Film Review: I Am Secretly An Important Man
“When I die, when I am fully grown...”
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| image generated by Craiyon |
Everyday, for years, I would listen to Prison - a spoken word record by the poet Steven Jesse Bernstein. The album was released posthumously, in 1992, on the Sub Pop label, a few months after its creator's strange and untimely death.
Prison is a hard album to ignore: An unrelenting barrage of disturbing imagery – the sweepings of a broken and insolvent world – brutal in its self-loathing and unyielding in its nihilism. Even the occasional glimmers of humour are weaponised by their author to enlarge a hodgepodge of self-inflicted wounds. There isn't an ounce of hope to be found anywhere across the 55-minute runtime. Put it on in the background, at sufficient volume, in polite company, and it will soon extinguish all conversation, until it commands the full attention of everyone in the room. “I am considered a very dark poet,” Bernstein once told a TV interviewer.
During the period when I was obsessed with Prison, I saw, in the turbulent psyche of its creator, a manifestation of my own troubled state of mind. Whether this unconventional method of addressing personal mental trauma was beneficial in the long-term, or an everyday act of self-harm that prolonged my suffering, I cannot say with certainty. Eventually I moved past my issues and laid the album to one side. Though I still occasionally play Prison for old time's sake, it no longer has the same impact upon me that it once did.
Bernstein was a teenager during the 1960s – a baby boomer, though he is more commonly associated with the generation that followed, and with the Seattle Grunge scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s. It was the legendary compilation album – Sub Pop 200 (released in December, 1988) that introduced him to the wider world. His gruff, surrealist rant, Come Out Tonight, was featured alongside an unwashed rabble of obscure bands who played at eye-level with their audiences; whose raw energy seemed destined to evaporate as their individual members were absorbed into dead end jobs and privation that was baked-in to their environment. A few years later, a handful of these musicians would go on to achieve a level of fame and wealth beyond anything they could have anticipated. In the decades that followed after, hard drug addiction and suicide would claim an extraordinary number of their lives, leaving behind a cultural void where memorials act as placeholders for men and women who should be enjoying the fruits of late middle age.
Unlike Bernstein's unadorned contribution to Sub Pop 200, the poems on Prison were set to music by the instrumentalist and audio engineer, Steve Fisk, who finished the album following the poet's death. According to Fisk, Bernstein lived long enough to hear a couple of the completed tracks and seemed happy to hand the project over. One character trait that emerges in I Am Secretly An Important Man – a 2010 biographical documentary that attempts to encapsulate the life of its subject in archive footage and interviews with family, friends and collaborators – is his willingness towards collaboration. Success notwithstanding, Bernstein regarded being a poet as a job and treated it accordingly.
Fisk's sound collages are attuned to Bernstein's well-timed delivery and disturbed mental frequency, lending his words additional emphasis and momentum. No No Man, which is divided into two parts that bookend the album, is set to the kind of careening urban jazz that might accompany a car chase in gangster movie, set in 1920s Chicago. On Party Balloon a squall of snarling guitar compressed into a near singularity, accompanies an account of a cloudy green fishtank “the length of an entire childhood” into which Bernstein deposits an array of discarded items found on waste ground around his home. His clenched, nasal drone maintains a steady sermonising tone, that slips into a narcotised drawl on some of the slower pieces. At his most desperate, his voice assumes the defeated whine of a beaten dog barring its teeth at its tormentors. He sounds like a man who has reached the end of tether, raging indiscriminately at a world that has failed him.
On Face, the album's centrepiece, the music falls away to a faint industrial wash that resembles the machine drone of a distant factory. Over the course of twelve minutes, Bernstein describes his struggle to make peace with his physical appearance, and the long-term impact that his warped narcissism had upon his mental health. Childhood polio and bullying from his classmates tail into his withdrawal to the garage of the family home, and a psychological breakdown in which he threatens to cut his mother's throat with a butcher knife and smear her blood all over his face. He pours a bottle of black lacquer over his head, after which he is declared insane and institutionalised. The poem owes much of its dreadful impact to its author's measured, matter of fact narration of his downward spiral into homelessness and drug addiction.
It is the opening lines of Face that are used as an introduction to Bernstein in this documentary of his life: “Look in the mirror Stevie. See, there's Stevie,” he mimics, twisting his mother's pride in her newborn son into an expression of cruel self-mockery.
Ironically, Bernstein stood out the most when he attempted to smarten-up and blend in. He appears in a 1989 interview on Channel 7 resembling a ventriloquist's dummy, in shirtsleeves and tie and subdued sweater vest, with his wiry hair plastered down, his thick-framed glasses anchored to his large protruding ears and his thin lips pressed together in a rictus smile.
