Dear Dr. Bennett

I still love your radio show Dr. Bennett. My ex-wife and her boyfriend were nice enough to send me a video tape of my son's pee-wee football game (since the lawyers all agreed I can't attend in person). And so I watched the tape of my son's football game with the nyquil I bought beforehand and I fell into the bottom of a deep and upturned water well in the sky, far above and at the height of airplanes. I found myself watching the game forgetting the particulars and simply observing the line of scrimmage as it formed and reformed at the beginning and ending of each play of the long game. The pure form of it and the repetitive/alternating stillness and entanglements of that line. So I woke up this morning and the sun was already out and the tape ran out but somewhere the game's still going.


Also Dr. Bennett, When I brought the nyquil to the checkout counter, the pregnant teenager behind the counter asked if I'd been crying, I said "no" of course but later on and throughout the night I talked to myself in my empty motel room while pretending I was confessing everything to her. I had a dream later in the night in which I followed the pregnant teenager and her boyfriend in the mall, closely and unseen, as a body-less spirit. She was chiding her boyfriend for having "killed her brother" in a manner that wasn't too casual yet not exactly marked by trauma. The peculiar incongruity of her tone of voice was un-captured by my memory but I hope it comes back to me. You know those type of terrifying bright yet freezing winter days? In which it's as though the sun itself is emitting the cold? I think that her peculiar tone of voice will somehow come back to me on a day like that, if ever.

Hitler: The Rise of Evil (Christian Duguay 2003)

Convex angles of a wide lens oscillate the foreground against background, a constant of its reality as the motion of Michael Bay's alternate universes unceasingly breathe off of (the only briefly applied) Deep Zooms of Vertigo and Jaws. Duguay's near consistent intra-frame tertiary executes the visceral immediacy of violence but the exaggerated spaces mainly execute history as psychology and Hitler arrives psychologically fully formed after the opening credit sequence summary of childhood.The rounded edges make literal mental interiors and the TV movie's institutional limitations and its historical and political obligations confine the direction to the didactic end. Similarly, The Godfather and Cabaret are short-handed as reference points, a deliberate distancing from the anchors of historical authenticity.

A brief gag on the violence of kitsch in the Nazi propaganda innovations: A future (and eventually regretful) right-wing sympathizer of the Fuhrer spotting him in the primitive beer hall speechifying days, noting that Hitler "is a cartoon" but begins his pull into the whirlpool. And of course there's the important discovery of the mustache, "The Chaplin", which I once had myself and regret feeling obligated to shave because of the day-today dangers therein. I wore the mustache to feel more closely aligned with icons of clownishness, failure, i.e. a spiritual self beyond my own time. Granted, a gesture I might have not pursued had history had been altered such that Hitler had not already ruined it for everyone.

The question arises if the Nazi conclusions would have been reached without Hitler, but something outside the frame, the transgressive death work is always waiting and desired. By giving a concrete articulation of and extending the language of the transgressive, the Nazi image-makers made it easier for the the transgressive world/self to fall more easily inward. It's not 1/100th as resonate or brilliant as the reverse Wagner of "Hitler: A Film from Germany" (Syberberg 1978), but that's the best film ever made.

The Private Life of Sherlock Homes (Billy Wilder 1970)

There is no Loch Ness monster but a replica was built and actually put in the lake and it may or may not be bewildering to the stupid animals when they see it motionless (but not decaying) on the lake floor.

Billy Wilder's movie isn't about that particular monster though. It does lead to a climactic reveal of a fake monster (mechanical wonder and failure) and the other characters react to the world famous Detective Holmes with a slower animal's bewilderment. The perspective is both sympathetic and cynical on the overlap of intelligence and sickness and the mournful end of a better age of men. Holmes is of an advanced mental acumen, so the terror conveyed is in being so close to a force that's always a level above and the gags unfold with the comedy of constant delay.

The Bad Kids of Black Heaven: Where's The Orchestra? Part Two

Beginning with a split second of the very end of the previous scene: The Senator and his wife, Hadassah sleeping soundly as an earthquake violently rattles their Florida hotel room.

A news report on the freeway shooting of German tourists with stereotypically scary sketches of young black gang members.

Images from a movie from the 1970s with zombified versions of Nazi soldiers emerging from the waves of a Florida beach, to the horrified reactions elderly beach goers. (Also apparently filmed on a day much too cold for beach going.)

Abruptly Cut To Title Card accompanied by silence:

"Studies show that people who are somewhat depressed predicted the future better than those who are happy and well adjusted."

This is still Florida but somewhere away from The Senator.

