Here’s part 1, a list of things I’ve written for other outlets.

This list, then, is a hodge-podge of the things I’ve written here this year. Anyone familiar with this joint knows that I do tribute posts for people’s birthdays. Some of these are just “re-packaged” (terrible word) from old posts I wrote in 2005 or whatever, mainly because the archives here are so gigantic who could even make sense of it? Hell, I can’t make sense of it. So I might as well bring that old stuff up to the forefront, where people can enjoy it! Over the years, I’ve added to this “birthday” archive, and I continue to do so. There are people I have never written anything about – not because I don’t have strong feelings but because … I just haven’t gotten around to it. I try to rectify that, and some of those posts are here. “New” birthday posts, if you will, additions to the archive.

On my site 2020 roundup

To start: 5 years ago, I wrote a list of Recommended Fiction, and kept meaning to do more lists, of recommended books in other genres. The first month of quarantine gave me the space to put these lists together. It was a way to organize my time, because that month was WEIRD. Making lists is calming. So here are the lists I made:
Recommended Books: Non-Fiction
Recommended Books: Biographies
Recommended Books: Memoirs

A post on poet/publisher Dudley Randall:

Randall’s Broadside Press – similar to Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine – was the first to publish many poets who couldn’t get published elsewhere, their work didn’t “fit” with what the big-wig mags wanted. Many of the poets first published by Broadside would go on to do great things. Nikki Giovanni called Broadside a “midwife” to the black poetry movement.

I had been wanting to interview Jennifer McCabe about her work as an acting teacher for a long time. I interviewed her years ago but so much has happened since then I thought it would be fun to re-visit. Jen and I go way back. We were roommates for nine years! I’m fascinated by the exercises she’s developed for her acting students, as well as WHY she developed those exercises, what problems she was trying to solve. I’m really proud of this piece.

This is also what directors need from actors, and what casting directors need to see in an audition: actors who are confident enough in their process to be like: “I’ve made this choice, it might be wrong, but every single choice is mine, and every moment is justified.” If you present only red, they can work with that, they can counter with: “Love all that red, now just give me only blue.” Or “give me less red.” If you go in there and give them all the colors of the rainbow, it’s too much, it’s too general.

I have always liked John Donne, but – as I say repeatedly – I am not a scholar, and I did not study any of this stuff in college. I was too busy taking singing and juggling classes – so it’s fun (and necessary) to play catch-up. I did that with this post about Donne. I scratched past the surface of the poems I know, the poems everybody knows, purely for my own edification. I enjoy doing that!

Donne wrote for himself and his friends who would understand and appreciate. He was not a court poet, like Philip Sidney, he was not a “poet laureate” churning out works meant to be read in public squares on the Queen’s birthday. He was a public man, he held high posts. His poems were private. You can feel how private he is being when writing them.

I wrote about Melvin B. Tolson, poet, professor, Debate Club coach, immortalized by Denzel Washington in the film The Great Debaters.

His parents instilled in him the importance of education. He went to a couple of different universities, became a teacher, and then went off to Columbia to get his Master’s. By this point it was the early 1930s. His thesis was on the Harlem Renaissance. Tolson was deeply influenced by the Modernist writers – he read them all – Joyce, Stein, Pound, Eliot – as well as all of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. He wasn’t from New York City. He was born in Missouri, went to colleges in the Midwest, so I think there’s something about his reaction to the Harlem Renaissance – as well as the Modernists – that had a freshness of perspective, a freshness of insight. He wasn’t a city boy, steeped in this stuff like it was the air he breathed. He felt in it the revelation that it was, the break with tradition.

I didn’t know much about Anne Spencer before I wrote about her. I am so happy I know more about her now. And I want to visit her house in Virginia, on the national registry of historic places! Spencer was a librarian-poet-activist-gardener.

Anne had a luxury that so few children had at the time, let alone black children: free time. She didn’t have to go to work, her mother didn’t send her to school at first, so she had all this free time to … think and dream and walk in the woods (she loved nature) and just BE. She taught herself to read by poring through Sears & Roebuck catalogs.

I had a lot of fun researching this one: in 1939 First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR, publicly, because the DAR barred famous contralto Marian Anderson from singing at Constitution Hall. There are some interesting codas to this story.