It is an awkward meeting of polar opposites. Bernstein looks shifty and uncomfortable; estranged from his true self which he has concealed beneath the cliched trappings of nerdishness. His female interviewer, with her volumised newsreader bouffant and large earrings, exudes the stylised glamour of her profession. Their conversation, through no fault of either party, perpetually teeters on the brink of collapse, as if the void between their lives is almost too wide to be bridged.
I Am Secretly An Important Man spends the first half hour of its running time establishing Bernstein's character, seasoning anecdotes from friends and family with archive video footage, filling-in the broad strokes of his latter years, before the narrative shifts to the beginning.
Performance artist, Susy Schneider, answers the door to her home in the character of her late boyfriend squinting and talking out of the side of her mouth in a nasal drone, shuffling along the hallway, ahead of the camera, affecting a slight hunch.
Showing off her S&W Magnum, she recalls Bernstein's unconventional style of aiming, that was determined by his inability to straighten his polio-damaged legs. Holding the revolver in two hands above his head, he would slowly bring it down until it was level with the target, at which point he would squeeze off a shot. “And he almost never hit the damn thing,” says Schneider.
There is footage of him clambering out of the window of the hotel room where he lived, and descending the ladder of the fire escape, dangling from the bottom rung with his legs swaying a few inches above a discarded bathroom sink abandoned on the waste ground below.
We see him sitting in the window of a department store reading his poetry to the amusement of passers-by.
Bernstein's tendency towards personal reinvention was there from a young age, when, according to his brother, he decided that the disembodied initial 'J', at the centre of his name, stood for Jesse. Later in life his self-mythologising was the nexus point at which his personal history, his writing and his need to perform all converged.
A woman named Bonnie Swordmaker reads a wilfully surreal author biography in which Bernstein claims to have worked as “seeing eye dog for the spiritually impaired” and as “an emergency storm drain.” Sub Pop co-founder, Bruce Pavitt, recalls Bernstein convincing him that “his mother was an opera singer and that his father generated a small fortune through the invention of the plastic strawberry basket.” A friend of the poet who talked to him about his childhood claims “he was not only inventing a colourful background for himself, but I think he was trying out different storylines”.
In exploring the early part of Bernstein's life, the film wisely defers to the reminiscences of family and former neighbours. He was a descendent of Ukrainian Jews. A sprawling black and white photograph of the extended family shows women in white dresses and headscarves, and men with neat moustaches, wearing bowler hats. His mother was outgoing; his father a remote engineer. Their marriage did not last.
Bernstein contracted polio at the age of five. There is footage of him a few years older, climbing a tree, radiating physical confidence. A neighbour, Cathy Fordham-Murray, recalls a “fabulous imagination” that was both fascinating and exhausting to be around. At school he was the weird kid. He would skip classes and head out to who knows where. Murray recalls him being the kind of person who would talk to anyone, but who was drawn to outsiders.
Another childhood friend, Carol Saturensky-Young, remembers Bernstein being enthused by a visit to a cafe named Barney's Beanery, where an installation of human figures with clocks for heads, sat around the bar: “Jesse was so exited. he was like hanging out of the car window yelling at people, telling everyone that's where we were going.”
Mental illness was evident at an early age. Bouts of extreme depression anchored him to the spot. The breakdown of his parent's marriage was a tipping point. His destruction a dolls house, a year after the separation, was so violent that the police were called. Tension between him and his mother escalated to a point where he once sat in his room with a knife with the intention of gutting her when she entered. He moved into the garage of the family home, ate dogfood and didn't change his clothes. A diagnosis of schizophrenia landed him at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where, to his delight, he met the jazz pianist, Phineas Newborn Jr, who was also an inpatient.
His escape from the institution marks the point where Bernstein's early life begins to unravel into loose threads, and the chronology also becomes a little vague. He appears to have spent some time at Esalen – a humanist community, located in Big Sur, California. A black and white photograph shows him, stark naked, sitting among an embracing circle of other nude figures. After he was picked up by the Highway Patrol, walking along the central divider of the Pacific Coast Highway, high on psychedelics, he was returned to a more secure institution.
A release into the care of his father, who hoped to provide structure, failed to bear fruit. Soon after, Bernstein had hitch-hiked to NYC where he lived for a while in Greenwich village. Back in California he took up residence at a hotel on Venice beach. He mayor may not have joined the Merry Pranksters on Ken Kesey's 'Further' bus. He made money by starring in pornographic films. In his mid-teens, now addicted to heroin, he was picked up by the Youth Authority who placed him in the juvenile program of the Synanon organisation in Santa Monica. It was an unconventional childhood.