Here is The Actress, on a movie set. In her early twenties but preternaturally hardened and aged, wearing the body-marked fatigue of mass awareness, the waking terror of fame, and the sublimated soullessness of having maintained a commitment to her goal. But what do any of us know about being that one and a million?

A crew makes painstaking and minute adjustments to the cinema lighting of a 1970s newsroom. A period piece, a bio-pic of the life of deceased Sarasota affiliate newscaster Christine Chubbock, who famously shot herself live on the air one Sunday morning in 1974. Footage of the incident was destroyed, has been sought after for years from collectors of rare video, and the entire basis for this feature film pivots around an exacting recreation of the event.

The 21st century Actress is playing the late Christine Chubbock and is getting made up to look like a newscaster from the era. The personal style and fashion sense exhibited in the ongoing spectacle of The Actress’ day-to-day has been commented on, by both celebrity journalists and academic celebrity theorists, as an updated version of the Dionysian fashions of the1970s, mixed with the timelessness of leather jacket archetypes amidst a haze of smoke. It was once said that fashions become out of fashion before returning later but in the accelerated age it has been found that nothing ever truly goes away, it’s all simultaneously present and waiting to be drawn from but this itself isn’t a facet of the time, it’s a consequence of the obliteration of all taste. Remaining only are the funhouse mirror reflections of the idea of a fashion specific to the current period.

What adds to The Actress’ allure in much of the public’s imagination isn’t solely due to the Dionysian look expressed in her fashion sense, seen primarily through the hurried and inebriated exits in and out of clubs and restraints captured in shaky hand held paparazzo cameras, but mostly the leather jacket archetype’s malleability into other appearances. Sometimes The Actress will have short hair, blonde hair, and more oddly thick glasses and shabby sweater (specifically utilized when The Actress is pontificating in interviews on the philosophical underpinnings of dramatizing the late suicidal newscaster’s final days); always the look in the shadow of another look, the fantasy of an absent self.

The look and its shadow define The Actress’ entrance into prior to the days of her own self-directed spectacle of drug and alcohol addiction rumors and minor arrests. The child of an Older Actress, a now aging former cover girl and star of comedic fluff who manifests a severe and medicated neuroses partly related to the lack of prestige associated with her reputation as an artist but primarily a consequence of the unreality being that one in a million. The Actress was introduced to the world as both a child and peer of her mother. While the daughter lived directly under the harsh light of the narcissistic fantasy of multitudes, her mother manifested a separate fantasy for aging women in the celebrity news narrative of being her daughter’s peer.

It is believed by The Director that casting this actress to portray Christine Chubbock will add poignance to the impending suicide death that frames the narrative, given that The Actress’ reputation for glamorously self-destructive behavior has made her a constant in office death pools for the last couple of years. References are made to famous beauties of the past that have also dies young and there is a shared excitement of potentially witnessing a similar scenario in real present-tense time. There is a faint glittery shine around many see around The Actress’ outline, a Black Heaven which in technical terms is the by-product of premature necrophilia.

So right now, the newsroom set is being prepared and The Actress is in her trailer with friends and assistants. She is practicing the voice, an affected version of Christine Chubbock's own voice, which she studies from videotape. The voice is an exaggerated low moan, Ms. Chubbock was depressed in her final days, reportedly over her fears of always being single and remaining alone. The Actress' impersonation progressively takes on the garish quality of broad characture but not that of a skilled performer, it's a crude gesture encouraged by the group of friends and assistants around her, everything she does with the intent of being the funny is met with agreeable laughter from the lower hierarchy of her circle. She laughs along with their laughter, encouraged she goes even further.

The laughter in repetitive echoes carries over to the next scene.

The Senator, early morning on the highway, examining the wreckage of the car in which the German tourists were gunned down. A psychic investigation, assisting police and other Floridian authorities. Their bodies removed, all that remains is a rental car with such an absurd amount of bullet holes, such that the exterior of the vehicle resembles some sort of modern art design. The Senator runs his hand slowly across pieces of the car's interior, torn material with jagged edges. His fingers touch the sharp edges lightly, eyes closed, he resists the urge to visually recreate the horror of the shooting in his mind and observes the gravity.

The laughter made by The Actress and her people in a small comfortable room continues to echo at this awful scene. The Senator seems to be the only one hearing it. The police and other Floridian authorities confusedly observe The Senator as he wanders away from the vehicle as though in a trance. Staring at the sky again (but this time, not in order to hear Hadassah) and looking past the wide plain next to the stretch of highway, The Senator is hearing the laughter and looking toward its source in the unknown distance. Laughter always overlaps with cruelty but their are two kinds of cruelty: One is a timeless element of earth and humanity, without it love wouldn't exist and vice versa. But then there's this other kind...

