The idea of massaging a, “Creepy Old Man,” was initially appealing coming from a home with a drug-addicted mom …

Read more

rol. I’ve tried for over a decade and failed, but if this is another one of those failures, at least I can now say that my words about it are final.

Read more

Read more

Something you may not know about the book, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” which was adapted into Scorsese’s The Irishman is that Joe Biden is referenced by Frank Sheeran as, “Someone he helped get elected.” How? you may ask, was a matter of 20th century news distribution, specifically in Delaware, when only two local newspapers covered the then-candidate’s rise.

The week after the senatorial debate aired on television, Frank Sheeran was tapped to “Stop the presses,” of the paper endorsing incumbent J. Caleb Boggs. The Morning News was paid to run an attack ad against Biden, which according to Sheeran led to him being extracurricularly tasked as Teamsters Local 326 President to prevent distribution of the paper to 600,000 (nearly the state’s total population) Delawarean subscribers. For four days, cited by The New York Times, the paper was stalled from delivery by a lock-out, obstructions to the loading bays, and presumably other prankish antics Sheeran adapted from his mischievous childhood and harrowing military service. As a result, voters were given a one-sided position on who’d be best for Delaware the week prior to the election, and in this case it was meant to favor Biden, who ultimately won. In the 1970s, newspapers were still widely regarded as the preeminent source of information for not just its readers, but the entire citizenry. While Sheeran neglects to name the person greasing his wheel for the political favor, it remains a footnote to what prosecutors alleged he executed as ranking enforcer for the Buffalino Crime Family.

If there is a single takeaway from the sum total of Sheeran’s life, it is that he felt his family’s safety and financial security depended on his capacity for violence. Appended to that notion, it is important to comprehend the aura of a man who served 400-plus days in combat. Sheeran admitted to his biographer that he was an alcoholic, further muddying the veracity of his confessions, but the human constant of violence used as a collectivizing force prevails to this day. Despite being easily overlooked or misattributed by the unsuspecting public, the violence is anything but meaningless. The Irishman is jettisoned from the editing bay this week, but the specter of organized crime courses through America’s imagination via Hollywood to DC. Generational moires reflect back new definitions of what qualifies a person as a gangster, but in action nothing changes.

I’ve been combing Youtube’s collection of The Dick Cavett Show episodes. My interest in celebrity interviews dredges slivers of interviewee’s authentic selves that provoke a sense of them A) getting away with murder and B) living in a totally different universe. Though fifteen minutes of exploration, like fifteen minutes of fame, imparts only cursory awareness of life’s interconnected conflicts big and small, it can sometimes pique the world’s judgment or impel audiences to realize an entirely “new” world. Television increasingly became the singular source for common knowledge in America, and its ascent largely depended on celebrity. Interviews represented one of television’s most powerful distortions, confounding candor and entertainment with authenticity. More apparent today through the internet, television could be used to skew perceptions of contemporaneous events by upstaging a moment in time. In essence, it could be a distraction. Personal judgments of character made about various stars were subsumed by the implication that corporate America would not endorse entertainment that intended to harm. To some degree, scandal could be expected, revealing depraved incidents behind the curtain, but the system could correct and preserve its integrity. Though parts of the system’s flaws were undeniable, the craven promise of Show-business is that it would eat its own to spare the masses.

It would be a sin to neglect the motivation for so much violence fifty years on from a presidential election mired by the auspices of Hunter S. Thompson, convention riots, and break-ins. A sense of being relentlessly duped starts to take shape as shards of the early seventies form the word, “leitmotif.” Same as now, charisma and talent could eclipse internal and external expectations and scandals, many material but also moral. People’s character, especially famous people, drives the narrative that extends beyond one project to the next, absorbing society’s judgment and dulling its idea of justice. While cannibalizing and metamorphosing themselves, American performers, industry professionals, musicians, and even politicians could command attention and drown out reprisals. The Shakespearean metaphor influences every subject within the frame. Maybe that public relations engine is less effective today due to the diffusion of multimedia and rise of social media. Still, fame gins up dramaturgical conflict with an unfortunate tendency to upstage real conflict. In the case of one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, his defining role as a gangster remains more accessible than the struggle of being a young actor from East Harlem growing up with a single mother. Perversely, as not only a man who becomes other people, but more instinctively becomes other versions of the people audiences see as himself, he and others could find places to hide on centerstage.