At the tail end of the 1960s, Bernstein was resident in Seattle. He fetched up at The Llahngaelhyn – a coffee house located south of University Bridge – and established a long-term friendship / collaboration with the musician, Pete Leinonen.
While at The Llahngaelhyn, he formed a relationship with the singer, Heather Hammond. In December, 1968, (Bernstein would have been 18 years old) she gave birth to their son, Daemon Aaron Bernstein. Hammond passed away in April, 2021, at the age of 75. She does not appear in the documentary, outside of archive footage.
The pair embodied the stereotype of 1960s hippie parents. A friend recalls Hammond telling her: “He's going to have him [Daemon] two weeks and I'm going to have him two weeks.” In reality, Bernstein appears to have been a sporadic presence in the life of his son. Daemon (who favours his mother physically and, contrary to the image that his name might conjure, couldn't look any less diabolical if he tired) recalls an itinerant childhood in the care of his mother, sometimes living in vehicles and, on one occasion, moving out of a perfectly good house to take up residence in a teepee.
Bernstein fathered a second son with another girlfriend, Holly Quinn. Shortly after the birth, he travelled to the Oregon coast where she was staying. While she was gardening, he clambered up on the roof of the house and asked her to marry him “for the child's sake”.
She said “No”.
Despite Bernstein's haphazard parenting, his two sons did interact with each other as children. Quinn shows a family of picture of what she describes as the three Bernstein boys, picking their noses for the benefit of the camera.
One of the more surreal moments in the documentary sees Alex (aged probably in his late 30s) giving Daemon a back rub. Behind them, a potted palm is held upright by a strip of fabric wrapped around the trunk, with the other end anchored in place by some books on a shelf. Later, the pair are filmed hesitantly duetting on a xylophone.
During the period when I was obsessed with Prison, I saw, in the turbulent psyche of its creator, a manifestation of my own troubled state of mind. Whether this unconventional method of addressing personal mental trauma was beneficial in the long-term, or an everyday act of self-harm that prolonged my suffering, I cannot say with certainty. Eventually I moved past my issues and laid the album to one side. Though I still occasionally play Prison for old time's sake, it no longer has the same impact upon me that it once did.
Bernstein was a teenager during the 1960s – a baby boomer, though he is more commonly associated with the generation that followed, and with the Seattle Grunge scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s. It was the legendary compilation album – Sub Pop 200 (released in December, 1988) that introduced him to the wider world. His gruff, surrealist rant, Come Out Tonight, was featured alongside an unwashed rabble of obscure bands who played at eye-level with their audiences; whose raw energy seemed destined to evaporate as their individual members were absorbed into dead end jobs and privation that was baked-in to their environment. A few years later, a handful of these musicians would go on to achieve a level of fame and wealth beyond anything they could have anticipated. In the decades that followed after, hard drug addiction and suicide would claim an extraordinary number of their lives, leaving behind a cultural void where memorials act as placeholders for men and women who should be enjoying the fruits of late middle age.
Unlike Bernstein's unadorned contribution to Sub Pop 200, the poems on Prison were set to music by the instrumentalist and audio engineer, Steve Fisk, who finished the album following the poet's death. According to Fisk, Bernstein lived long enough to hear a couple of the completed tracks and seemed happy to hand the project over. One character trait that emerges in I Am Secretly An Important Man – a 2010 biographical documentary that attempts to encapsulate the life of its subject in archive footage and interviews with family, friends and collaborators – is his willingness towards collaboration. Success notwithstanding, Bernstein regarded being a poet as a job and treated it accordingly.
Fisk's sound collages are attuned to Bernstein's well-timed delivery and disturbed mental frequency, lending his words additional emphasis and momentum. No No Man, which is divided into two parts that bookend the album, is set to the kind of careening urban jazz that might accompany a car chase in gangster movie, set in 1920s Chicago. On Party Balloon a squall of snarling guitar compressed into a near singularity, accompanies an account of a cloudy green fishtank “the length of an entire childhood” into which Bernstein deposits an array of discarded items found on waste ground around his home. His clenched, nasal drone maintains a steady sermonising tone, that slips into a narcotised drawl on some of the slower pieces. At his most desperate, his voice assumes the defeated whine of a beaten dog barring its teeth at its tormentors. He sounds like a man who has reached the end of tether, raging indiscriminately at a world that has failed him.
