Press Release from Montgomery Blair Sibley, former counsel for DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey

Ed.--This arrived in my mailbox around 11:00 am. Do we really need a retrial of the charges against Jeane to establish who gets her remaining (known) assets? Just more loose-ends...

Judge Robertson Sets Status Hearing In Palfrey Case Greetings: As you all know, Jeane died on May 1, 2008, in an apparent suicide. As a result, Judge Robertson was required to dismiss the criminal charges against her thus ending the criminal suit. See: Order of May 20, 2008. The dismissal of the criminal case lifts the stay of the civil forfeiture of Jeane's seized assets -- which total over $1.5 million -- and that civil case will now proceed. That stay order was entered to prevent Jeane from being able: "to obtain an impermissible advantage and to prejudice the Government’s position in this criminal prosecution." Judge Roberts has set a status conference for Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 9:30 a.m. in Courtroom 23A. At that time, the Judge will address the substitution for Jeane by a representative of Jeane's estate to contest the forfeiture of Jeane's assets. That contest could ultimately result in a complete re-trial of the matters raised in the criminal case with the significant difference that the rules of civil procedure would allow broad discovery of information that the government was able to block from use in the criminal matter. That information includes, among other data, the names of 855 customers of the Jeane's escort service and their telephone numbers saved for -- but oddly not used -- in the criminal trial and heretofore never publicly revealed which are presently in the custody of the undersigned. As always, if you (i) would like me take your name from this mailing list or (ii) have any questions, please contact me. Montgomery Blair Sibley, Chartered Attorney & Counselor at Law Admitted to Practice: New York www.civilforfeiture.com 1629 K Street, N.W. Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20006 202-508-3699 202-478-0371 (E-Fax)

Why Edgar Allan Poe Belongs in Baltimore

Baltimore, Maryland/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania--As a disinterested party living in Indiana, this whole affair seems somewhat concocted and at the primary instigation of one Edward Pettit, who wrote a provocative piece on October 2nd in the Philadelphia City Paper (a cover article) calling for the disinterment of the writer from Baltimore to the city of brotherly love.

Pettit is a literary scholar and critic living in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and has a good pedigree as as a member of the National Book Critics Circle. That said, his own piece contains elements that undermine his argument on a number of key-points.

Overall, the reasoning by Mr. Pettit for why Poe belongs buried in Philadelphia is flatly wrong: Edgar Allan Poe always considered himself a Southerner first, and was raised primarily in Richmond, Virginia. This is a frequently overlooked fact, perhaps more than his time in Philadelphia is. Beyond this obvious fact is what we all know--that Poe died in Baltimore, and that he wrote his very first horror short story 'Berenice' while in the city.

The story was published in 1835, in the Southern Literary Messenger. This has been astutely noted by the Poe House and Museum's curator Jeff Jerome, in an October 10th issue of the Baltimore Sun, but is widely known, and certainly known to Mr. Pettit. But it appears a number of individuals with selfish interests would like to hijack the legacy of our greatest writer for the sake of local prestige and those coveted tourism dollars. Remember back to August when the doddering Sam Porpora claimed to be the Poe toaster, an obvious and bald lie. Yet, the press ate the story up with undue credulity. The call by Pettit is begging-the-question of where Poe's body belongs, and engages in some very peculiar logic. While the writer and critic has uncovered some very interesting details on Poe's time in Philadelphia, he makes the peculiar assertion that the great writer somehow felt in his element there and would have had a large funeral in the city of brotherly love at the time of his death...had he died there. As we all know, he did not.

As historians--and Pettit himself--have pointed-out, dying at an early age in Philadelphia during the time Poe resided there (1838-1844) would have been fairly easy. The city was riven with ghastly official corruption, labor violence and strikes, race riots, rampant and unsolved crime, poor hygiene, runaway disease, and squalid poverty. Appropriately, it all sounds a bit like Poe's own life (because it was), as well as a page from one of his own short stories.

