‘Warren Sonbert’s last 16mm film, Short Fuse (1992), was finished just three years before his death, of AIDS, at forty-seven. Like his other titles—such as The Bad and the Beautiful, Rude Awakening, Noblesse Oblige—this one evokes Hollywood action, gangster, and noir pictures. But the exact image it conjures—a bomb’s wick shedding sparks—is an apt icon for Sonbert’s explosive style.
‘Sonbert’s films consist of relentless montage. Scenes burst forth and quickly give way to the next. They inhabit the fringe of narrative, almost telling a story but never conveying character, conflict, or plot. Sonbert drew inspiration from his favorite Hollywood directors (Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk) and translated their languages of suspense and melodrama into the grammar of avant-garde American cinema. Four of his films were presented on January 13 at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, in a program called “Hall of Mirrors.”
‘The afternoon began with Sonbert’s first film, also called Hall of Mirrors (1966). Made while Sonbert was still a teenager in New York City, the work is the result of his early preoccupation with editing. It begins with a meditative montage, using still photography from the set of Michael Gordon’s An Act of Murder (1948), in which the characters are trapped in a funhouse hall of mirrors. Sonbert’s ordering of the stills skips and repeats, expressing the carnival’s manufactured vertigo and the stuck state of the protagonists. The film suddenly segues to a sequence shot in Rene Ricard’s apartment, where the artist smokes cigarettes and makes maudlin gestures amid eclectic décor. The dreamy melody of The Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee” (a witty echo of Ricard’s first name) offers an aural counterpoint to the angst conveyed by the artist’s facial expressions. The film’s final movement shows Warhol star Gerard Malanga contemplating his handsome visage in a series of reflective surfaces.
‘Hall of Mirrors feels like a complete, mature work. But it was only the beginning of Sonbert’s lifelong study of montage. In program notes for his best-known film, Carriage Trade (1971), Sonbert describes his distinct theory of montage as one “not strictly involved with plot or morality, but rather the language of film as regards time, composition, cutting, light, distance, tension of backgrounds to foregrounds, what you see and what you don’t, a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce various displace effects.” Whereas in Hollywood movies montage is used to condense time and move the plot forward, Sonbert makes the montage the whole story. His films are typically constructed of hundreds of discrete shots.
‘Between the films, the organizers played short audio excerpts of a talk Sonbert gave at the PFA in 1986, in which he uses the word “propulsion” to characterize his work. Indeed, these films move at outrageous speed. Yet Sonbert’s precise approach to each shot’s singularity, and the meanings that emerge in transitions, effectively slows everything down by insisting that viewers vigilantly attend to every frame. This contradictory feeling of time moving quickly and slowly at once seemed especially pronounced in the silent films on the program: Divided Loyalties (1978) and The Cup and the Lip (1986)
‘In another excerpt from his 1986 talk, Sonbert describes his process of sequencing shots by referring to Sergei Eisenstein’s technique of making meaning by juxtaposition. But while Eisenstein often combined images to build narrative tension or make a point about a figure’s ideological allegiances, Sonbert’s approach to montage is rarely so straightforward. Divided Loyalties and The Cup and the Lip accumulate imagery along certain thematic lines, signifying by aggregation. His “meanings” in each film are revealed slowly. Sonbert was infamous among his friends for carrying his camera everywhere. Much of the footage in Divided Loyalties was shot at amusement parks, circuses, parades; The Cup and the Lip also shows crowds, but from a more sinister perspective, with riots instead of thrilled circusgoers. Cats, playful in much of Sonbert’s work, are seen in attack mode in The Cup and the Lip. The film ends with a brief but awesome shot of the Hoover Dam, followed by a cat attacking a rubber eraser on a windowsill. The works, however intuitively coherent, are finally open to interpretation. Both films produce an atmosphere of frenetic public activity, reflected by the pace of Sonbert’s galvanic editing. They gesture toward the drama of mass spectacle, the terror and violent potential of the mob. His montage can also be funny, liberated from the pressure to appear ideologically or narratively pure. A shot of shirtless men drinking beer at a gay pride parade in The Cup and the Lip cuts abruptly into a shot of ducks playfully milling about on a placid pond. But there is no narrative resolution, just breathless movement at story’s frayed edges.