On Face, the album's centrepiece, the music falls away to a faint industrial wash that resembles the machine drone of a distant factory. Over the course of twelve minutes, Bernstein describes his struggle to make peace with his physical appearance, and the long-term impact that his warped narcissism had upon his mental health. Childhood polio and bullying from his classmates tail into his withdrawal to the garage of the family home, and a psychological breakdown in which he threatens to cut his mother's throat with a butcher knife and smear her blood all over his face. He pours a bottle of black lacquer over his head, after which he is declared insane and institutionalised. The poem owes much of its dreadful impact to its author's measured, matter of fact narration of his downward spiral into homelessness and drug addiction.
It is the opening lines of Face that are used as an introduction to Bernstein in this documentary of his life: “Look in the mirror Stevie. See, there's Stevie,” he mimics, twisting his mother's pride in her newborn son into an expression of cruel self-mockery.
Ironically, Bernstein stood out the most when he attempted to smarten-up and blend in. He appears in a 1989 interview on Channel 7 resembling a ventriloquist's dummy, in shirtsleeves and tie and subdued sweater vest, with his wiry hair plastered down, his thick-framed glasses anchored to his large protruding ears and his thin lips pressed together in a rictus smile.
It is an awkward meeting of polar opposites. Bernstein looks shifty and uncomfortable; estranged from his true self which he has concealed beneath the cliched trappings of nerdishness. His female interviewer, with her volumised newsreader bouffant and large earrings, exudes the stylised glamour of her profession. Their conversation, through no fault of either party, perpetually teeters on the brink of collapse, as if the void between their lives is almost too wide to be bridged.
I Am Secretly An Important Man spends the first half hour of its running time establishing Bernstein's character, seasoning anecdotes from friends and family with archive video footage, filling-in the broad strokes of his latter years, before the narrative shifts to the beginning.
Performance artist, Susy Schneider, answers the door to her home in the character of her late boyfriend squinting and talking out of the side of her mouth in a nasal drone, shuffling along the hallway, ahead of the camera, affecting a slight hunch.
Showing off her S&W Magnum, she recalls Bernstein's unconventional style of aiming, that was determined by his inability to straighten his polio-damaged legs. Holding the revolver in two hands above his head, he would slowly bring it down until it was level with the target, at which point he would squeeze off a shot. “And he almost never hit the damn thing,” says Schneider.
There is footage of him clambering out of the window of the hotel room where he lived, and descending the ladder of the fire escape, dangling from the bottom rung with his legs swaying a few inches above a discarded bathroom sink abandoned on the waste ground below.
We see him sitting in the window of a department store reading his poetry to the amusement of passers-by.
Bernstein's tendency towards personal reinvention was there from a young age, when, according to his brother, he decided that the disembodied initial 'J', at the centre of his name, stood for Jesse. Later in life his self-mythologising was the nexus point at which his personal history, his writing and his need to perform all converged.
A woman named Bonnie Swordmaker reads a wilfully surreal author biography in which Bernstein claims to have worked as “seeing eye dog for the spiritually impaired” and as “an emergency storm drain.” Sub Pop co-founder, Bruce Pavitt, recalls Bernstein convincing him that “his mother was an opera singer and that his father generated a small fortune through the invention of the plastic strawberry basket.” A friend of the poet who talked to him about his childhood claims “he was not only inventing a colourful background for himself, but I think he was trying out different storylines”.
In exploring the early part of Bernstein's life, the film wisely defers to the reminiscences of family and former neighbours. He was a descendent of Ukrainian Jews. A sprawling black and white photograph of the extended family shows women in white dresses and headscarves, and men with neat moustaches, wearing bowler hats. His mother was outgoing; his father a remote engineer. Their marriage did not last.
Bernstein contracted polio at the age of five. There is footage of him a few years older, climbing a tree, radiating physical confidence. A neighbour, Cathy Fordham-Murray, recalls a “fabulous imagination” that was both fascinating and exhausting to be around. At school he was the weird kid. He would skip classes and head out to who knows where. Murray recalls him being the kind of person who would talk to anyone, but who was drawn to outsiders.
Another childhood friend, Carol Saturensky-Young, remembers Bernstein being enthused by a visit to a cafe named Barney's Beanery, where an installation of human figures with clocks for heads, sat around the bar: “Jesse was so exited. he was like hanging out of the car window yelling at people, telling everyone that's where we were going.”
Mental illness was evident at an early age. Bouts of extreme depression anchored him to the spot. The breakdown of his parent's marriage was a tipping point. His destruction a dolls house, a year after the separation, was so violent that the police were called. Tension between him and his mother escalated to a point where he once sat in his room with a knife with the intention of gutting her when she entered. He moved into the garage of the family home, ate dogfood and didn't change his clothes. A diagnosis of schizophrenia landed him at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where, to his delight, he met the jazz pianist, Phineas Newborn Jr, who was also an inpatient.
