Notes On Vertigo

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I was an undergraduate at Portland State taking a seminar class on psychoanalysis and art when I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It was 1998, forty years after the movie’s release, and a year after my first trip to San Francisco, where Vertigo was shot. Before this, I had a cynical view of filmmaking. All that was accessible to me were blockbusters, which seemed to serve the single purpose of wasting time, and I was beginning to see movies as a second-rate art. Vertigo changed that. It felt like something I could perform an autopsy on. I could look inside its guts and start to make sense of the pieces. Vertigo opened a new path for me. Peering into it, I could see something human in the San Franciscan landscape.

Years later, in 2013, I would move to San Francisco, but before that, I lived in Brooklyn, where I had a partner who became increasingly toxic. She had borderline personality disorder and was an addict. Our relationship became codependent and unsurprisingly, she split me black. It was like, without reason, I went from being her hero to being seen as the central source of all that’s negative and disgusting in her life. This was followed by the typical narcissistic discard. The irrational situation was too much for me to handle, and I decided to get as far away as possible. I returned to the west coast, bypassing my hometown of Portland for the Bay Area. 

As I said previously, I had only visited San Francisco once before, in 1997 with my friend Heather, but back then I hadn’t seen Vertigo. Even before seeing the movie, I had a strong love for the city. But after seeing it, San Francisco became a more potent thing, full of real and cinematic emotions. I spent my first months in the Bay Area exploring the city and visited most of the sites from the film: Mission Dolores, The Empire Hotel (now The Vertigo Hotel), The Palace of the Legion of Honor, The Palace of Fine Arts, the top of Nob Hill, Scottie’s apartment on Lombard Street, Coit Tower, Claude Lane, and the site of the demolished McKittrick Hotel. I visited the iconic location under the Golden Gate Bridge, Old Fort Point, where Kim Novak jumped into the bay in a fake suicide attempt. Much of the area was fenced off, possibly because of the movie, or because the Golden Gate Bridge and its surroundings have historically been magnets for suicides, as documented in the 2006 film The Bridge.

I knew what to expect from most of these sites. But there was one location I visited that was an entire mystery to me. At the beginning of the film, Gavin Elster tells Scottie that his wife sometimes sits by the lake in Golden Gate Park. Elster mentions her looking at some pillars that rest on the far shore. “You know,” he says, “Portals of the Past.” Like Mrs. Bates in Psycho, Rebecca in Rebecca, George Kaplan in North by Northwest, and the real Madeleine Elster in Vertigo, Portals of the Past is never shown in Hitchcock’s film, only mentioned. Because of its lack of visual inclusion, I’d never given the location much thought, but I decided to track it down regardless. Across the small Lloyd Lake in Golden Gate Park, I found a columned entryway surrounded by vegetation. It’s displaced, like some kind of René Magritte painting. Once part of a Nob Hill mansion that was destroyed during the earthquake and fire of 1906, the entryway was relocated to the lakeside as a remembrance and rechristened Portals of the Past.

Portals of the Past

Portals of the Past

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the title, Portals of the Past, summed up much of Scottie’s problem in Vertigo. Everything relies on the past. In the film, he’s diagnosed with acute melancholia. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes melancholia as when someone is chronically looking back at the past and obsessing over an unidentifiable loss that they can’t make sense of. Unlike someone who is mourning, someone who suffers from melancholia can’t put the pieces together. They’re unable to process the past and move on. They’re stuck in the past. After Scottie’s release from the mental hospital, he wanders San Francisco, trying to figure out what happened. He’s stuck contemplating Madeleine’s death. This ultimately leads him to Judy, who he uses as a canvas to retrace his steps, to make sense of his loss. Once she’s transformed into Madeleine he mentally returns to the scene of his loss, San Juan Batista. Then, when he puts Carlotta’s necklace on Judy and uncovers the lie, his neurosis is broken, and he’s “free of the past.”

But something I never understood in all my years of watching this film was why Judy went along with this cold transformation of her identity. Why does she accept the abuse? At the beginning of the film, Scottie acted as a caretaker for the imposter Madeleine (Judy), who is herself believed to be possessed by the past (a ghost), but in the second half of the film the roles are reversed and Judy becomes the caretaker for the mentally unstable Scottie. The codependency of their relationship is flip-flopped. Judy goes along with Scottie’s requests because she believes doing so can return them to the honeymoon phase of their relationship. She too is obsessed with the past and wants to step back in time. She wants to return to the good times, but as with all abusive relationships, those days will never return no matter how hard the caretaker tries. And when that caretaker can no longer provide security for the dependent or is no longer needed, they are discarded, as Judy is at the end of the film. 