All of these factors were typical of conditions in the city centers at the time, but Philadelphia was one of the worst examples (and still is), along with New York City at the bottom for its inhumanity and modern indifference. Another city had the same conditions: Baltimore, a fact made clear by the very few facts that we know surrounding Poe's mysterious death. Note this passage from Pettit's op-ed from October 2nd:

Poe, if we define him by his macabre works, felt right at home. Could he have experienced all of this in other cities? [Ed.-As a matter of fact, he could have.] He most certainly could have, but it was in Philadelphia that he wrote most about these kinds of experiences. Before living in Philadelphia, his horror tales were more grounded in a European Gothicism. Post-Philadelphia, Poe's personal problems — erratic behavior, sporadic drunkenness, poverty, his wife's illness and death — take over his life, diminishing his creative output until his own early death a mere five years later. (Philadelphia City Paper, 10.02.2007, http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/10/04/were-taking-poe-back )

The problem with Pettit's so-called 'logic' should be obvious even on casual inspection--he notes that Poe's writing tails-off after Philadelphia, and he makes a bald move to separate the writer's life from his work while simultaneously saying they are one. This reveals the self-serving component of a Pennsylvania son. To say it has an element of the tedious and the banal would be too fair.

For Poe to return to Philadelphia would have been some kind of nightmare for Poe, and it still is to many living there today. While living in Philly during the late-1960s, director David Lynch witnessed a murder in front of his own flat. This has proven to be the genesis of his own confrontations with the darkness throughout his own original body of work in film. Should the Montanan David Lynch be interred in Philadelphia when he dies? He's lived in Los Angeles since 1970. Abraham Lincoln lived in Indiana for over ten years of his life--should he buried here? There are equally serious questions.

Poe didn't need Philadelphia in any exclusive sense to find horror along the American landscape of his time. Like many fallen Southern aristocrats, he feared 'the mob,' or 'the crowd' of 'rabble.' Crime, rioting and strife were everywhere, punctuated by the occasional slave rebellion. Poe was not enamored with democracy. To his eyes--rightly--chaos was everywhere. Labor conditions were so horrible that they spawned violence, rioting, strikes, and the birth of organized unions. Flight to the frontier offered little respite from misery. Just two years before his untimely death, we would see the ethnic cleansing of the Trail of Tears, while the year before brought us the horrors of the Mexican-American war under that forerunner of George W. Bush, President James K. Polk. Slave rebellions occurred during Poe's life as well, and poverty and rioting were a common part of life.

In 1833--just two years before Poe wrote 'Berenice'--the Nat Turner slave rebellion occurred, nearly touching-off civil war decades before the real thing exploded in 1861. The heads of the rebellious slaves were fitted onto posts as a warning to other rebels. There were other economic woes. Mr. Pettit mentions the economic depression of 1842 (occurring while Poe was in Philly) in his sprawling piece, which is really more a testament to typing than a valid attempt at proving a thesis. This fitting example should prove the point:

Between his reputation for writing imaginative fiction and withering reviews, his writings were sought after by many other periodicals around the nation." Poe's initial successes in the city diminished by 1844. Poe's irascibility and drinking problems, exacerbated by his wife's tuberculosis, began to alienate the editors whom Poe needed to court for work. (ibid)

Yet:

Had Poe died in Philadelphia, there would have been a huge funeral. The penny press would have trumpeted the announcement for a solid week. Philadelphia has always had a way of celebrating its disasters, its ne'er-do-wells. Poe, found delirious, possibly drunk, in a tavern, taken to a hospital where he dies raving like a lunatic? ...True enough, while newspapers around the country were maligning Poe's name, Philadelphia's Quaker City Weekly was blasting a clarion to defend it: "As an author, his name will live, while three-fourths of the bastard critics and mongrel authors of the present day go down to nothingness and night." Poe still had friends in Philadelphia. (ibid)

Pettit waxes faux-nostalgic on how there would have been parades in the city of Philadelphia had Poe died there...but history isn't about 'what ifs,' as any credible historiographer will tell you. What seems most likely is to be found in his own article--that Poe hated the city and its squalor, its crime, its indifference, and that he feared the people of the city who Pettit claims would have championed him. It's a ludicrous assertion.

The city of Philadelphia was not good for him or his young wife who was dying from tuberculosis the entire time. Poe found the dark city to be a slice of hell. Had the support for him been so ubiquitous as Pettit implies, why did he have to leave to find work elsewhere? All he had were the 'editors,' and his friends were few in the city of brotherly love. Poe earned much of this animus due to a very unstable nature made worse by his alcoholism. Very few people attended his funeral in 1849, as he likely would have had it.

What is well known is that Poe contributed greatly to the indifference and animosity--if not outright hatred--he was frequently greeted with, and like most writers of his time, he was treated very poorly indeed by his publishers and 'editors.' Note also in Pettit's piece that he willfully ignores the fact that Poe wanted to be known as a poet, and that the horror stories were a way of paying the bills to his mind.