His escape from the institution marks the point where Bernstein's early life begins to unravel into loose threads, and the chronology also becomes a little vague. He appears to have spent some time at Esalen – a humanist community, located in Big Sur, California. A black and white photograph shows him, stark naked, sitting among an embracing circle of other nude figures. After he was picked up by the Highway Patrol, walking along the central divider of the Pacific Coast Highway, high on psychedelics, he was returned to a more secure institution.
A release into the care of his father, who hoped to provide structure, failed to bear fruit. Soon after, Bernstein had hitch-hiked to NYC where he lived for a while in Greenwich village. Back in California he took up residence at a hotel on Venice beach. He mayor may not have joined the Merry Pranksters on Ken Kesey's 'Further' bus. He made money by starring in pornographic films. In his mid-teens, now addicted to heroin, he was picked up by the Youth Authority who placed him in the juvenile program of the Synanon organisation in Santa Monica. It was an unconventional childhood.
At the tail end of the 1960s, Bernstein was resident in Seattle. He fetched up at The Llahngaelhyn – a coffee house located south of University Bridge – and established a long-term friendship / collaboration with the musician, Pete Leinonen.
While at The Llahngaelhyn, he formed a relationship with the singer, Heather Hammond. In December, 1968, (Bernstein would have been 18 years old) she gave birth to their son, Daemon Aaron Bernstein. Hammond passed away in April, 2021, at the age of 75. She does not appear in the documentary, outside of archive footage.
The pair embodied the stereotype of 1960s hippie parents. A friend recalls Hammond telling her: “He's going to have him [Daemon] two weeks and I'm going to have him two weeks.” In reality, Bernstein appears to have been a sporadic presence in the life of his son. Daemon (who favours his mother physically and, contrary to the image that his name might conjure, couldn't look any less diabolical if he tired) recalls an itinerant childhood in the care of his mother, sometimes living in vehicles and, on one occasion, moving out of a perfectly good house to take up residence in a teepee.
Bernstein fathered a second son with another girlfriend, Holly Quinn. Shortly after the birth, he travelled to the Oregon coast where she was staying. While she was gardening, he clambered up on the roof of the house and asked her to marry him “for the child's sake”.
She said “No”.
Despite Bernstein's haphazard parenting, his two sons did interact with each other as children. Quinn shows a family of picture of what she describes as the three Bernstein boys, picking their noses for the benefit of the camera.
One of the more surreal moments in the documentary sees Alex (aged probably in his late 30s) giving Daemon a back rub. Behind them, a potted palm is held upright by a strip of fabric wrapped around the trunk, with the other end anchored in place by some books on a shelf. Later, the pair are filmed hesitantly duetting on a xylophone.
Bernstein went out on the road with Pete Leinonen, travelling with a group and writing songs. Former band mate, Robin Remaily recalls him as “incredibly smart, but all underneath the surface. Internalised and private. Hard to pull out”.
Throughout the documentary, Bernstein's songs, many of which have a hymnal quality, surface as background accompaniment to silent video footage. Though there is a certain raw intimacy in these performances, he was not a great singer and his words seem constrained by being forced to adhere to a song structure. Various interviewees speak favourably of his abilities as a musician. His brother recall his improvisations on the piano gradually silencing a room, as those present paused their conversations to listen. A live performance at a prison (the original concept for the Prison album) reputedly won over a room full of hardened criminals. None of this flare for musicianship is particularly evident in the documentary. It is tempting to conclude that what these audiences were reacting to wasn't the music itself, but the wayward charisma that was bound-up in Bernstein's process of creating the music – something that couldn't be captured on film or in audio recordings.
In the early 1980s, he met the writer William Burroughs who suggested that he set his words to music. This yielded an intermittent live collaboration with Pete Leinonen on double bass with the Bernstein providing trailing, semi-melodic vocals.
Bernstein gravitated from music to performance art where he developed a confrontational style and enjoyed pushing boundaries.
Throughout the documentary, Bernstein's songs, many of which have a hymnal quality, surface as background accompaniment to silent video footage. Though there is a certain raw intimacy in these performances, he was not a great singer and his words seem constrained by being forced to adhere to a song structure. Various interviewees speak favourably of his abilities as a musician. His brother recall his improvisations on the piano gradually silencing a room, as those present paused their conversations to listen. A live performance at a prison (the original concept for the Prison album) reputedly won over a room full of hardened criminals. None of this flare for musicianship is particularly evident in the documentary. It is tempting to conclude that what these audiences were reacting to wasn't the music itself, but the wayward charisma that was bound-up in Bernstein's process of creating the music – something that couldn't be captured on film or in audio recordings.