‘Sonbert’s resistance to plot structure dovetails with his interest in experimental writing, particularly that of the Bay Area Language poets, who concerned themselves with radical formalism, paratactic structures, and diffuse narratives. Lyn Hejinian, whose theoretical writings are key for the Language school, made a distinction between “closed” and “open” texts in her landmark essay “The Rejection of Closure,” and it seems particularly applicable to Sonbert’s output. The open method, Hejinian writes, is one in which “all the elements of the work are maximally excited,” resulting in a text that can never be limited to any one meaning. Bay Area poet Alan Bernheimer, also affiliated with the Language poets, introduced Sonbert’s films at PFA. Just as these Bay Area writers derived their language from a variety of sources—from overheard quotidian speech to formal Marxist theory and anything in between—Bernheimer emphasized Sonbert’s impressive range of formal sources.
‘As Short Fuse progresses, Sonbert’s imagery turns grim: burning trucks, armed soldiers racing out of buildings, hard-to-watch scenes of invasive medical procedures viewed from the bedside. There are a few shots of visitors at a Vietnam Veterans Memorial, followed by a gathering police force. We recognize them as San Francisco police, and the landscape as downtown San Francisco. The cops organize in a huge army, set up barricades, beat protestors. Finally, in a moment that feels more traditionally climactic than any other in these films, the protestors slough off their jackets to reveal ACT UP T-shirts and signs.
‘But such a scene, as devastating and unforgettable as it is, couldn’t be the culmination of Short Fuse or any other Sonbert film. Short Fuse shows the adjacency of the medical industry and state violence in a way that would have been clearly legible to AIDS activists in the 1990s—too pat for Sonbert, who railed against what he saw as the “simplicity” in Eisenstein’s montage. Instead, to the strains of Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria,” we see a happy couple drinking champagne, among other delirious celebrations, as this painful film draws to its glorious, mortifying, ironic conclusion.
‘Waiting for the train home after the film, I ran into friends who had also attended the program. Each of us, I learned, had been brought to tears by the last minutes of Short Fuse. And yet it was difficult to really say what exactly prompted them. Sonbert’s cinema is witty, exhausting, sentimental, and full of rage. But it is never facile, and it never concedes to being any of these things all the time. To me, that seems to be its fundamental power.’ — Brandon Brown
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Stills
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Further
‘The Tuxedo Theater: On filmmaker Warren Sonbert’, by David Ehrenstein
Warren Sonbert @ LIGHT CONE
WARREN SONBERT FILM COLLECTION
Warren Sonbert @ Canyon Cinema
WARREN SONBERT’S PROPULSIVE CINEMA
Charm Offensive: The Films of Warren Sonbert
Warren Sonbert @ MUBI
Warren Sonbert: A Remembrance
Book: ‘The Writings of Warren Sonbert’
WARREN SONBERT: TRUTH SERUM
The Worlds of Warren Sonbert
Warren Sonbert @ letterboxd
A Delicate Balance: Warren Sonbert’s Creative Legacy
Podcast: Howard Guttenplan and Warren Sonbert
WARREN SONBERT AND THE RELIEF OF ANTI-NARRATIVE
Brief Candles: The Films of Warren Sonbert
Filmmaker Warren Sonbert, 47
Postcards From Warren: The Cinematic Legacy of Warren Sonbert
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Extras
The Warren Sonbert Collection Trailer
Warren Sonbert in a cafe in NYC writing in his schedule
postcards from Warren
Jonas Mekas on Jon Gartenberg’s preservation of Warren Sonbert’s estate
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Brief Interview
How do you decide on the length of your films?
My new film’s length was locked in aco. to the duration of the music tracks (like a Balanchine ballet) (though the longest seq. – 20 mine. – combines 2 diii performances of the same piece of music: a concert version with a Quiet ending and an operatic intro to Gluok’s Iphpgenie in Aulis Cv.). In any case the new wk is 31 mine – somewhat longer than my usual (of late) 20 mine. 20 to 30 mine. for a film is long enough. All films even the good ones – are way too long at the standard 90420 mine.
Certain images recur in your films such as flowers, animals, landscapes,water, etc. Msinly very beautiful images. Do you choose your objects because they are beautiful?
Definitely net. There’s always a double edge to the beauty. Or I try to show stuff that is both attractive and sinister/deadly. Or really there’s both an appreciation of and yet a critical attitude towards the same image. If an Image Is merely beautiful then I try to have it enecreen for the ehorteet possible duration – the editing, the yanking away is the critical elant.
