Steven "Jesse" Bernstein performs spoken word with a live mouse in his mouth in Peter Sillen's "I Am Secretly an Important Man."
July 28, 2011
by Joel Crary
Director Peter Sillen’s “I Am Secretly an Important Man” chronicles the life and art of Steven “Jesse” Bernstein, one of Seattle’s most intriguing spoken word performers. To the world outside the Pacific Northwest, Bernstein may bring associations of William Burroughs and the early ’90s grunge explosion to mind. But Bernstein was an avant-garde crusader, a complex man with a brain too big for his skull, who had many demons and suffered just as many setbacks in his drive to produce poetry. His work, characterized by his unique, stormy delivery and bluesy acoustic accompaniment, resonates as a guttural reaction to life in America for people on the margins.
I talked with Peter about how he came to discover Bernstein and the long 20-year process involved in bringing his story to film. “I Am Secretly an Important Man” is screening at Pacific Cinematheque Saturday, July 30th through Monday, August 1st. Check the website for showtimes.
You’re a filmmaker out of New York. How did this spoken word artist from Seattle come into your life?
I first came across Jesse’s work through his album “Prison,” the spoken word album that he put out. I came across it and then just wrote the archives. I was interested in the work and wanted to get more of it. I wrote the archives and they got me some of the books. That’s kind of how it all started.
How did you first come across “Prison”?
A friend of mine was a music critic. I was at his apartment and he had stacks of CDs at the time. After he listened to them, half of them he’d maybe toss in the end. I was going through the ones that were getting tossed, just seeing what I could score for myself. I came across the CD and I was immediately taken with it. That was the interesting part for me, I think. I’m a very visual person, and the art direction and Art Aubry’s photography… There were a number of photographers that actually had work on that CD, but the front cover was Art’s. It just really jumped out. It really stood apart. It felt like it was something kind of different, and it had that Sub Pop stamp to it. It really caught my eye, and then once I listened to it, it was sort of the whole package. It was very cinematic and it really spoke to me.
And in there, it discussed the fact that he had passed away. I felt like I had just missed this incredible opportunity to meet somebody and possibly make a film of somebody that was inspiring and so committed to his work. And then I started getting his work and reading it, and I finally talked to Leslie, his widow, about possibly doing some sort of a film project. In the beginning I didn’t really know what I was doing. I wasn’t sure if it would just be a short portrait. Maybe it would be a feature-length doc. At one point I started thinking that I wanted to do a dramatic film from one of his short novels. So it took a lot of different paths before we actually got it to where it is, but finally it’s done. It’s taken a long time.
I got the sense watching the film that Jesse would be a difficult subject to make a documentary about. In one scene a friend reads a fake biography of his, and at one point you talk to Bruce Pavitt from Sub Pop and he talks about the bullshit stories Jesse used to tell about his life. Was it hard to separate Jesse the legend from Jesse the human being?
In the beginning it was very hard. In the beginning I was a little overwhelmed. The man knew so many people. He really did. He was always true to who he was, on some level, but he ran in so many different circles. He could be hanging out with straight-up literary poets one day, and then the next night be out with punk rock kids, and then the next night be doing some sort of a performance piece in a contemporary art environment. He was able to slide in and out of these different circles very easily. He definitely was always inventing himself and reinventing himself, but at the same time he was always very true to who he was as an artist and as a person.
In the beginning it was tough. This film took a very long time to make. I don’t know if it’s a luxury or a curse, but most filmmakers don’t have the ability to grow up with [their subject]. My relationship with Jesse started after he died, and most people in the film and most of the people that I talked to had the absolute opposite relationship. They knew him, and then he died, and now they feel a sense of loss. I never had the actual Jesse to sense the loss, so I’ve been trying to put together this puzzle for years.