In the early 1980s, he met the writer William Burroughs who suggested that he set his words to music. This yielded an intermittent live collaboration with Pete Leinonen on double bass with the Bernstein providing trailing, semi-melodic vocals.
Bernstein gravitated from music to performance art where he developed a confrontational style and enjoyed pushing boundaries.
“Are you alright?” he enquires of a small mouse, named Blinky. Placing the animal inside his mouth, with the tail dangling between his lips, he proceeds to read a monologue that he attributes to Blinky, in which the rodent claims to be teaching Jesse how to talk.
“That concert got so much protesting by animal rights people, but actually Jesse was very nice to the mouse, in fact he gave it writing credit,” recalls Leinonen.
An impromptu reading at an exhibit at the Rosco Louie gallery, saw Bernstein standing under an 8ft replica of a MIG Russian jet fighter, shrieking at the top of his voice about his days working as hitman in San Francisco.
During a spoken word performance, prefacing the final ever show by the abrasive industrial punk band, Big Black, he stares down a rowdy audience, who are impatient for the band to come on.
“Play some music!” shouts somebody in the crowd.
“This is music, asshole!” he screams into the darkness – a comeback that doubled as a fitting epitaph for Big Black, who exited the stage that night under darkened house-lights, leaving behind a string of lit firecrackers.
Bernstein had begun tattooing himself and others. Many of this drawings were no more than crude doodles. The word 'LIVE' is spelled out in neat capitals across the knuckles of right hand, and the corresponding word 'DEAD' across the left. He rendered a tiny squiggle that might charitably be described as an apple on the elbow of his friend Pete Sibbald, while the pair were “terribly high”. Afterwards, he signed the drawing with the name 'Jesse' in enormous cloudy letters down Pete's forearm. “So Pete says he hates, when he has his shirt halfway up, people think he's a Jesus freak,” says Bonnie Swordmaker.
The picture of Bernstein that emerges in I Am Secretly An Important Man is of someone who followed his nose, spontaneously latching onto new hobbies and inserting himself into communities that were of interest to him, The 1970s finds him working in the shoe department at the Goodwill, after his kung-fu master insisted that he hold down a steady job so that he could pay for his classes.
There is incongruous footage of him among the all black choir of the Trinity Christ Memorial Church, in Seattle, throwing himself body and soul into the spiritual Down by the Riverside, clapping in time and bouncing up and down on one leg. He had been passing the church during a choir rehearsal and, on a whim, had wandered inside and asked whether he could join.
“He was a part of you regardless of what you thought of him, and he made you feel like you couldn't say no to him about anything cause he was always wanting to do something,” recalls the pastor Wilson Barnes.
In addition to his poetry and his music, Bernstein was also a playwright, an actor, and a director. “Jesse was able to move amongst different disciplines with great ease,” recalls one of his contemporaries
In Birthright, he appears as a doctor, dressed in a long white coat, candidly informing a woman, who wants to have a child, that procreation by natural means in no longer permitted.
A scene from Shredder Orpheus sees him dressed like an aviator, incongruously riding a street luge among a pack of younger skateboarders. According to IMDB, the film concerns a “skateboarder named Orpheus and friends who go to Hell to stop television signals that are brainwashing America”. The featured review on the website is simply titled: “This movie sucks”. I still want to see it.
Bernstein was a prolific and sometimes eccentric creator. A late work titled Strip Poker took the form of a poem presented inside a wine bottle. Whenever he was able, he unleashed some of his writing on the world in slender volumes. His second book, Choking on Sixth, owes its existence to a stripper who suggested that he published some of his poetry. When he told her he didn't have the money, she went into the parking lot and came back an hour later with the funds.
In an interview, he claims to find writing and performance to be a draining experience, and that he struggles to attune the need to be around people, to recharge his batteries, with the secluded life of a writer.
He found some balance while he was a resident at an artists commune called SCUD (Subterranean Cooperative of Urban Dreamers) where he would visit the Free Mars cafe downstairs, before returning to his room to write. Bernstein became such a fixture at the cafe that they named a sandwich after him. For the sum of four dollars and twenty-five cents, you could avail yourself of two cheeses (Swiss, raw milk cheddar, blue, or cream cheese) cucumber, tomato, lettuce, mystic mayonnaise (whatever that is) and sprouts, sandwiched between “locally baked wholesome breads”.
Bernstein's precarious mental health was a dark presence throughout his entire life, impacting, sometimes violently, upon his personal relationships. The writer, John Bennett, recalls jamming on the harmonica with the poet, only to open his eyes and find his friend, now suddenly deranged, holding a broken bottle under his nose and threatening to cut his face off.