Do you like Bruce Conner’s work? Do you think that you’ve been influenced by him?
I love Bruce’s work and always show his films to my students but he’s no more big an influence than Markopoulee or Brakhage or Sirk or Keaton or Hitchcock or Ophule….
Do you think that advertising (such as tv commercial) Is/can be a kind of poetry?
Of couree – I’m no snob. Kubelka hae made commercials you know. I love poetcarde which are filled with poetry.
What do you think of MW?
I never watch it (save the work of my ex-students).
If you are commissionedto do an MTV music video for a group, what kind of video do you think you’ll make?
I’d love to do it though I’d make sure that the group is NEVER, NEVER shown so I don’t know how happy they’d be about ldmt. I hate it when you eee people mouthing the same words you’re hearing. In any case check out my new film, FRIENDLY WITNESS, which opens with the 4 greatest rook videos ever made (songs from the `50e/early `60e – pre egghead rock) – people should be faDing out of their seats.
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10 of Warren Sonbert’s 17 films
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Where Did Our Love Go (1966)
‘Warhol Factory days… [Gerard] Malanga at work… girl rock groups and a disco opening… a romp through the Modern. My second film.’ — WS
the entirety
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Hall of Mirrors (1966)
‘This film is an outgrowth of one of Sonbert’s film classes at NYU, in which he was given outtakes from a Hollywood film photographed by Hal Mohr to re-edit into a narrative sequence. Adding to this found footage, Sonbert filmed Warhol’s superstars Rene Ricard and Gerard Malanga in more private and reflective moments.’ — Jon Gartenberg
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Amphetamine (1966)
‘In both provocative and playful fashion, AMPHETAMINE depicts young men shooting amphetamines and making love in the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll.’ — Jon Gartenberg
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Carriage Trade (1972)
‘Carriage Trade was an evolving work-in-progress, and this 61-minute version is the definitive form in which Sonbert realized it, preserved intact from the camera original. With Carriage Trade, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920’s; he particularly disliked the “knee-jerk’ reaction produced by Eisenstein’s montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described Carriage Trade as “a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.” This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between individual shots. This occurs through the spectator’s assimilation of “the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar worldwide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing and density of images.”’ — letterboxd
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Divided Loyalties (1978)
‘Warren Sonbert described DIVIDED LOYALTIES as a film ‘about art vs. industry and their various crossovers.’ According to film critic Amy Taubin, ‘There is a clear analogy between the filmmaker and the dancers, acrobats and skilled workers who make up so much of his subject matter.’ — Jon Gartenberg
Listen to audio of Warren Sonbert introducing ‘Divided Loyalties’ here
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Noblesse Oblige (1981)
‘The style is relatively unchanged, but the images–press conferences, news events, disasters–convey his vision of the world in a new, direct, political fashion. Featuring startling footage of the City Hall riots after Councilman Dan White received a light prison sentence for slaying San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, Noblesse Oblige opens a new chapter on Sonbert’s career.’ — David Ehrenstein
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A Woman’s Touch (1983)
‘What is a Sonbert movie like? ”A Woman’s Touch” exemplifies his current style. It begins with celebratory images of women, intercut with fireworks in some of the most dazzling sequences he has ever devised. Men enter the picture later, more threatening in appearance, often wearing uniforms and distanced from the camera. Depicting many people and activities, the shots pass quickly across the screen – relating to one another in multiple ways, suggesting notions and emotions that careen off one another in kaleidoscopic patterns. No ”messages” are thrown at the viewer, since Sonbert likes an indirect, even ambiguous approach. The bulk of the film explores various relationships between the sexes; the ending hints at a new male-female rapport.’ — David Sterritt
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The Cup and the Lip (1986)
‘THE CUP AND THE LIP is a complex and challenging picture that will stimulate adventurous filmmakers for years to come. … Although its imagery is too dense, varied and fast-moving to be thoroughly parsed after one viewing, the film appears to be a regretful and perhaps sardonic essay on human frailty – and on the effort to stave off chaos by means of political and religious institutions, which carry their own dangers of social control and mental manipulation.’ — David ‘Sterritt
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Friendly Witness (1989)
‘In FRIENDLY WITNESS, Sonbert returned, after 20 years, to sound. In the first section of the film, he deftly edits a swirling montage of images – suggestive of loves gained and love lost – to the tunes of four rock songs. “At times the words of the songs seem to relate directly to the images we see…; at other times words and images seem to be working almost at cross-purposes or relating only ironically. Similarly, at times the image rhythm and music rhythm appear to dance together, while at others they go their separate ways.” (Fred Camper)’ — Jon Gartenberg
