So yes it’s been an eventful month. Nicolas Rapold, editor-in-chief at Film Comment, asked me to write a regular column for them. It is a huge honor. It’s going to be focused on … whatever I want to focus on, basically. I already have an editorial calendar set up for myself of stuff I’ve been wanting to write about. I am so thrilled Film Comment would want something like this from me!
The inaugural essay just went up, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to write for years: an essay on New York-School poet Frank O’Hara and his passionate love of the movies.
Present Tense: Frank O’Hara at the Movies
I really enjoyed this — especially the discussion of “remove” and Poetic Insight — and am excited to see that the column will be about these intersections between the movies and other forms. For one thing because I know I’ll learn something new and you always find a rich and thoughtful perspective but also because they’re so fun. These connections always toss me around like a baton in a relay race. Like, O’Hara and the theatre/cinema space — smoke, solitude and danger, the flickering focal point of the screen, intimacy, sex and death — my brain immediately leapt to a Nick Cave track from the POV of a boy being molested in a cavernous cinema in front of the “great screen” — which in turn draws from a Peter Straub story, which, which… so thank you.
Anyway, I identify with O’Hara’s exclamation points. lol. Congrats on the gig, well-deserved!
Thank you, Jessie!! It’s pretty exciting, and was very happy to launch it with Frank!
and wow – that Nick Cave track.
Congratulations Sheila!
Thank you!