Jesse Bernstein – Secretly An Important Man

Speaking of himself in the third person, Jesse Bernstein once noted that he was “unemployed until the age of six; since then he has worked as a seeing eye dog for the spiritually impaired and as an emergency storm drain.”
Poet, performance artist, playwright, actor and friend of what he called the expendable people, he killed himself in 1990 in Neah Bay at age 40.

Photo Alice Wheeler

Most of his friends remember him not for his tragedy, which included mental illness, alcoholism and drug addiction, but for his talent, his generosity, his steadfast loyalty and gleeful charm when the debilitating fog of illness lifted.
Small with bow legs and tattoos running up his arms, Bernstein had a
gravelly voice that became slurred when he neglected to put in his teeth
for his late-night phone calls to many willing and semi-willing
listeners.
They rarely needed to say anything. On the phone he said it all, ranging
across the history of poetics, the crimes of the Central Intelligence
Agency, the need for cheaper breakfast cereal and the search for a
sustaining form of God’s grace.

A well-edited collection of the range of his best work has yet to appear, although a posthumously released Sub Pop CD titled Prison briefly lit up the charts after selections from it played over the open sequence of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.

Peter Sillen’s recently completed documentary on Bernstein, I Am Secretly An Important Man, opens at The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina on Friday. It will screen as part of a Creative Capital film festival at the Museum of Modern Art on May 15 & 27. Sillen is still working on a Seattle release.

More Noise Please!

I live on a street

where there are many

many cars

and trucks

and factories

that pump

and bang and

grind all night

and day.

It is a miracle

that I can write poetry

or sleep or

talk on the telephone

or that

my lover will

visit me here.