Holly Quinn, speculates that he may have been plagued by multiple personalities,
Alison Slow Loris, who was Bernstein's wife between 1979 and 1984, attributes a neurological cause to his sudden mood swings and mini-seizures. A scan of his brain, which was thought to be too large for his skull, revealed a surface covered in scar tissue. Bernstein describes seeing his brain in perfect resolution and recalling with horror how “it was all pushed out to one side.”
In common with a great many creative souls, he found that the drugs that were used to control his behaviour made it difficult for him to be productive. Long periods of sobriety were interrupted by stretches when he would attempt to self-medicate using alcohol and narcotics.
Some video footage that was shot towards the end of Bernstein's life captures him bald and bearded, standing in a narrow gap between a pair of diamond-wire fences, drawing random topics, written down on slips of paper, out of a hat.
“Thrust,” he says. “I guess that's what I feel about the world. It was thrust upon me.”
On October 22nd, Bernstein was staying at a friend's trailer on the Makah Reservation, at Neah Bay – a remote part of the Washington coast.
He was found one morning in the cluttered kitchen, kneeling in a pool of blood, with his head tilted back and an assortment of crude, self-inflicted wounds criss-crossing his throat. The knife that had dealt these injuries was still in his hand.
His friend recalls: “Where had bled, there was a hole in the floor and underneath there, I guess there was a little water run-off, maybe a freshwater stream underneath the trailer, and so he bled out the trailer through the hole and out to the water.”
Anyone who has listened to Prison would hardly be surprised by this outcome.
One of Bernstein's associates recalls him being being adopted by many different groups of people who would each claim him as their own. I think that statement could be expanded to include that scattered headcount who heard Prison and went on to develop a fascination with the album.
Despite my interest in his work, for many years I avoided I Am Secretly An Important Man; I don't know why. As the end credits rolled, I experienced what can best be described as a sense of closure. The twisted, hate-filled wretch, knotted with rage and desperation, who narrates Prison, was a distillation of one part of the man, but it wasn't all of him.
Bernstein's existence, while undeniably chaotic and traumatic, can be seen as an attempt to stare down an ugly world, to wring experiences from his surroundings, to connect with other people, and to satisfy his creative urges in whatever manner he deemed appropriate.
His brilliance and his violence were deep rooted in the same battle-scarred, misshapen brain. The drugs that were prescribed to silence his neurological demons were a blunt instrument that also nullified the creativity that made his life worth living.
He was a man in the grip of an unbeatable illness who had the courage to rise above his condition and grab hold of life. If Bernstein were present to pass comment, he would probably tell you that he was just doing his job.
“That concert got so much protesting by animal rights people, but actually Jesse was very nice to the mouse, in fact he gave it writing credit,” recalls Leinonen.
An impromptu reading at an exhibit at the Rosco Louie gallery, saw Bernstein standing under an 8ft replica of a MIG Russian jet fighter, shrieking at the top of his voice about his days working as hitman in San Francisco.
During a spoken word performance, prefacing the final ever show by the abrasive industrial punk band, Big Black, he stares down a rowdy audience, who are impatient for the band to come on.
“Play some music!” shouts somebody in the crowd.
“This is music, asshole!” he screams into the darkness – a comeback that doubled as a fitting epitaph for Big Black, who exited the stage that night under darkened house-lights, leaving behind a string of lit firecrackers.
Bernstein had begun tattooing himself and others. Many of this drawings were no more than crude doodles. The word 'LIVE' is spelled out in neat capitals across the knuckles of right hand, and the corresponding word 'DEAD' across the left. He rendered a tiny squiggle that might charitably be described as an apple on the elbow of his friend Pete Sibbald, while the pair were “terribly high”. Afterwards, he signed the drawing with the name 'Jesse' in enormous cloudy letters down Pete's forearm. “So Pete says he hates, when he has his shirt halfway up, people think he's a Jesus freak,” says Bonnie Swordmaker.
The picture of Bernstein that emerges in I Am Secretly An Important Man is of someone who followed his nose, spontaneously latching onto new hobbies and inserting himself into communities that were of interest to him, The 1970s finds him working in the shoe department at the Goodwill, after his kung-fu master insisted that he hold down a steady job so that he could pay for his classes.
There is incongruous footage of him among the all black choir of the Trinity Christ Memorial Church, in Seattle, throwing himself body and soul into the spiritual Down by the Riverside, clapping in time and bouncing up and down on one leg. He had been passing the church during a choir rehearsal and, on a whim, had wandered inside and asked whether he could join.
“He was a part of you regardless of what you thought of him, and he made you feel like you couldn't say no to him about anything cause he was always wanting to do something,” recalls the pastor Wilson Barnes.