'The Raven' was a new step in his writing career that melded both together in way that was probably more pleasing to a very troubled man with a very miserable and unsatisfying life, but a good part of the misery was of his own making. That life, and his works, are inseparable, and Mr. Pettit knows better. It's unlikely Mr. Poe would have wanted to continue his vagabond life on-the-move in death as he had in life. Lastly, in what is already an unwarranted piece overall, Mr. Pettit enjoins his fellow members of the crowd to break the law and disinter Mr. Poe's remains by traveling down I-95 to Baltimore, echoing the lawless attitudes of 160 years ago that the writer so feared.

You're not taking anything back, Mr. Pettit, he was never yours. What's likely is Poe will never leave Maryland, lawsuits will drag-on well after all of our insignificant lifetimes, and that an armed guard will be indefinitely posted at the Westminster Burying Grounds if it's necessary. You can bank on it.

The response from 'Balmer,' 10.10.2007: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.vozzella10oct10,0,3325218.column?coll=bal_news_local_util

Pasolini's Teorema (1968) review

I cannot get this man out of my system, our era's ephemeral Socrates. Pier Paolo Pasolini haunts the modern mind, reminding us of the terminal crisis (ironically brought on by the human desire for freedom), in this, our common era of human society. The Italy of his lifetime passed from a preindustrial to a modern state in less than one generation and it was a shock to the WWII generation of Italians who had previously been very provincial, isolated, and basically an agrarian nation of peasants.

This would be like taking American history from 1877-1920, when we became an industrialized nation, and cramming it into roughly 30 years. The effects on the culture could only be devastating and genocidal, as Pasolini astutely described the Americanization of the Italian peninsula. Other nations fared far worse under the effects of modernization: We know the results in Russia under Stalin with the tens-of-millions dead. But the damage to Italy during the "economic miracle" of the 1950s, and passing into the 1970s, was almost unique: traditional Italian culture was slipping-away, and changing into an empty, bourgeois consumerism. This mindless industrialized technological consumerism now spans the globe. Pasolini saw the writing on the wall: the bourgeois revolutions were culminating in the destruction of the natural environment and human civilization.

Like many authors, artists, and intellectuals of (t)his era, he was doing what most artists do, namely questioning the social order around him. Like Philip K. Dick and Werner Herzog, Pasolini was concerned that this reality we are now surrounded by would strip people of their humanity, their symbols, and of any authentic qualities and spirit, and that we cannot continue along such a path, that the end was near if we did. We would lose our myths and we would lose our souls. Today, the damage is pretty obvious with movies that say nothing, music that makes the listener feel nothing, television that only seems to lie to us more than ever, devouring our creativity and our souls...a runaway consumerism that is literally metabolizing nature and a scientific and economic order that continually tells us that there is no meaning to anything, no truth.

Global warming and an impending ecological catastrophe are the realities that these artists and intellectuals warned us all of during the Cold War, and some still are. Pasolini didn't wax-nostalgic for some sentimentalized remote past, but he saw things as getting worse and that an apocalyptic calamity was waiting at the end of it all. In 2007, this doesn't seem so far-fetched, but one should realize that the alarms were already being sounded over 40-years-ago. So little has changed. Into the bloody fray of 1968 politics and culture came Pasolini's "Teorema," or "theorem." There really isn't another film like it in any director's canon, yet he would top it with Salo at the end of his short life. The film begins with what appears to be a newsreel story taking place at the gates of a factory called "Paolo." Is it a strike? Why are all the workers there, milling-about? The journalist (probably Pasolini, off-camera) with the film crew asks them what's going on, and we find that the owner of the factory has given it to the workers, lock-stock-and-barrel. You'll never see a scene like this in any American movie. But most slaves want to remain slaves.

Pasolini goes on by taking a swipe at the Italian Communist Party (PCI), by having a worker dismissing the miracle as "part of a trend." (!) It's the end of the story, and a lesson on how the Left--and most all of modern humanity--had lost contact with the divine and the ability to recognize it in life and within each other. Much to his credit, Pasolini scandalized all. Barth David Schwarz's biography on Pier Paolo Pasolini "Pasolini Requiem" (1992) illuminates the film's premise:

People expected Pasolini to deliver a straightforward if scathing attack on the bourgeoisie and its lack of religion. His apparently simple premise, the "theorem" of the film's title, was that when one family was faced with a power that constituted real liberation (by necessity sexual) and their values were revealed as bankrupt, its members would spin into "madness."
(Schwarz, pg. 519. Pantheon, 1992)