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Short Fuse (1992)
‘Sonbert was also a noted opera critic, and he frequently theorized about the relationship of film to other art forms, in particular, music. He analogized the notes, chords, and tone clusters of music to the progression of shots in film. The shot was the building block upon which Sonbert created the musical rhythms of his films. Sonbert published excerpts from his feature-film screenplay adaptation of Strauss’ Capriccio, his favorite opera, in 1986. Short Fuse, completed six years later, can be seen as a return to Capriccio’s themes, including ‘Nazism and eroticism, beauty and force, detail and structure.’ (William Graves) Underscoring a question raised by Capriccio–whether in opera the music or the libretto takes priority–Short Fuse is replete with a soundtrack that counterpoints the film’s visuals, prompting the viewer to ask whether the music or the imagery predominates.’ — Jon Gartenberg
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. ‘Major’ might be pushing it, but we’ll never know. A cool thing about Caravaggio is that he can be whoever you want him to be. I interviewed Derek J. ages ago for the LA Weekly. I think it’s in ‘Smothered in Hugs’. At the Chateau Marmont. He was very nice. So there’s the Sonbert post I managed to cobble together with your kindly tips. ** Ian, Hey there, Ian! Oh, good, about your having found a trustworthy friend to show your story to. Let me know what he says, if you feel like it. My fingers are additionally crossed should they be needed. Homemade pho, nice. Slurp. And Russian doom gets a slurp too, of course. Happy, healthy onrushing Xmas to you! ** Jes, Hi, Jes. Welcome. And thank you for coming in here. Two very good questions right there. I hope his name compelled him, no? ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Jack! Yeah, I had a double take, ‘is that typo?’ kind of moment there. Hugs with jingling attached bells. ** Corey Heiferman, I never met Lucien Carr. It seems like Mr. Ehrenstein might have as he seems to have met almost everybody of note. Hang in there for the next week, man. Sounds very intense. I didn’t have those issues with the Kaufman film while I was watching it, but it’s possible that, on second viewing, and with you having raised them, I might. There’s so much pleasure for me in seeing an American filmmaker/writer making something so intelligent in the ‘mainstream’ context that my opinion might gave it a big loan. I’m amazed he’s getting the big opportunities he is considering how good he is. My guess is that the opportunities will lessen since his stuff is probably not paying his benefactors’ bills as it is. No writers spring to mind re: Pessoa’s tech, no, but I’ll have a think. Very interesting area of interest there, man. ** Bill, Hi, B. I like some of Andre’s early stuff. He’s one of the majority of artists who gets known for doing a certain thing and then makes that his brand whereupon the returns begin to greatly diminish. Xmas cards. I only got two, and I think I can get away with being an ingrate in those cases maybe. I’ve heard of ‘Precarious’. It might be on one of my illegal sites, I’ll check. The only film I’ve watched in the past days is that new Bee Gees documentary for some whim-based reason. It was okay, although it didn’t get into their great psychedelic late 60s stuff nearly enough by my reckoning. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too, about the Fleury. And, yes, I looked far and wide, and there’s no trace of the video online anywhere, which I think probably speaks to his objections. ** Misanthrope, It’s definitely pretty shit. But I guess it’s amazing those people agreed on anything. Or that’s the silver lining overlay. But, yeah, fuck them with a truncheon. Doctors over here are nicer and more competent, I think. Or I’ve been really lucky. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. Well, no one really knows, but apparently bisexuality is a serious option on his part, and, based on his paintings, it wouldn’t shock. Yeah, calling Haneke’s films manipulative was lazy and simplistic of me. I was typing too fast. It’s much more complex than that, I agree. I agree with your assessment. That makes sense. It’s more that I’m surprised I like his films as much as I do given the very pointed turns they take or something. Did you actually read ‘Juliette’ all the way through? I’m a big Sade fan, obviously, but I’ve never read him without skimming a hell of a lot. ‘In a Glass Cage’, interesting. I haven’t seen it since it was originally released. I remember being impressed that it hit the erotic/shocking crux so strongly when it did. And that it did so within a fairly good aesthetic look. I don’t remember much else about it, though. I think David Foster Wallace is one of the very, very best fiction writers in English. And in non-fiction too. His sentence-making abilities drop my jaw in wonder. Yeah, I’m a huge fan of his writing. I didn’t read ‘The Pale King’ because I’m suspicious of it since it was hashed together after his death and without his control. But I love pretty much everything else he wrote. So I guess that’s a recommendation. Your week sounds pretty set. Mine’s kind of a total blank. No plans other than maybe scoring another Buche and maybe a friend Zoom session and trying to stop procrastinating on some work I need to do. It doesn’t look wildly different than any other week, at least from this angle on it. I wish for infinite niceness from your week. You deserve it, bud. ** Okay. I managed to put together a Day about the late and wonderful American filmmaker Warren Sonbert, and I hope you’ll explore it because he’s a very interesting maker of movies. See you tomorrow.
Sculptor 
But as they stood outside the courtroom and watched the elevator doors close, the mother and sister of the victim, Ana Mendieta, called him a murderer. ”I know he killed my daughter,” the mother, Raquel Oti Mendieta of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said. The sister, Raquel Harrington, said: ”He might be getting away with murder now. But he’ll get his just rewards. Just wait and see.”
In prosecuting second-degree murder charges, an assistant district attorney, Elizabeth Lederer, said the defendant’s calling the 911 emergency telephone line was an incriminating factor. A tape of the call showed Mr. Andre saying: ”My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.”
Evidence at the trial showed that Ms. Mendieta had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol before her death. There was a fight, Ms. Lederer said, and it escalated in the bedroom, and ”he caused her to fall out the window” at 300 Mercer Street. Mr Andre later told the police that he and his wife had been watching television before she went to bed alone. He said when he went to bed, he found that she was not there and that the bedroom window was open. A doorman working nearby testified that he had heard cries of: ”No! No! No!” just before the body hit the ground. Mr. Hofffinger said any seeming inconsistency between what Mr. Andre told the 911 operator and later said was a result of Mr. Andre’s ”eclipsing” events the night of the death.
In November 2002, 
Boham had the right look but not the right attitude for modeling work. He didn’t like people telling him what to do. He seemed like an angry person. His opportunities were tapering off. Lara Holland, who lived in a Denver mansion on High Street in an apartment a floor below Boham, gave an interview. “Boham has an explosive temper and owned a large collection of guns, including a rifle with a silencer and a scope”, Holland said. Boham, who has a 5-year-old daughter, also picked fights over petty disputes with friends, she said[citation needed]. “He got into bloody fistfights,” Holland said. “He just had anger issues.” Boham told Lara Holland, that he “sanitized” his apartment by thoroughly scrubbing it because a gay man had lived there previously, she said. “He hated (gays),” she said. “He hated their lifestyle.”
A housekeeper found Kelso, 43, shot to death in the bathtub of his upscale Congress Park home on November 13. The police named Boham as a suspect in the slaying. Kelso, reportedly often hired the services of male dancers/escorts. Boham was arrested on November 16 at the U.S.-Mexico border in Lukeville, Arizona. He was extradited to Colorado and is being held without bond. According to the Denver Post, Boham told his family that he killed Kelso because he believed that Kelso kept $100,000 to $400,000 in his household safe.
One of France’s biggest rock stars was released from prison recenty after serving half of an eight-year sentence for killing his actress girlfriend in a jealous rage over a text message. 
Cantat became the centre of a lurid drama in July 2003 when he punched and slapped Marie Trintignant, 41, in an hotel room in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. They had quarrelled over a text message that Ms Trintignant, a mother of four and the daughter of Jean-Louis Trintignant, a 1960s film idol, had received from her former husband. She struck her head on a radiator and died in a Paris hospital a week later.
Tom Melford entered Columbia in 1995. His major was visual arts, and his freshman year seemed to go well enough. With little money for winter clothes, he could be seen trudging through snow in sandals, jeans and a T-shirt as if he were strolling through warm California beach sand. He formed a band called Couchcase and recorded a few songs featuring his frenetic guitar playing and scruffy voice. He also had several cartoons published in the student newspaper, The Columbia Spectator. His cartooning revealed a mordant, Mad magazine sense of humor about many subjects — designer drugs, Internet sex, infomercials. In one cartoon, a man and woman trade a series of insults and ugly confessions, culminating with the man saying, ”The voices told me to kill you in your sleep.” The woman then screams, ”April Fool’s!” The man replies, ”That’s today?”
