The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

October 16, 2011


Psych

Well, since I've been on the residency - which deals with pain, wounding,
death, sexuality, and the virtual - I've also been dealing with the death
of my father, embezzlement, flooding, death of my thesis-advisor/friend,
and family split-up. So tonight we watched Psych, a popular/satirical
television program about a detective pair who solve crimes. So tonight my
downstairs neighbor came back; at noon he had had an auto-accident in
which his neck was broken, so he was in a heavy brace; the other driver
was taken away in a stretcher. So my neighbor has amnesia about the whole
incident which occurred four blocks from where I'm typing this, and Azure
and I and another neighbor went out to solve the case. We took an
infra-red camera and found 150' tracks across a major avenue indicating
the other vehicle had been traveling at an untoward rate of speed. We
found the bumper and front-end of the car indicating it struck my
neighbor's vehicle most likely from the front, on the right-hand side. We
found the license-plate and other clues. We photographed everything in
flash, in normal night-light, in infra-red. And we're almost certain our
neighbor, who can't remember anything, isn't at fault. What's fascinating
about this is his state, which is one of shock that I think is masking the
pain, and the oddly detective-oriented investigation we conducted,
checking out the skid marks, noticing where there was a sudden bend in
them in the middle of the intersection, working the case; our neighbor
will wake in pain, hopefully the other driver on the stretcher is okay,
Psych has nothing on us but the music, but we've got the photographs of
something real and violent that happened, more pain, more wounding, more
thought for the Eyebeam residency. I will read more James Ellroy. He
knows. In the meantime I've been listening to Batak (Toba) funeral songs
which are the most powerful I've heard; I've discovered my hasapi is also
a shaman staff, playing in depth into my state of mind. Hopefully back to
sexuality, even though that organizes itself, repeatedly, around organs
and bodies, lines of sight, and blankness where a detective might come in
handy, spoiling everything, spoiling the goods. We're quiet in the
building; our friend is most likely in pain. (on the Eyebeam blog)

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