The Cross vs. The Circle: In Defense of Lifetime Television's "Cyber Seduction"

For those who excel and find comfort in the current cultural climate of snark, eager to be the first find humor in every subject, the immediate reaction is disbelief that this movie exists. "Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life," A made-for-television film with the issue of internet porn addiction as the impetus of its central narrative invites interest of an ironic nature. However, what gets overlooked is how the seeming ridiculousness of the lesson-oriented drama provides a valuably reductive framework for an extraordinarily well executed and morally grounded drama, comparable to the transcendent graces of Robert Bresson's cinema. It's also worth remembering that a snapshot of laughter is also a picture of cruelty.

The surprise of director Tom Mcloughlin (responsible for "Friday the 13th: Part 6", the singular and atmospheric height of that famed slasher series) and his modest and powerful film is that it is not issue-specific toward the seemingly ridiculous subject of "internet porn" as much as a formally and thematically disciplined drama about addiction in its universal terms. The teen age protagonist is a perfectly cast (wide eyed and awkward overbite) picture of vulnerability and innocence. The montages of the teenage protagonist's long nights at the computer are precise evocations of the automatic circle of the whirlpool trajectory toward the drain. The brief second of bright blue that fills the screen in the addiction montages is mirrored in the baptismal high school swim meet pool chlorine that saves him. Yes, he finds religion, or "gets radical" as he says he needs to do upon realizing how his embarrassing addiction has crippled his girlfriend, family, and life.

While the baptismal conclusion opens "Cyber Seduction"up to the criticism of exchanging one extreme for another or of bit being shallow religious propaganda, its worth noting that Eastern religions espouse the endless masturbatory Circle ( indirectly adopted as the form of our secular times as Philip Reiff has observed) and Christianity has the Cross, a rising line of confluence and intersection. The subversive criticism inherent in the lingering question of Mcloughlin's film is that the circular nature of addiction leaves its victims with no other choice but seek the Cross of confluence. Additionally, in the film's relationship to larger aesthetic trends, the reductive framework of the issue-oriented moral lesson film such as this one, and other Lifetime pictures, is one that would behoove other filmmakers to follow. It would benefit all of us for filmmakers to aspire to make Lifetime pictures as opposed to the fake independent success of the well marketed nihilism in disguise, revealed in the therapeutic platitudes of films like "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Juno."

Persistance of the Goodness Vision

"You go on vacation with your family, you know... you hang out you relax. But here...these brothers are on the prowl!"

Recorded in 1991 in front of an audience of predominantly black tourists in Aruba, "Sinbad: Bringing the Funk" is a masterful comic performance. A singularity of place, time, and intended audience (black people vacationing in the Caribbean) but its effects are transitory and a larger testament to specificity-in-performance.

I highly value the Goodness Vision and comedians with reductively clean parameters like Brian Regan and Bill Cosby (Sinbad's overriding influence) but what's often overlooked about Cosby is the undercurrent of anger that should mar the reverence that is held by comics for his tales of childhood and parenting. I understand why today's best comics like Louis C.K. and Chris Rock compare Cosby to a Jazz musician, but the mastery of formalism can't salvage his abusive Black Catholicism in my mind, though Cosby ultimately does achieve the Goodness Vision (though more often than not more successfully in his brilliant 1980s sitcom than in his stand-up recordings).

Pain is intractable from humor, we all know this, but the requisite negative line that runs through Sinbad's story telling manages to hit home with his audience of single black male and female tourists, the force of recognition can be felt in the reaction to his bit about couples who try and ditch each other immediately upon exiting the airplane.

I particularly liked the segment where he mocked a collective procrastinating tendency (implicating his own in a gesture of humility) toward packing a suitcase much too late in the evening before the next morning's flight in its developed exploration of a banal subject. Here and in a later bit in which Sinbad portrays an ugly guy he knows in Atlanta, who is lucky to be outnumbered by many single successful black women, the comic uses a hard-to-place ambiguous "nerd" voice. A brilliants shorthand to invoke obliviousness though without cruelty.

The comic's performance closes with a serious biblical reference which precedes in a celebratory loving ritual chant-a-long led by special guest Doug E. Fresh, and a reminder to the audience that while it's okay to have fun as singles on vacation, these experiences pale next to the value they will someday possess to "the life of a child." Friedrich Nietzsche would appreciate this compartmentalizing of sin and morality as he valued this capacity in the Greeks. Also worth noting is the fact that very few comics could or would pull this off a moment of closing transcendence at the completion of sustained gaiety in this current period defined by a constant desperation search for transgressive openings . Even a supposedly non-blue Christian comic like Brad Stein seems like a con working a fraudulent gimmick with his pleas to his promise-keeper fans to oppose "activist judges," seeming to come from out of nowhere and not at the peak of a crescendo or to mitigate excessive levity.