Wandering San Francisco, reflecting on Vertigo, I unpacked that I too was a survivor of a domestic psychic violence. Like Judy, I was used, manipulated, and discarded. Unlike her, I was also physically assaulted. But what separates the film world from reality is that in our realm, there is usually no healing or conclusion. My abuser will likely repeat her destructive patterns infinitely, moving in and out of dysfunctional relationships her entire life. I don’t believe she’s this way by choice. I think it’s connected to the fact that she also was once a victim of some kind of abuse. In that vein, let’s not forget that Scottie, in the first half of the film, is the one being manipulated and used (by Elster). It’s because of this I can’t condemn Scottie or my former partner in an extreme fashion. I believe in accountability, but I realize we live in a world of damaged people who end up damaging other people. I see this in Vertigo and I repeatedly see this in the real world.

Report #8: The Return

I fell asleep on New Year’s Eve and missed the flip of the clock. I woke up and immediately thought of Agent Dale Cooper’s question at the end of Twin Peaks: The Return: “What year is this?” I’ve been feeling nostalgic and welcomed the flippant thought of being plucked from this timeline and put somewhere else entirely different. Like most, I am relieved for 2020 to end. Though, I’m not sure it matters that the years change. Sure, it feels like we are getting a fresh start, but it won’t take long for us to realize the same struggles continue. I’ve always thought of the United States as latently fascist, and the past presidential election has shown me that in America, fascism is dangerously close to becoming manifest. Over the past four years, violent groups of Trump supporters have become more and more confident. A co-worker of mine, who has been the lone Trump supporter at work, recently claimed to be a Proud Boy. I guess he didn’t expect the break room to erupt in laughter when he announced this. I don’t think he expected the barrage of criticisms either. I have no sympathy for him. Since the election, he no longer speaks his politics publicly. As many of my co-workers let him know, people who voted for Trump are saying that racism, sexism, and xenophobia don’t matter. It’s disparaging that half of the country feels this way.

I have several plans for the new year. The most important is to write more. I only wrote one poem in 2020, and it’s debatable if I’m even finished with that. It’s not shocking how much being a full-time “essential” worker can drain you of your vitality. Years ago, on a lark, I read William Shatner’s biography Up Till Now and he wrote something that spoke to me. It was about how privileged he was to have the time and energy to make art:

“Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before. I’m absolutely thrilled at the moment of creativity – when suddenly I’ve synthesized my experiences, reality, and my imagination into something entirely new. But most people are too busy working on survival to find the opportunity to create. Fortunately, I’ve been freed by reputation, by the economics of success, and by emotional contentment to turn my ideas into reality. I’ve discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.”

In late August, I visited my hometown of Portland, and the plane leaving New York was nearly empty. It felt uncomfortable traveling during the pandemic as if I was committing some kind of sin. On my way to the Portland Art Museum to see the Mount Saint Helens exhibit, I walked through Portland’s South Park Blocks and was horrified that I was the only one there wearing a mask. I spent most of my time in Portland cleaning out my storage unit. I got rid of more than half of my books and shipped the rest to New York in sixteen boxes. In my friend Nova’s backyard, I had a bonfire where I disposed of old zines and chapbooks, and other possessions I no longer wanted. I didn’t feel guilty about burning the past. Instead, I felt a sense of relief. There was an unusual pleasure seeing old paintings of mine from college go up in smoke. In the morning, Nova and I laughed about how much ash was left in the fire pit. Over the past eight years, I’ve been trying to limit how many possessions I own, and this experience seems like the climax of that drive.

During this cleansing process, I discovered many keepsakes that I’d forgotten about. One of those was my uncle Randy’s manuscript of poetry and prose One Room on Earth. It was given to me by Portland poet Dennis McBride when I was a teenager. Randy was a paraplegic and passed away when I was a kid. I don’t exactly know what his illness was. His body was twisted and, despite his kind demeanor, it frightened me. I didn’t get to know him well, but I remember him being the lone voice of reason in our screwed-up family. Reading over his manuscript as an adult, I can see a kinship with him as a writer and a seeker. There was one passage that I connected with and would have liked to talk to him about. It was in a piece he wrote called “Deep Space Dream,” where he has a mystical dream while in a near-death state:

“In the dream I was hovering in a kind of vertical spirit body above a highway intersection near a college I was attending. I hovered a few moments and then was suddenly in deep space surrounded by galaxies. I was in a circle with twelve other entities who existed as I existed. Our conversation was telepathic and instantaneous, occurring at once and not one sentence at a time. We were there to determine the answer to some great question. There were two possible answers which were mutually exclusive, meaning they were opposite in nature and only one could be true. The answer was unsettling: both answers were true.”

