this collection of stories may say more about the period in which it was first published than it does about the days its stories purport to chronicle.

History is hard work, I know, but I wish that someone had provided footnotes and additional context for this edition. In the lone exception, Tony Prohaska writes, in a thoughtful introduction to the new edition, that " 'Lore and Legend,' then, is a period piece: one rich period [1948] gazing back at another. . . ."

Nonetheless, the stories in this 128-page book are interesting and fresher than most, since they were, with one exception, not written by a member of my own family.

The best material - and not incidentally, the closest to primary sources - are two accounts concerning the discovery of German saboteurs on the Amagansett beach by a United States Coastguardsman, John Avery, on a dark night in June 1942.

The Saboteurs

Alex Haley, later of "Roots" fame, wrote the official version, which appears in "Lore and Legend" and documents the Government re sponse to the incursion. Mr. Haley's account is followed by a letter written by the Long Island Rail Road's Amagansett stationmaster at the time, Ira Baker. He sets straight the wildly exaggerated stories about his heroism that appeared in papers as far-flung as Delray Beach, Fla.

Mr. Baker wrote simply that he sold four tickets to Jamaica, Queens, to a "swarthy man who spoke good English" and later found some wet clothes and a single tennis shoe in the hedge outside.

These two stories hint at a country terrified by the war in Europe and driven nearly to hysteria by the reports of the German mission.

Much of the book, however, is devoted to fables really, reflecting a rosy-tinted view of the past that is neither illuminating nor especially accurate. Rather, it is a reflection of America's national myth of the goodness, thrift, and industriousness of the early settlers.

"Amagansett Lore and Legend"

Carleton Kelsey, Ed.

Amagansett Village

Improvement Society, $15

It is a convenient fiction that those who first populated these shores did not include a fair number of miscreants, rogues, and criminal oddballs for whom resettlement in the dangerous and unknown new world represented something better than prison or poverty in Europe.

As a recent study of the treatment of Indians on Long Island by the colonists and their descendants indicates, our forebears were hardly the virtuous and honorable pioneers many of the essayists in "Legend and Lore" would have us believe.

Indeed, evidence is abundant in town records that the settlers were a litigious and acrimonious lot as inclined to sue as lend a hand to a needy neighbor. Our national dogma is dependent on such patchwork histories of benevolence and good-spirited ancestors.

A recently published collection of photographs of Southampton Town, edited by Mary Cummings of Bridgehampton, is part of Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America" series, and will be of interest to history buffs. Suprisingly, however, it contradicts the adage about a picture's being worth a thousand words and does not manage to come close to the Amagansett volume in the amount of information it conveys.

Its endless numbers of poorly reproduced black-and-white photographs go by - like watching an interminable vacation slide show - without leaving much of an overall impression.

The paperback volume is organized chronologically, with the earliest shots from the 1890s. The images are jumbled on top of each other, and the book is difficult to penetrate.

Stunning Ziel Entries

It should be noted, however, that the book contains stunning photographs from the Ron Ziel Collection, part of what was the Long Island Rail Road's archive. In contrast to much of the rest of the book, these shots were made largely by professional photographers and are far more compelling.

One view of Sag Harbor's waterfront from a hilltop shows a bucolic meadow with white-clothed children and Long Island Sound steamboats in the distance. Another, probably the strongest in the book from an artistic point of view, shows a man walking toward the camera as the railroad's rotary steam snowplow whirls in a blizzard of white behind him.

"Southampton"

Mary Cummings

Images Of America Series

Arcadia Publishing, $16.99

These photographs underscore the reality that this kind of book demands both an artist's eye and a historian's sense of context to help the reader make sense of the vast amount of material locked in the images. Neither is in evidence.

Problems In Text

Ms. Cummings's informational captions are not all they might be. The homegrown whaling industry that took place along Long Island's Atlantic Coast is identified as "on-shore" (italics mine).

Whether this was someone else's error or not, this and other problems, like two conflicting counts of the number of sailing ships in the Sag Harbor fleet and sloppy dating of pictures of the Hurricane of 1938, render the text suspect. As further indictment of Ms. Cummings's text, I found that the book improved on a second go-round. Freed from the compulsion to read all the captions I was able to immerse myself in the images and soak up some of what life might have been like a century ago.

Given the choice between the romantic view of history circa 1948 that the Amagansett book offers and the vacuous collection of photographs in the contemporary volume, I prefer the former, not for any significant historical reason, but simply because "Amagansett Lore and Legend" does not pretend to be what it is not.