All in all, compared to most everyone else, Sinbad possesses a nuanced understanding of sin's necessity curbed by morality as much as he does comedic business and its proximity to serious business.

Florida: Where's The Orchestra? Part One

Just above a whisper..."Hadassah...Hadassah.......Hadassah"A small figure on the shoreline. It's comedian Gilbert Gottfried, portraying a politician (The Senator) in a three-piece-suit slightly too large for his small frame.

The Senator approaches the shore of the Gulf Coast holding his cell phone, he tells his staff that he's seeking a better signal but he really wants to speak to his wife alone as he evades them while walking into the waves, ruining his pants and increasing their professionals' disconcert.

The Senator examines the sky and shoreline, where they meet as one wall. Her voice tiny in his ear but filling up that sky. The terrifying infinity of space and possibility. Haddasah's faith nullifies the terror of possibility, Those endless possibilities of the secular age. He always says her name the same way, as if struck, haunted, and especially when the sky clears.

Returning from the water, surrounded by the assemblage of his staff, revolving around him, speaking and moving at a different frame rate. The Senator's smile is resilient but slightly pained by sunlight, but it looks that way under clouds too... as we'll discover.

The heat makes illusionary tremors out of the horizon lines in the distance but there have been actual earthquakes in Florida lately. Maybe this explains the jittery nature of The Senator's staff, natural phenomena uncommon to the territory named after Easter has expanded naked possibility fraught with the fearful imagination of a collective.

Also happening lately, the shooting murders of German tourists by black suspects on Floridian highways, everything is feeding into everything else in these strange times. The Senator is heading the one man exploratory committee following these unnatural events due to his peculiar sensitivity in these type of matters; it seems that every one of his colleagues has a story about his capacity for surprising clairvoyances. Small things mostly, he once located the missing house keys of his Senatorial colleague from South Carolina, but remarkable nonetheless to any and all observers bound by the normal sensory limitations.

Later on at a press conference, strobing flashbulbs and reporters questions shouted with urgency. The Senator's voice, seemingly designed for maximum annoyance is self-consciously restrained here as in all of the his public appearances, a performative austerity, but one always wonders what he this voice sounds like in full panicky fright mode and unbound at night like a Jewish Werewolf. This is the true undercurrent of The Senator's unpopularity with many of his colleagues and the media: a formal unflappability of manner. Sure, there is the overly nuanced balancing act of his lengthy explanations (The Senator is a master of this "jazz neutrality"), his stereotypically politician transgressions and triangulations from and refusal of acknowledgement of what's plain-as-day-true to everyone else, that is the content which justifies the fists pounded on tables in frustration but the voice...the voice completes this perfect impetus for vexed hair-pulling.

The balancing act, the neutrality and triangulations, these are the byproducts of the Visions, the burden carried and worn by the seer. An elaborate path toward the right thing is being followed and its unexplainable by The Senator because it's beyond words, even beyond vision because the Visions are not literal visions. People overlook this imperfect nature of the prophet, who wears this burden with a shuffling hunched sloppiness, visions are not answers but attacks that lead its victims with not even directions but on a path seeking directions.

The press conference over, The Senator smiles, recording devices shut off violently and pencils stab sentence ending periods onto note pads in frustration. He's said nothing but he's made revelations seem as though forthcoming in the immediate; his gifts are not salesmanesque but he manages this illusion of nearness and farness impossibly through the prolonged static of outwardly flat and neutral execution.

At nighttime, The Senator climbs into a hotel bed with his already sleeping wife. Incidentally, he always sleeps in his suit when not on holiday out of a long gestating superstition. She resembles sea-turtle passivity in these unguarded moments and he drapes an arm across her body, an awkwardly placed hug intended to keep her slumber undisturbed. The Senator recounts his day in an anemic whine with therapy session honesty into her ear. Hadassah jolts unconsciously, moans monosyllables and The Senator nods a serenely felt understanding before reaching his own restful surrender.

He. She. Asleep. And his ongoing psychic investigation will have to resume the next morning as they both maintain their stillness as the next massive earthquake begins. The slow rising falling of their bodies in breaths, comforting to watch from above with God's eye, though inexplicable as the entire room vibrates with violent rattles.