As I got older, I started understanding him more as a person. When I was younger I was just in awe of him, and I saw him as this kind of colourful, amazing writer that was part of this vibrant scene. I wanted to do this portrait of him, but as I got older and I started… You know, I got married, I had kids, and you start realizing the complexities of life and how they play into your own work and how they play into your day-to-day existence. I started to really understand him better. It became easier for me, in a way. I was able to relate to him. Not that I’m anything like him, really, but in some ways I was able to respect him and I was able to understand some of the decisions that were harder to understand, maybe, in the beginning.
And a lot of the legendary stuff was him having fun, or him being that gregarious night owl that he kind of was. I think the film looks at him more as a person and a man, and how he was struggling to make his art, and how he was uncompromising and determined to make his art.
You mentioned earlier that you were given access to these archives. It seems like you had a lot of stuff to dig through. There’s a lot of old video and photographs in the movie. How did you go about deciding which materials to include, and at what point?
I started communicating with the archives and talking about a project probably in about ’92, and then I think my first trip was maybe ’94. At the time it was pretty close to Jesse’s death, and people were pretty upset. He left a lot of people. It was very raw. The loss of him not being there was still very fresh. Everybody was very guarded and people didn’t want to just give stuff up. But I think the fact that I was coming from New York and I sort of had this objective viewpoint and I wasn’t in any one of these camps that claimed Jesse as their own – I think that helped me, and I think Leslie was able to see that I was really interested in making an honest portrait of him.
I didn’t really have an agenda. I wasn’t trying to prove he was the punk rock god. I wasn’t trying to prove he was the heir to William Burroughs or anything like that. I was just trying to really look at his life and trying to understand it better, and look at the work. What always fascinated me was that so much of the work was in the first person. It was a lot of things, but a lot of the time it was dark, and a lot of the time it was really out there. You knew some of it was real, but you didn’t know where he was blurring the line. I found it really interesting that he would be able to blur that line and suck you in and make you wonder and get your attention and hold your attention. I was really interested in that in terms of the writing.
So you have these materials. Did you have a framework that you were working with to include them in the movie?
When I went out there the first time, I did some detective work. I was trying to ask people… You know, people would tell you these stories about a show here or something that happened there, and my first question would be, “Did anybody have a video camera?” And then sometimes somebody would say, “Oh yeah, there was this guy, he was shooting in the back. I think this is his number.” You’ve got to realize also that this is ’94. This is pre-email, pre-cell phone. It wasn’t that easy to track people down. I would go and I’d wait outside people’s houses and just say, “Hello, I’m making this [film].” They thought I was a freak.
I would just track people down. I got probably about 30 hours of old material from a bunch of different people, but it was the ‘80s and nobody had any money and the technology was just evolving. A lot of these video formats were just VHS, people’s parents’ VHS camera that they just borrowed, or the community access TV centre that had a VHS camcorder that people would borrow. They didn’t have proper tripods a lot of the time, so a lot of the footage was hit or miss.
I was dealing with two moving targets. On one hand, it was the early days of video documenting, so some shows would be shot really nicely and at others it would be shaky cam and almost unusable camera angles. It was almost like people were making video art of the music or the poetry. It was limiting in that way, and other times it was Jesse. Jesse was the moving target. Jesse would have amazing shows and then he’d have terrible shows. You didn’t know what you were getting, so it was a little bit of a crapshoot as to what any tape was going to be.
But luckily there was a lot of good stuff in there, and we were able to comb through it over the years and really figure out what elements we were able to use. And then there’s also the other side of it, that I didn’t want to make this eulogy to him. In a lot of the stuff I started shooting, everybody was talking in the past tense and it became very weighted in that. I started going down that road and I had to rethink things. I wanted to breathe some life into the film and get him in the film and saturate the film with his work. I think that was really important, and I think we did that. I hope we did in the end, in some way – kind of channel some of his spirit.
There is quite a bit of his work in the film, and it’s almost like listening to a ghost as the film progresses. There’s this deep rumbly voice and this bluesy music coming out of the night, and it really paints it with this atmospheric brush. It is elegiac, to a certain extent, but you can definitely feel him throughout the film.