Both of these books are not so much histories themselves, but about history, reflections of how we thought and think about the past.

In a 1922 letter to Ezra Pound written right after T.S. Eliot's landmark poem, "The Waste Land," was published, William Carlos Williams wrote: "I distrust that bastard more than any writer I know in the world today. He can write, granted, but it's like walking into a church, to my mind. I can't do it without a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach."

Max Blagg, a 43-year-old British poet and performance artist, might well have written those words. He came to America in 1971 much as the American-born Eliot had emigrated to England in 1914, to flee a musty aesthetic - walking out of the church of English poetry with, as it were, a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"There's a place for Eliot and the British poets, but I am riveted by the American idiom," he said during a recent interview in his Bridgehampton farmhouse. His pronounced British accent is mellowed by an easy way with American slang and deletable expletives, and by a self-deprecating, rather headlong sense of humor.

Bruce And The Beats

"At age 14 I came across a Grove Press paperback of the works of Lenny Bruce that knocked me out," he went on. "Then an American friend introduced me to the poetry of Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and the Beat writers, and that was it."

"They had the freedom to say whatever they wanted, and that's what I wanted, too."

Mr. Blagg has published five volumes of poems and appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Bomb, Elle, Mirabella, and Verbal Abuse.

He reads his work regularly at a wide variety of New York venues such as the Kitchen, Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, Performing Garage, the Drawing Center, and the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the last a casual forum that has "more influence on poets than the Academy of American Poets," according to Allen Ginsberg.

The New York Voice

Of his attraction to the American vernacular and its street-talk cadences, Mr. Blagg said English speech patterns just didn't inspire him: "I never felt the creative thing in London, where there were one or two very academic poetry readings a year as opposed to one every night here."

"In the '60s, Allen Ginsberg tried to promote the funky, working-class, Beatles sound of the Mersey River poets in Liverpool, but I was never drawn to it," the poet recalled. "The New York voice was much stronger, and England was this cold, dark place with no visible means of support."

Mr. Blagg was born in 1953 in a Midlands village, the youngest of 12 children. His father was a plumber. While not especially brilliant in school, he was taken up by a teacher who encouraged his writing, and published his first poem in the school magazine when he was 15.

Discovering Burroughs

Serendipitously, the teacher also introduced him to another seminal American writer. "I've just read the most disgusting book," he told his student, "'Naked Lunch,' by William Burroughs."

Of course the budding poet raced to his local library, found the book on a back shelf, and took it home. "It was so disgusting I couldn't believe it," he said. "But the humor, like Lenny Bruce's, was thrillingly different. I knew at once that I had to get out of my hometown."

While attending the University of London with the help of Government grants, he set off at age 16 on a pilgrimage following in Mr. Burroughs's and Paul Bowles's drug-dazed footsteps. Hitchhiking through North Africa, he religiously dropped acid, smoked hash, popped Ritalin, and snorted crystal meth, a clothbound copy of "Naked Lunch" enshrined in his knapsack.

Hallucinatory Pilgrimage

This hallucinatory trek is documented in "A Monkey Wrench in the Garden of Allah," an outrageous little Bildungsroman published by the magazine Appearances. It has been presented in mixed-media versions at various New York spots, and was performed a cappella at Canio's Books in 1990.

In 1971, hopelessly in love with America, Mr. Blagg scraped up the money for a plane ticket to New York. "Frank O'Hara was the main reason I came, and the city has never disappointed me," he said. "My life began the day I landed."

He moved in with friends, to a huge loft on Spring Street.

"You actually live here?" he gasped when he saw it.

"After those little London bed-sitters, I couldn't believe how free it felt. England is so crushing."

Westward Ho

Working as a carpenter, Mr. Blagg was further liberated by the "rough and readiness" of American craftsmanship: whacking 2-by-4s together and slapping on Sheetrock was a lot quicker than toiling over the dovetailed timbers of British building sites, and seemed more practical, too.

"The U.S. really is the land of opportunity," he said. "Anybody can say he's a carpenter, or a bartender, or a cabdriver, and get a job and make money. England's been a closed shop for generations."

In 1975 Mr. Blagg embarked on another pilgrimage, this time a recreation of Jack Kerouac's wild rides across America immortalized in "On the Road" and "Dharma Bums."

After taking a bus to St. Louis, he hitchhiked west on Route 66. "It was right after the Charles Manson murders, and the country was crawling with hippies and Jesus freaks," he said. "With my long hair, I was scared to death of being shot by some deranged cowboy."

Acid Took A Toll

Luckily he got a ride-share back with an actress returning east to be in a revival of "Jesus Christ Superstar." After an X-rated cross-country romance, hilariously documented in a prose piece, "Five Days," he moved into her New York apartment and tried to concentrate on writing.

"I went to the St. Mark's readings of poets like Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, and Larry Fagin," he remembered. "It was a vibrant scene, but the main man, Frank O'Hara, was missing. I was so murderously shy I only actually talked to these people years later."

His writing was also inhibited at first, by a mind he'd more or less blown with drugs, he said. "Acid puts a total crunch on creativity and makes you paranoid and insecure; it took me several years to shake off the effects."

Recovery

But recover he did, on his own, and began reading and publishing his work in avant-garde night spots and magazines. A paperback anthology called "Unbearables" contains an early prose memoir, "Feet."

"As the fisherman loves the sharp odor of the dawn sea, as the snurge adores the leathery contours of a well worn bicycle seat, as the epongeur relishes the fetid dampness of a subway restroom, so I have loved feet," the poet confides.

In the blurbs for the "Unbearables" writers, Camille Paglia enthuses that "they expand your imagination . . . they open up brain cells you didn't even know you had." Marguerite Duras says, "They laugh their own private laugh, malicious, inimitable; no one can figure out why."

Self-Confrontation

In subsequent poems, Mr. Blagg shifted into a free-wheeling lyricism incorporating the playful, fast-fade, jump-cut, chatty, cataloguing styles of O'Hara and other New York poets, particularly Mr. Ginsberg.

While these poems are not especially imitative, they do rejoice in the "I do this, I do that" panache the New York poets unfurled before their audiences in a glorious surge of self-proclamation, a mutiny against the solemn '50s.

Turning Outward

In this mode, Mr. Blagg went through the grim business of confronting himself, and got over himself, so to speak. Repetitions of lines like "Daddy the fun's gone, all the fun gone, and the well run dry," reflect not only the end of the drug high, but also of the sexual high, as both male and female friends began dying of AIDS.

His more recent poems seem to turn outward again, perhaps echoing Williams's dictum: "No ideas but in things."

Ribald As Ever

"No one thinks that poetry exists in his or her own life," Mr. Blagg said. "I believe the poet's purpose is to be a pair of eyes that shows people that it does; the universal lies in the particular."

Not that he's gone all high and mighty on us. These new poems are sharp and ribald as ever, charging ahead like Terry Southern on a roll, though with a gentler heart, and fired by a stunning, thesaurus-worthy vocabulary.

In one, the poet longs for that bright place

where words like "bejewelled"

are permitted, encouraged,

Thimble, gombril, Lantana

cyrillic, lanolin

sussuration, lapidary

they tumble from the tongue. . . .

He's left, of course, with

the bodies cooling in the funeral parlor

at Third Street

close by Tony's cafe deluxe

Where we began each day

guzzling scrambled eggs off the formica. . . .

Life seems to be made rich by these things, however, and full of what he calls "federal days . . . that bathe in this specific light."

Mr. Blagg shares his quota of "federal" and other days with his wife and collaborator of 14 years, Anita Madeira, a collagist and television commercial designer; with their daughter, Nell, 3, and with an adopted black cat named Kipper.

Solemnity Begone

He's working toward a November reading at St. Mark's.

"I used to add things to the performance, and not just stand there," he said. In collaboration with Ms. Madeira and other artists, he's incorporated montages of projected images, mixed-media improvisation, music, and even a back-up chorus of Girl Scouts into his presentations.

"It got to be style over content, however, and now I'm back to solo readings," he said. "But I'm still trying to puncture the solemnity of the words 'poetry reading.' "

" 'Hey!' I want to shout. 'Don't run away! It'll be entertaining, I swear!' "

He loped across the grass to meet his daughter running toward him. She looked quite confident that entertainment would, indeed, be forthcoming forthwith.

The dumbers-down are at it again, this time in far Northwest. The Roosevelt Land Corporation, developer of the old Van Scoy farm, has proposed giving the streets of its new subdivision there such lackluster names as Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter Lanes, names that would be irrelevant at best anywhere in the nation, but are downright witless in a region so steeped in history.

