"I Am Secretly An Important Man"

The above title is wonderfully loaded even you don't know the author/performer with whom it's commonly associated among some veteran and ex-pat Seattleites. If you do know it from Jesse, I've got cool news for ya...

Still, I'll do the background for whomever. Jesse Bernstein, a.k.a. Steven Jesse Bernstein, technically Steven Jay Bernstein, invariably just Jesse, was, to be succinct yet accurate, a fucking great writer. Also, he was a performer, having built a reputation by the late eighties as a spoken word artist (italics due to my discomfort with what I consider the pretentiousness of the term), an actor and musician. 

In any case, as Jesse pointed out, everything he did came from and was founded on writing. In this, he was brilliant, compelling and, as any real artist, by definition, is supposed to be, inexhaustibly curious and adventurous in his work. Unfortunately, he also had serious neurological problems that were probably the driving force behind his suicide shy of forty-one back in 1991. Seattle became distinctly less interesting when Jesse left us that autumn, and the waves of shock and grief rolled around and reflected back and across Puget Sound for a long time after. Maybe there are still some faint ripples yet.

Meanwhile, a filmmaker out of NYC, Pete Sillen, had just made a documentary about another deeply odd duck, Athens, Georgia musician Vic Chesnutt. It made the festival rounds, got good notice. Pete turned up in our midst in Seattle via mailed VHS copies of "Speed Racer: Welcome to the World of Vic Chesnutt", phone calls, email. I don't remember how this happened, but Pete caught wind of Jesse and got interested. Poor bastard.

It wasn't that everyone had his or her (or...) own opinion about Jesse. No, it was that so many had the correct and true perspective on Jesse. Jesse was good at making friends. Jesse was good at making friends with a wide variety of people, including nutjobs who were convinced that only they had the true vision of the world, that they understood the real Jesse. Well, Jesse was, to understate it, a compassionate guy. He was good at making people feel befriended, cared for, loved, that their's was a valid and beautiful perspective. He also lived low to the ground. Very low. Still, not all the nuts live down low. Some of them have very nice houses in Magnolia. Anyway... Jesse got around, he had a couple of ex wives and a soon-to-be widow, a few kids, fans in several different arts circles and drug cultures. Lots of angles, opinions... and stories. Jesse was a Storyteller, so whether he was telling you something that really happened to him or something he pulled out his ass was, I think, hardly the point. It did -- and still does -- however confuse things a bit. Into this post mortem nest did Pete Sillen step to make a documentary film.

Pete's a stalwart kinda guy, seems to me. Focused as hell, too. He's finished the doc, about seventeen or eighteen years after he made those first steps, and I figure it's a good, even handed profile with compassion pretty similar to the level of its subject. Also, Pete's included a bunch of Jesse's music in it, some of which I recorded, all of which many of us have always felt was underexposed compared to Bernstein's other works. I'm absolutely stoked to see it, although I haven't a clue when or where that will be. What appears to be its first screening is at a film festival at Duke about a week and a half from now:

http://www.fullframefest.org/more_film_info.php?id=1896

http://www.iamsecretlyanimportantman.com/

So, the secret is about to get out again. Jesse (oh... one of his nicknames was Walter... pocketa-pocketa-pocketa...), down on the ol' street, dice in his pocket, a Russian spy on his arm, a stack of rumpled typewritten paper in his jacket, a million schemes in his head, will be spewing and whispering and singing and guffawing from the screen again. I get to be up there, vicariously via old recordings in the spy's hideouts in the industrial parts of town, secretly important, too. It should be a hoot. It'll be sweet. Jesse's coming to your town, starring as the ghost in the machine. 

I think Jesse always dug the idea of being virtual.