Roosevelt wrote about it in her weekly column, saying, “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.” To those who can’t seem to grasp that widely-discussed news events existed before the age of social media, this was a well-publicized uproar that brought national headlines.

Angelina Weld Grimké was a poet, playwright, activist, in the ‘teens and 20s of the last century. She didn’t write much but she was at the center of the nation-wide protests against D.W. Griffith’s racist Birth of a Nation, so I thought it would be interesting to write about that.

There is a myth – perpetuated by people who don’t know anything about history – that everybody “back then” was just a-okay FINE with Birth of a Nation. The OPPOSITE is true. The film was protested ferociously at the time. The film caused an uproar. People protested the theatres. Writers wrote about it. The NAACP organized protests. Don’t ERASE these courageous pissed-off people just because you can’t be bothered to actually read a book.

I wrote a post about Basil Bunting, one of Ezra Pound’s (many) proteges, whose life as a poet was punctuated by his work as a diplomat and his love of Persian culture. Interesting guy.

Bunting, like the rest of his generation – Pound, Williams, Eliot – really thought about and wrestled with poetry: what is it, what should it do, what should it be. It wasn’t enough to do your own thing. You had to tell others how to do it as well.

I don’t know why I never wrote about Vaslav Nijinsky before, since my obsession dates back to reading his diary when I was in high school. So I decided to rectify that.

Nijinsky was only in his early 20s, but he was already creating his own work, in particular three ballets that one can say without exaggeration changed the world: The Afternoon of a Faun, Jeux, and The Rite of Spring.

Showing a little Rhode Island love for Rhode Island’s first poet laureate Michael Harper, who died in 2016.

His poetic rhythms were, famously, influenced by jazz. His first volume of poetry (1970), nominated for the National Book Award, was called Dear John, Dear Coltrane. He was deeply interested in history, and many of his poems feature real historical figures, like John Coltrane, Jackie Robinson, Frederick Douglass and Roger Williams (the founder of the State of Rhode Island …and Providence Plantations. Littlest state in the Union, longest name). He focused on “kinship”, the dovetailing of narratives crossing cultures.

Another person I love, whom for whatever reason I had never written much about: the poet A.E. Housman. I didn’t really “get” his stuff until I had loved and lost. Like, REALLY lost. He writes with nostalgia, but you can’t really feel his pain until you’ve felt pain yourself. I write about my misconceptions about him when I was younger, and how I “get it” now.

I am not sure how I missed his sadness. I suppose because the verse itself is so perfect, the rhyme scheme immaculate … and there are funny lines, the whole thing can come off as rather arch if you don’t pay close attention. Or, more likely, I didn’t get how sad he was because I was still an adolescent, and although I was an intense adolescent, I didn’t understand yet just how sad things could get, when you get to a certain age and realize your life isn’t going to work out as you planned, I didn’t get that love could be lost forever, and you could be haunted by the memory of What Might Have Been. And Housman is all about longing for What Might Have Been.

I thought it would be fun to finally write about Robert Frost, and express my thoughts that the “popular” idea about him – that he’s a cozy rural writer writing about cozy rural life – is so wrong as to be almost absurd. The fact that this man – whose outlook was so bleak he’s basiclalya nihilist – would be so embraced by the mainstream is one of the weirder occurrences in American literary life.

What I get, again, is the sense of Frost erecting a defense against the madness of not choosing. He is the type of man who makes a decision and then erects all the justifications and reasons afterwards. He looks back on the “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” – and what is NOT said is (for me) the most obvious: What if you contemplate the possibility that the other road was actually better?

2020 was a poetry-heavy year. I’ve always found poetry calming and reading poetry has been part of my everyday life since I was in high school and first got turned onto it. As with Robert Frost, I have a lot of feelings about Andrew Marvell, so I decided to write a post about him.

Marvell was a member of Parliament, writing satirical pamphlets on the hot issues of the day. The poems were hugely influential. However, his pamphlets and prose writing were more well-known than his poetry during his lifetime. He was a public man. Not an ivory tower poet.

In going through my archives, I completely forgot about this piece, a piece about concentration and my struggles with it, particularly in quarantine. This is also about my struggle writing the piece about H.D. for Film Comment. Biting off more than you can chew thy name is Sheila. This is interesting to read, a snapshot about my process. I have no memory of writing this. It’s been a weird intense year.