The Van Scoy farm was surrounded for centuries by houses belonging to members of the Ranger family, the first of whom, Samuel Ranger, is thought to have arrived from Stonington, Conn., in 1777. The farmhouse owned by his son Dering, who married a neighboring Van Scoy, still stands, near an old cemetery that is the Ranger family burying ground, in an area off Northwest Road known as Grassy Hollow.

In the years after the Revolutionary War there was a one-room school on the land, populated mainly by Ranger children. Ranger men were school and Town Trustees throughout the 19th century, as well as farmers and whalers. Some were Civil War veterans.

Although the name of Ranger appears on the family trees of many present-day East Hamptoners, the Parsons, Talmage, and Lester families among them, there seems to be no one left of that name either in the town or, indeed, in Suffolk County. All the more reason to try to keep it alive.

Charles E. Squires, an East Hampton native with roots in Northwest, wrote recently to the East Hampton Town Planning Board asking it to urge the Van Scoy farm developers to consider more meaningful street names. The board has encouraged pertinent names in the past, though not always with lasting results. The residents of Pennypacker Lane, named for a local historian, for example, decided some two years ago that they would rather live on Country Lane and got the town to comply with their wishes.

Nevertheless, we hope the planners will try again. Ranger Road. Van Scoy Drive. Grassy Hollow Lane. Dering Street. Names with meaning, and a sense of place.

As odd as it may sound, it is rather uplifting to go to the dump. Seeing townspeople going from bin to bin to dispose of recyclables they have sorted meticulously renews a little faith in the human race. Yes, it's painstaking to separate garbage among multiple trash cans at home or work, where one used to suffice, but for the most part people have shown a willingness to be a little inconvenienced for the public good.

If only certain of our elected officials showed as much public-spiritedness. Instead, shortsighted and regressive attitudes toward recycling have surfaced among some members of the East Hampton Town Board, as evidenced by comments and actions at recent meetings.

For example, Councilman Len Bernard recently said that educating the public about recycling was not "important at this particular point in time." He made this comment in connection with a Republican plan to save money by eliminating the position of recycling coordinator, which the G.O.P majority deemed "not essential." In addition, the majority on the board has left six positions in the Sanitation Department vacant to save money. Those six jobs would make it possible for the town to bale its recyclables and, in turn, to receive more money for them. Without the extra workers, the town is baling only cardboard, and perhaps not all of that.

The Republican members of the board also have proposed closing the dump one day a week as a cost-saving measure, which will be a great inconvenience to many homeowners and businesses, and probably encourage illegal dumping. Moreover, they have rebuffed suggestions that a separate hearing be held to get public reaction to this proposal, saying a Nov. 1 hearing on next year's town budget should suffice. So be it. Anyone with a commitment to recycling, seven days a week, should take that opportunity to speak up.

Garbage is more than just a dollars-and-cents issue. We certainly should strive to make our waste disposal operation as efficient and cost-effective as possible - but not at the expense of the overall goal of recycling as much of our garbage as possible -and of making the whole recycling and composting plan self-sustaining eventually.

Instead of seeking out competitive prices for our recyclables, and stockpiling them when the market is low, the Republicans are increasing the town's dependence on carters. Those carters are hauling more and more of our trash to privately owned recycling plants elsewhere, when market prices make it profitable to recycle, or to out-of-town incinerators and out-of-state landfills when it does not.

East Hampton has, truckload by truckload, begun abdicating its responsibility and self-determination. But, even when it costs more, recycling should take precedence. As Michael Haran, the town budget officer, pointed out in a discussion of whether or not to bale paper, "So it costs you $7 a ton to do the right thing."

The economics of recycling is like an emerging market of an Eastern European country - it's a new system that needs time to eliminate the kinks, reach maturity, and gain wide acceptance. Unfortunately, since taking over the majority on the Town Board, the Republicans have sought quick remedies to contain costs that may turn out to have the opposite effect.

East Hampton prides itself as being in the vanguard on environmental issues. The solid waste management plan was adopted in that tradition, and deserves bipartisan support even if some bugs have been found in it.

Let's not fall to the back of the pack now. We should be figuring out how to raise compliance with recycling, which Mr. Garnham estimated at only 37 percent, and how to get the full cooperation of carters.

If instead we follow the lead of Mr. Bernard and company, we won't need cute little recycling mascots like Rocky Raccoon reminding us to recycle. Instead, our new mascot could be an ostrich, as our leaders stick their heads in the sand.