And so, the story "begins" where it began, the home of the industrialist bourgeois--a Milanese "borghesa"--and his family, in this antiseptic villa that seems almost empty (of belief? of values?). As in life, the bourgeois characters reside in their own social space, alone, living in virtual solitude without meaning. There is the daughter, the wife, the son, and the devout peasant maid who dream of some kind of a release from their life, some transcendence. Be careful what you wish for.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a kind of salvation announces its coming. A herald in the form of young Italian boy announces his arrival in a note to the maid. In time, the "stranger" (played by a 28-year-old Terence Stamp) appears, and quite abruptly without any explanation. Pasolini had this to say about the stranger in his film:

Originally, I had intended this visitor to be a fertility god, the typical god of preindustrial religion, the sun-god, the Biblical-god, God the Father. Naturally, when confronted with things as they were, I had to abandon my original idea and so I made Terence Stamp into a generically ultraterrestrial and metaphysical apparition: he could be the Devil, or a mixture of God and the Devil. The important thing is that he is something authentic and unstoppable. (ibid, pg. 521)

Inautheticity withers in the presence of truth. Like all the great tragedies of Greece and Rome, the family passively accepts his presence as a symbol of their fate. The stranger rarely speaks, but he brings every family member love and a direct contact with the divine through sex. He fills the void in their lives of isolation and emptiness. Again: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

The maid (Laura Betti) is first: he rescues her from a suicide-attempt, and makes tender love to her. Shortly afterward, she leaves the villa and the bourgeois reality itself to return to her village. She begins a fast of contrition and eventually seems headed towards some kind of beatification or sainthood, even levitating at one point towards the latter-half of the film. Her fate is the best one, although that of the son points to the interior life of artists and the authentic everywhere, and he is the next to be seduced by the stranger. Then comes the daughter Odette (played by Godard's wife at the time), who appears in some respects to be the most sexually-fulfilled. The mother and father, finally, end the seduction. For a time, they all seem to have lost that feeling of "loneliness" and incompleteness that comes with modern life...and then the stranger leaves, just as abruptly as he came, a hallmark of the divine. With his absence comes the fall, and a reminder that the void never left, a stunning metaphor for the limits of sexual-release and escapism. No, the void in life never leaves, and is made all-the-more lonely after coitus.

The once sexually repressed mother (the sultry Silvana Mangano) becomes a nymphomaniac, and begins to seduce young men in the nearby city, repeatedly trying to recreate her experience with the stranger, but to no avail. The son becomes totally immersed in creativity and contemplation, showing the dissatisfaction and longings of the artist that can never truly be achieved. Like Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave," he can never touch the true forms (the stranger) ever again. His fate is preferable to the rest of the family since he appears to at least have an outlet for his obsession. The daughter Odette lapses into a comatose state that seems permanent. After an illness that's healed by the stranger, the father becomes a sexual deviant who exposes himself at a train station by film's end. Throughout the movie, we see images of a desolate, gray landscape shot at Mt. Etna. It's meant to reflect the inner-loneliness of the characters and ourselves. This dead landscape is the modern worl, the empty space in all of our lives, and what's waiting at the end of this social order. By the end of the film the father is seen running naked through this volcanic wasteland, finally letting-out an almost inhuman scream of existential despair. From this, you can tell that Pasolini actually felt sorry for most of the bourgeoisie, something that I don't share with him.

Teorema is available through Koch/Lorber video on DVD, and is perhaps one of the greatest films of the entire 1960s. It won a special award from the International Catholic Film Office at the Venice film festival that year, but elements within the Vatican had it withdrawn. The students in the Paris, Rome, and Berlin of 1968 adored the movie, yet Pasolini tended to heap scorn on many of them, calling them "bourgeois," and that the New Left's fight with the establishment in France and Italy was a "battle between the haves and the haves...an internecine struggle." Once again, he was correct. One can see and hear Salo (1975) coming in this film, a work that probably got Pasolin killed before his time in a field at Ostia, a place where human sacrifices were once held. Salo is a dark chocolate, while Teorema is a truffle, the appetizer before the meal.

Revised, 11.27.2009

Kei Fujiwara's Organ (1996) review

Frankly, I'm astonished at some of the bad reviews of this film--ignore them. If you love extreme cinema that explores the basis of the human animal, you have found a home in the cinematic space-time continuum. Ostensibly, this is a Yakuza and detective film, with elements of film noir and expressionism.