Conspiratorial theses of current events through pop-culture typically spell embarrassment, ostracizing their proponents through cringe-inducing omissions, generalizations, and a vague sense of inevitable oversights, finally casting dispersions of one or another form of prejudice. The saving grace for conspiracy theorists in 2025 are twofold: networks of various public figures’ associations are more easily monitored and revisited; these public figures survive on publicizing those connections, effectively broadcasting their bonafides and sway simply by their persisting visibility. Notoriety fuels the business of Alan Dershowitz the same way as any influencer nudging along (sometimes aggressively) public discourse. Most of the time, the only meaningful objection to the government and co-opted media “debate” come from whistleblowers who nearly ensure career-suicide. The sin a one-time Pacino-cast lawyer/satan character stated perfunctorily, “Vanity,” infects the corporate and media culture to their core.

Pacino endures as a subject of Living Proof 2 Print in this latest episode, in this instance as a portrayal of real-life journalist and television producer for 60 Minutes, Lowell Bergman. The 1999 film, The Insider, stars Al Pacino opposite from Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand, a former tobacco company scientist and executive turned advocate against the industry’s marketing practices. Directed by Michael Mann, the film received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture but was deemed a commercial failure. Hollywood in its y2k era was on the verge of its maximalist digital, on-demand transformation, and the constant gripe within the industry were prestige films being unable to combine critical acclaim with commercial success. With Pacino co-starring as an appropriately hard-boiled, loudmouth foil to Crowe’s repressed, erratic heroism, The Insider stokes the crucible of American newsroom dramas with an unvarnished appeal to the power and illusions behind the Fourth Estate. The film also represents a different era of television news when network and cable television programming were still largely a sociable medium. To quote Pacino introducing himself to Russell Crowe, “60 Minutes reaches a lot of people.” In real life, 60 Minutes bungled the release of Wigand’s interview, drawing the ire of other publications questioning the pressure CBS corporate put on its newsroom while facing a potential sale.

The slip.

Curiously, around the same time I last watched The Insider, it was also recommended I watch Woody Allen’s 2015 film Irrational Man, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, and Parker Posey. During this time, Allen was known for releasing a new film every year, never straying from his stilted existentialist dopey fare, and the formula for storytelling he developed over four decades proved profitable in this instance, raking in 30 million dollars worldwide from its 11-million dollar budget. Irrational Man delivers on Allen’s expected hallmarks, basically pandering to his and fan’s egos with stream-of-consciousness voice-overs and gimmicky humor in the same way a modern Marvel picture promises Easter-eggs and ever-expanding references through digital paint. And like a Marvel movie, it would be a mistake to call Allen’s style subtle. Despite critics noting Allen’s auteurism in decline, the commercial success of Irrational Man speaks to the nuances of what drives box-office attendance.

Juxtaposing these two films is purely coincidental, which can be discerned by the broken shutter photography taken on my old iPhone dating back to 2020. I personally rate entertainment by its usefulness, which means I derive more enjoyment from a monologue about Kant or a depiction of real life events than the warble a cartoon space alien makes. What each movie says about its constituent parts fits into a larger context of how and why the zeitgeist lurches in one direction over another. Most of all, hindsight unveils the cracks between moments caught on screen. And what event in show-business galvanizes audiences across the board more than a trial? When you’re in it, you know it.

To decipher what “it” means, permit yourself a syllogism:

A. The President’s security thoroughly assesses all, or as many strategic, private individual contacts The President makes, even after leaving office, for national security.

B. The President would not be allowed to meet with or become embedded with a private individual contact who could usurp The President’s security, for national security.

C. Therefore, for national security, The President’s security could not be usurped by a private individual contact.

The problem is, in fact, The President. Not Trump, for whom I’ve exhausted all antipathy and view his junior-fascist resumption as merely a way of extending the status quo, but, rather, Bill Clinton. But not just Bill Clinton, the idea of presidency — primacy, supremacy, chief, boss, Dutch-master, etc — inhibits and codifies and corrals and colludes for one purpose, to save everyone’s jobs.

A blend of industry and government reaches every niche American life, widening the scope of entertainment, turning the mundane into a sensation, and quieting dissent. Even a video gamer can become a multi-million dollar Twitch-pimp, which says something phonetical about the generation. Yesteryear’s idols, the Clintons, Woody Allen (not Herman), the Gates’, and Al Pacino stick to the grain like lacquer, slowly becoming entirely irrelevant except for their demonization. Today’s idols are different, and some might insist that speaks to their character, but downstream they tend to act in-step.

As such, there’s not much theorizing needed to decipher a recurring incident, like a Jeffrey Epstein, to the populace. People like me represent a far more sinister effort to replace the methods powerful figures use to hide their criminal behavior. The idea Jimmy Hoffa represents, the counter to big-business and big-government disenfranchisement, still resonates across the law-to-crime divide. Through collective action, organizing for worker’s rights proved so lucrative it could rob itself blind. Their solidarity is a far-cry from modern worker’s movements. Even as his assassin, Frank Sheeran professed his deep respect for Hoffa, saying, “[He] stood for the right thing,” and that had things gone differently, he might’ve traveled as a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Today’s movements are preoccupied with the personalities associated with them than the deals they strike.

The Irishman chips away the symptoms of bi-polar mania, alcoholism, and PTSD through characters who’d likely reject the diagnosis. For Pacino, his role as Teamster’s president offers a masterclass on how character defects might snowball. While delivering a hearty performance, audiences will struggle to distinguish between the actor and the person, rather viewing Pacino’s character as another mythic version of himself, yet. There still remains a problem.

The managerial and administrative function, based on insurance, complaint, and remedy traces back to Hammurabi. When they etched notches in the clay signets as promissory notes, did they know? Did they know what kind of record they were keeping?

The whisper The Insider ends on with a promised fulfilled by an FBI agent to Bergman: advance notice of a siege on the Montana Freemen, which broke down due to what Wikipedia states, “[was] a mixture of religious and legal "mumbo-jumbo.”

Read more

High school is the first official setting that offers the general Western history and practice of psychology to students. The love of self-centric sciences has overflown to every corner of modern life, often informing people’s endless contortions and miscomprehension of their constant companion: themselves. At once, we’re all important and entirely pointless passengers through the world, soaking up memories decreasingly collective while reaching for remote esoteric comforts.

When the idea for Living Proof 2 Print began, my “journal-”ism sprung from the idea of larger currents existing in Americans’ media diets. As the purveyance of digital television inserts toll booths to the most current and hyped information, its free broadcasts become more disjointed and disorienting to a person’s sense of the current moment. Within the threshold to navigating digital subscriptions, arts, life, and news are advertised as a sort of charity reminder that time-based and relevant content are luxuries in an educated society. One’s wake through a given day without even local news no doubt repairs the loss of context and public access with the damning thought it really mustn’t matter. As a consumer, more news never promised better success collectively or individually, but its newspeople were assured to still be rattling off humanity’s ills in the name of spreading awareness. As that old form of brokering payment for discretionary knowledge dries up, media organizations have become increasingly dependent on brand identity as a stand-in value proposition where telling the truth runs afoul of powerful “decisions.”

Ultimately, the study of one’s interior and exterior presence in the world stems from an anointed blend of fate, circumstance, choice, and luck flung together and strung back out with (mostly) wishy-washy dates and differing points-of-view. A name tucked in the folds of this video project (“Don’t Call it a Gestalt, pt. 3”) is Adam Curtis’s glimpse into Jim Garrison’s memo, “Time and Propinquity: Factors in Phase I.” Judging from its contents, Garrison’s investigation of circumstances building up to and emanating from the Kennedy assassination seemed to draw ever-widening sets of evidence, connecting people and events to all of his individualized data points, effectively confounding cause and coincidence. In a nutshell, Jim Garrison’s theory described in this memo was that logic couldn’t be assessed or followed because it’d likely always remain hidden from the observer. In the place of logic and meaning, people would have to rely on fragments of data, associations and patterns whose overlapping ripples accented or canceled out various individuals’ choices. As Curtis later relayed to The New Yorker, “I just thought, Yes. . . . Fragments. That’s how people think now. They make associations, and there’s no meaning. That’s the world we live in.”

What indicts the re-inspection of the past are the developments people can no longer ignore. In the professional sphere, coming in new to a job can feel like an appraisal and exhumation of the past all at once, where the newly hired employee catches a rare glimpse of not only what their employer would like to change, but what it must’ve actually been like before. That crack, by dissociation, is inevitably filled with something else, and as Edward Norton once said, “The movie keeps going, and nobody notices.” But what if your dream is the movies? Like making movies?

Nothing weakens the truth more than remaking it, it turns out. By providing any point-of-view, suddenly that perspective is inherently misconstrued as a form of entertainment/propaganda, especially if it is either entertaining or propaganda. Movies as a form of truth-telling are akin to poetry. They’re psychographic snapshots of something exterior that is, in that sense, more real. If the movie is historically based, and to what extent it’s faithful to history, has no bearing on its commerciality. Rather, how money flows from one person’s command to the budget of anything, even a major studio film, remains ostensibly unrivaled amongst the market’s concerns. As a cinephile, the suspension of disbelief is replaced by the much more edifying suspension of good taste. At once, all movies are ripples in concert, bonded by tropes, genres, themes, and most novelly, obviously, pictures with sound.

In the advent of wirelessly transmitted digital communications, historical events become fodder for instant analytical deconstruction fueled by an economy of individuals empowered by their smartphones. When I started my last W-2 gig for a boutique apparel printing company in Atlanta, I was reminded, “The iPhone is really [just] a camera.” While I’d argue that’s one of the many surveillance capabilities Steve Jobs sold the world, it would be sacrilege to ignore the agency one gains by being able to present their side of things. Counter to my need of self-expression, friends of mine rely on different features, like Apple’s, “Find My Friends,” and divvy their patronage amongst their shared hotspots, simultaneously documenting their combined worth as buyers and sellers. Grace Tatter of NPR’s, “Endless Thread” can be heard in Pt. 3 comparing the app to social media, which Apple ironically comments was not the intent. Whatever the means, people of my age, education, and means submit their take on the depths to which they’re misled, mismanaged, and lowballed into their assigned place. The smartphone liberates and enslaves the populace with the sense one can’t escape the tide of technology. Some of the things it can’t do well, like making music, contrast as insignificant to the mountain of capabilities in the palm of your hand. As a case study, “Find My Friends” exhibits that consumers don’t necessarily link social media to their creative output. The caveat to the potential built into a smartphone is that the product may not work as advertised, and the people might become even more passive. Users who want to, “Go viral,” likely need more than perfect, perfectly placed content as the phenomenon of organic reach has been utterly commoditized. Coinciding with the end of net neutrality and the democratized internet, science and technology and news coverage have begun to retreat from open view. Replaced by loops of news clips and promoted tweets, mankind’s ingenuity hasn’t died out but rather must rely on subtler methods of dissemination. To succeed, people wanting to find and document truth (separate from fact) and what they love (separate from beauty), must also engage the cleverer side of boosting their interests. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the products within smart devices have their own subset of products, and the supply chain of companies within companies doesn’t necessarily guarantee they move in step or even get along.