While emptying my storage, I also discovered a number of my old chapbooks and zines. Nova scanned them for me and they are now available to download on my website. Considering how little I’ve written this year, I’m glad that I was this productive in my youth. I’m really fond of my fiction chapbook Freels Comes Alive, and both issues of my surrealist zine Black Giraffe. Though, in my opinion, my poetry chapbook I Cut My Throat seems out of place in my oeuvres.

Since I last wrote, there have been a number of deaths. Beat poet Diane di Prima, who I saw read when I lived in the Bay Area, passed away. Poet Lewis Warsh, who I saw read when I first moved to New York, passed away. Actress Daria Nicoladi, who co-wrote Suspiria with Dario Argento, passed away. By chance, on the day she died, I was watching Mario Bava’s Shock, a film she starred in. Most importantly, for me, is the closing of the Saturn Bar. From the first time I walked through the door at the Saturn Bar, which I lived next to in New Orleans, I immediately felt comfortable, like I'd been there before in another life. With that door closing, the city of New Orleans has lost some of its magic.

One video-based highlight from the past few months is comedian Tom Green’s Youtube series Travels with Charley. The series takes its name from Steinbeck’s book and consists of Green traveling in a van around the southwestern United States. The episodes are short and minimalist. Green, traveling without a crew and only his dog Charley, stop at ancient Pueblo sites, explore ghost towns, and hunt for natural rock formations.

Another highlight I found while browsing the Criterion Channel. It’s a documentary about Portland poet Walt Curtis called The Peckerneck Poet. I met Curtis a few times when I was a teenage poet looking for mentors. He was known as the poet laureate of the streets. Curtis always seemed to have a libido-driven personality and this documentary captures that spirit. There’s a constant monologue happening about human genitalia. I enjoyed listening to him, a gay man, talk about the female genitalia and his fear of being castrated by it. There seems to be a connection being made by Curtis between logging and castration, as he once lost his finger at a sawmill. Trees are phallic, and Oregon is “where the boys have hard-ons like Douglas Fir trees.” I loved watching Curtis drive around Oregon City and Portland, finding public places to read his poems. And I enjoyed hearing cowboys and bathroom dwellers alike take offense to the perversity of his words.

Lastly, I had a dream about the house I grew up in that I found rather moving. In the dream, my parents were still alive and when renovating the backyard they discovered an entire living-space beneath the house. There were windows that extended down below the back porch and into the dirt. My father couldn’t figure out how to get in. Somehow he did though, I assume by breaking one of the windows. Inside, the space had furniture from the seventies or eighties. There was a bedroom in the back and another room next to it that I never entered. The bedroom was completely white and fluorescent bright. Inside it was a bed and a weird photo holder that had many photos from my childhood and up into my thirties. Finding these photos disturbed me. Who lived down here? Obviously, they had abandoned it long ago. I kept thinking there must have been a secret door that went out to the sewer or street, but instead, I found a different entrance. There was a door that went to a strange mechanical passage, full of electric wire, pipes, and steam. I walked through that passage to another passage. This one had a slanted path and one part of it had a bunch of small televisions built into the wall and two seats with helmets on them. The helmets had hoses that extended to the ceiling. The televisions were on, but only showing static. I walked by the seats, to a door that had a glass panel on it and a curtain. I could see the sun on the other side and the backyard. But as I opened the door and walked into the backyard I noticed that the door was completely camouflaged when closed from the outside. There was no way to detect it was there.

Books I’ve been reading:

  • Philip Lamantia - Preserving Fire

  • Harold Norse - Memoirs of a Bastard Angel

  • Diane Di Prima - Revolutionary Letters

  • Lewis Warsh - Out of the Question

What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

  • The Vandals - Peace Thru Vandalism

  • Raymond Cass - The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP

  • The Platters - The Platters

  • Rowland S. Howard - Teenage Snuff Film

  • Nico - Camera Obscura

Movies I’ve been watching:

  • The Night of the Virgin (Roberto San Sebastián, 2016)

  • Don’t Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)

  • One Dark Night (Tom McLoughlin, 1983)

  • The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)

  • The Whip and The Body (Mario Bava, 1963)


Postscript:

I would like to apologize to anyone who got an email from Substack. I was contemplating switching from Tiny Letter to Substack, and I think a group email was inadvertently sent out by Substack.