In addition to his poetry and his music, Bernstein was also a playwright, an actor, and a director. “Jesse was able to move amongst different disciplines with great ease,” recalls one of his contemporaries
In Birthright, he appears as a doctor, dressed in a long white coat, candidly informing a woman, who wants to have a child, that procreation by natural means in no longer permitted.
A scene from Shredder Orpheus sees him dressed like an aviator, incongruously riding a street luge among a pack of younger skateboarders. According to IMDB, the film concerns a “skateboarder named Orpheus and friends who go to Hell to stop television signals that are brainwashing America”. The featured review on the website is simply titled: “This movie sucks”. I still want to see it.
Bernstein was a prolific and sometimes eccentric creator. A late work titled Strip Poker took the form of a poem presented inside a wine bottle. Whenever he was able, he unleashed some of his writing on the world in slender volumes. His second book, Choking on Sixth, owes its existence to a stripper who suggested that he published some of his poetry. When he told her he didn't have the money, she went into the parking lot and came back an hour later with the funds.
In an interview, he claims to find writing and performance to be a draining experience, and that he struggles to attune the need to be around people, to recharge his batteries, with the secluded life of a writer.
He found some balance while he was a resident at an artists commune called SCUD (Subterranean Cooperative of Urban Dreamers) where he would visit the Free Mars cafe downstairs, before returning to his room to write. Bernstein became such a fixture at the cafe that they named a sandwich after him. For the sum of four dollars and twenty-five cents, you could avail yourself of two cheeses (Swiss, raw milk cheddar, blue, or cream cheese) cucumber, tomato, lettuce, mystic mayonnaise (whatever that is) and sprouts, sandwiched between “locally baked wholesome breads”.
Bernstein's precarious mental health was a dark presence throughout his entire life, impacting, sometimes violently, upon his personal relationships. The writer, John Bennett, recalls jamming on the harmonica with the poet, only to open his eyes and find his friend, now suddenly deranged, holding a broken bottle under his nose and threatening to cut his face off.
Holly Quinn, speculates that he may have been plagued by multiple personalities,
Alison Slow Loris, who was Bernstein's wife between 1979 and 1984, attributes a neurological cause to his sudden mood swings and mini-seizures. A scan of his brain, which was thought to be too large for his skull, revealed a surface covered in scar tissue. Bernstein describes seeing his brain in perfect resolution and recalling with horror how “it was all pushed out to one side.”
In common with a great many creative souls, he found that the drugs that were used to control his behaviour made it difficult for him to be productive. Long periods of sobriety were interrupted by stretches when he would attempt to self-medicate using alcohol and narcotics.
Some video footage that was shot towards the end of Bernstein's life captures him bald and bearded, standing in a narrow gap between a pair of diamond-wire fences, drawing random topics, written down on slips of paper, out of a hat.
“Thrust,” he says. “I guess that's what I feel about the world. It was thrust upon me.”
On October 22nd, Bernstein was staying at a friend's trailer on the Makah Reservation, at Neah Bay – a remote part of the Washington coast.
He was found one morning in the cluttered kitchen, kneeling in a pool of blood, with his head tilted back and an assortment of crude, self-inflicted wounds criss-crossing his throat. The knife that had dealt these injuries was still in his hand.
His friend recalls: “Where had bled, there was a hole in the floor and underneath there, I guess there was a little water run-off, maybe a freshwater stream underneath the trailer, and so he bled out the trailer through the hole and out to the water.”
Anyone who has listened to Prison would hardly be surprised by this outcome.
~
One of Bernstein's associates recalls him being being adopted by many different groups of people who would each claim him as their own. I think that statement could be expanded to include that scattered headcount who heard Prison and went on to develop a fascination with the album.
Despite my interest in his work, for many years I avoided I Am Secretly An Important Man; I don't know why. As the end credits rolled, I experienced what can best be described as a sense of closure. The twisted, hate-filled wretch, knotted with rage and desperation, who narrates Prison, was a distillation of one part of the man, but it wasn't all of him.
Bernstein's existence, while undeniably chaotic and traumatic, can be seen as an attempt to stare down an ugly world, to wring experiences from his surroundings, to connect with other people, and to satisfy his creative urges in whatever manner he deemed appropriate.
His brilliance and his violence were deep rooted in the same battle-scarred, misshapen brain. The drugs that were prescribed to silence his neurological demons were a blunt instrument that also nullified the creativity that made his life worth living.
He was a man in the grip of an unbeatable illness who had the courage to rise above his condition and grab hold of life. If Bernstein were present to pass comment, he would probably tell you that he was just doing his job.
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| image generated by Craiyon |
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