I have often wondered if my rigorous acting training – started at a very young age – kicks in when I need to gather my forces and write something as big and as rigorous as this piece. So much of acting training, as well as acting experience, has to do with strengthening your concentration. You cannot be an actor if you don’t have an abnormally devloped power of concentration.

Was introduced to Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan in high school, through Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Ring of Endless Light (title a quote from one of his poems). So he’s been “in” me ever since then. Decided to finally research him and write about him. Please forgive my non-scholarly thoughts. I’m an enthusiast, not an expert, and my learning process is a lifelong one.

One of the things I get from Vaughan’s work is he is not connected to the earth at all. He is detached from the body, entirely. Henry Vaughan is 100% ethereal.

From Henry Vaughan to Anita Loos: Welcome to the Sheila Variations. Keep up. I love Anita Loos’ work but had never written about her. Now I have.

Loos was a finger-on-the-pulse kind of writer, one of the reasons she was so valued by studios. Along with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she is probably most well-known for writing the screenplay for The Women, a legit classic almost 81 years later. Think about that. Similar to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she looks at the rivalries among women, the jostling for position, the hurt when one is preferred over the other. Additionally: despite the fact that men are talked about so much, none of them appear. There isn’t one man in the movie.

I spent the early months of this year inhaling The Nick Tosches Reader. I babbled on and on about Nick Tosches, using tons of excerpts, in this piece.

I can’t even say he’s inspirational as a writer – honestly – because to be inspirational you have to inspire in other writers thoughts like: “I want to write like him.” Yeah, well, I can’t. Not in a million years. His stuff is so sui generis it’s a fingerprint of his soul, dark and dirty, golden and shining. It couldn’t come from anyone but him. But I can stand in awe of his use of language, and push myself to do better in my own work in my own way.

Jessie Redmon Fauset was a formidable figure, and I remember her well from the class I took on the Harlem Renaissance in college. So I decided to write about her.

She was valedictorian of her mostly-white high school class. She set her sights on Bryn Mawr but was rejected due to her race. Cornell, however, accepted this promising young student. At Cornell, she studied classical languages (you can feel its influence in her later work, once she started writing). She went on to get a Master’s in French from the University of Pennsylvania. Fluent to the point where she was totally bilingual, she visited France often, and ended up translating many black European and African authors into English for the first time.

Like Robert Frost, like Anita Loos, I was slightly surprised to discover I had never written anything about Irish poet Austin Clarke. So I wrote something about him.

Austin Clarke tried to carve out more space in Irish literature, space already “claimed” by Yeats. It was an uphill battle. He strove to remove himself from politics, damn near impossible to do in Ireland.

The world being what it was this year, and my country being what it was this year, I thought it would be clarifying to write about Sophie Scholl, one of the heroes of the 20th century, and her story was one I clung to this year. In a welter of propaganda, keep your wits about you, and do not underestimate how HARD it will be. I also felt it would be good to write about her when PROFOUND lack of empathy for others was dominating our national life.

When Scholl saw the light, through her activist brother, as well as her activist father (who had been imprisoned for his anti-Nazi views), she broke with the tide. Not because she herself was at risk, but because others were at risk. What the Nazis were doing to OTHERS was wrong. It’s easy to fight for yourself. Self-preservation kicks in. Fighting for others, caring about others, recognizing that YOU may be safe but OTHERS are not and you have a RESPONSIBILITY to fight for those who are not safe, like, oh, children in cages, for example … is the REAL heroism.

Gosh, it feels like I wrote this so long ago. I finished a binge-watch of Homeland (binge-watching has saved my ASS during my almost 9-months of almost-total isolation). I wanted to talk about Carrie’s mental illness and Danes’ portrayal thereof, as connected with my episodes of mania, because, as they say, I’ve got what she’s got, and also about my error in shipping Carrie and Quinn so hard.

Of course there is still some stigma: people may interpret you differently if they know the truth about you. And if you really “act out” – say, by drinking too much, by ranting and raving, by picking fights – often these things will not be “forgiven” as a manifestation of the illness. Which is fair, I guess. I feel no stigma. I don’t give a fuck.

I decided to write about “Cool Papa Bell”, and also about the Negro Leagues. (There’s been recent news about the Negro Leagues: the MLB can incorporate the stats now. Good of them. Better late than never, I guess?) I had fun writing this one. I knew a little bit about him, but had fun researching more.

There’s a famous story, mentioned in every piece about him, first related by Satchel Paige: Bell was so fast that at bedtime he would flip the light-switch in his room and be in bed before the light actually went off.

I had so much fun writing about Alexander Pope. I was BUSY those first months of quarantine, damn. I compare Alexander Pope to Eminem. Because what else do you expect on the Sheila Variations.

He was so huge in his day, so talked-about, so hated and feared by some writers – and so loved by other writers – that his lapse into total obscurity for over a century – until he was rediscovered in the 20th century, is one of those fascinating phenomena that happens in literature. People are “in style” and then they aren’t, and someone as huge as Pope was destined to be a huge target. Writers reacted against him – and the whole Neoclassical period – for 100 years.

I wrote about composer György Ligeti, whose music was used so memorably in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

“Musica Ricercata” is almost unbearable to listen to. It’s so tense you ache for something to relieve it, even if whatever it is is violent. The music is violent. It’s not a call to violence, the violence is embedded in those sharply struck piano notes. The notes of the piece happen one by one, there is no “arrangement” or blending of left-hand with right-hand (at least not traditionally). There is an echo: what is happening at the top-end of the piano is echoed by the same notes far down at the bottom end. And it’s awful: it creates a trap, you can’t escape ABOVE and you can’t escape below: the piano notes are locked gates. The overall effect of the song, the image it gives you, is of a single man sitting at a piano, banging out the notes with one jutting finger.

I forgot about this but it’s a sweet story. I’m glad I wrote it. About the whole experience of getting my Elvis sheet music framed.

If anything is going to survive this pandemic intact, it will be love of Elvis.

I re-read some Ryszard Kapuściński this year. One of my all-time favorite authors. A man who experienced fascist aggression and totalitarianism up close and personal and who spent his life as a journalist fighting against it, mainly by telling the truth about it. I wrote a piece about Kapuściński’s thoughts on brute power. This was during the first wave of protests in response to the murder of George Floyd.

Kapuściński’s first memory was watching Russian tanks roll into his small Polish town. His birth of consciousness was simultaneous with tyranny and totalitarian oppression. He eventually devoted his whole life as a journalist traveling from revolution to revolution around the world (this was the 1960s), at one point he was the only foreign correspondent in cold-war Poland, and he always reported back on the side of “the people.”

I hesitated about writing this piece about my experience writing for The Rebeller, whose parent company was the now-disgraced Cinestate. Normally I don’t chitter-chatter about upheavals like this. I’m not a news site and I have no desire to throw my “takes” into the “hot take” ring. But this one affected me personally and some of my writing was caught up in it, so I thought it would be useful to put my story out there.

Some months back, under the umbrella of Cinestate, a new site was launched called The Rebeller. It was going to cover “outlaw cinema,” meaning movies that didn’t get the “love” from mainstream critics, like genre films, horror films, dirty cop films, films with “reactionary” politics, etc. I think this is a worthy cause. A lot of the stuff I write about (hello, Elvis movies) don’t get the “love” from critics and I think it’s not only valid to create a space for serious discussion of these films, I think it’s essential. The hermetically-sealed critical world can be stifling in its consensus of not only what is good but how you are supposed to write about what is good.

This was piece I originally wrote for The Rebeller, about costumes in Walter Hill’s movies. This is one of the funner assignments I’ve ever had: Myths, Archetypes, and MTV Mood: Costuming in Walter Hill’s Movies

In his films, Walter Hill often uses costumes in this way: clothes as signifiers, symbols, avatars, warnings, weapons. It’s reminiscent of commedia dell’arte, where stock characters were instantly identifiable by the costumes they wore: You would never mistake Pierrot for Scaramouche. The archetypes are recognizable. Walter Hill works in modern-commedia archetypes.

James Weldon Johnson is a huge figure in American culture, basically paving the way – clearing the space – for the Harlem Renaissance to happen. His accomplishments are so many you think he might have had more than one life. It was fun to research this post.

