Ellen Willis’ years as a rock critic were a blip, comparatively, to the rest of her work, deep and engaging pieces on feminism, economics, anti-Semitism, revolution, mass consumption, Marxism, and … believe it or not … pleasure. Pleasure was a big big deal to her. It was political. Because of this, her work was often against the grain of mainstream feminism, and Lord help you if you are against THEIR grain. Believe me, I’ve been there. Nobody SHUNS more effectively than a mainstream feminist. Willis’ focus on pleasure, on happiness, on JOY, is still radical to read today, maybe even more so. We live in a humorless age. And because there is no humor, there is no joy. I mean, obviously people still feel joy on occasion but joy as a GOAL, pleasure as a GOAL … this, for Willis, was looped into politics.
I first came to her because of her music writing, collected in the wonderful volume Out of the Vinyl Deeps. Her beginnings are amazing, and disheartening at the same time because the world is so different now. She wrote this massive wild personal piece about Bob Dylan for an underground magazine. It’s an OPUS. This is the definition of “letting your obsession run the show”. Be as obsessive as you want to be, and do it in an authentic way. People are always trying to tell you to calm down, get some perspective, focus on serious issues. Especially in 1967, when she wrote that piece. The piece, as I said, was in an underground magazine, but it created a wave. Out of that wave, she was given a column on rock and pop music in The New Yorker, the first of its kind. She literally had no established fingerprint as a cultural commentator. The Dylan piece was enough. There were no women writing about rock music at the time – at least not at her level. And The New Yorker! The bastion of high culture! Covering rock music? By a WOMAN?? She crushed it with that column. Her music writing also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, etc. She saw Elvis perform twice, once in Vegas, and once at Madison Square Garden, and she wrote about both experiences. I treasure these pieces because they are a rarity: writers responding to him in real time while he was still here. He STILL wasn’t being covered in a serious way. He was seen as schmaltzy, silly, out of touch – never mind that he sold out Madison Square Garden in minutes for four separate shows. Willis covered the Elvis phenomenon seriously.
Her writing inspired many people – like Greil Marcus, for example – who are way more well-known than she is. Typical. Robert Christgau cites her as influential on him. Many others do as well. If you know you know.
She expressed some frustration that her “legacy” was mostly her music writing. She did so much more, but it was mostly feminist writing for feminist journals, and therefore not as well known. Don’t get me started. Her voice in feminism was just as unique as her voice in music writing. It’s like there are all these different strains of feminism … and because we live in a world that sucks, it’s just assumed that only ONE strain can “win”. You can’t allow diversity in a demographic under siege. (Apparently.) But Willis’ feminism – and how she keeps coming back to pleasure – (and we’re not talking about just sexual pleasure, but a life of joy and fun as political goals) … is a missing piece for me in today’s rhetoric.
I realize I’m speaking in generalizations but this is not abstract territory to me. I came of age in the 90s, so … very different from 1970s feminism, but the divisions were pretty much the same. Ellen Willis wrote a piece about Monica Lewinsky that I think about probably daily. It is SO out of step with today’s discourse I am sure some people would reject if without even having read it. But I LOVED her perspective. Reading it was like coming up for air.
Read Out of the Vinyl Deeps, absolutely. But then go on and read The Essential Ellen Willis filled with everything ELSE she wrote. “Essential” indeed.
“Music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated — as good rock ’n’ roll did — challenged me to do the same, and so, even when the content was antiwoman, antisexual, in a sense antihuman, the form encouraged my struggle for liberation” — Ellen Willis
One of the honors of my career thus far was being asked to write the narration (read by Diane Lane) for the tribute reel played at Anne Coates’ Lifetime Achievement Oscar ceremony.
From Lawrence of Arabia to 50 Shades of Grey is a hell of a run. (When asked what she thought of 50 SHADES, she said, “I think it could have been a bit more raunchy.”)
Anne Coates was responsible for one of the most famous cuts in cinema history – which mainly came about because they didn’t have the right technology on site to create the intended dissolve. But when director David Lean and Coates saw the cut, they thought: “Is there any reason we CAN’T just leave as is?”
And then, AFTER that famous cut, comes an equally famous dissolve, from the sun rise to the dunes:
David Lean, who himself started as an editor, said that Anne Coates was the only editor he worked with where he saw her first pass on a sequence and didn’t want to change anything because it was how he would have done it.
In my humble opinion, her editing of the romantic sequence in Out of Sight is a masterpiece. Sexual tension made manifest. The tension is in the performances for sure, but the cutting helps it land. Because, as you notice, there’s no sex. But it is as sexy as it gets, due to how they cut, and use flash-forwards to see where the characters are going. There was a lot of discussion between Coates and Soderbergh on putting together this sequence.
Watch this clip here of The Elephant Man. Watch for what comes at around the 1:30 mark.
There are a couple of things that are so masterful here. We get glimpses of the “elephant man” but it is in that excruciatingly slow push-in to Hopkins’ face where the empathy is born. (This is also masterful because Hopkins’ one trembling tear falls just as the camera gets at its closest vantage point. Genius.) Stella Adler always used to say (and it’s a difficult thought, people resist it): “Talent is in the choice.” I think there’s a lot of truth in it. True talent is revealed in the choices an artist makes. This is an amazing choice. She said repeatedly that so much of her work came from an actor’s performance. Good actors create a rhythm – the rhythm is already present. She was known as an actor’s editor. She didn’t make unnecessary cuts. She was about the performance. And so here, with Hopkins – there was not only no need to cut back and forth between the elephant man and Hopkins’ face – such cutting would ruin what was happening in Hopkins’ performance.
Coates’ work is so legendary and so respected, Scorsese cast her as an editor in THE AVIATOR, briefly seen going through a mountain of film, wearing a teal-green/silver dress.
“Frank [Sinatra] is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in my lifetime?” — Bing Crosby (This quote may be apocryphal. But I like it.)
1. For about 8 years, I lived two buildings down from Sinatra’s birthplace in Hoboken. On the day he died – literally, within hours – the entire town was draped in purple and black bunting. It was as though an army of Oompa Loompas had been hiding in the bushes, holding baskets of purple bunting at the ready, waiting for the news. The beautiful old City Hall had deep purple bunting hanging from all sides. The post office was draped in purple bunting. Suddenly, within hours, black ribbons were tied around every lamp-post. And crowds had gathered outside the birthplace, two doors down, even though Sinatra did not live there, and had not lived there in 900 years. But people went to lay flowers in tribute. Seriously: this all happened within a couple of hours of the news breaking. The Italian population was still enormous in Hoboken at that time (this is no longer the case, at least in terms of Italians like FRANK was Italian.) When “Frank” died, there were still many people in Hoboken at that time who had probably known Frank’s family, or had been here when he was here. It felt like a strange somber honor to actually be there, two doors down, on the day he died.
2. It’s still hard to believe that this even happened, but it did:
3.
Here is a clip from the Dean Martin Show, featuring Frank, Dino and Judy. What we see here is so simply done that it might not be all that obvious how genius it is, and genius because they are genius.
The simplicity of the presentation, the sheer star power of the trio, the non-descript background which highlights them all the more because they are all that matters, and the almost rudimentary movements of the trio – rudimentary, perhaps, but thrilling because it’s THEM doing it.
They walk-walk-walk to the right, they walk-walk-walk to the left, arms linked, and then they walk downstage together and the audience erupts into applause as though it is a complicated kick-line done by 100 women.
Why do they applaud?
Because just being able to watch these people is a privilege.
There are so many little moments I love: Judy’s gestures, Dean’s little shrug, Dean’s whole body language on “you’re growing old …” The pointing back and forth at one another they all do, Frank being a tiny bit behind on some of the steps, but who gives a shit, he’s Frank.
4. This young YouTube reactor has exploded in the last year, and this was what got the ball rolling. At least it’s how he came on my radar, and I know that was true for many others. He listens to Frank Sinatra for the very first time – because his grandfather told him to – and … well, just watch what happens to him. Watch where Frank takes him. Old Blue Eyes still has it. He’ll never lose it.
5.:
My brother put Frank Sings Cole Porter on his “50 Best Albums” list. Bren’s essay here.
Let’s start off by saying that Brenda Lee set chart records which weren’t broken for 20 years. By Madonna.
She is mainly known now for “I’m Sorry” (maybe?) but mostly “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, played on repeat every Christmastime (and charting. So she continues to make the charts: Let’s see if Madonna can say that into her twilight years. Brenda started off as a kid with a huge growly voice, kinda like Christina Aguilera, who had an adult belting sound when she was like 11 years old. Brenda Lee moved on to superstardom, selling millions and millions of records. And millions. She dominated the 1960s and her career was basically forgotten by the generation directly following. Still: she was on the heels of The Beatles – the freakin’ Beatles – in terms of how many records she sold. She beat the Beach Boys. She was huge.
Brenda Lee was one of those kid stars who supported her whole family before she was even in double digits. She got her start singing on the radio, covering country classics like “Jambalaya” in a massive growly voice, that’s almost funny because she was such a pipsqueak. What was she hearing, imitating? She had her OWN radio hour, again before she was even 10 years old. The fact that she didn’t flame out like so many child stars is amazing. She had a good attitude. Red Foley heard her sing, was blown away, and got her in front of the people at Decca. She was nine. It was the mid-late-50s and as is probably obvious she was associated mainly with country music, even though her voice had that RASP, a Wanda Jackson almost “ugly” rasp. She was extremely popular but her earliest stuff has a whiff of novelty act about it. She was barely over four feet tall (she was always a tiny woman), and she made a massive sound.
But she had powerful people behind her, and she performed on live TV and toured constantly, including in Europe. Rockabilly hit the United States like a bomb, or more like strafing machine gun fire, and she tried to segue, not successfully at first. She started off the 1960s with her first big hit – “Sweet Nothins”:
Listen to that sound. Listen to her voice. She’s 15 years old. In my opinion, that big sound is predicting what Phil Spector and the Beach Boys were going to be doing with walls of sound: it’s HUGE and her voice is big enough to power on over it.
It was a huge hit, and you can hear why.
Her next huge hit was a B-side called “I’m Sorry”. Nobody was expecting “I’m Sorry” to do much. It wasn’t the hit, or not supposed to be. But it exploded. Now the funny thing about this is: the lyrics are earnest and yearning, where a young girl – who didn’t know “love could be cruel” – begs for forgiveness. Forgiveness for being young, naive, for not knowing.
But the way she plays it makes me think …. this girl is not sorry at all. In fact, the song COULD be read as entirely sarcastic, or at the very least stiflingly passive-aggressive and it’s a much better interpretation, I think.
She had hit after hit in the ’60s and was just completely forgotten in about a decades’ time, although she kept on keeping on, and she always had her fan base, and she’s in the record books forever – it took 20 years for Madonna to take her pedestal – twenty years – and of course every holiday season you can hear her voice blasting over the airwaves, a 13-year-old girl wishing you a rockin’ Christmas from 70 years ago.
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.
Willie May Thornton, a.k.a. Big Mama Thornton, was “an Alabama kid”, as she said once in an interview, who ended up really getting her start in Houston, with the semi-disreputable Don Robey who ran a nightclub called the Bronze Peacock Club, and he also ran a little record label from a back room (Peacock Records). He had a bad reputation for being violent with his talent, and Thornton was just a teenager, 14 years old, when she started singing at his club. Little Richard was singing there too! He had STORIES. She saw a lot of shit. She experienced a lot of shit. Her life was difficult. She grew up in poverty, had a kid as a teenager, and then lost the child due to being deemed “unfit”. She was just a kid herself. She was, as they say, a “big girl”, and she dressed in so-called “masculine” clothes, so she didn’t really “fit” anyone’s idea of a lead singer. But her voice was so commanding, her presence so dominating, her performance style so exhilarating she literally would not be denied. Audiences went absolutely wild for her.
Her dad was a minister, and she was surrounded by gospel music, and really not all that much blues singing (one of the many quirks of her story). When she started singing the blues, it was as though she invented it. She auditioned for the Hot Harlem Revue when they came through Montgomery, and joined them on tour. Nobody was getting paid much. She was still living in poverty, and struggling to survive. The show reached Houston, and she quit. Houston would be her home base, Houston would be where things really started happening for her. This is where she met and was hired by Don Robey, this is where she met everybody, who came through on their various tours and played the Peacock. People like Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino, and most importantly Johnny Otis. Johnny Otis was the child of Greek immigrants who chose to live as a Black man (for many complex reasons but one was his marriage to a Black woman at a time when interracial marriage was illegal). Most importantly, he “discovered” so many people who would eventually become legends, who brought rhythm and blues to the wider world.
Willie Mae auditioned for Johnny Otis, and he took her on tour. He’s the one who gave her the name “Big Mama”. She sang with his band behind her. They toured the South, the East Coast, then Otis took her out to Los Angeles. This is where Otis introduced her to the songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who had a little song in their pocket called “Hound Dog”. She recorded it, and Johnny Otis played drums in the band behind her, but the song wasn’t released for a couple of years. She was on tour in the Midwest in 1953 when she heard herself on the radio, and the DJ called it a hit “nationwide”. This was the first she heard of it. She couldn’t even remember the lyrics it was so long ago.
“Everybody went for it. Hound Dog took off like a jet.” — Big Mama Thornton
So, for some perspective which might have been lost in the mists of time: Big Mama Thornton, a Black woman, became famous for a song written by two Jewish men, and recorded by a Greek-American man living as a Black man. Additionally, at the time – late 40s, early 50s – other ethnicities/races weren’t considered exactly “white”, and Jewish people and Greek people were among them. This borderline-type thing is a huge part of the story of rock ‘n roll. Things are complicated.
Leiber and Stoller were teenagers at the time. Crazy! And Big Mama Thornton was barely out of her teens. They were the living embodiment of the demographical youth explosion, across cultures and races and classes and landscapes, which was going on overall in every population in America in the post-war years.
Thornton recorded a couple of other songs by Leiber and Stoller, who were the hottest thing going at the time, writing star-making songs. Songs like “I Smell a Rat”:
And “Nightmare”:
There was a huge copyright dispute between Leiber/Stoller and Otis, which resulted in a lot of bitterness, and all of this was – obviously – complicated immeasurably by the improbable explosion of Elvis Presley, and his version of “Hound Dog”, which helped make his name. (The copyright issue was massive, and so many people got screwed over. This was before the rise of the singer-songwriter, those who kept the copyrights, sang their own stuff, got the money they deserved. The copyright thing was one of the reasons why the so-called “Colonel” established an Elvis Presley songwriting-publishing arm of the operation, so that Elvis – even though he didn’t write the songs – would have the copyright. This worked for a while. Plenty of songwriters – who had no expectation of making much money – would have killed to have Elvis sing one of their songs, and were happy – at the time – giving up their rights. It was a short-sighted world. This whole copyright thing ended up screwing Elvis, post the rise of the singer-songwriter, because songwriters stopped giving their shit away. See: the famous example of Dolly Parton and Elvis. Songwriters refusing to give away their own copyright to Elvis meant the quality of his songs suffered. There’s a reason for everything.)
A lot of people sang “Hound Dog”, it was just that kind of song, and it was an era when everyone sang everyone else’s stuff. But it was Elvis who catapulted it to another level in 1956. He changed the lyrics, which basically erases the meaning of the song. The song is about a pimp, not a dog. Elvis’ performance of it is ferocious and when he did it on the Milton Berle Show it started the nationwide controversy around him, basically racist in nature. If you go back and listen to what people were actually saying about him at the time, it might be a bit of a revelation for those who have never heard of it. It was a race thing and he was a white man. He was declaring his affinity for Black music, and this was tantamount to crossing the “color line”. He was “bringing down the white man to the level of the N-word”, was one famous comment (outraged white-man official saying this on camera). Elvis broke all kinds of taboos, including the undeniable fact that Black kids flocked to his shows alongside white kids. This was also happening to Black performers, like Little Richard, etc., where white kids were flocking to the shows, causing all sorts of “problems” for racist white nightclubs. It’s a huge issue involving racism and history and culture and Big Mama Thornton was, ultimately, a victim of all of it.
At any rate, Elvis erased Big Mama’s version. His fame erased pretty much everything that came before him, even if it was just a couple of months before him, and it’s not his fault, but people who care about this stuff – music and history – need to look closely at what was going on and give props where they are due. There are so many people who deserve spots in the history of this era. Who deserve to be seen as pioneers, who need to be UN-erased. Baz Luhrmann’s movie covers all this, and Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) is seen singing “Hound Dog” in a club in Memphis, crushing it, her massive voice floating out into the air (which was what it was really like, when the song first went nationwide. It was everywhere). Luhrmann’s presentation makes it clear the originator. (Tragically, Dukureh died in July 2022, just a month after the film was released.)
Luhrmann’s film condenses the timeline a little bit (and the timeline was already condensed). At this point, there’s really no excuse not to know about Big Mama Thornton.
In 1963, 10 years after she recorded “Hound Dog”, Big Mama Thornton recorded an “answer” to the song, called “Tom Cat”.
Unfortunately, it was released on the day (maybe? or maybe right around there) that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and so it was ignored. Again, none of this was her fault. A victim of circumstances.
She died in 1984. She never stopped touring and recording. In 1980, visibly ill (she’d lost over 100 pounds), she appeared alongside Aretha Franklin. Once we start getting into the 60s/70s/80s, we start to have more footage of these legends performing live, due to variety shows, and the filming of concerts. We are lucky to have this:
In an interview, she expressed a desire to sing more spirituals (“I feel that I got the voice. I feel like I got the power”), and she also expressed understandable resentment at the “youngsters” coming up behind her, who didn’t pay tribute to – or give a shit about – or even KNOW about – the “old-timers”, as she called herself. The ones who paved the way.
“The old-timers got more to offer than some of those youngsters. If people would just listen to the old timers, they’d realize the old timers are still going. Let me show the world what I got. That’s all I want.” — Big Mama Thornton
It’s a very sad story. Johnny Otis became a reverend and he gave the eulogy at her funeral, saying,
“Don’t waste your sorrow on Big Mama. She’s free. Don’t feel sorry for Big Mama. There’s no more pain. No more suffering in a society where the color of skin was more important than the quality of your talent.”
I can’t close this without mentioning her breathtaking rendition of “Summertime”, from Porgy and Bess. I love the arrangement, it’s luscious and intricate, it’s slow and languid, giving her room to do her thing. The arrangement makes an impression, but it doesn’t overpower the astonishing things she’s doing with the vocals, or her interpretation of the song. It’s the base from which she is able to SOAR.
“Summertime” is a MAJOR performance from her, and so I’ll end with it. Take a moment. Listen to the whole thing. Reflect on the impact she had. It’s important.
Reference: Audio of an interview with her. It’s great because so many people told her story FOR her. Here, she tells it herself.
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.
My first encounter with the intriguing, mysterious (and yet somehow still vulnerable) Jean-Louis Trintignant, was seeing The Conformist at The Music Box in Chicago, circa mid-90s. I was completely unfamiliar with him. Even just the look of his face pinned me to the spot, never mind all of the OTHER riveting visual things going on in that film. The entryway is his face. And WHAT a face.
In The Conformist, his chilly and yet sensual face, was a fascist face. An in-the-closet face. His beauty was a mask hiding political rot.
.
It would take a long time for me to piece together the rest of his extraordinary career. He worked with everyone. He was different. Special. Remote, eloquent, sharp, withheld. With that FACE.
He was so handsome that his face is practically “come-hither” in its beauty and sculpting. You lean in. You are drawn to it. The full lips, the sharp angles. But the face was closed-off too, a smooth marble mask. A perfect face for the movies. He was handsome AND beautiful. Rare. Like Gary Cooper.
Here he is in Costa-Gravas’ Z, as the incorruptible magistrate, for which he won Best Actor at Cannes. Being incorruptible in the middle of near-total corruption is an extraordinary feat (especially when you consider the performance in The Conformist, its opposite). In Z, he is indomitable. Tenacious. Smileless. Hard to imagine him even cracking a smile at a joke. Not a man to be fooled with. A thorn in everyone’s side. Trintignant doesn’t come into Z until the second half, but once he enters, everything changes. Army generals quake. Panic ensues. A government falls.
No one who has seen this film can forget the gloating yet uncertain look on Trintignant’s face in the back of the car at the end, when Dominique Sanda is crying for him to help her. We can see that he knows he is damned, yet there is a part of him that is frozen, too, unable to respond. His character is missing that component of empathy for others, or it was destroyed or taken from him (this point can be argued). He seems to be thinking, “Does it matter?” And the answer is: yes and no, or perhaps. Alas! Like many of the major screen actors who were only at their best for certain directors, Trintignant is on the fence emotionally and intellectually, and the process of watching him sort that out will always be exciting, sexy, chilling, and dismaying.
Trintignant’s was a major career. He started with Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman in 1956, playing husband to Brigitte Bardot. There was Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, and – almost 20 years later – Red, a “chapter” in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s color trilogy. He worked with René Clément, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, so many others. Most recently, he appeared – heartbreakingly – opposite Emmanuelle Riva, in Michael Haneke’s 2012 film Amour, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film – and was nominated for Best Film period – and scored nominations in the Directing, Screenplay, and Best Actress categories.
I wrote about Amour for The Dissolve’s special feature on the best films of the 2010s (sadly, The Dissolve – an excellent site – has vanished from the internet). Here’s my entry on Amour.
Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning film Amour is the story of Georges and Anne, an elderly couple played by the great Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and their experiences following Anne’s debilitating stroke. A careful, meticulous examination of mortality, intimacy, and loss, Amour is the rare film with the patience and courage to stare unblinkingly at the process of aging and impending mortality. Amour does not tell its story with sweeping violin strings. The emotion comes honestly (and devastatingly) through Haneke’s commitment to small details: how the frail Georges manages his caretaking duties, how Anne’s body begins to fail bit by bit, how their adult daughter (Isabelle Huppert) cannot deal with what is happening. All this is anchored by the performances from the two leads, so intimate with each other it’s easy to believe they’ve been together for decades. Georges and Anne made mutual promises long ago, and they continue to keep them. It was probably inconceivable to them that they would ever be this old. And yet they are, and reality must be faced; the promises remain, and they must be honored. As painful as Amour is, it’s also a redemptive story of love and marriage. It looks where most people don’t want to look, and it isn’t afraid.
Trintignant worked almost until the very end. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 91.
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.” — Emily Dickinson to Thomas Higginson
Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830. It is not known why she withdrew from society so completely. Theories abound. Books have been written. What we have are her poems. A wide interior life lived in one house. (Terrence Davies’ miraculous film A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily, is a fascinating meditation on this idea.) Michael Schmidt wrote:
“We have the legend, but the crucial facts in the recorded life are absent. Dickinson’s reticence seems part of her poetical strategy: if we could assign the poems to specific emotional events, we would ground them. As it is, they are a miracle and a mystery of language.”
The legend of the publication of Dickinson’s poems posthumously is … complicated, and it’s made up of confusion, mixed-motives, and frustration. Even now, it’s challenging to find a published version of her poetry that keeps her syntax intact, all those breathless dashes. All of that stuff was ironed out and eradicated in the initial edition, and … it’s been like a game of telephone over the years. Famously, Thomas Higginson and Mabel Todd brought out a volume after her death, in which they “neatened up” her unique punctuation (and also erased every reference to “Sue”). It’s bowdlerized, as is the “legend” spread about her being this shy retiring recluse. The story was told by Mabel Todd and it’s stuck. Boy, has it stuck. I highly recommend the wildly entertaining and yet also informative Wild Nights with Emily, starring Molly Shannon as Dickinson. I reviewed for Ebert. I adored it. We owe Todd and Higginson a huge debt. I know, I know. But they butchered her language and the confusion persists to this day.
Joseph Cornell made some of his most famous “boxes” for Emily Dickinson. He built those boxes as spaces she might inhabit. He was “preparing a place” for her. Or … preparing to imprison her? So many of his Emily boxes are empty. With open windows. Has she flown the coop? Interesting: he was creating a box for her, where he could hold her and keep her – but he always left the window open.
Here is the most famous Emily Dickinson box, called “Toward the Blue Peninsula”:
It’s like she just left, hopped out the open window.
