There are two George Kuchars: Kuchar the maker of expansive film parodies with curious, rambling sexual themes; and Kuchar the maker of spontaneous, strangely revealing video chronicles. Tonight's program features this low-budget satirist rendering his own life electronic. Using an 8mm video camcorder, Kuchar has created a body of richly textured diaries, improvisatory in style yet highly dramatic in impact. The "Video Albums," a general rubric, are assembled concurrent with the taped events, production spanning mere days or weeks. Using the camcorder's limited editing capabilities, Kuchar performs insert edits, replacing previously recorded footage with cutaways and new segments. Deceptively sophisticated, the outcome is a complex story-telling structure, replete with changing locales, intimate POV, and hilarious observations of the surrounding culture. East by Southwest has Kuchar on a whirlwind tour of Boston and New York. The plot is mundane: friends are encountered, sights are traversed. But Kuchar possesses such a wry ache for life that the commonplace becomes radiant in its desolation. Investing his journal with an ironic tension, Kuchar bares himself to the camera, only to remain camouflaged by his own nudity. One episode in a tenement outside New York City has Kuchar ensconced with his mother and brother, Mike. His mother's apartment, filled with artifacts of her children, seems like a mausoleum where time has been neglected. Here, Kuchar plaintively laughs amidst the stillness and decay. The Thursday People is a eulogy to Curt McDowell. But like McDowell himself, the videotape is driven by a lust for life. Kuchar's remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the filmmaker oscillate between the mournful and the perversely humorous. But there's not a hint of bathos, not a slodgy tear; Kuchar's quirky candor and uncanny instinct for a good story always keeps him one step ahead of self-indulgence. -Steve Seid