My brother and me in the front yard, getting ready to go to a picnic with our group of friends in a nearby park. We’re in our late teens. Baseball was on the menu. I have no idea why the planet Saturn is circling between my feet. I was ready to play ball. Listen, I was on a Little League team when I was a kid BEFORE this country got its act together and created girls’ leagues. I had seen Bad News Bears. There was no WAY I wasn’t going to participate. I was the only girl on my Little League team. How did I get the guts for that? I don’t even remember it being an issue. I was determined to play, so I signed up and I played. I was a child unconcerned with convention (I quit Girl Scouts on the day they made us make duffel bags. I looked around and remember clearly thinking, “Oh hell to the no I am not spending my afternoon doing this.”) I was a tomboy. Not really a jock, but a sports fan. I saw no reason to not try out for Little League, and my parents saw no need to dissuade me. My dad had coached some Little League teams too. I’m proud of myself, my little 10 year old self, for not giving a damn about what other girls were doing, for not thinking that I too should yearn to make duffel bags and cupcakes, just because that’s what was assumed were activities all girls enjoyed, or that I was the only girl on that baseball team. I was not a good outfielder, but I was aces at the plate. I always made contact with the ball. In case you were wondering. Which of course you were not. Listen, the world is a raging tirefire at present. Taking 5 minutes to remember a blazing summery day when my brother and I set out into the leafy green neighborhood, battered baseball gloves under our arms, gloves we had had for years, to play a baseball game with our friends, is a good thing.
Charm like that cannot be manufactured. Charm like that is a lost art. He was that way effortlessly.
I won’t lie: I like my James Bond as a RAKE. A sex-pot double-entendre-loving RAKE. Enough with brooding men with dark back-stories. I’ve had enough of them to last a lifetime.
The story above is such a perfect story because you can feel Roger Moore knowing that he had to complete the joke, to create the symmetry necessary, and … to also give a fan a really good story.
My pal Jordan Hoffman has listed what he considers to be the best movies premiering at Cannes. Directors represented: Claire Denis, Agnes Varda, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Noah Baumbach, Michael Haneke, Takashi Miike, Lanthimos, Haynes, Östlund, Bong Joon-ho … and Sofia Coppola!! I’ll be reviewing her latest, a re-make of a Clint Eastwood film of all things, which opens in June. I’ve heard varying things. Trying to avoid more lengthy commentary until I see it. I can’t wait to see each and every one of them when they hit Stateside.
I’m so happy my good friend Keith Uhlich (my X-Files partner-in-crime) will be recapping Twin Peaks for MUBI. You’ll see why when you read his recap. I love this observation of his in particular:
If the early parts of a movie or television show (especially something as auteur-driven as this one) give us a sense of how to watch it as a whole, then this is likely the new Twin Peaks’s key sequence: Watch. Wait. Something may occur. Or it may not. Learn to live with the duration, with the beautiful monotony. Impatience, boredom, irritation, agitation (all very grounding human emotions) segue into a more transcendental state of mind.
YES. And this is what the internet fanboys – raised on Christopher Nolan – cannot abide. But I had moments of true exasperation watching some of these episodes, a sort of “hurry up” energy – before clocking myself doing it and asking myself the question: “Hurry up to WHAT, Sheila. Where are we going?”
I’m heartbroken. For myself but also for him, his family, his friends.
I was talking about him all day yesterday, trying to describe what that voice MEANT, when it first arrived on the airwaves. That whole time is very vivid, and what it felt like to have these new sounds pouring out of the Pacific Northwest … to really get into it is to court cliche. But what can you do. I was there. I experienced it. These people – my peers, essentially, although they all were a little bit older – were describing what life felt like down on the ground. Voices of a generation.
But Chris Cornell’s voice – his actual instrument – was another thing altogether.
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime voice. It was the greatest voice to emerge from my generation. He could break your heart. He could make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Nowadays, vocal pyrotechnics are expected, and yet so much of it is empty. Howling up and down the scale to no purpose. The only response is, “Wow, she can really sing!” But nothing about how it makes you FEEL, how it FORCES you to feel. Cornell’s voice – able to go anywhere, do anything – forced you to feel stuff you might have otherwise avoided. It was a dazzler, that voice.
I want to talk about Chris Cornell — today, tomorrow, and always — in the same way I hear people older than me in record stores talking about Freddie Mercury or Janis Joplin. I want to pick up a Soundgarden LP and lightly slap the cover while locking eyes with someone younger than me and saying, “This guy. This fuckin’ guy was one of the last real rock stars.” Because he was. Or at least, every generation names their rock stars as the last, and he was one of the handful out of my generation who outlasted all the rest. Cornell was, of course, aesthetically rock: In any era, his look and comfort at the front of the stage seemed effortless. But he also approached the genre with care and reverence.
Read the whole thing.
On Facebook yesterday we were talking about Cornell’s covering of other songs. Like “Billie Jean,” a complete re-imagining of that famous song, Cornell owning it completely. My friend Michael (we dated in the year of “Black Hole Sun”, well, it was the year of that whole album, Soundgarden was the soundtrack to many of our shenanigans) mentioned that his favorite Chris Cornell cover was “Ave Maria”. I took a moment yesterday, cleared the deck, shut down the Internet browsers, to listen to it with no distractions. By the end, I was in tears.
There was much about the “grunge” scene that was missed by its critics back in the day. Or maybe the critics were just revealing themSELVES when they criticized the openness of these young mens’ howls of pain. Young men aren’t supposed to be soft. We raise them to not have feelings. And then we wonder why they become violent or self-destrucive. Well, how about DEALING – as a CULTURE – with the fact that saying to a 5-year-old “Boys don’t cry,” or saying to a 7-year-old, “Man up” is tantamount to saying “Don’t ever have feelings, kid, and good luck with that”. It is evil. I call it by its proper name. To the current punching-bag of the moment, ye olde millennials, I say: I get it. Everyone hates you now – for their OWN failings – and you do not deserve it in any way shape or form. But you are not re-inventing the wheel. You shoulda been there in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death. You should have heard what they were saying about us. Making fun of us for caring, for crying, for mourning him. Calling his pained lyrics “whining.” Yes, because God forbid we ever admit we have emotions. God forbid we ever allow ourselves the outcry, “This is unfair.” Nothing has changed. The President* refers sneeringly to Chuck Schumer as “Cryin’ Chuck” – never ever forget that this nickname came about because Schumer welled up with tears when talking about his family MURDERED IN THE HOLOCAUST. You see what I mean? Evil.
It’s the air we breathe. Cobain absorbed it, spit it out in a roar of rage. We heard and felt that rage. Cornell howled his feelings of alienation and depression in lyrics unforgettable, in chord changes that still haunt my dreams. They spoke the truth. A truth we still need to hear.
All of this is to say is that Chris Cornell’s voice – as powerful as it was – had a kind of vulnerability and sensitivity that cannot be faked. I want to say that it was earnest and sincere, qualities that are hard to come by, and often smashed to bits by our heartless culture. That “Ave Maria” is a perfect example of what I am talking about. He keeps the structure, he keeps the familiar traditional arrangement, and he sings the song, all told, pretty straight. His voice – like Judy Garland’s voice – is a vehicle for his emotion. You can HEAR it.
I had to wait until I saw Get Out to read the latest entry in the awesome Black Man Talk series, a series of conversations between Odie Henderson and Steven Boone about various entries in African-American cinema. I’m addicted to Black Man Talk. This is how these guys talk in real life too. (Here’s a memory of a group conversation at a party. We all already knew each other at that point. But it was after that that I considered all of us friends for life. Even if I never spoke with them again.)
It’s exhilarating just to get to eavesdrop.
Get Out is brilliant and unforgettable, and so is Odie/Steven’s conversation about it.
So many spoilers here. See the film, if you haven’t already.
His was my favorite kind of career. A reliable character actor over DECADES of work. Someone like Boothe is the bread and butter of the industry. Without someone like Boothe, the A-Listers cannot shine as bright. Think of the way he looks down at Anthony Hopkins in one of the key scenes in Nixon. Hopkins slumped in a chair. Haig has come with the important message. What must be done. Hopkins, of course, is the focus of the scene. But – as is true across the board, 100% of the time – stars do not act in a vacuum of their own stardom. They rely on people like Boothe to highlight them, to do their part in scenes to make the story happen. In that moment in Nixon, Alexander Haig IS the story. He is the one pushing the story along. It is what is in Boothe’s face in that quiet moment – a kind of mournful upright sense of compassion, even pity, overlaid with the strength to know that this man has GOT to go – that makes that moment happen.
There are many such examples in this man’s lengthy career. In parts large and small.
He WORKED.
To an actor, that’s all that matters. Not fame, not above-the-title credits, not even salary.
It’s the WORK that matters.
Boothe’s passing leaves even more of a hole than an A-Lister’s passing.