Speaking personally, I first came across Jesse after I got my hands on the Sub Pop 200 record when I was a teenager, coming out of the whole Seattle grunge thing. I imagine a lot of people who see the film will be familiar with him in a similar way. I was wondering what you personally make of him being labelled, as The Independent put it, the “godfather of grunge.”
I don’t give it a whole lot of credence. First of all, I’d been making the film for so long that grunge… I was probably around a little bit before the grunge era, and now I have teenagers. I talk about grunge and they think of it like I might as well be playing Elvis Presley. It just seems like it’s so passé in some ways.
To a certain generation it means something and people respond to it, but for me, I saw him as an important figure more for what he represented to a lot of the kids that were coming up in the punk rock/grunge movement in Seattle. When you’re 22 and you see a guy who’s in his late 30s who’s living in flophouses and living for his art and just really cares and basically gives up everything for their art, it’s kind of inspiring. You didn’t see that every day, maybe, at that time and in that age group.
I think in some ways he gave people courage. They saw him and it inspired them or gave them some courage to go out and do whatever they wanted to do. I think definitely people like Slim Moon, who went on to found Kill Rock Stars – I think he looked at Jesse as somebody that was inspirational. Things kind of clicked for him once he met Jesse, or once he saw Jesse perform. He was like, “Ah, I can do this.”
I think in that way he was less of a literal… I don’t think he was out in front telling everybody what to do. He was kind of all over the place. You look at scenes and you think of them as some sort of a tightknit world, but really they’re all over the place for the most part. It’s not like there’s only one centralized voice or anything, but I do think he was important. I think he was a person that was on the scene and really gave it the different kind of texture and the different kind of flavour that he did.
There are certain moments in your movie where I was picturing him holding court in his shitty hotel room with people who were up and coming in the arts scene.
I never met him, but I assume so also, and from all those stories it seems like it. When I was showing early cuts of the film, a lot of people said to me, “You’ve got to go get Courtney Love, and you’ve got to go get the Nirvana guys and Soundgarden and everybody.” I never meant for this to do that. I was never trying to legitimize the “godfather of grunge” title. That wasn’t ever important. That was just something that somebody threw on there. What was important was his work and the dedication to his work and what he represented. I think that was really the key – that the work came first no matter what.
And he gave up a lot, you know? He suffered and he gave up a lot for his work. He used to say, “Do your job,” and that’s the bottom line. His relationships with different women and wives and children suffered incredibly, but through all of it – through mental illness, through drug addiction, through everything – he continued to create his work. I think there’s a really beautiful message in that. There are a lot of people that suffered in his crusade to make his work, but I don’t think he ever intended it to be like that. I think it was always just a passionate desire to do the work. I think there’s a beautiful message in there. That’s the upside of it, the positive side. That’s what I tried to focus on.
You’ve been talking about not knowing Jesse personally and what that was like in the making of the film. If you could have spoken to him for the film, what would you have talked with him about?
When I think about having an opportunity to meet him, I don’t think of it in terms of one sit-down interview or anything. I think about wanting to go and almost move to Seattle for six months or something and hang out with him on and off for a long period of time, and really spend some time [with him].
I became fascinated a little bit with his relationship with his father, and his early years and how formative they were, and the circumstances that unravelled and developed into a less-than-ideal situation that really informed his world. I just wonder if he could have had a more sustainable life had they been a little bit different. You kind of realize that you can’t escape some stuff. He had a rough childhood. If things broke a couple of different ways, he could have been somebody that ended up being a writer that was successful enough to pay the rent and get by.
I don’t know that he would have been the same writer, obviously. Maybe not, but I’d love to still have him here. Some of those early years – I’d love to know more about that. I think it was incredibly painful for him, but I think that’s where a lot of the work comes from, those early years.
Trailer for “I Am Secretly an Important Man”:
