The turn from optics to "apres-garde" film; film-as-communication and the E.T.A. Entertainment Requirement

pivotal · UNDATED (B.S. into Subsidized; the last ~decade of JOI's life)

• When: UNDATED; JOI's late creative bloom, overlapping the founding and running of E.T.A. up to his death in YTSDB
• What: After early retirement from hard science JOI turned to "apres-garde" experimental- and conceptual-film work, leaving behind "a substantial... number of completed films and cartridges," some earning a small academic following "for their technical feck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time" (though a lot of it "just plain pretentious and unengaging and bad"). His governing thesis — that athletes are trainee entertainers — he "had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt" as E.T.A.'s six-term Entertainment Requirement: "students hoping to prepare for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza's line." His lavish willed-in-perpetuity equipment and crew (sound engineer, Best Boy, PA, and "third-favorite actress" Soma Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf) reshape the E.T.A. curriculum (053); the optics scholarship and editing lab bear his name (048). Scene 048 flags the tragedy: he "was revered as a genius in his original profession without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself... while he was alive." The hinge between the careers gets its own dark gloss in scene 138: in "the dark B.S. '80s period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private entrepreneurism," "a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored," and he "took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar's Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada's Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle" — the origin of the Lyle friendship that threads his decline (event 12) and, per the scene, germ of the later film Low-Temperature Civics. [Scene 138's "dark B.S. '80s" stamp clashes with the surrounding career chronology — see Dating notes.]