The fact (I’d argue) that iPhones aren’t musical instruments is the most important puzzle piece in the Living Proof 2 Print thesis. While I had vague competing ideas of periodically synthesizing a selection of films to their place in current events, the idea was that I could rearrange them in such a way that they’d mean nothing individually, but together they would invite uncharacteristic observations about their meaning as a whole. The music is the only way to jog elements of each film out of its original tone. Splicing music I made with undercurrents of the different film’s contemporaneous runtime audio had me initially drawing rules for Dogme ‘25 on the whiteboard. It was difficult not to be distracted from that project with all of the ideas for Living Proof 2 Print that were cropping up. While part three of “Don’t Call it a Gestalt” contains the same music from previous episodes, a notable instance behind the editor’s desk was rescoring Joe Gallo’s entrance in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” with Scorsese’s earlier picture, “Gangs of New York,” for which Howard Shore provided original music. Maybe it’s the musician in me that found the juxtaposition interesting, but the superimposed image of Robert Deniro with Shore’s “Brooklyn Heights” seemed more like a budget documentary than a 100-million-dollar Netflix crime epic. The degree to which sound sets the tone could easily be mistaken for total.

And as I try to parse my professional development as both a filmmaker and musician, haplessly combining them together under the banner, “I’m a writer,” another comparison of how each industry treats its talent starts to take shape. In my mind, the difference is clear. Both industries are being crushed by the new ways their products are made and distributed. Namely through streaming, even the early dominant company Netflix struggles with a negative cash balance at last check. Spotify executives have been cashing out, chased by the contingent of marquis and independent acts seeking fair compensation. Musicians are told their core product is actually something other than records, like clothing and live performance. The cultural churn taking place in the political forum likewise represents a threat to the very idea of making good art. Where they differ may seem subtle to the outside, but I must remind my readers as an entrepreneur steeped in the nondenominational tradition of beating on doors, I reach out to a lot of people. In the world of music, I couldn’t tell you if any of the artists and producers actually exist, but I felt partially affirmed by David Israelite’s comment last October that, “Currently, the [music] industry is predicated,” and I’d say sustained, “on theft.” Apart from pt. 1 and pt. 2’s cheeky side-by-side breakdown of song references (namely to my own work), I have tried to offer my experience as a pianist only to have my ideas expropriated without even acknowledging I exist. It happens over and over again, and while Diddy stands trial for racketeering, he is only one of a number of bad actors. It might seem ironic to be discussing plagiarism after watching these videos, since they’re littered with incidents of IP theft, but my argument for fair use becomes simple when the thesis behind the project is understood.

Filmmaking and journalism are an awkward fit. While I reference all of this season’s dissertation on Adam Curtis’s 2021 BBC series, “Can’t Get You out of My Head,” I find it hard to agree with his self-identifying as a journalist instead of an artist. Something about the moving picture collage seems uplifted by journalism, but somehow more enlightened. With CGYOOMH, Curtis examines the sprawling period of Western civilization from the 1950s to now, featuring images that are at once references and totally novel, totally authentic forms of artistic expression. That contrast with the artificiality of pairing Howard Shore’s Brooklyn Heights score to “The Irishman” is somehow also both artistic and journalistic. As the Joe Gallo entrance scene is preserved to the original edit, so is the score, and their interplay feels more like a hidden joke than a shot in the dark. What can anyone do but sit there and take it apart, if it really is a matter of intent. That same question applies to the psychological reaction to Curtis’s work as analog anecdotes for very real, very current modern-day personalities. Again, we live in a world that has been cast by Shakespeare to be a stage, but where what happens on the stage is the reality. Put another way, no matter how deep a line of facts may be buried, some of the most obvious crimes might be hiding in plain view. A term that one day walked out of the movie business was, “type-cast.” In fact, there is something to the idea that you’re always playing yourself. Something the worldly likely only half-knows. Then again, yet another, “Big picture” might come into view instead.

Read more

Read more

Read more