Report #6: Cure For Pain

The last six months have been difficult. I started working full-time and overnights, which has cut back on my creativity. I hardly have time to do anything anymore. I even have trouble finding time to go to the doctor. I go to bed at nine in the morning and wake up around six in the evening. The only benefit I get from this is that I no longer have to deal with customers at work. I’ve been feeling very short-fused too, so this is probably a good thing. My health problems persist, and I’m now seeing three different doctors. I was told my aorta is dilated by thirty percent. My blood pressure is ridiculously high, so much that each doctor has to do a double-take on the numbers. The new medication I’m taking for my hypothyroidism seems to be helping. This has all been very scary. My uncle died of a heart attack last year, and I don’t want to follow in his footsteps.

On a brighter note, last month, I finally released my second ebook, Brandon Freels vs. The Reality Principle. It consists of twenty-three prose poems. I wrote most of them in New Orleans, but some are from when I first moved to New York. The cover image is a collage I made several years ago while visiting Kevin Sampsell’s collage night at the IPRC in Portland. I released this ebook as an ePub and with it re-released my previous book, Seven Nightmares, also as an ePub (instead of a PDF). Both can be downloaded on my website.

Also in writing news, this summer Rob Mcleenan asked me to write a non-fiction piece for his blog, My (Small Press) Writing Day. At first, I was hesitant, but I found the experience fulfilling. Not long after, I was asked by an editor from Reality Hands to answer some interview questions for their website. In the interview, I was able to revisit some of the same ideas I wrote about on Mcleenan’s blog. Unfortunately, it appears the editors of Reality Hands shut down the website before my interview was posted. It’s a shame too because I enjoyed the writing and design of that website. If you want to read the interview, I’ve uploaded a PDF of it here.

On a sadder note, my friend and mentor Steven Dalachinsky passed away in September. I first came into contact with Steve when I was in high school. I had been writing letters to Hal Sirowitz and Hal decided to introduce me to other New York City underground writers. Steve was one of them. Eventually, my friend Kris Hagner and I published a xeroxed broadside of one of Dalachinsky’s poems. We were teenagers but Steve welcomed the venture. He humored us. As I got older, in my twenties, Steve and I would lose touch on and off but he’d always come around and send me a collage-postcard. I’d visit my parents and get all these collages he’d mailed me.

I met Steve in person for the first time when I moved to New York in 2013 with Allison. He was feisty and fierce yet very personable. The first time we met, he spoke about taking me to The Stone to see some jazz. He patiently listened to my relationship woes and when I, unfortunately, had to leave four months later to escape Allison, he gave me a list of poets and artists to meet in San Francisco when I got there. When I returned to New York two years ago, Steve was reading everywhere. He was prolific. He was so ingrained in my understanding of New York, I’m not sure what New York will mean to me without him. I’d run into him and Yuko at readings, noise shows, avant-garde music shows, and art shows. He always knew what was happening. He was in so many worlds. I will miss him.

As for highlights, one for me was seeing Brad Abrahams’ documentary about the painter David Huggins, Love and Saucers. Huggins believes he lost his virginity to an alien named Crescent, and his paintings document his encounters with her and other aliens. Huggins’ paintings are nocturnal and intensely libidinal. Many of his works include nude alien women, sometimes mounting him, or at other times having him suckle their breasts. I also saw Gee Vaucher of Crass speak at the New York Art Book Fair and caught Francis Bacon’s monumental work Three Studies for a Crucifixion at the Guggenheim. Lastly, I was very proud to have one of my involuntary paintings included in the Involuntary México show in Mexico City. The show was held in the Hidalgo Station of the Mexico City subway, which I found curious considering my piece that was included was taken at the Ralph Station in Brooklyn. From one subway wall to another.

Books I’ve been reading:

  • Kenneth Patchen - The Journal of Albion Moonlight

  • Benjamin Péret - Mad Balls

  • Steven Jesse Bernstein - I Am Secretly An Important Man

  • Bessel van der Kolk - The Body Keeps The Score


Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

  • Don Cherry - Brown Rice

  • Pharmakon - Devour

  • Joe Jackson - Steppin’ Out

  • Sonic Youth - The Destroyed Room


Some publishing notes: