AFI Silver Classic Film Weekend, day 1

Posted on November 13, 2026 by sheila

Yesterday, I had so much fun introducing two films in the lineup yesterday of the AFI Silver Classic Film Weekend, here in Silver Spring, Maryland: Wild Girl (1932), directed by Raoul Walsh, starring Joan Bennett, Charles Farrell, with a robust supporting cast including Ralph Bellamy and Eugene Pallette.

I also introduced the final film of the day, the rare and virtually un-seeable Man Trouble (1930), directed by Berthold Viertel. Un-seeable because the print was destroyed in the catastrophic Fox vault fire in 1937 – a fire resulting in one death, and the loss of the entire archive of Fox’s silent films, and films before 1932. The only thing that survived of Man Trouble was a 35mm nitrate, restored recently by the UCLA Film Archive. Hopefully it will eventually stream soon so everyone can discover it. It stars the wonderfully real Dorothy Makhaill, an actress I fell in love with when I tripped over Safe in Hell (1931), and was like, “wait, wait, WHO is THAT.” She’s so real, so grounded, her work feels so right now. Also starring Milton Sills, a forgotten actor and therefore a really fun research project. I’ll be doing posts about both Makhaill and Sills. Sills dropped dead of a heart attack playing tennis with his wife just weeks after the release of Man Trouble. He was a HUGE star, and now totally forgotten … so I’d like to pay tribute to him. He was one of the founders of Actors’ Equity in 1913. A Union man! So important!

Also on the lineup yesterday was One Hour With You, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald – a pairing I’m not particularly fond of – the funniest moment in the film was a quick cut to Charlie Ruggles wearing an Elizabethan costume, and Dancing Lady – which I’ve seen, starring Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone. Quite a love triangle, offscreen and on.

I’ve met a couple of people I’ve been friends with online for about 15 years. Never met them in person. It’s been so fun. We went out for Thai food and had a blast. Met some nice new people, as well as festival attendees who came up to me after screenings to discuss the films I’d introduced. This was lovely. The lineup of speakers is here, and I am truly honored to be in the company of such heavy-hitters.

The hotel is a block away from the AFI movie theatre. So … that’s all I’m seeing of Silver Spring.

The festival was included on the list of The 35 best things to do in the D.C. area this weekend and next week in the Washington Post, online AND print!

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“It doesn’t make sense to make [my movies] for more money because I’m making noncommercial work.” — Kentucker Audley

Posted on November 13, 2026 by sheila

Kentucker_Audley-628x348
Kentucker Audley

Director, writer, actor, editor Kentucker Audley has been working in independent film in various capacities for 20 years now. Born Andrew Michael Nenninger, he adopted the name “Kentucker” as a nod to his birthplace, Kentucky. He’s mostly associated with Memphis, where he went to film school and got his start as a filmmaker in the low-budget to no-budget vibrant scene there. (He started a film coop called No Budge, launching it on Tumblr – appropriate for both the subject matter and the mid-2000s environment – and it now has a streaming platform.) He met his now-wife and long-time partner (romantic and artistic) Caroline White during a tour of Graceland. I mean, come on.

He’s done it all, and was chosen as one of the 25 faces of independent film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2007, based on the strength of his first feature Team Picture, which he made for almost no money in Memphis, and which he did with a two-person crew. Audley first came on my radar in 2012 because of his performance in Amy Seimetz’s Sun Don’t Shine, where he plays opposite Kate Lyn Sheil, an actor I’ve actually written quite a bit about in various reviews, but I should probably devote something solely to her. I love her.


Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley in “Sun Don’t Shine”

She comes from the same realm as Audley (as does Seimetz, whom I was lucky enough to get to know during our time as jurors at the Indie Memphis Festival). I was unaware Audley was a filmmaker when I saw Sun Don’t Shine, but I soon did the proper catch-up work. He’s been on my radar since then. I’ll see whatever he does.


Kentucker Audley in “Bad Fever”

In 2011, he appeared as a hopeful standup comedian in Dustin Guy Defa’s Bad Fever. Filmed in Salt Lake City, it is a bleak and uncompromising work, and Audley plays a man who has nothing going on, really, who for some reason wants to do this thing that is totally not natural to him. I wrote about it on my Substack.

He’s always fascinating to watch as an actor. He’s so handsome. But his face is both mysterious and transparent at the same time. This makes him intriguing. I said in a review that he doesn’t walk around on film as though he is aware how handsome he is. In some things, he’s so recessive he’s almost invisible. And yet, he’s magnetic, in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. I know guys like this in real life. He’s a minimalist as an actor. It’s almost like he does as little as possible. He says the same is true for him as a filmmaker. He doesn’t try to make a splash with “style”. He’s not trying to imprint himself on the films visually. For him, as an actor, doing as little as possible makes you lean in. There’s always a lot going on in there. This is most obvious in Christmas, Again, a plot-less wonder of a movie, which I’ll talk about in a bit.

He’s co-directed two movies with Albert Birney, the first one being Sylvio (2017).

Sylvio was one of my favorite films that year and it wasn’t released in theatres and it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. I don’t care. For a movie about a wistful gorilla, who spends his days working the phones as a debt collector and his nights alone eating microwaved dinners, you wouldn’t expect delicate tenderness, you wouldn’t expect a sensitively observed character study. Especially since the whole thing started as sketches on the Vine app. (RIP Vine. The days of innocence.) I read a review that called the vibe of Sylvio “subdued slapstick”, which I think is perfect. They released it online. It’s a must-see. (I interviewed Brett Hanover, another “no budget” Memphis filmmaker, who was inspired by people like Audley, to make his own films, which he did, starting when he was a teenager. We gave his film Rukus the Hometowner Award at Indie Memphis. Hanover released the film online for free. This was part of the spirit of the project.) Memphis “mumblecore” is a whole THING, and Audley was one of the pioneers of the whole scene.


Kentucker Audley, “Strawberry Mansion”

The second film he directed with Birney was the excellent Strawberry Mansion (2022), which I reviewed for Ebert.

He’s worked with a lot of very good directors, often when they were up-and-coming, like David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), Adam Wingard (V/H/S), Ti West (Sacrament), Alex Ross Perry (Queen of Earth and Her Smell), Ma – a wonderful experimental film – with no Wikipedia entry – which I reviewed. (Audley has a small part in it, but director Celia Rowlson-Hall is “someone to watch”: this is her only feature, but she appeared as the adult Sophie in Aftersun.) Most recently, Audley appeared in the VERY unsettling She Dies Tomorrow, where he reunited with director Amy Seimetz and Kate Lyn Sheil. It’s SO good. (I reviewed).


Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley, “She Dies Tomorrow”

But my all-time favorite is Christmas, Again, directed by Charles Poekel in his feature film debut. Christmas, Again came out in 2015, and I gave it a rave for Ebert. I have introduced so many people to this movie, and I watch it every year, reveling in its heartache-y Christmas New York lonely vibe.

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Kentucker Audley, “Christmas, Again”

I cannot say enough good things. There was a long period where it was un-seeable, not streaming. The director reached out to me and sent me one of the commemorative DVDs they released, in limited edition. I was so touched. It is now streaming, thank God, and it’s also picked up steam, creating its own audience because of the streaming. It just played in London and has made it on a couple of lists of “best Christmas movies”, and I have to agree.


Kentucker Audley and Hannah Gross, “Christmas, Again”

It’s my kind of movie. It shows a very specific seasonal sub-culture, so familiar to anyone who lives in New York City: the routines of those who sell Christmas trees on every corner in December. Poekel himself did this job. The lead character is named “Noel”, perfect considering the holiday, but ironic, because Noel is not, how you say, filled with Christmas spirit. In fact, he is walking around weighted down by heartbreak. He doesn’t say much but his experience fills the entire movie. The dialogue does not drive the plot. There is no plot. When characters talk in the film, you feel the currents of chaos driving so many conversations in real-life, the zig-zags, the silences, the sudden shifts, the unresolved feelings. These energies/rhythms are so rarely portrayed in film, because so many films are so concerned with “story”. Noel is buried in himself, and interactions are painful for him: he’s short with people, he has to be snapped to attention. Christmas, Again feels no pressure to be anything other than what it is. It’s a tone-peom about being lonely.


Kentucker Audley, “Christmas, Again”

The arc of the story can be seen in the face of its star.

Dan Mecca at Film Stage interviewed Audley about Christmas, Again as well as all of the other stuff Audley’s got going on.

I was especially interested in Audley’s conception of the nearly-wordless character he plays in Christmas, Again and the challenges this provides him as an actor:

So basically the process for me was withholding. For the first hour withholding any kind of expression or life in the face of the eyes. And just lean into that difficult time I feel like we can all relate to and let whatever’s washing around me, just let it be there and don’t find satisfaction in anything. And then when I do shift to find some joy in the moment ,and you really notice that because you haven’t seen it and you haven’t realized you haven’t seen it. So it’s a pretty simple shift but it somehow – I think it works in the film because we show so much restraint that any small, little shift is noticeable and recognizable.

He’s so smart. Audley has a website called Talkhouse where he shares video-essays, short films, essays, etc.

I get so excited when I “meet” a new actor or director. And he’s young-ish, too. There is still so much to look forward to.

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“Something is gone and that’s why you write.” — Eamon Grennan

Posted on November 13, 2026 by sheila

“I have a double sense of things, but I tend to write about what’s under my nose. I write about here when I’m here and when I go back to Ireland I write about what’s there. I regard myself not as in exile, but as a migrant. That’s what attracted me, in some of my early poems, to birds. My becoming a poet—in this particular incarnation anyway—was not unconnected to someone giving me the present of a pair of binoculars.” — Eamon Grennan (who wrote a poem called “Sunday Morning Through Binoculars”)

Eamon Grennan was born in Dublin on this day. He has lived most of his life in America. He went to UCD, and moved across the Atlantic to Harvard to get his PhD. He has taught at Vassar for over 30 years. He returns to Ireland annually for what he calls a “voice transfusion”. His career has been long and fruitful, with prizes and National Endowment grants. His poems appear with regularity in The New Yorker. His connection to Ireland is clear in his work (you can hear the cadences of the Irish in his rhythms), yet he looks at things from a distance. It is an international perspective. He says he feels that all poems are “elegies”. Every poem is trying to capture something that has been “lost”. A memory, an image, a feeling. “Something is gone and that’s why you write,” says Grennan.

He is quite eloquent in interviews about language, and the particular problem of language when you are Irish. This is well-trod ground. When you speak English, you are speaking an imposed language. A language imposed with violence. This was most clearly expressed by James Joyce in the famous “tundish scene” in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I discussed that here and elsewhere.) What happens when the language you use is not comprehensible to all readers? Do you adjust? But if you adjust your language to make it easier for those who don’t understand, are you not cutting yourself off from your own history? Grennan thinks about this a lot.

In this fantastic interview with Grennan, the language-problem is addressed when discussing Grennan’s poem “Wing Road”.

BH: [“Wing Road”] is a street in Poughkeepsie, New York, but “dustbin” is an Irish word.

EG: That’s right.

BH: I wonder if you use that word intentionally. I was thinking of Seamus Heaney’s remark that you should stay close to the energies of generation.

EG: Right. That’s right.

BH: Heaney was speaking of one of his poems where he used the word “flax-dam.” He said originally it would have been called a “lint-hole,” but later he had to explain “flax-dam” anyway, so maybe he should have stayed close to the energies of generation and used the original term. I wondered about that with your usage.

EG: Yes. I mean I’m sure there is something like that. I wouldn’t have formulated it so elegantly or eloquently, of course, but I think I used “dustbin” there because in another book, in “Incident,” for example, I say “garbage can.” In part, I think every choice you make has a whole set of tentacles attached to it. Right? When you’re writing a poem, you don’t know about them until after the fact.

When I look at the tentacles attached to “dustbin,” I would say: One, it’s a word that would come naturally to me. “Empty the dustbin” is what I would say. “Garbage can” is still a foreign word to me and “garbage collection,” too. I mean, I think of them as the dustbin men because that was what I thought of them as a kid in Ireland. And then, I’m sure I’m using “dustbin” here because when I hear the line “young man who empties our dustbin,” I’m hearing the sound of “young” and “dustbin,” so that is a bit of assonance at play. I’m sure I used it because “young man who empties our garbage can” would not have pleased my ear, so the other came more naturally.

BH: You use assonance quite frequently.

EG: Yes. It’s the old and probably Irish kind of nerve beating inside the verse, for me anyway. So I used “dustbin” for that, and then somebody decided I used it because “dustbin” has a slightly more eschatological, last-judgment kind of thing, and this is the last judgment, right; the thing is about the last judgment in some way as is the garbage collection, so “dust to dust” is evoked by dustbin [laughter]. So, in fact,” dustbin” is a more interesting word than “garbage can” in a certain sense, because of its connotations.

BH: That also suggests, perhaps, a religious context…

EG: That’s what I mean.

Amazing.

You can see what Grennan meant when he discusses the “tentacles” attached to every word choice. To James Joyce (and his alter ego Stephen Dedalus in Portrait), “tundish” was the word he would use. It was “tundish” or nothing else. You can’t suddenly call an “elephant” a “magnolia” and have everyone agree to it. There would be holdouts who still would see a great grey-colored trunked-creature and say, “Dammit, that is an elephant.” While “tundish” and “funnel” meant the same thing, the difference was as great as that between an elephant and a magnolia; so the English could call a “tundish” a “funnel” all they wanted, but the entire “tentacle” formation around each word was entirely different. This is a matter greater than just language. You cannot eradicate a language without doing damage to meaning and identity. Stephen Dedalus, confronted with the British Jesuit who says it is “most interesting” that the Irish call a “funnel” a “tundish”, thinks distractedly:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

Nobody even comes close to what Joyce accomplished in that one paragraph.

But the problem remains, and Irish poets – whether living in Ireland or America – still face those issues.

Grennan has said of the poem I chose to excerpt today, “Men Roofing”:

I have a few poems about workers. The poem “Men Roofing” is another celebratory acknowledgement of a certain kind of work. I don’t know if it sentimentalizes it, but it certainly tries to celebrate it by turning it into art, not so much deliberately, but charging the language used to describe it with a kind of ceremony.

I love the poem. There is a sentimentality at work here, as he says, but it is of a poetic nature: a way of seeing and trying to “celebrate” what he sees. It is a prosaic act, putting on a roof, but what could it mean metaphorically? What could it show us about who we are, and the beauty of it? Eamon Grennan has often been compared to the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (one of my many posts on her here), and here, in this poem, it is obvious why.

Men Roofing
for Seamus Heaney

Bright burnished day, they are laying fresh roof down
on Chicago Hall. Tight cylinders of tarred felt-paper
lean against one another on the cracked black shingles
that shroud those undulant ridges. Two squat drums
of tar-mix catch the light; a fat canister of gas
gleams between a heap of old tyres and a paunchy
plastic sack, beer-bottle green. A TV dish-antenna
stands propped to one side, a harvest moon, cocked
to passing satellites and steadfast stars. Gutters
overflow with starlings, lit wings and whistling throats
going like crazy. A plume of blue smoke feathers up
out of a pitch-black cauldron, making the air fragrant
and medicinal, as my childhood’s was, with tar. Overhead
against the gentian sky a sudden first flock whirls
of amber leaves and saffron, quick as breath, fine
as origami birds. Watching from a window opposite,
I see a man in a string vest glance up at the exalted
leaves, kneel to roll a roll of tar-felt flat; another
tilts a drum of tar-mix till a slow bolt of black silk
oozes, spreads. One points a silver hose and conjures
from its nozzle a fretted trembling orange lick
of fire. The fourth one dips to the wrist in the green sack
and scatters two brimming fistfuls of granite grit:
broadcast, the bright grain dazzles on black. They pause,
straighten, study one another – a segment done. I can see
the way the red-bearded one in the string vest grins and
slowly whets his two stained palms along his jeans; I see
the one who cast the grit walk to the roof-edge, look over,
then, with a little lilt of the head, spit contemplatively
down. What a sight between earth and air they are, drenched
in sweat and sunlight, relaxed masters for a moment
of all our elements! Here is my image, given, of the world
at peace: men roofing, taking pains to keep the weather
out, simmering in ripe Indian-summer light, winter
on their deadline minds. Briefly they stand balanced
between our common ground and nobody’s sky, then move
again to their appointed tasks and stations, as if they
were amazing strangers come to visit for a short spell our
familiar shifty climate of blown leaves, birdspin. Odorous,
their column of lazuli smoke loops up from the dark
heart of their mystery; and they ply, they intercede.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“As we say in church, I look back on a job well done.” — LaVern Baker

Posted on November 11, 2026 by sheila

It’s the birthday of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer LaVern Baker.

Her legacy is vast, so vast that it’s under threat of being forgotten. With the birth of a new style of music, a lot of huge forces are at play, forces simultaneously cultural/political/generational. Changing things up is never the job of one person, even though the history books iron things out that way, singling out individuals solely. There are of course individual humans who make a massive difference, who (almost) single-handedly steer everything to go in another direction. (But even there, other forces are at play. The unprecedented unforeseen success of Eminem, for example, and the radical merging of hip-hop and pop took a lot of people by surprise. He wasn’t the first to do it even, it was just the SCALE of his success that made it so notable. The ground was already prepared for something like it to happen. This is not the same as saying it was inevitable. It’s just that on occasion societal forces – economic, social, class – converge in a way where they create a giant void in the center of the culture. I wrote about the void in the culture in my massive Eminem post. Very few entertainers get big enough to fill a void of that size. The same void was present when Elvis came along. To be totally clear: there wasn’t a void in MUSIC in either of those cases. There was a ton going on in music in the 90s, and a ton going on in the late 40s and 50s, the OPPOSITE of a void. In the 50s the void was cultural, and went across generations / class distinctions / racial differences (again, like I said before: you rarely get a void THAT big.) 1950s America was experiencing post-war prosperity sparked with terror of the atom bomb, creating a flourishing yet conformist middle-class, where more and more people had more and more leisure time, which in turn eroded class distinctions helped along by things like standardized technology in electronics/washing machines/indoor plumbing, the spread of radio/television and also the GI Bill, which ushered people (white people, that is) who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to college into higher education, the burgeoning civil rights movement spilling out into mainstream consciousness, and also the unique generational phenomenon of massive amounts of teenagers running around with not a lot to do besides looking for fun. There were more teenagers than adults in America. So. I am not a sociologist. But when I’m talking about a void, that’s kind of what I mean.

The 1940s and 50s featured many people who were crucial in developing the new raucous sexually adventurous must-be-danced-to sound: the desire “out there” for something DIFFERENT was reflected by the smart performers who felt the need. So there were people like Fats Domino, Sam Phillips, Wynonie Harris, Ahmet Ertegun, Little Richard, Carl Perkins … I mean, these people were all over the place, geographically and culturally, but they all felt the same restless desire to CHANGE. To open the damn windows and let in something NEW. LaVern Baker felt it too.

LaVern Baker, the granddaughter of a runaway slave, was born in 1929. She grew up in Chicago and her family including a couple of well-known female blues singers. She started performing when she was a teenager, which I think is important. It takes teenagers to feel what teenagers want. Baker was one of those rare people: she felt the void, she had awareness of what was happening “out there” AS it was happening. She entered the blues trend (which wasn’t a trend, at all) byu birth, and then pushed it forward into the Future. Art that won’t change does exist but it remains niche, with a small audience. Rock ‘n roll was not going to be that. Little Richard called himself the “architect of rock ‘n roll” (and who’s gonna argue? Who wants to go toe to toe with Little Richard? I don’t.) Still: there were many architects. Baker was one of them.

Rhythm and blues was its own thing. Although it appealed to kids, it was FOR adults. But there were so many more KIDS in the early 1950s. They wanted to dance, make out, throw each other around. Rhythm and blues wouldn’t cut it. There were other strands of the same genre: jump blues, blues shouters, etc, but they rested mostly in night clubs, deemed too suggestive for radio play (and for kids’ access to it). It didn’t have a chance to spread nationally or to move out of the sub-culture within the culture. In the white world, there was boogie-woogie and big band music, where teenagers threw each other around. (Cross-cultural needs, in other words. This is, again, what a void requires.) These powerful “trends” – jump blues, boogie-woogie, big band dance music, rhythm & blues – were already merging, HAD in fact already merged, but it was about to go mainstream.

Baker was a blues singer from a young age: when she was 17 she was singing in bars and clubs. At first she was a novelty act, called “Little Miss Sharecropper”, where she dressed in raggedy blue jeans and a straw hat. There was pressure on her by club owners to adopt this persona. Baker was an urban Chicago girl. Her life had nothing to do with sharecropping. These were racist stereotypes, and they made Black performers acceptable to the white nightclub audience. (It was also a dead end, artistically.)

Nevertheless, Baker got gigs, got experience. In the 1940s, her family moved to Detroit, which put her in a burgeoning music scene where she didn’t need to pretend to be a sharecropping girl to make people listen. She started recording and touring around the Midwest. 1953 in general was a very important year (I appeared on the Very Good Year podcast to talk about the movies in 1953!) 1953 was when the cultural VOID got too big to ignore. People started pouring into the void, filling it up. (And in July, 1953, a 19-year-old truck driver in Memphis slinked into Sun Records to “record a song for his mother”.) Baker signed with Atlantic. The head honcho at Atlantic was the legendary Ahmet Ertegun, who felt the void “out there”. He was her biggest fan.

She had a minor hit with “Soul on Fire” and then struck gold with her next single, “Tweedle Dee”.

She was singing with the Atlantic house band, a world-class operation: listen to the arrangement, it’s so carefully done to not overwhelm her performance. She’s the star of the track. Her voice is so powerful and flexible: strong as hell but with variety in its shadings. You can hear her playfulness, her humor. She’s got a rasp too, but she can control it. She brings in the rasp as an emotional thing, it’s a vocal choice. The whole thing is thrilling. By no metric on earth is “Tweedle Dee” a great song. It’s barely a good song. But Baker obliterates those critical considerations since she is having so much fun and crushing it so hard!

“Tweedle Dee” reached #4 on the r&b charts (the “race charts”, as they were called), and this launched her on a national level. The song was something like #13 on the POP charts, too. “Tweedle Dee” was that all-important thing: a crossover hit. Crossover hits were almost unheard of in October 1954. White charts and “race” charts were two separate things, by design, but Baker crossed over. The kids – black and white – flipped over it. Elvis was just two months into his career in October 1954. He would be the one who obliterated the crossover “line”, but he was white. He dragged the white world along with him (although “dragged” isn’t the right word, because they all went willingly). But Baker got there first (in fact, Elvis sang “Tweedle Dee” on one of his earliest appearances on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in the fall of 1954. It’s a weak showing, for him, but it speaks to how quickly the song infiltrated the national consciousness. Everyone knew it.)

I am so happy Baker performed the number on the Ed Sullivan Show so we can see her in action at the moment she “hit”.

“Tweedle Dee” was a game-changer song. You can hear in it the boogie-woogie big-band influence, but you can also hear in it – and her voice – the deep well of blues influence. Baker wasn’t a teenager by this point, but she brought to her performance a lively sense of humor, a kind of insouciant “I want what I want” vibe, and she is not ashamed or coy. Listen to the lyrics. This was a woman singing about her needs. She’s blatant, she’s greedy (in the best sense): “Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme all the love you got!” This was something the teenagers loved, found revelatory, a break with their parents’ conservative values.

It’s different when a woman sings “Gimme gimme gimme”. It just is. The song is inherently feminist, whether the people at the time would label it “feminist” or not. It brings women in to the story. Boys aren’t the only ones who want fun sexy times. Girls want it too.

Baker had another hit with “Jim Dandy”, another sexually expressive song from a female point of view.

The lyrics are funny. There’s no euphemism. Jim Dandy’s got it going ON and Baker is IN.TO. IT.

She toured Europe, she toured Australia with Bill Haley and Big Joe Turner. She was instrumental in spreading rock ‘n roll to the world. This can’t be measured. She appeared in rock ‘n roll movies (a new exploitation style of cinema), and this made her recognizable to the world.

Now comes the twist in the story and her name is Georgia Gibbs, of “If I Knew Your Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake” …. fame? Gibbs loved “Tweedle Dee”, as everyone did, but she put out a cover identical to Baker’s (she even hired the same back-up band and used the same arrangement, literally note for note.). The success of Gibbs’ version wiped out the original, in terms of sales and visibility, even with Baker’s Ed Sullivan Show performance. Baker was pissed. She didn’t mind people covering her songs as long as they put their own spin on it. The era of the singer-songwriter hadn’t happened yet. This was an era when everyone sang everyone else’s songs. There are like 10 versions of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” before Elvis came along. The IMPACT might be different, and there’s unfairness in that, yes, but it’s just a general unfairness. COPYING is different from COVERING. And Georgia Gibbs was a COPIER.

Unlike everyone else who was irritated at being copied (and watching the copiers get more success), Baker was loud about it. Ahmet Ertegun tells just one story:

“We were at the airport, on our way to a record convention. LaVern stopped at one of those machines you get flight insurance from. She was a comedienne, you know, and she had that look in her eyes. She said, ‘In case something happens, do I make my beneficiary Georgia Gibbs?'”

Baker didn’t stop there. She wrote an open letter to Georgia Gibbs:

Dear Georgia, inasmuch as I’ll be flying over quite a stretch of blue water on my forthcoming Australian tour, l am naturally concerned about making the round trip safely and soundly. My thoughts naturally turn to you at this time, and I am enclosing an insurance policy on my life in the amount of $125,000. This should be at least partial compensation for you if I should be killed or injured, and thereby deprive you of the opportunity to copy my songs and arrangements in the future.

She went to bat – taking great risks, and paying the price – for other artists. She was queen of the Open Letter. She wrote another famous open letter to Charles Diggs Jr., the first Black man elected to Congress from Baker’s home state, Michigan, and a champion of civil rights. Baker asked him to strengthen or at least fortify U.S. copyright law to make such copying practices open to litigation.

In her open letter to Diggs, she wrote:

After an investigation of the facts, you might see some wisdom in introducing a law to make it illegal to duplicate another’s work. It’s not that I mind someone singing a song that I wrote or have written for me by someone, but I bitterly resent their arrogance in thefting my music note-for-note.

This made headlines. It brought the issue – with all its racist implications – into the mainstream. No laws were passed against “copying” but it became such an implicit no-no that Georgia Gibbs backed off trying to enter the r&b trend and stayed in her “baked a cake” lane (and, consequently, descended into obscurity). Baker’s loudness about this issue made “copying” so unpopular that radio stations started refusing to play white note-for-note cover versions. Someone as famous and influential as Alan Freed stopped playing copycat versions on his broadcast.

Another important nuance: the white record producers/radio stations were behind the times. They assumed white kids would not buy records made by Black people. Their ideas were outdated. White kids were buying Little Richard and Fats Domino and LaVern Baker records. They heard this music on the radio. They didn’t need to actively seek it out anymore. It was right there on the air. There was no need for duplication by the Georgia Gibbs’ of the world. Baker helped bring awareness of this out into the open.

This is such a huge and important legacy.

I love her 1961 hit “Saved”, which Elvis ended up doing 8 years later on his 1968 comeback special. It’s a gospel rager.

What I love about “Saved” is how openly it admits sin. Smoking, drinking, doing the ‘hoochy-cooch” … there’s humanity in this, having faith is not about being perfect. (Also, it makes sinning sound way too fun to give up. Kind of like how Satan is the most appealing character in Paradise Lost.)

You couldn’t get more mainstream in the late 50s than collaborating with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a couple of Jewish boys who were also architects of rock ‘n roll. Baker sang their “Whippersnapper”:

She had hits with all kinds of music, including ballads. In 1965, she did a FUNKY duet with the great Jackie Wilson called “Think Twice”.

They recorded an X-rated version too! Not for public consumption but we have it and it is raucous fun.

Listen to her DOMINATE.

Baker didn’t really have hits after that but she continued working, often mentoring younger singers coming up, promoting them, helping them. She toured Vietnam with the USO and landed in the Philippines where she worked at a military base night club, not just performing, but booking the acts, basically running the place. She gave opportunities to young artists. She picked out talent and nurtured them.

“LaVern Baker looked out for us.” — Renée Minus White of the Chantels

She stayed in the Philippines. The work put her in contact with artists of all generations and she relished the opportunity to help younger people. She fought for the rights of artists, and lived long enough to see the results. She returned to the United States 22 years later. She appeared on Broadway as Bessie Smith. She died in 1997.

Aretha Franklin was the first female solo artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. LaVern Baker was the second.

References:
500 songs podcast
The History of Rock ‘n Roll Song by Song
Hall of Fame article

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Excessive consciousness is a disease.” Happy Birthday, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Posted on November 11, 2026 by sheila

“Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You may say I’m not worth bothering with; in that case, I can say exactly the same to you. We are talking seriously. And if you do not deign to give me your attention, I will not bow before you. I have my underground.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, 1864

I wrote a thing on Notes From Underground here. Notes from Underground is so ahead of its time as to be damn near SPOOKY. That’s a 20th century book published in 1864.

He’s one of my favorite authors and I return to his stuff again and again. In fact, I just re-read Crime and Punishment last year. It’s my 4th or 5th time. I don’t really count the first time, which was in high school, although SOMEthing got under my skin back then. The book gets deeper and deeper each time I return to it. Also FUNNIER. It often makes me laugh out loud. Razmuhin! I love that character so much.

His humor is one of the things that startles me about Dostoevsky consistently. He’s funniest when his characters are at their most deadly serious. There is nothing funny about the situation in The Double at ALL and yet … it IS hiLARious. The lead character in White Nights is in DEADLY EARNEST but he’s so so funny! You want to tell him to please just put a cool cloth on his head and RELAX. Laughing “at” Dostoevsky’s characters is dangerous though – for me, anyway – because it’s like laughing at myself, laughing at vulnerability, laughing at people who are sensitive, who take things too hard. I finished Crime and Punishment this last time on the flight back from Utah, and I was in tears. I’ve read the damn thing like 5 times. And I’m still in tears. I take it personally. I think it’s impossible not to. He was just that kind of writer.

QUOTES

E.M. Forster’s lecture on the “prophetic novelist”, under which category he put Dostoevsky:

“Prophecy — in our sense — is a tone of voice. It may imply any of the faiths that have haunted humanity — Christianity, Buddhism, dualism, Satanism, or the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them: but what particular view of the universe is recommended — with that we are not directly concerned. It is the implication that signifies and will filter into the turns of the novelist’s phrase, and in this lecture, which promises to be so vague and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere to the minutiae of style.”

E.M. Forster:

In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them … Every sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary sense — that is to say his characters have relation to ordinary life and also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our ordinary standards are inapplicable.

Dostoevsky’s characters ask us to share something deeper than their experience. They convey to us a sensation that is partly physical — the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up, but “the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea”.

Clifford Odets, journal entry, March 29, 1940

The man of genius walks, talks, sleeps, eats, loves, and works with a load of dynamite in him. If he carries this load carefully — balance — its power for good work and use is enormous — it can landscape a whole mountainside. Abuse — out of balance — is suicide and a bitter grave.

It is in this sense that the artist, if he makes a proper amalgam, is beyond good and evil, for everything in him is for creation and life.

For example, let us say that Dostoevsky had impulses of rape in his heart. See how a great artist held this part of himself within his recognition and acceptance of what he was. Its creative uses were enormous. It gave him work, tone, feeling, anguish, a wealth of feeling. Finally, it was just such “weaknesses” which gave Dostoevsky’s novels their religious ecstatic fervor.

In other words … inner contradictions are not solved by throwing out half of the personality, but by keeping both sides tearing and pulling, often torturing the self, until an AMALGAM ON A HIGH LEVEL OF LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IS ACHIEVED! For the artist there is not “bad”. He must throw out nothing, exclude nothing, but always hold in balance. When he has made this balance he has made and found his form.

H.L. Mencken:

The more the facts are studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art, at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot. From Dante to Tolstoy and from Shakespeare to Mark Twain the story is ever the same. Names suggest themselves instantly: Goethe, Heine, Shelley, Byron, Thackeray, Balzac, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoevsky, Carlyle, Moliere, Pope – all bitter critics of their time and nation, most of them piously hated by the contemporary 100 per centers, some of them actually fugitives from rage and reprisal.

Dostoevsky
by Charles Bukowski

against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn’t have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.

James Baldwin:

I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing that way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoevsky, from Balzac. I’m sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn’t experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it.

William Styron:

Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word – life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life” – you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then. Dostoevsky had them and Marlowe had them and we all have them, and they’re a hell of a lot more invariable than nuclear fission or the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. So is Love invariable, and Unrequited Love, and Death and Insult and Hilarity. Mark Twain was as baffled and appalled by Darwin’s theories as anyone else, and those theories seemed as monstrous to the Victorians as atomic energy, but he still wrote about riverboats and old Hannibal, Missouri.

Alexander Woollcott to Mrs. Otis Skinner, Aug. 2 1935:

[I have been] weeping steadily because once again I had come to the great healing chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon of the following day.

Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint:

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off!

John Gardner:

The theory of the superman is kind of interesting, abstractly. The question is, Is it right? Will it work? Can human beings live with it? So Dostoevsky sets up the experiment imaginatively. Obviously he doesn’t want to go out and actually kill somebody to see if it works, so he imagines a perfectly convincing St. Petersburg and a perfectly convincing person who would do this. (What student in all of St. Petersburg would commit a murder? What relatives would he have? What friends? What would his pattern be? What would he eat?) Dostoevsky follows the experiment out and finds out what does happen.

I think all great art does this, and you don’t have to do it realistically. Obviously Raskolnikov could have bee a giant saurian as long as his character is consistent and convincing, tuned to what we know about actual feeling.

Gabriel Fallon, Sean O’Casey: The Man I Knew:

Then Yeats ventured an opinion. He said that the play, particularly in the final scene, reminded him of a Dostoevsky novel. Lady Gregory turned to him and said, “You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoevsky.” And she promised to amend this deficiency by sending him a copy of The Idiot.

Ralph Ellison:

Never mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism. Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial – all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Michael Schmidt:

Fyodor Dostoevsky is nearer to Poe in his fiction than any American successors.

James Baldwin:

I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom that the major ones don’t. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven’t got the same weight or intensity.

From “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”:
By Hugh MacDiarmid
(Gin Glesca folk are tired o’ Hengler,
And still need breid and circuses, there’s Spengler,
Or gin ye s’ud need mair than ane to teach ye,
Then learn frae Dostoevski and frae Nietzsche.

Rebecca West, letter to Sylvia Lund, 1917, written during air raids:

Talking of these nasty foreigners I cannot agree with you about Tolstoy. I wish I could. Twice have I read War and Peace and found nothing but stuffed Tolstoys, and such lots and lots of them. And plainly Anna Karenina was written simply to convince Tolstoy that there was nothing in this expensive and troublesome business of adultery and oh Gawd, oh Gawd, Kitty! And about Resurrection I cannot speak, but only yawn. And those short stories seem to me as fatuous as the fables of La Fontaine. But Dostoevsky –! The serenity of The Brothers Karamazov, the mental power of The Possessed, the art of The Raw Youth! Isn’t it awful to think that nothing can ever decide this dispute?

John Gardner:

Look, it’s impossible for us to read Dostoevsky as a writer of thrillers anymore because of this whole weight of explanation and analysis we’ve loaded on the books. And yet The Brothers Karamazov is obviously, among other things, a thriller novel. It also contains, to my mind, some pretentious philosophizing.

William Styron:

My God, think of how morbid and depressing Dostoevsky would have been if he could have gotten hold of some of the juicy work of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, say Sadism and Masochism. What people like John Webster and, say, Hieronymus Bosch, felt intuitively about some of the keen horrors that lurk in the human mind, we now have neatly cataloged and clinically described by Krafft-Ebing and the Menningers and Karen Horny, and they’re available to any fifteen year old with a pass-card to the New York Public Library.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Each time I see it, I know I accomplished what I set out to do as an actress, that I created a person.” — Bibi Andersson on Persona

Posted on November 11, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

It was my great honor to write and narrate a video-essay for The Criterion Collection about Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann’s collaboration – both separately and together – with Ingmar Bergman: Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, Sisters in the Art

From David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film : Expanded and Updated , the entry on Bibi Andersson:

“She needed such a holiday to prepare for one of the most harrowing female roles the screen has presented: Nurse Alma in Persona (66, Bergman). That this masterpiece owed so much to Bibi Andersson was acknowledgement of her greater emotional experience. She was thirty now, and in that astonishing scene where Liv Ullmann and she look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and Ullmann arranges Andersson’s hair, it is as if Bergman were saying, ‘Look what time has done. Look what a creature this is.’ Alma talks throughout Persona but is never answered, so that her own insecurity and instability grow. Technically the part calls for domination of timing, speech, and movement that exposes the chasms in the soul. And it was in showing that breakdown, in reliving Alma’s experience of the orgy on the beach years before, in deliberately leaving glass on the gravel, and in realizing with awe and panic that she is only another character for the supposedly sick actress, that Andersson herself seemed one of the most tormented women in cinema.”

Indeed. I saw the movie in college when I was studying acting and felt a kind of swoon of despair/anxiety/desire: it’s like you’re shown “the bar” which others have set in the field you’ve chosen for yourself. And you may never be that good, but at least you recognize what there is to strive for. That’s what Bibi in Persona did for me. Her drunken monologue which remains, for me, one of the greatest single pieces of acting I’ve ever seen.

But there is so much more to her career than just Persona. She did 10 movies in total with Ingmar Bergman, and had a rich career elsewhere (although it is through those films with Bergman that she will be remembered: Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona being the most famous, but there’s also The Passion of Anna, The Magician, The Devil’s Eye, Brink of Life … God, this collaboration. (Here’s a piece I wrote about Bergman’s work.)

She was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived. I was so in awe of her as a teenager after Persona that I stayed far far away from that film for some time. I needed courage in my own pursuit of acting, I needed to find my own way and her example was too daunting, too intimidating. (I had a similar thing with Gena Rowlands. The fact that, so many years, later, I would pay tribute to both Rowlands and Andersson for the Criterion Collection, having completely found another path for myself, hacking a writing career out of NOTHING all by myself … is a beautiful and strange dovetail, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.)

Bibi Andersson was flat out on another level, and I recognized it instantly. It is a level very few actors reach … but at least you know it’s there, at least you know the bar has been set.

 
 
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From the archives (March 17, 2005): Saturday Night Fever in Ithaca

Posted on November 11, 2026 by sheila

March 17, 2005: Saturday Night Fever in Ithaca

Michael, an old boyfriend of mine, was born in the wrong generation because he is a kick-ASS disco dancer. He took it seriously, too. He was passionate about it. He was a geek about it. Michael was Italian, passionate and definite and opinionated, very masculine intellectual type. So smart. And a talented disco dancer.

I met him when we were doing a show in Ithaca- a great show, and we had a great success with it. We started dating within 5 days of arriving in Ithaca. We were far away from our “real” lives, doing an intense show, there were only 3 other people in the play, so all we did was hang out with each other. Romance blossomed.

There are MANY amusing stories about our time in Ithaca, one of them being appearing on a small local-cable talk show. We were local celebrities. I still have that tape, I’ve only watched it a couple of times, but every time I do, TEARS of laughter stream down my face. I mean, look at us.

I had breakfast with Michael last summer, when he came to New York, we guffawed about our television appearance, our 90s grunge romance captured on VHS for all time. I’m Gen X. I have very little “footage” of me from when I was in my 20s. I have photos, but not thousands of them. I have maybe two or three videos.

The following entry in my journal at the time is about how he and I made up after some stupid argument by going out to an underage disco club and danced together for a sweaty exhilarating three hours. And what song started the orgy of dancing? “Tragedy“, by the Bee Gees. Of course.

Michael wasn’t just into disco. He was a SNOB. In honor of Michael, who’s a regular reader here and loves it when I post about him, I give to you:

Our night of Disco in Ithaca, from my journal then.

September/October

He is reading Brando’s biography, I am reading Howards End. I cook for him. I had an out-of-body experience staring into one of his eyeballs. I don’t know how else to describe what happened. It was 2 a.m., we had been making out for hours, time was meaningless, and I fell into his eyeball and that is all that I have to say about THAT.

Leaves turning. Orange – gold – red – flame – purple – lit from within. Freezing nights. Warm blue-skied days.

I know how much I will miss this experience when it’s gone. I will miss this situation, knowing these people in this way. It won’t come again.

Ithaca: The Commons. Simeons. Rosebud Cafe. State St. diner. Sirens. So many disaster vehicles. There appears to be some inbreeding. Strange. Churches. Michael and I have fights on the sidewalk, then we go get Ben and Jerry’s. We went into a church today. Presbyterian. Golden light streaming through circular window. Arched ceiling. Deep blue cushions on pews. Huge organ pipes. I feel like we have been in Ithaca for months. We go to the park, and sit in the grass. I put my head in his lap and he reads out loud to me from the Village Voice. Then we go and get ice cream. I am telling you, we get Ben and Jerry’s every day.

Michael’s parents came to the show. We have been spending every minute of every day together, so for two nights he hung out with his parents, and he missed me. He was obsessed with what I did during those two days. I went to go see Reservoir Dogs with Pat, and Michael was absurdly jealous. “What did you guys talk about? Why won’t you tell me? What did you do after the movie?” Ridiculous.

I take care of him. I’m good at it, surprisingly enough.

In a lot of ways, he and I do not speak the same language, but at the same time we’re both really good listeners. So, weirdly, it all works out.

One night, we had a fight. He got very mean. He apologized, but by then I was so hurt I could barely process the fact that he was apologizing for being mean, and then THAT pissed him off. We were in a loop. We didn’t make up.

But the next night was when we went to the “70s Dance Party” at Club Semesters. Just the two of us, and we had a fucking BALL.

That was when I realized our compatibility. We didn’t even have a make-up conversation like: “Oh, I’m sorry I was mean…” or “I’m sorry I was a bitch.” No. What did we do? We went out dancing for 3 hours straight. And then we were FINE. If only all misunderstandings could be solved in such a fun way.

Club Semesters was a totally bizarre place. Unclassifiable, really. It was like an underage dance club. Everyone seemed about 14 years old. Maybe it was like a high school mixer. They actually had a big long table with bowls of party snacks. Yet they carded us heavily at the door. So there were probably a lot of fake IDs in the domain of Club Semesters.

The lights were garish and elaborate, sweeping colored spotlights, flashing strobes, mirrored spinning reflecting balls – and smoke puffed out onto the dance floor. Totally disco, totally weird, and totally ridiculous.

It was enormous, too – like a massive Rec Room.

Michael and I had a ball, once we were danced out (and drenched), sitting over to the side and people-watching (doing a lot of people-trashing, I must admit.)

“God, let’s try to find at least one person in this crowd who has managed to maintain their dignity,” said Michael.

Michael has the potential to be the most scornful and contemptuous person alive. We are misanthropes. Romantic misanthropes. Two peas in a pod.

Oh, I forgot to tell this part:

We were a little scared to go into Club Semesters, initially. We hadn’t been before. Michael kept predicting that they wouldn’t play real disco music, and they would just play 80s dance stuff, or confuse disco with funk (sacrilegious to him). Michael loves the Bee Gees, even pre-disco Bee Gees, and he is a purist about the whole disco thing. So Michael suggested that we stand (this is so FUNNY) outside in the alley, where we could hear what kind of music they were playing inside, and make an executive decision on whether or not we wanted to go in, based on the songs.

The first song we heard was “It’s Raining Men” – which is 80s and definitely not pure disco. Despite this technicality, I shot through the roof (well, not really – we were outside) with excitement. I am, to put it mildly, NOT a disco music snob.

Michael scorned my excitement with contempt. He SNEERED at me. His estimation of me went down and I blatantly did not care. I found his contempt hilarious. And Michael got such a kick out of it – because I know every word to the song- and every nuance to the song – all their little “Go girlfriend” comments underneath the music. I basically danced AT him in the alley.

“Humidity’s rising…”
—Mm. Risin’.
“Barometer’s getting’ low”
—How low?
“According to all sources…”
—What sources now?

Insane. I was hip on going in, and Michael was NOT. I kept saying, “If they are playing the fucking Weather Girls, it’s gotta be a cool club!”

Michael harbored the exact opposite view.

The next song met with Michael’s approval (snot!), so we went in.

Long black entrance corridor, with black turned white, so the whites of our eyes glowed, and Michael’s tight white T glowed, and everything looked spooky.

We went in, scoped it out. We drank Cokes like it was a sockhop in 1954. I held back. We were picked out by a gleaming blue spotlight, this long column of light. Big muscle men bouncer types strutted around, girls wearing tight clothes, all kinds of sad adolescent behavior, and NO ONE was dancing. NO ONE. And yet also – there was this major Broadway-level light show going on. On the empty dance floor.

Then we knew we had to dance.

And what was our call to dance? The Bee Gees’ “Tragedy”.

This time it was Michael who shot through the roof.

He was a maniac with excitement. “I can’t believe they’re playing this! No one ever plays this!”

He dragged me out onto the dance floor. And he and I basically – well, we re-enacted Saturday Night Fever. NOBODY else was dancing. It was hilarious. Michael actually knows how to dance -and he doesn’t dance disco with irony, he doesn’t dance to make fun of the style of dance – he GOES for it. He does not make himself ABOVE that particular cultural moment – he LOVES that cultural moment. I’m not such a bad dancer myself. And I’m good at letting men lead. We took up a lot of room (after all we could, because no one else was out there). Now this is embarrassing to report, but it is the truth: a clapping cheering circle formed around us. I am laughing out loud. The night before we were yelling at each other on the sidewalk.

Michael was in his glory. He was in his fantasy. He has studied John Travolta. He told me that when he was 9 or 10, he memorized the main dance number in Saturday Night Fever and he used to do it to entertain his parents. And then they’d have guests over, and they’d want him to do it for the guests, and it was too traumatic, and he would start to cry. Hysterical.

Dancing together erased the memory of the fight the night before. It was a huge release for both of us. We danced until we were drenched in sweat. I would start to twirl away from him, and he would grab my belt buckle and yank me back, without missing a step. And let me reiterate: we were surrounded by a clapping crowd of formerly glum and shy teenagers. We howled with laughter about that later.

It was the best thing we could have done, and it was so great – it was just us, too – the rest of the cast had no interest. We dig each other. We make each other laugh. He would imitate how I danced. I would laugh.

Also, we looked like nobody else there. The 2 of us were in true Seattle grunge mode in our battered jeans, flappy flannel shirts, and Doc Martens. And identical Buddy Holly glasses. Michael kept saying, “We look like grunge drug addicts compared to everybody else.”

For the second act of the show, Michael would put this brown stuff below his eyes so he looked like shit, like a man losing his grip, getting no sleep. It looked good. Sometimes he wouldn’t wash it off after the show: “I think it makes me look sexy, don’t you?” I would say, patiently, “Yes, Michael. It looks very sexy.” Yawning as I said it.

But the two of us looked like characters out of Drugstore Cowboy.

Everything is so vivid now. Everything is sensory. It’s all about the taste of coffee, the golden light inside the church. I am filled with awareness of the colored leaves and the cold and the stars and the crickets. Michael is a sensory experience, too. I fell into his eyeball, after all. French toast, ice cream, books, cafes, coffee drinks, sitting in the sun, people watching, lying in the grass, fallen leaves, Michael’s voice reading out loud, and he would keep checking to make sure my eyes were closed and that I wasn’t peeking. All of these simple things now ARE my life.

Friendly grungy black-shadows-under-eyes drug addicts, disco dancing in a club in Ithaca, New York.

2026 thoughts

I learned along the way of life to cement the good times, the times of magic, in my journal. Because you forget. In the larger narrative of disappointments and hard times … it’s way too easy to allow the hard stuff to blot out the good.

Our time together in Ithaca was great – and unique – to both of us. It did not last long. It felt very “normal” and I never had normal relationships. We were WAY too young, though. We had way too much wildness to get out. I “took a break” from M. to be with Michael – which … tells you my mindset at the time. Like … But Michael was the same. We were out of town for six weeks. That six weeks was enough to cement a friendship for life, something I never could have foreseen at the time. I couldn’t foresee social media, where we could at LEAST keep tabs on each other, not in a creepy way, but because we are, still, invested in each others’ lives and art and are happy when the other person is doing well. I put him in the acknowledgements section of my Frankenstein book and he was one of the first people I told when I got the gig. I am not sure how we managed this.

We did not have a “bitter” breakup. We just kind of re-entered our old lives. We ran into each other at auditions and always flew at each other happily, talking a mile a minute. I called M., and was like, “yoooo” and “got back” with him together immediately. I was such a floozy, lol. But I did my best not to hurt anyone.

On my last night in Chicago – a year later – I threw a goodbye party for myself in my backyard. Everyone came. Everyone but Michael. He was, to put it mildly, NOT reliable with meeting-times or even meetings, in general. And back in the day, with no cell phones, people were just your basic no-shows. He had said, “I’ll stop by”, and I thought, “Yeah, sure you will.” Because it was the 90s, saying goodbye properly was SO important because moving to a new city really MEANT goodbye. So I was like, “Goddammit, Michael.” But I was taken up with being with M., and doing all these last things with him, having no idea that … we would continue on. For seven more years. My relationships have sure been interesting, at the very least.

The party wrapped up at around midnight. I sat on my front stoop in the cool night, with Mitchell and my friend Ann Marie. We were drinking grape soda. Why do I remember such things? I don’t think I’ve had grape soda since, and grape soda was never my thing … so maybe that’s why I remember it. We weren’t drunk. We were being quiet, coming down from the party, just enjoying the quiet and the night. I was buzzing from all the goodbyes. There were tears.

Then I saw a dark figure coming down the sidewalk towards us. About half a block away, I knew it was Michael. He showed. Five hours late. But it was perfect. Our goodbye had to be one on one. Ann Marie and Mitchell said hi to him, and then floated away into the house. Michael and I sat on the stoop, and we leaned against each other, tilted heads touching. I don’t remember what we said but I don’t think we said much. I am sure it’s in my journal. I felt so calm and safe and happy. He showed! It was hard to say goodbye. (Amazingly, a couple years later a movie came out, which he had directed, written, AND starred in. He was writing it when we were together! I hadn’t seen him since I left Chicago. I remember looking at the review in the Chicago Sun-Times – Roger Ebert reviewed it positively – and I was GLOWING. MICHAEL. YOU DID IT. I didn’t have his phone number. I had no idea where he was. But HE DID IT.)

A year later, Michael proposed marriage … on my answering machine. I hadn’t seen him OR TALKED TO HIM in about four years. I said yes. He then took the proposal back.

I just don’t understand why my life is sometimes like this. It seems surprising to others. I am not surprised.

The memories are all good and I have no regrets. But I don’t want to forget because my life in the mid-2000s was so hard. Hell, the early 2000s were hard. I sat on a bus in Hoboken and watched the second plane hit from across the Hudson. Nothing was the same again.

So I still think: re-claiming old good times is important.

One thing I learned during my year of (forced) treatment for bipolar, and the CBT therapist I was assigned, was that the brain is resilient. Going undiagnosed as long as I did, the illness accelerated, and I had 3 or 4 hours of sleep for about 8 years (so scary) … and the damage done to my brain could be seen on a cat scan. I have done damage. But I learned the brain can heal itself. I didn’t know I could fix the brain. I lived so long being defensive when people gave me pep talks, like “This is my brain. This is ME. STOP trying to fix my brain.” I learned coping skills from the therapist, which I have shared here before, ways to heal the neural pathways – the pathways felt as deep as the Grand Canyon. I was so scared by the 2012 crackup, though, and intimidated by my family’s heavy involvement in getting me better. I worked very very hard, and did everything they told me to do. Even the brain stuff, which I was very resistant to. I made the flash cards they told me to make, I worked on getting 8 hours of sleep, which took me 6 or 7 months, building back up, I read the books they told me to read. I’ve resisted self-help since my teens when I was failed by everyone. Fuck self-help. There I was, though, taking little quizzes, and adding up the results, and following their instructions and … it fucking WORKED. (I highly recommend Re-Inventing Your Life. It (helped) save my life.)

One thing I never forgot from this time: the therapist said to me that you actually CAN build up resilience in your brain by “imprinting” good times in your brain. If bad times or trauma leaves a mark, then SO DO GOOD TIMES. And, whaddya know, I’d been writing a DETAILED diary since I was 12 years old. I avoided flipping through them, because it made me too sad. Look how happy I once was … I looked through them again, although I was scared to do so. I did find a lot of happy stuff I winced at, knowing what was coming, the heartbreak, the bad times … but some stuff, the random stuff, the funny times in Chicago, the jokes, the hilarious parties, my awesome creative friends, the adventures … some of which were so funny everything came flooding back, and I was crying with laughter as though it happened the day before.

I got to remember again! I got to FEEL the good again. My brain was actually healing.

You see, I forgot about going with Michael to the disco night at high-school-mixer Club Semesters. I had forgotten totally about me dancing aggressively at him in the alley as he laughed hysterically. I forgot about him pulling me in by my belt buckle, dancing seriously, looking at me with these intent eyes as he twirled me back out again. I forgot about how freeing it was to let him lead. How together we felt. The two of us somehow managing to be light on our feet in our Doc Martens. As teenagers clapped and cheered.

From the archives archive

Silhouette, Parts 1 and 2 (2005)
Patrick Stewart as Macbeth (2008)
The pros and cons of “smotheration” (2004)
Under the Ghostbuster sky (2006)
The first post on my blog (2002)
Wisconsin Idyll in Funny Hats with Rocket Launchers (2011)
I Was Told I Would Get Wings (2004)
My Situational Crush (2006)
Chicago: The Cold Extreme (2004)
A Sea-Level Kind of Girl (2006)
There Was Already Something a Little Off… (2003)
“Go Ask Sheila.” (2010)
How We Talked (2011)

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“Here in the movies I can be as mean, as wicked as I want to – and all without hurting anybody.” — Claude Rains

Posted on November 10, 2026 by sheila

For Claude Rains’ birthday: a conversation some years back, where Mitchell and I discuss the superb actor. I asked Mitchell to describe him in one word, and we took it from there. We both love Rains so much, it was fun to discuss him.

CLAUDE RAINS

SOM: One word.

MF: Professional.

In a lot of ways, Cary Grant was the greatest male movie star ever. But I think that Claude Rains was actor first, movie star second. You need it done? You get Claude Rains. He’s the pro. There’s a scene in Mr. Skeffington where he has dinner with his daughter and it is so heartbreaking and so contemporary and so real. His performance is so full of compassion. He’s got those warm watery eyes. But then you can see him play somebody almost evil like in Notorious.

MF: He can be funny and quirky like in Casablanca. And then somebody so good and honest like in Now, Voyager. Or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Then he played Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, with Vivien Leigh as Cleopatra, and he’s marvelous and funny and warm.

MF: Nobody looks like Claude Rains. It would be very difficult to know who he really was. Cary Grant wanted us, on some level, to know who he was. He was sort of telling us what to think about him in a lot of ways, and then he used that as the jumping-off point of his acting career. But with Claude Rains, I don’t know who the hell Claude Rains is. I couldn’t even begin to tell you. To a lot of people he’s The Invisible Man. To a lot of people he’s the guy from Casablanca. To me his ultimate performance is in Mr. Skeffington because he is so full of kindness in that movie.

MF: On Turner Classic Movies they do these little mini bios between movies and I think Richard Chamberlain did one about Claude Rains and working with Rains towards the end of Rains’ life. Rains was older and having trouble remembering his lines. This is why I say he was a professional. He had a big speech in the movie, he kept blowing his lines, he was getting frustrated, he kept saying, “There’s too many words.” You know, blaming it on the script in some way. And before he became too much of a douchebag about it, he said in a self-deprecating way, sort of called it on himself: “Clearly I can’t remember my lines.” He was totally professional to call that out on himself, and then of course went on to give a fabulous performance.

MF: I think Claude Rains … I don’t want to limit it to film acting, I think he’s one of the greatest actors who has ever lived. Even though he was always Claude Rains, clearly recognizable, his funny little face, his weird stance … he’s the greatest there ever was. There’s Deception with Bette Davis where he plays this evil son of a bitch music teacher and she ends up shooting him. And you totally buy him in that, and then you totally love him as the father in all those movies where he has a brood of girls. You just believed him, no matter what he said.

SOM: He doesn’t change his appearance radically which is the trend now with actors, they feel like they’re not doing enough: “If I look like myself, I’m not acting”. Claude Rains always had his silver hair, but it’s like his soul changed. He could change his soul.

MF: I think he came from the school where I’m not sure they knew how to do it any other way. You walked out onstage and you became the character. I’m not familiar with his history. Was he a stage actor?

SOM: He had a ton of stage experience. He came from good old Show Trash. His parents were actors.

MF: See, that’s it. And isn’t that interesting, my first word was professional. The man was a pro. He also finished off with some classic films, unlike Joan Crawford. That’s a cautionary tale.


Claude Rains in “Lawrence of Arabia”

SOM: Well, he’s a male.

MF: The boys fared better. Joan and Bette … they gave Meryl Streep the gift of being able to have the long career that she has. The battles that Joan and Bette fought, all of them, Susan Hayward, Meryl Streep is the beneficiary of that.

SOM: When people dismiss Meryl Streep as “Well, she’s a leading lady, she’s a movie star, whatever”, my point always is: “Whether or not you like her acting is irrelevant. What other leading lady in her mid 60s do you know of?” This is a pioneer career. Can we give her props for that? I am so sick of ignorant commentary like that where people have no idea of the context of what is happening right before our eyes.

MF: There are two women of that age who can open movies, and it’s Barbra Streisand and Meryl Streep.

SOM: Joan Crawford was not doing the parts she should have been doing when she was an old lady.

MF: Yes, she did not get the opportunity. So the fact that those ladies lasted, in spite of everything that was against them, is extraordinary. But boy, Claude Rains finished out pretty great. His two last films were Lawrence of Arabia and The Greatest Story Ever Told. That’s pretty high up there. He wasn’t doing Trog, let’s put it that way. He was a consummate pro.

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Nov 12-15: AFI Silver Classic Film Weekend

Posted on November 9, 2026 by sheila

Really pleased to announce I’ll be presenting three films at the Silver Classic Film Weekend, happening this week and weekend, an annual festival hosted by the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland. It will be a jam-packed four days, with some old favorites – like Three on a Match, Rain, What Price Glory? – being programmed, but also some harder-to-see films. The full schedule can be viewed here.

The lineup includes rarities and restorations, silent animated films (with live accompaniment), and a series of pre-Codes. The festival will include talks and QAs, plus an introduction for each film. Archivist and historian David Pierce has been the fearless organizer.

The closing night film, which it will be my honor to present, is Letty Lynton, the Joan Crawford film so bogged down in legal confusion that it has been basically un-seeable for 90 years. Earlier this fall, the Paris Theatre ran Letty Lynton in an afternoon matinee, which I attended, and it sold out. Over 500 seats, an all-ages crowd. Many of the younger crowd – early 20somethings – showed up in vintage clothing, and they all looked amazing. There was such a sense of excitement, like you wouldn’t believe. We have all heard ABOUT this movie but no one’s been able to see it.

Joan Crawford: still selling out theatres 90 years later!

Letty Lynton is terrific, based on a true story, and has all the earmarks of a classic Pre-Code, including … the lack of punishment when someone does a “bad thing”. Sometimes people get away with things. You can have murder AND a happy ending. Once the “code” was enforced, circa 1933-34, such ambiguities were no longer allowed. In Letty Lynton, Joan is right at the tipping point of her real fame, and it’s great to see. Joan’s costumes – by the incomparable Adrian – are worth the price of admission, including of course the famous “Letty Lynton dress”, all ruffles and chiffon.

Along with Letty Lynton, I’ll be presenting two films on the first day, 1932’s Wild Girl, starring Joan Bennett as a tomboy girl living in the redwood forest, and the plot involves vigilante justice, brothel girls being hustled out of town in a stagecoach, and every man in sight is an absolute sleazebag. Ralph Bellamy and Eugene Pallette are also in it!

I’ll also be presenting 1930’s Man Trouble, a film long impossible to see, incomplete and in degraded condition. The film has now been restored by the UCLA Film Archive.

The other presenters are Farran Smith Nehme (a friend, incredible writer and historian, plus a novelist), film preservationist (and television writer-producer) David Stenn, and author/historian Scott Eyman. Eyman has written a number of excellent biographies. His celebrated biography of John Wayne is one of the best “entertainment” biographies I’ve ever read (and long overdue), and he also wrote a biography of Cary Grant. This year, he published the first biography of Joan Crawford (another excellent read). I’ve admired Eyman from afar for a long time so I am looking forward to meeting him.

If you happen to live in the DC area, maybe this would be a fun event to attend! All Access passes are $200, but you can pay $15 per movie too. We’re expecting a lot of the films to sell out since so many of these screen so rarely. I love Three on a Match but have never seen it on the big screen! All films are playing in the AFI Silver and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. If you end up attending, find me to say hello.

You can explore the lineup and buy passes here.

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#OTD Open season, 1938

Posted on November 9, 2026 by sheila

From William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany:

On the night of November 9-10, shortly after the party bosses, led by Hitler and Goering, had concluded the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, the worst pogrom that had yet taken place in the Third Reich occurred. According to Dr. Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a “spontaneous” demonstration of the German people in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris. But after the war, documents came to light which show how “spontaneous” it was. They are among the most illuminating — and gruesome — secret papers of the prewar Nazi era.

On the evening of November 9, according to a secret report made by the chief party judge, Major Walther Buch, Dr. Goebbels issued instructions that “spontaneous demonstrations” were to be “organized and executed” during the night. But the real organizer was Reinhard Heydrich, the sinister thirty-four-year-old Number Two man, after Himmler, in the SS, who ran the Security Service (SD) and the Gestapo. His teletyped orders during the evening are among the captured German documents.

At 1:20 am on November 10 he flashed an urgent teletype message to all headquarters and stations of the state police and the SD instructing them to get together with party and SS leaders “to discuss the organization of the demonstrations.”

a. Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger to German property. (For instance synagogues are to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)

b. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted …

d. …. 2. The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be hindered by the police …

5. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons … Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible.

It was a night of horror throughout Germany. Synagoges, Jewish homes and shops went up in flames and several Jews, men, women and children, were shot or otherwise slain while trying to escape burning to death …

A number of German insurance firms faced bankruptcy if they were to make good the policies on gutted buildings (most of which, though they harbored Jewish shops, were owned by Gentiles) and damaged goods. The destruction in broken window glass alone came to five million marks ($1,250,000) as Herr Hilgard, who had been called in to speak for the insurance companies, reminded Goering; and most of the glass replacements would have to be imported from abroad in foreign exchange, of which Germany was very short.

“This cannot continue!” exclaimed Goering, who, among other things, was the czar of the German economy. “We won’t be able to last, with all this. Impossible!” And turning to Heydrich, he shouted, “I wish you had killed two hundred Jews instead of destroying so many valuables!”

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