JOI films the final cartridge — the auto-wobble neonatal lens; the two scenes; the sobriety price

pivotal · Xmas YTMP – 1 Apr YTSDB; filming start of YTSDB (2003-04)

• When: filming "here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B." (2004), inside the Xmas-YTMP-to-1-Apr-YTSDB sobriety window; JOI killed himself "less than ninety days later"
• What: JOI films Madame Psychosis / Joelle's unveiled face for his last cartridge at the "Back Bay–edge" co-op brownstone (the one she'd lived in with Orin), over a camera bolted down inside a stroller-or-bassinet pram under a self-built "auto-wobble" lens engineered to reproduce a neonate's nystagmic visual field. Per Joelle's own firsthand account (scene 178) the thing she performed was exactly two scenes — (1) a glass revolving-door loop, whirling endlessly to follow an epicene stranger; (2) the crib scene, "at least twenty minutes of permutations of 'I'm sorry'" delivered in a white floor-length gown over the wobbling lens, her face "wasn't important" and "Not exactly veiled." The lens was the point: "the son was lenses" (Mario carried the case; Leith ran cameras; JOI made all his own). The price of her appearance was JOI's quitting distilled spirits, which he kept until his death. Per n.80 the crib scene is "the weird wobble-lensed maternal 'I'm-so-terribly-sorry' monologue-scene of the last thing he'd done, and then never shown her." See Joelle's timeline (events 27-28) (the sobriety condition and the two disputed content-accounts, Joelle firsthand vs. Notkin secondhand).