In the fall, Mr. Nelford underwent an abrupt transformation as he began to date Kathleen Roskot, the first serious girlfriend his Columbia friends had ever seen him with. He cleaned himself up, got a crew cut and took a job selling jeans. Some of Mr. Nelford’s more bohemian friends did not understand the attraction. She seemed preppy, standoffish. Once, when Mr. Nelford introduced her to a friend whose bedroom walls were plastered with photographs of marijuana buds, it was clear that she wanted to get out of the room fast. But the two had things in common — athletics, contemplative natures and a passion for the music and literature of the 1960’s. Ms. Roskot decorated her room with posters of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. She stuck up favorite Kerouac quotes. Before long, Mr. Nelford was spending many of his nights in her suite on the fifth floor of Ruggles Hall. After she failed to show up for lacrosse practice one Saturday, her room was checked and her nude body was discovered. Were it not for the fact that Mr. Nelford subsequently threw himself in front of a subway train, dying instantly, his friends said, they would have found it impossible to even imagine that he had slashed her throat. Did he or didn’t he? That’s the ongoing assumption, but the truth will never be known for sure.
Three days after 
Burroughs was held in custody on murder charges for two weeks before being released on bail after his brother arrived from St. Louis to dispense thousands of dollars in a variety of legal costs, which may have included bribes to Mexican jailors. Vollmer was buried in Mexico City and her two children were taken back to the United States. Her daughter Julie was raised by her father, Paul Adams, and his family; her son was raised by her in-laws. For a year, Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent attorney worked to resolve the case. However, when Jurado fled the country after accidentally shooting and killing a trespasser on his property — a child of a government official — Burroughs re-entered the United States, where he was fortunate that Louisiana had not issued a warrant for his arrest on the previous narcotic charge. In absentia, Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer’s death. He received a two year suspended sentence. In essence, the Mexican justice system effected a penalty of two weeks incarceration for Vollmer’s death.
Richard Dadd was born August 1, 1817 in Chatham, Kent, England. At age 13 the family moved to London, and in 1837, Dadd, age 20, was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art. Dadd showed talent at the Academy and gathered a number of painterly friends, known collectively as ‘The Clique’. He won several awards while at the Academy, and began exhibiting his work during his first year. Overall, his style was not particularly remarkable, no more so than any other moderately gifted painter in Victorian England during the stylistic phase now referred to as “The Fairy School”.
In June 1842, Dadd and his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips, left England to travel extensively in the Middle East and Europe. Things were going well until Dadd, in Egypt, encountered a group of old Arab men smoking a “hubbly-bubbly”, an arabic style waterpipe. Dadd joined them, and according to his later claims, spent five continuous days and nights smoking. Though the men never spoke, Dadd became convinced that the sound of the bubbling pipe was actually a form of communication. By the fifth day, he had deciphered a message, which he claimed was from the Ancient Egyptian god Osiris.
Dadd left Phillips and returned to England, where his family had a physician specializing in mental illness examine him. The doctor found him to be “non compos mentis”, legally not of sound mind. Unfortunately, instead of being institutionalized, Dadd convinced his father that all he needed was a rest, and together they travelled to a country village called Cobham, where Dadd claimed that he would “disburden his mind” to his father. It was on August 28th, 1843, at a chalk pit called Paddock Hole, a forested area just outside of Cobham, that his life changed forever. Rather than disburden his mind, Richard Dadd chose to brutally murder and dismember his father with a knife and a razor. 
While traveling with friends and a relative named Will Stafford in 1917, the great blues and folk musician 
While Leadbelly was serving time at Shaw State Farm, his father died. Just before his death, Wes Ledbetter had tried to bribe prison officials into releasing Leadbelly. But in 1925, Leadbelly won a full pardon on his own. Oddly, the pardon came after the governor of Texas went on record as opposing pardons. The governor had visited the prison several times to hear Leadbelly sing, and Leadbelly later maintained that he won over the governor with his song “Please Pardon Me.”
