JUST BEAR WITH ME…

…is devoted to the proposition that each of us has powerful and interesting stories to tell if we do the work to find them.

WILL DEMOCRATS REGAIN CONTROL OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN 2024?

[Values in bold italics update with new polling, methodological tweaks, and/or data correction]

May 17, 2024: Compared to 2022 election results, Democrats must net five U.S. House of Representatives (“House”) seats to regain the majority. Combining all generic ballot polls conducted since January 1, 2024 (n=77) and the weighted-average Democratic margin of +1.0% in the total national House vote since 2012, I project Democrats will win the national House vote in 2024 by 0.8%. This is a 3.6-point improvement from 2022, suggesting Democrats will gain seats, according to these two models.

Model 1 Probability=96.6% (27 cycles, all years, 1970-2022)

Model 2 Probability=48.2% (13 cycles, presidential election years, 1972-2020)

THE BLOG

You may also find my thoughts on my Doctor Noir YouTube channel. I look forward to interacting with you both here and there.

May 7, 2024: My Doctor Noir YouTube channel, which I launched in January 2023, just crossed 1,000 subscribers. I am grateful for every subscriber and for the nearly 63,000 views my 13 videos have earned. Two-thirds of those views are on my Top 100 Films Noir video, of which I am very proud.

May 6, 2024: I no longer include polls of “all adults” when I calculate my weighted-adjusted polling averages (“WAPA“). This has minimal impact, as I only removed 11 polls – nine presidential election, one generic ballot and one Florida Senate race – from my Excel workbooks.

May 5, 2024: After careful consideration, I deleted my Bluesky and Instagram accounts. Social media has become irredeemably toxic and anxiety-inducing, and I feel there are better uses of time and energy. Along those lines, I expect to have new videos on my YouTube channel within a week or so, as I continue to work on the Measuring the Unmeasurable essay series.

April 15, 2024: I recently resumed my autodidactic cinephilia by exploring the experimental short films of Maya Deren – I was mesmerized by Meshes of the Afternoon, which I have since watched half a dozen times (along with brilliant modern reconstructions) – Mary Ellen Bute, Walter Ruttmann, James Broughton, Stan Brakhage and others. From the latter, I was particularly moved by his earlier black-and-white films Interim and Reflections on Black. I also rewatched the wonderfully absurd Un Chien Andalou.

I also watched, for the first time, two Italian neorealist masterpieces – Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City – and three films by French artist Jean Cocteau – The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus. The two Italian films were knockouts – especially the latter – showing how much you can accomplish with very little. My only criticism of Cocteau is that when he is not dazzling us with his mastery of camera trickery and dark beauty, his films are pedestrian, almost as though the “normal” scenes bored him to film. It is a bit of a slog to get through the early scenes of BATB, for example, but once we are in The Beast’s castle, we are in an entirely different – and truly wondrous – film. While all three are very good, BOAP was the most interesting (to me) because it is entirely experimental.

April 2, 2024: I am heartbroken by the passing of American actor and writer Joe Flaherty. He died at the age of 82 on April 1, 2024.

I was fortunate enough to be able to watch the first season of the fresh and quirky Canadian sketch comedy show called SCTV around the time it aired in Canada because it was shown on WHYY, Philadelphia’s PBS station, within a year of its 1977 debut. The opening credits of the show, set to Spike Jones’ irreverent version of “Dance of the Hours,” introduced the world to the extraordinary comic talents of Flaherty, as well as John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Harold Ramis, and “Dave Thomas as The Beaver.” The show’s setting in a television studio in the fictional American town of Melonville provided the cast – all of whom had emerged from the Second City improvisational comedy troupes of Chicago, IL and Toronto, Ontario, Canada – with an endless array of shows, movies, and commercials on which to riff. Each each cast member also created his/her own original and memorable characters. Throughout the show’s run, which later moved to NBC in 1981 for three highly successful seasons, Flaherty brought to life acerbic local news anchor Floyd Robertson (opposite Levy’s inept and dim-witted Earl Camembert), “Monster Chiller Horror Theatre” host Count Floyd, tight-fisted and unnecessarily wheelchair-bound station owner Guy Caballero, talk show host Sammy Maudlin, and Big Jim McBob, the co-host (with Candy’s Billy Sol Hurok) of “Celebrity Farm Report” – a segment where celebrities would be humorously blown up.

Following his time on SCTV, Flaherty continued to find steady work in film and television, often in smaller roles. Two of my favorites include the Western Union delivery man at the end of Back to the Future, Part 2 and as General Raymond (Curtis Armstrong’s military-obsessed father) in One Crazy Summer.

In interviews, Flaherty, who frequently portrayed exasperated characters reaching a slow boil, came across as warm, generous, and a bit shy. He cherished his time on SCTV, even as he always seemed a bit surprised by its success. Flaherty could convey more with a raised eyebrow or a bemused sneer than many performers can with an entire script. His comic delivery was all the more impressive given that he appeared more comfortable with writing than performing.

In summary, the world has lost a comedic virtuoso, and one of its genuinely good individuals – a man who was genuinely funny without ever resorting to being petty or mean-spirited. Rest in peace, Mr. Flaherty.

For anyone who has never seen SCTV, I wholeheartedly encourage you to find and watch episodes – or even just snippets – on YouTube. For my money, the cast – which later included Robin Duke, Rick Moranis, Tony Rosato and Martin Short – was the greatest comic ensemble ever assembled.

March 19, 2024: Businessman Bernie Moreno wins the Republican Senate Primary in Ohio. He will face incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown in November. Brown currently has a 64.9% chance to win reelection. Democratic Senate nominees are favored by at least that amount in every seat they are defending except West Virginia (0.0%). If this holds, and no Republican-held seats flip Democratic, the Senate would again be tied 50-50, with the newly-elected vice president breaking the tie.

March 8, 2024: Here are some updates on polling and projections for the 2024 election.

FiveThirtyEight.com has updated its pollster ratings; Rasmussen Reports no longer meets its criteria for analytic inclusion. I thus removed two presidential election polls, one Arizona Senate election poll and one generic ballot poll conducted after January 1, 2024 from my analytic dataset. The net effect is to improve slightly the prospects for President Biden and congressional Democrats, both of whom are projected to win the total national vote by about 0.4 percentage points.

The decision by U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) not to seek reelection means Democratic House Member Ruben Gallego now has a 79.0% chance to win this Senate seat over Republican former television personality Kari Lake (assuming they win their party’s nominations).

Democrat Josh Stein and Republican Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor, respectively, won their party’s nomination for governor. This race shifts to toss-up, with Stein having a 33.6% chance to win. At this stage of the election, I count as a toss-up any probability between 33.3 and 66.7%.

Democratic House Member Colin Allred will face Republican Senator Ted Cruz this November. As of now, Allred has an 11.7% chance to win.

Finally, Democratic House Member Adam Schiff will face Republican former Major League Baseball player Steve Garvey for an open Senate seat in California. Schiff has as close to a 100% chance of winning as is possible to calculate.

BOOK WRITING UPDATES

Revisions galore. No longer will there be a revised Interrogating Memory: Film Noir Spurs a Deep Dive Into My Family History…and My Own because I put everything I learned over the last year into a more-focused book called (for now) The West Philadelphia Story: An Immigrant Jewish Journey. With a little luck and a lot of persistence, I will finally find a literary agent for these and all subsequent books.

Update [May 5, 2023]: Rather than make moving to the suburbs appear to be the ultimate aspiration, and given that it is the locus of action for most of the book, the first new book to emerge from Interrogating Memory is now titled The West Philadelphia Story: An Immigrant Jewish Journey. The title – what I called Part I of Interrogating Memory – gently riffs on the play and film The Philadelphia Story, which my mother Elaine Kohn thought reflected life on the other side of the tantalizingly-close City Avenue.

Meanwhile, I may yet turn the second half of Interrogating Memory into The Idiosyncrat (subtitle to be determined), which addresses my life-long search for my “place in the world,” beginning with my adoption into a loving Jewish family in 1966, and focusing on my idiosynracies – thus the invented noun of the title – and gentle rebellions against conformity. I might even break down and call this a “memoir.”

Update [December 10, 2023]: I have finished a complete first draft of From Shtetl to Suburb, and I have almost completed a first comprehensive edit. However, I am becoming more convinced that I still have two books mashed into one. For one thing, the point of view changes from primarily third-person (objectively reporting history I never directly experienced) to primarily first person (fact-checked subjective accounts of events I directly experienced). For another, once my parents and other family members “cross the line” – literally called City Avenue – from city to suburb in November 1965, well, why continue to write about them. They’ve reached the suburbs, right?

One answer is that their being in the suburbs did not necessarily make their lives better (or worse – it was simply a different place to live). Another is that having followed “characters” like my parents and maternal grandparents for 11 chapters, a reader may well ask, “well, what happened to them?” Yet a third answer is I may perceived as cynically mercenary for breaking a perfectly good book – albeit one that is properly called From Shtetl to Ivy League – into two books, solely to increase book sales. (Here I sheepishly note I have yet to sell even 30 copies of Interrogating Memory.)

Meanwhile, arguments FOR creating a second book called, say, Iconoclast: Tales From a Suburban Gen-X Jewish-raised Atheist include within-book consistency of point of view; a sharper focus on central stories (Jewish immigrants, life in suburbia); being able to add back stories I removed in the interest of brevity; being able to tell queried agents (and, by extension, traditional book publishers) I have already written the follow-up book, proving that I am a “serious” non-fictionalist. Also, there is nothing wrong with creating a series of related books – whatever I ultimately do with my “a life in diners” idea could be the third part of an “interrogating memory” trilogy. This makes some sense, actually, since both the one-book version of “Shtetl” and the hypothetical “Iconoclast” end with my acceptance to Yale in 1984. My long night drives in search of diners, among other things, began that summer.

Stay tuned.

Update [November 10, 2023]: While I still encourage you to read and enjoy Interrogating Memory, I realize now I tried to do a bit too much in a single book: tell my family stories, discuss the life of Herman Modell, explain how I learned about my legal family, present a reimagining of film noir, and describe my childhood and early adulthood from multiple perspectives. While these things are united by the theme of “investigate things you think you know thoroughly both to learn the truth and to uncover hitherto unknown stories,” it is a bit much. Highly entertaining, but a bit much. Thus…From Shtetl to Suburb zeroes in on “early-to-mid Jewish immigrant experience in Philadelphia,” with “my story” reframed as “follow what happened to ‘characters’ after 1966.”

At the same time, however, I was struck by how much folks – who began to read Interrogating Memory for the film noir pieces or the family history – enjoyed Chapters 7-11, in which I relate my history, albeit still following the structure laid out in the essay that inspired the book. One possibility is the shift in voice from third-person history to first-person narrative; for many reasons, the former is too-often considered boring, the latter exciting. Another is that, having lived these events, I can provide details lacking at times in the earlier chapters. Also, the film noir themse – almost entirely absent from Chapters 1-5 – is most apparent here, as each chapter is divided into “tales from my life” and “part x of ‘how Matt Berger became a film noir fan.'” And, if I may be permitted a moment of shameless braggadocio, I tell some genuinely entertaining stories.

A final reason is one I am strongly considering turning into its own book – that these chapters relay parallel voyages of self-discovery. The boy raised Jewish becomes an atheist (while still loving that aspect of his heritage), while the adolescent enamoured of astrology and numerology becomes a critical-thinking skeptic. Decades of popular culture – music, movies, television, books – suffuse these pages. The clinically-depressed Matt Berger slowly awakens to, and acknowledges through treatement, this condition; I only understood this after writing Interrogating Memory. These are highly-relatable stories…and just as I refocused Chapters 1-5 into a new book, so may I refocus Chapters 7-11 into yet another book.

Watch this space.

Video introduction. This is the second video I posted to my “Doctor Noir” channel on YouTube.

Catching your eye. Interrogating Memory was recently designated a “next great read” (along with 37 other books) in an Instagram post from the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. I remain deeply humbled by their interest in my book, which, among other things, is a heartfelt love letter to Philadelphia.

Local events. On September 15, 2022, I participated in Hummingbird Books’ first Local Author Fair. The event was a success, in large part because of the deep literary talent pool in the Boston area.

WHAT IS THIS WEBSITE?

The purposes of this website are…

ONE, to tell stories with data, as in this map showing the current “electoral geography” of the United States, at least at the presidential level.

Two, to describe, promote and sell my books, be it through BookShop, Amazon (and similar online retailers) or this very website.

My story-telling style—call it “annotated meandering”—inspired this site’s name.

I do always get to the point, though…eventually.

Just bear with me.

WHO AM I?

Click here to learn about Matt (aka Dr. Noir).

WHAT KIND OF STORIES DO I TELL HERE?

Broadly speaking, I write essays – tell stories – about topics in three areas:

  1. My own life (see below)
  2. American politics – including calls for bipartisanship and mutual respect
  3. Popular culture – primarily film/television and music

Within film/television, I have written a great deal about film noir, but also about Charlie Chan films, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Who and what makes a pleasure (in this case, film) “guilty.”

I write about other topics as well, including our lives during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, baseball, epidemiology and public health, true crime and anything else about which I can tell a good story.

I ALSO WRITE BOOKS!

Far more often than I had expected, I tell stories from my own life, using what I call “contextualized introspection.” My first (self-)published book, Interrogating Memory: Film Noir Spurs a Deep Dive Into My Family History…and My Own, is precisely in this vein. And while supplies last, you may purchase a signed copy through this website for only $25, a savings of more than $10 off the Amazon list price. You may also purchase it as an ebook.

Interrogating Memory began as an attempt to turn an essay about why I love film noir into a full-length book. At the same time, I was undergoing genetic testing, exploring my own personal “origin story” and using tools like Ancestry and Newspapers to help me contextualize my “journey” within a larger American immigrant story. I coined the term “interrogating memory” to describe this process – and one of the first things I learned was that the death of my paternal great-grandfather David Louis Berger made the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer more than 100 years ago.

I recently received my first – wholly unsolicited – review, and I could not be more grateful and humbled. David Mayhew wrote: “Greatly have I enjoyed your new book, which kept me glued! It all flows well. Film noir is a real fetching theme! What an expert and connoisseur you are!” Other writers such as Larry Harnisch (“It’s a good one!”) and Morgan Richter (“I am enjoying it immensely.”) have also praised it.

I have now begun to write my second book, tentatively titled Meet Me at the Counter: A Life in Diners. Indeed, the photograph at the top of the page shows the sorely-missed ValeRio diner, which once sat on Route 23 in Phoenixville, PA, at the intersection with Route 113 North. It features prominently in a number of posts – such as those having to do with constructive dialogue and healthy skepticism.

At least…that was what I began to write until I inadvertently stumbled upon the January 1909 statutory rape trial of Adelaide “Addie” Burns – who just happened to be the first wife of my wife Nell’s paternal grandfather. I now plan to write a book about this trial, grounding it in both the aftermath of the Civil War (tens of thousands of dead fathers, husbands, sons and brothers) and the distinctive social mores – including nativism, misogyny, and Congregationalist (read: Calvinist) attitudes toward poverty and crime – of Connecticut at the time.

I am also considering writing books about prognostication in the 2022 midterm elections and film noir, drawing more extensively from my Excel database.

Stay tuned!

WHAT ELSE WILL YOU FIND HERE?

The Noir of Who: Classic Film Noir’s Imprint on the Resurrected Doctor Who

Disease Testing Worksheet

WHAT DO I ASK FROM READERS?

Just continue to bear with me, while inviting others to do the same. I am grateful to everyone who clicks “Like” and comments in a respectful way: it truly is possible to disagree without being disagreeable.

I invite you to follow me on Instagram @drnoir33.

Please also check out my Interrogating Memory book. I think you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Then keep an eye out for new essays and my upcoming The Burns Woman and Life in Diners books.

And if you enjoy what you read here, please consider making a one-time or recurring donation.

Thank you.

HOW CAN YOU CONTACT ME?

I want to hear from you!

Please click here to offer your thoughts, ask me questions – or just say Hello!

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