It is not a purely genre film at all, but an art film with incredible complexity about what it is to be human. Fujiwara is best known for her role in Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo: the Iron Man" (her role is a memorable sex-act), and her relationship to his work shows here. That's because she was co-author of the film, a fact that often gets overlooked. The first Tetsuo film is just as much hers as it is Tsukamoto's. You can still feel her absence in his most recent films.

The human body is the battlefield, as well as the human soul. Much of life to Fujiwara consists-of: birth/mutilation/exploitation/death. Joy is a small-part of this process. To the Buddhist, life is primarily misery that has to be transcended. Maybe it took an inspired woman to say this, and a Buddhist one at that. In so many ways, this feels like a tale by Edgar Allan Poe! The similarities are in the psychological nature, as well as an obsession with repulsion. As a matter of fact, "Organ" is on-par with Poe and his Japanese analog, "Edogawa Rampo" (a pen-name), the other legendary detective and psychological horror writer. This is a film I have watched several times, and it always delivers a new revelation or insight. One viewing is simply not enough to begin to understand it, as in all cinema that aspires to be art.

If Organ is ugly, it's because life has ugliness. If it has beauty (and it does), it is because life does. Even in mutilation, even in our decay, there is a visual beauty. Just ask David Lynch, and just ask a mortician or a coroner. Lividity has an incredible range of colors. Repulsion can be transformed into an attraction to the life-process, it's a philosophical choice. There are roughly two narrative paths to the film: first, the story of the outsider detective searching for his "dead" partner after their uncovering of a horrific black market organ-smuggling ring run by Yakuza, and secondly, the story of the insiders of the ring, a brother and sister. The detective-narrative reminded me strongly of Kurosawa's "Stray Dog" (aka "Nora Inu," 1949), and is probably a conscious nod by Fujiwara.

Other noirish elements reminded me of two films by Yasuzo Masumura: Blind Beast (1969), that has similar themes of destructive sexual-obsession, and Manji (1964). Both films center on a sexual-obsession that intensifies towards death and an ultimate bodily-mutilation. This is why some comparisons of this strain of Japanese cinema with the works of director David Cronenberg are off-the-mark. Fujiwara knows her cinema well.

In the depraved underworld reality of Organ, the surgeon brother has reanimated the "lost" cop and is doing hellish experiments on him, transforming his form into a monstrosity (while paradoxically making him more spiritually human and further dehumanizing himself). Meanwhile, his incestuous sister Yoko runs the organ-snatching gang, and fends-off the outside world, keeping their spiritual sickness and decay alive. It's an interesting structure of hidden worlds and unseen images, which makes the film eminently rewatchable. The philosophical themes of birth-and-death are also very rewarding.

Yes, it's an extremely low-budget film shot on 16mm, but it's also a well-executed work by a genuine maverick of cinema. The rejections of this work come from the gore and the thematic-structure, which must be seen to be believed. Americans have a fear of nearly everything, but especially graphic depictions of death-and-decay and the disintegration of the personality. At the film's philosophical-core is the relationship with the surgeon brother within the organ ring, and the reanimated cop.

As grotesque as the half-dead cop appears, he's more human than the internally-diseased brother and sister. In fact, he's metaphor for the surgeon's remaining-humanity that's slipping-away; Fujiwara makes it clear that the brother and sister were horribly abused as children by their psychopathic mother, making it the origin of their spiritual-decay and sadism. Fujiwara tends towards "nurture" rather than "nature" in this respect regarding the origins of human injustice and sadism. The film, then, is about cycles. As though in some diseased womb, the reanimated cop is hidden away by the surgeon in a secret room where the two have an "internal-dialog" that's a philosophical debate for OUR benefit.

The other half of the narrative is also very powerful. The outsider detective's obsession finding his partner has taken a horrible toll on his family. It seems that being a cop hasn't done himself or his home any good, even before the body snatching incident. These tableaux are just more of the examples of the cycle of abuse and neglect in the film, and they're potent ones. Again and again, Fujiwara paints life as such (so you don't miss it): birth, mutilation/exploitation at the hands of others, and finally, death.

Sadly, this is the fate that awaits many human beings in this inhuman era we inhabit. Consider this when you buy products "Made in China" sometime. Out of the themes of this film, one could surmise that Mrs. Fujiwara has a strong ambivalence to motherhood. What is puzzling is why so many women do not. This film is a contemporary masterpiece, hands-down. "Organ 2" [Ed., 08.30.2008--Called "Id," also extraordinary.] has been completed, so expect more of the same!