In order to hear all the voices out there – someone has to CAPTURE those voices, someone has to create a structure where those voices CAN be heard, and also someone has to explain the context, someone has to say “Here is why this matters.” In other words, someone has to make the case, and make a STRONG case, for the material’s relevance and worth. This was what James Weldon Johnson did

I read this book in June and it felt like it spoke so specifically to that current moment, particularly in terms of propaganda and how it operates, how Hitler used it, how Hitler – an unattractive nobody – had such a HOLD over his people. Hmmm, wonder why that question seemed so urgent to me? It’s a great book. Wrote a little something about it.

Language is key. Orwell knew it. Orwell laid it all out in 1984 – as well as in his great essay “Politics and the English Language” (it should be required reading). Orwell’s insight: If you limit the words people are allowed to say – then you limit THOUGHT. Less words? Less thought. Once you remove words from circulation, the ideas/thoughts/conceptions attached to those words vanish as well. You eliminate the word for, say, liberty, or freedom – and you eventually eliminate the thing itself. The brain has contracted, the brain no longer has the capacity for individualistic thought: language has been co-opted by the State. The State is now IN you. Its language is your language. You accept the parameters imposed on you. You love Big Brother.

I’ve always loved his paintings – I referenced my fave in one of the reviews I wrote this year – so in this year where I gave myself writing-tasks, in addition to all the writing I was doing elsewhere – I decided to write about Henry Ossawa Turner.

His paintings went around the world, under-cutting the racist depictions of black Americans for a very wide audience.

Another person long overdue for a post here: Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. One of my heroes. I also get into Stalin’s love of erasing the past – sometimes literally – and why it’s a bad bad tendency and it should be resisted. Akhmatova was a symbol of refusing to erase the past. As long as she was alive, there would not be a total forgetting/erasure. (It’s amazing she was allowed to live.)

Akhmatova almost overnight became not only passe, but perceived as dangerously retro. Reactionary, even, in the through-the-looking-glass-world of the Russian Revolution. She was called “bourgeois” – the literal worst possible name you could be called in Revolutionary Russia. A death sentence. It didn’t take long. By 1925, she was no longer allowed to publish anything, and all of her previous work was suppressed. Anna Akhmatova was erased, air-brushed out of history.

Over the years, I’ve written many things about Iranian actress Hediyeh Tehrani, reviewing as many of her films as I can get my hands on. This summer, I wrote an overview of Tehrani’s career. Great actress.

There’s always more she’s not showing us and this gives her screen presence the tension and interest that all great stars command. In Donya, Tehrani plays the “surface” – the breezy confidence of an independent woman – but also has in place the schemes of manipulation going on inside this woman – completely hidden – not revealed until the end. Without Tehrani’s tension between surface and underbelly, the film could not be what it is.

It was interesting to write about poet/novelist Margaret Walker, whose “For My People” is an overwhelming anthem – meant to be read out loud. These pieces are fun to write. You feel like you’re actually meeting someone.

Her father gave her a love of heavy-hitters like Schopenhauer, classic English literature, all poetry, and her mother steeped her in music, ragtime, and read poetry outloud. Walker got a very WIDE home education, from early African-American writers like Paul Dunbar (my post about him here) to Shakespeare. She also heard stories of her family, her grandmother passing on stories of her mother, who was a slave in Georgia. All of this – the diversity of all of these influences – all of it poured into Margaret Walker’s own work. She was a kid when the Harlem Renaissance writers started emerging, and she read them all.

This piece is kind of all over the place, but what it’s really about is the YouTube reactor community: I really got on board with them this year and I swear they have helped me make it through quarantine. Particularly the two guys at Script Work. I think the whole phenomenon went to another level because everyone was just sitting around at home, including the “reactors”. The piece is also about Eminem, whom I have always loved, but the reactor community brought it to the forefront.

Script Work also just flat out know hip hop way more than I could ever hope to, so they pick up references and basically SCHOOL me on what the hell someone might be talking about. “Oh yeah, member back in the 80s when so-and-so signed with such-and-such label and then this beef started up between this group and that group?” And I have no idea what they are talking about because I wasn’t listening to underground hip hop back then, but they’re teaching me. Watching these guys is like going to school. Member what I said about curiosity? I love these two because when I listen to them I get to go into a zone of curiosity, just like they do.

I wrote about American journalist Dorothy Thompson, the first foreign journalist to be ousted from Germany (in 1934 – they were that scared of her).

Thompson was one of the few American journalists – hell, European journalists, ANY journalist – who recognized the threat of [Hitler] instantly, and devoted her career to warning people about him in her regular radio broadcasts, and devoting columns to him.

Poet/journalist Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson was married to Paul Dunbar (unhappily), and her life was quite difficult, and she found it difficult to get published … but she kept at it. She kept a journal for her whole life, one of the only diaries (in existence, anyway) written by an African-American woman of that time period. I went down the rabbit hole of research and discovered all these really cool things about her.

She took full advantage of the often meager opportunities available to African-Americans at the time. She went to college and became a teacher. Her first book of poetry, Violets and Other Tales was published in 1895, when she was just 20 years old.

Worked on this piece for over a month. It was a hard month so I welcomed the distraction. It ballooned into a monster and I decided not to stop it. I had a lot to say about Eminem. Great conversation in the comments section!

He didn’t downplay the elephant in the room, his race. He boldly decided to exaggerate it, exaggerate what made him different. Not only am I white, but I have blonde hair and blue eyes and I am ADORABLE. And not only am I adorable, but I have a dimple in my fucking chin. I LOOK like I’m a Backstreet Boy, but I’m gonna KILL The Backstreet Boys with a chainsaw, motherfuckers. This has always been one of his tactics: beat people to the punch, admit shit about himself before it can be used against him. A disarming tactic. It worked.

One of the friends pictured here sent me this photo of all of us backstage at Milwaukee Summer Fest. I had never seen it before! It brought me right back into the past. I went down Memory Lane. And said as much as I feel comfortable saying. Because trust me, there’s a whole OTHER narrative going on beneath that photo. Some things you just don’t want to share.

To this day it is the most fun I’ve ever had. And because there were no cell phones, there are almost no pictures of it. I love that I came up in a time where this was still true. This is one of the pictures. Evidence, more like.

I love Philip Larkin. Never wrote about him. Decided to see if I had anything to say about him. I did.

Along with his poetry, he was also a music critic, and as a music critic he attacked avant-garde jazz. He felt the “abstraction” of modernist poets in avant-garde jazz’s improvisations, and he felt that such experiments threatened the cohesion of civilization. This may sound pretty extreme but Larkin wasn’t kidding around. The poetry that came out of Larkin’s extremity pulses with nostalgia and pain – which could be (and sometimes is) seen as reactionary. Larkin’s pain generates from cynicism and awareness, awareness that his views have made him an exile from the world of warmth and love and companionship.

I love Irish poet Medbh McGuckian. Decided to write something about her for her birthday.

She writes about families and love and childbirth and mothers and daughters. These are not “women’s concerns”. Does not Seamus Heaney write about his father? His childhood? Does not James Joyce write about his wife in every damn thing he ever wrote? Why is it different when he does it? The fact of the matter is it is NOT different, but it seems different, “lesser”, when a woman does it – at least to men looking on. Medbh McGuckian, standing in a very male tradition, writes from the center of that tension. She is highly aware of the “other”-ness of female experience, specifically Irish female experience. She feels that womanhood itself has been pathologized in Ireland. The only safe role for women historically has been “beasts of burden”. If the Irish woman shows some spunk or intelligence, or even a desire for love, if she is in any way unruly, she is feared and scorned or thrown into a Magdalene Laundry. These fears are real.

Georgia Douglas Johnson was one of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance: mostly known for her plays, she also wrote novels, and had a weekly column in The Crisis. Also, for 40+ years, she hosted a salon in her home for African-American women writers. A fascinating person. I wrote about her for her birthday.

Some of her plays were given radio productions, although many were never published or produced. Her plays were mostly attached to her anti-lynching activism, and she refused to coddle the audience with happy hopeful endings. Then and now, this was not a “commercial” attitude to have, and so her work suffered as a result.

How is it possible I have never written anything about Frances Farmer before? I rectified that, pronto.

Her hair is wild, uncombed. She looks feral, furious, formidable. These pictures went everywhere, and they are still the first images that come up when you Google her name. Dammit, I LIKE that woman, lying in the cot, seething, staring at the camera dead-on. Unrepentant. Trapped. Furious. I get it.

My beloved cat Hope died in early September. I was not ready to let her go. But she was so sick and her suffering was impeding her enjoyment of life. I miss her still. I sometimes hear her feet padding around in the next room. I ache for her. She died just before things got REALLY bad. Thanks a lot, Hope! But she has been a huge comfort to me over the years, and I hope I was to her, too. She had a hard life before me. She got to relax once she came home with me. She was the best.

The sound of her purr was like a balm to my ears. It was her goodbye. I am convinced.

I wrote about French New Wave star Anna Karina.

Karina could be vivacious but could then be totally remote a second later. She could break your heart. She could draw you to her, while at the same time something in you might hold back, intimidated, frightened.

I wrote a post about DeShaun Dupree Holton, a.k.a. Proof, a.k.a. Big Proof, Detroit-area rapper, and what Malcolm Gladwell would call “a connector”.

Every single hip hop artist who came up in Detroit around that time, the 80s, the 90s, has a Proof story, and it’s always the same story, albeit with tiny details changed. Proof was there at a crucial moment, Proof hooked the person up with another person who could help, Proof said the ONE thing that helped the person out of a slump, Proof did the ONE thing that put the person on the right track. There are hundreds of stories like this.

I haven’t written a personal post in years. Not like this anyway. Maybe the last one was about that time I had a date and a sexual assault on the same night. I just don’t like to write personally anymore on here. Not like that. But this year was not like other years. And this story – about the time a man said “Tsk tsk tsk” to me in a disapproving way – and what I made it mean – and how that choice ended up … I mean, honestly, saving my life, or at least saving an essential part of me – that I would NEED later. It’s maybe the best choice I’ve ever made – and it was prophetic – scarily so… This story has been niggling at me for years. I think I wanted to write about it all those years because I didn’t quite understand it. I knew it worked, I just wasn’t sure what it meant. It happened to me but I still didn’t quite understand it. I understand it now because I wrote the piece.

In remembering those first couple of years, the “Tsk Tsk Tsk” episode balloons out in almost eerie importance. I am now fully cognizant of how much he meant, but it goes deeper than that. I am trying to make language do what I want it to do, and language is inadequate (which he actually expressed to me – see end of this post). He didn’t just “mean a lot” to me, or whatever. Only time has shown me the real impact, which goes way beyond the comfort of a good memory.

I love actors who know how to work their angles. I’ve written about this before here and there, but decided to devote a whole post to it.

This has nothing to do with beautiful faces shot lovingly in closeup. This has to do with the body, and the boldness of these actors’ understanding of SHAPES. And by shapes I mean ANGLES. And by angles I mean ARCHETYPES.

I reviewed the wonderful Killing Eleanor, directed by Rich Newey, and starring Annika Marks and Jenny O’Hara. It’s fantastic. It’s currently doing the film festival “virtual” circuit, but I have a feeling this one will go the distance. I’ll post any updates about online distribution when it comes. It’s so good.

By the end, the film reverberates with its own message. But it hasn’t told us the message. It’s shown us. The catharsis is difficult but it is also thoughtful, emotional, and true.

Jessie Reyez’s debut album dropped at the end of March, and I absolutely adore it. Wrote about Reyez, her early songs, her early EPs, “Gatekeeper”, Eminem’s Kamikaze, and … beyond. She’s going to be major and I am excited to be in on the ground floor.

Reyez is strikingly vulnerable, and she expresses something a lot of people feel. You know those relationships you can’t get out of? That you shouldn’t be in? But the sex is great? Fight-or-fuck relationships? This is Reyez’s milieu. She’s also CLEARLY powerful, but her power comes from admitting her darkness, her flaws, her tendency towards obsession, craziness. Her love songs are neurotic, sometimes violent. She feels the pull of the mad love.

And that’s enough for now! Take a day off, Sheila! I will leave you with:

My brother Brendan O’Malley’s music writing

Every Monday, I’ve been posting essays written by my brother Brendan O’Malley, from his 50 Best Albums list on his old blog. They’re an amazing archive of writing and thought and insight. Currently, I’ve been posting his ongoing “Scott Walker” series.