In 1930, Leadbelly was sentenced to ten years at the Louisiana state prison in Angola. After the authorities discovered Leadbelly’s prior conviction, he was disqualified from any chance at early release. n 1933, a Harvard-trained expert on American folk music, John Lomax, was making his way through Southern prisons and recording musicians when he stopped at Angola and heard Leadbelly sing. Lomax made some preliminary recordings of Leadbelly’s songs. Although Leadbelly later maintained that he was pardoned because the Louisiana governor had been moved by his prison song, records indicate that he was released as a cost-saving measure.
One of the greatest murder mysteries in the history of art appears to have been solved with new evidence that 
Mr Graham-Dixon said, however, that a report written by the barber surgeon who examined Tomassoni’s dead body provided evidence that Caravaggio was, at least on one occasion, aggressively heterosexual. “Sure, he had an eye for male beauty, but he probably swung both ways,” said Mr Graham-Dixon, who is also a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine.
The Richardson family murders involved the murder of three members of the family in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. The bodies of Marc Richardson (age 42), his wife Debra (age 48), and their son Jacob (age 8) were found by a friend of Jacob on April 23, 2006 at 1 p.m. Absent from the home at the time of the discovery was 
According to friends of Steinke, he told them he thought he was a 300-year-old werewolf. He allegedly told his friends that he liked the taste of blood, and wore a small vial of blood around his neck. He also had a user account at the VampireFreaks.com web site. Jasmine also had a page at the same site, leading to speculation they met there. However, later, an acquaintance of Steinke said the couple actually met at a punk rock show in early 2006.
The couple were also found to be communicating at Nexopia, a popular web site for young Canadians. Various messages they sent to each were available to the public, before the accounts were removed by Nexopia staff. Jasmine’s user page, under the name “runawaydevil”, included pictures of her in dark Goth make up, falsely said she was 15 and ended with the text “Welcome to my tragic end.”.
While the goth lifestyle can involve trappings of the occult — with followers preferring black clothes, white makeup, and underground music — a founder of a popular goth website says the movement does not condone or inspire violence. “It’s silly to assume that all we do is sit around in circles and talk about death and killing each other and stuff like that,” said Steven Vardy, founder of Toronto-goth.com. “I mean, what do you talk about with your friends? It’s the same thing.”
After the murders, the local school in Medicine Hat pulled a children’s book called Running from the curriculum. A concerned parent pointed out that the goth character might have been inappropriate material for the school at that time. One of the features of the book is having students take a black and white picture of themselves and to draw themselves in as a goth character. The school substituted the classic The Outsiders for the goth book.
A Polish pulp fiction writer was sentenced to 25 years in jail on September 5, 2007 for his role in a grisly case of abduction, torture and murder, a crime that he then used for the plot of a bestselling thriller. In a remarkable case that has gripped Poland for months, 
The killing of Janiszewski was one of the most gruesome cases to come before a Polish court in years, with the “Murder, He Wrote” sub-plot unfolding in the district court in Wroclaw and keeping the country spellbound. Janiszewski, said to have been having an affair with Bala’s ex-wife, was scooped out of the river Oder near Wroclaw in south-west Poland by fishermen in December 2000, four weeks after going missing. The police tests revealed that he was stripped almost naked and tortured. His wrists had been bound behind his back and tied to a noose around his neck before he was dumped in the river.
The police had little to go on. Within six months, Commissar Jacek Wroblewski, leading the investigation, dropped the case. It remained closed for five years despite the publication in 2003 of the potboiler Amok, by Bala, a gory tale about a bunch of bored sadists, with the narrator, Chris, recounting the murder of a young woman. The details of the murder matched those of Janiszewski almost exactly. Bala, who used the first name Chris on his frequent jaunts abroad, was arrested in 2005 after Commissar Wroblewski received a tip-off about the “perfect crime” and was advised to read the thriller.
But Bala was released after three days for insufficient evidence, despite the commissar’s conviction that he had his villain. When further evidence came to light, Bala was re-arrested. The case against him, however, remained circumstantial. Police uncovered evidence that Bala had known the dead man, had telephoned him around the time of his disappearance and had then sold the dead man’s mobile phone on the internet within days of the murder.
All along, Bala protested his innocence, insisting that he derived the details for the Amok thriller from media reports of the Janiszewski murder. The court heard expert and witness evidence that Bala was a control freak, eager to show off his intelligence, “pathologically jealous” and inclined to sadism. “He was pathologically jealous of his wife,” said Judge Hojenska. “He could not allow his estranged wife to have ties with another man.”
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