When I think of Cassavetes, anything that comes up is inextricable from my own life journey. He’s just so IN there with me, the choices I made, the goals I had, my values. He’s also behind my favorite marriage proposal, which might sound silly but … it’s Cassavetes. It’s not silly at all. That’s the one proposal I said yes to. Now, we did not end up getting married, but it’s still a pretty funny story. I discovered Cassavetes young, which I think is good. I discovered him before I was a film critic, long before, which I also think is good. I came to him as an actor, looking for community, hungry for connection. He was (and still is) inspiring. I took this picture, when I was living right behind the Music Box Theatre, and spent all my free time there.
It was years before I could finally see the long-unseeable Love Streams (his final film) … and, coincidence? I think not … my first “gig” for Criterion, back in 2014, was to write and narrate a video-essay about Gena Rowlands’ career. It all made sense.
Of course I’ve written so much about Cassavetes over the years but I’ll highlight just two I’m really proud of:
And most recently, I wrote a piece I’d been wanting to write for years. Decades, really. I wrote about my VIVID first year in Chicago – which I’ve covered in other contexts (“tsk tsk”) – and how I saw Opening Night for the first time, and also discovered Tennessee Williams’ Two-Character Play. Within months of each other. To this day, those two works of art seem almost the same to me. I was different after I encountered both, and never really got back to my before self: John Cassavetes, Tennessee Williams, and Intelligent Insanity.
“I guess every picture we’ve ever done has been, in a way, to try to find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film. And so, that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all the stuff in that war, in that word-polemic and film-polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff doesn’t really interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in – love. And the lack of it. When it stops. And the pain that’s caused by loss of things that are taken away from us that we really need. ”
— John Cassavetes
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As someone whose family can (and does) recite What’s Up, Doc? from beginning to end – “What happened to Fritz?” “There is only me. Franz.” “Oh, what a SHAME.” – this is sad news! (My old friend Trav wrote up a tribute to Henry when Henry died in 2019.)
Here’s a story I came across just recently. It illuminates perfectly Buck Henry’s genius. It comes from an interview with Peter Bogdanovich at the AFI back in the 70s. Bogdanovich had the idea for this kooky story, a spin on the screwball comedies of the 1930s, featuring a dizzy dame, an absent-minded professor, and a hot-to-trot old lady, who all have the same style bag. Hijinx ensue when the bags get mixed up.
Bogdanovich brought the script/treatment to Buck Henry for feedback. Buck Henry sat there and read it all the way through. He thought a little bit. Then he said, “I think there needs to be one more bag.”
One more bag in play means one more level of confusion. Means more utter anarchy. If there were only three bags, the audience could easily keep track of each one. With four, you lose track. As a matter of fact, during filming Bogdanovich lost track at a couple different points. “I think we’ve lost one bag.”
To me, this small anecdote shows Buck Henry’s genius. He didn’t need weeks to come up with it. He read Bogdanovich’s first draft and he knew something wasn’t quite right.
“There needs to be one more bag.”
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Milton was born on this day in 1608. Although he left Oxford without completing his degree, he remained a thinker, a propagandist/pamphleteer, a scholar till the end of his days. The isolated poet, focused on self and personal emotion, would come in with the Romantics. Milton was a public and a political man, a propagandist for the Commonwealth (a dangerous position to take, especially once the Restoration came about). Milton traveled widely, and wrote what amounts to op-ed columns discussing the constitution in England at that time of great upheaval. Whatever poetry he wrote (and he wrote a lot), he wrote privately. Milton was famous in his own day. His reputation since then has risen and fallen with the tides, and we are now in a huge Milton upsurge. He turned 400 in 2008, and there were celebrations across New York City: art exhibits, library exhibits, and also a costume-party in Brooklyn where you had to dress up as either Milton, or a character from Paradise Lost.
I had to read Paradise Lost in high school and thought it was the most boring thing I had ever been subjected to in my life. I had to prop my eyeballs open. I re-read it about 10 years ago, and was totally swept away by it, not only by the thoughts/philosophy in the great work, but also the depths and transcendence of the language itself. I feel like people should be forced to RE-read what they were forced to READ in high school.
If you were there, then you remember the singular moment when Sinéad O’Connor arrived on the world stage. It wasn’t like the appearance of any other “big star”. It was different. She came from seemingly nowhere. Her voice was eerie and transcendent. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Her head was shaved, a protest against objectification, an announcement she would not be just another “pop star”. She insisted she wasn’t a pop star at all. “I’m a protest singer,” she said. She arrived fully formed into a world with no place for her. She created her own place. The second she arrived, you couldn’t imagine what it was like before she got there. That’s how it was when Sinéad O’Connor arrived.
If I had to talk about favorite songs … there are so many. “Troy” blows your hair back. “Red Football.” Protest. “This is the Last Day of Our Acquaintance.” Personal. “Famine.” Political. “Scorn Not His Simplicity.” “Black Boys on Mopeds.” Political. “Daddy I’m Fine.” “No Man’s Woman.” “4th and Vine.”
She torched her career when she tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live.
But she was fucking right.
And she was courageous enough to say it out loud when nobody wanted to hear it. When people were still propping up evil, defending and denying it. She ruined her career for it. She was fucking RIGHT. Where were all the apologies owed her?
If you haven’t seen this recent performance of “Nothing Compares 2 U” … clear your schedule.
Sinéad O’Connor deserved better. The world showed its true colors in response to her, as it always does when someone breaks from the status quo, when someone says “FUCK THIS”, when someone tells the truth nobody wants to hear.
Let’s end with “Troy”. Hair-raising. Let’s look at the recording and then watch it live.
I will never stop being sad.
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One of my favorite contemporary actors. I think he blows the competition away. I can’t say enough good things about him. His versatility is dazzling. He can be so gentle. He can be so ferocious. He can be elegant and cosmopolitan. He can be provincial and practically pre-verbal. He can be 100% right-now and he can also be at home in a period piece. He’s always convincing. He doesn’t have to work to convince me that he is who he says he is in any given role. He just IS that character. He flies a little bit under the radar, all things considered. Actors should know who he is, and explore his work. Of all of my columns for Film Comment, the one I did on Schoenaerts got the least engagement on Twitter. This doesn’t seem right. Schoenaerts guy is not just the real deal. He makes other actors look show-off-y. He is not intellectual in his approach – his approach is very physical (he’s similar to De Niro). He lives in Belgium mostly. He’s a devoted graffiti artist, he’s been doing it since he was a kid.
I’ve written quite a bit about him:
First up: I put it all together when I devoted one of my columns to his career – and his interesting examinations of masculinity and its toxic claustrophobia, the damage it does – not to women, but to men. He is so so insightful about this. I picked out four roles to discuss.
Now for individual films, all of which I referenced in the Film Comment piece:
I absolutely love Alice Winocour’s Disorder – and since I reviewed it for Ebert I’ve re-watched it 4 or 5 times. It’s extremely effective, a high-throttle home invasion thriller, but also a devastating psychological/physical portrait of combat PTSD.
I wrote about 2011’s Bullhead, which is the first time I saw Schoenaerts, probably true for many of us (in the States, at least). Bullhead is deeply upsetting, start to finish, traumatizing to watch, and I don’t think I’ll ever see it again, but his performance is unforgettable.
And last but definitely not least: I went long on the extraordinary Rust and Bone, a movie I can’t say enough good things about (clearly).
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In less than a decade, Ellen Burstyn was nominated 5 times for an Oscar (for The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Same Time Next Year and Resurrection) and won one Oscar (for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore). One of the best runs in the business. Then in 2001, 4 decades after that extraordinary run, she was nominated for an Oscar again for Requiem For a Dream. Her work in the 70s and 80s helped define the new cinema, the independent era, the boundaries-breaking of the old studio system. Similar to Jack Nicholson, she WAS 1970s film.
She’s nominated almost any time she acts, including the controversial nomination for her 14 seconds of screen time in HBO’s Mrs. Harris in 2006. People were upset, like: how on earth could only 14 seconds be worthy of a nomination? It was the talk of the town for a good 2 weeks. Burstyn made no statements about it for a while. After all, it wasn’t her fight. If they wanted to nominate her, how is that HER fault? Finally, she did make a statement, and it’s glorious:
I thought it was fabulous. My next ambition is to get nominated for seven seconds, and ultimately I want to be nominated for a picture in which I don’t even appear.
She’s co-President of the Actors Studio, an organization which she has always been highly involved in and associated with. Lee Strasberg adored her, and clocked what he saw as her issues as an actress immediately, issues that needed to be addressed if she wanted to get anywhere in her career. But I’ll talk about that in a minute.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s two documentaries about the genocidal campaigns in Indonesia in 1965-66 are so haunting and terrible – the leering mask withdrawn to show something even more monstrous underneath – I don’t know if I can see them again. But they definitely push the boundaries of documentary film-making into new and controversial arenas. This is his first narrative feature, and it’s a dystopian musical! I don’t think it really works, ultimately, but I am here for the experimentation and I am open to what he was trying to do. I reviewed for Ebert.
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It’s his birthday today. One of the best documentaries of the year is Lisa Cortes’ Little Richard: I Am Everything, which I had the pleasure of reviewing for Ebert.
Little Richard. Live performance of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”, 1963.
In the performance above, Little Richard moves from preacher to sexually-explosive showman to maestro, sometimes blending them all together, no difference between Personae. The performance is almost 6 minutes long. He conducts the audience, like a Pentecostal preacher does on any given Sunday, bringing emotions, down, then up into a fevered pitch, or like a conductor of a gigantic orchestra, commanding the strings to retreat, the percussion to come forward, the horns to subside, the unison/melody to explode as one. Little Richard starts out like he’s in church, speaking to the congregation, telling him what he wants from them, telling them what he EXPECTS from them. This will not be a passive experience. He demands something from them, just like they demand something from him.
The audience response throughout is both organic and created: Little Richard is in control of it. The audience response is damn near involuntary – and that is because he is never less than totally in charge.
The middle instrumental section is riveting: Slowly, with no fuss or fanfare (it’s not James Brown throwing off his cape: it’s as though Little Richard is in his bedroom by himself), Little Richard takes off his jacket, folds it, puts it down, straightens his tie, and then re-tucks his shirt into his pants, as all hell continues to break loose around him. Taking off his jacket is not a “bit.” It looks practical: a professional performer who gets rid of the jacket because it is constricting and he’s hot (and so wet with sweat by the end of the performance he looks like he’s swum the Hellespont). But the tucking-in-shirt, straightening-the-tie caesura is also because he has to take a moment to “get himself together” before he moves into the second half of the song … which he knows will be a workout. He knows where he’s about to go.
Near the end of that sequence, he climbs up on top of the piano: he needs perspective so he can conduct from a better vantage point, so that everyone can see him.
Later, he drops to his knees and the mood changes, the bottom drops out: he’s got something personal to say, he needs them to listen. He’s a preacher again, pleading with his audience, bringing them down: quiet down now, quiet down, listen to what I’m telling you. After getting them in unison with that quiet, he jumps to his feet again, and the performance explodes. You wouldn’t think there was a higher level the performance could reach, but Oh Us of Little Faith.
Little Richard’s job – calling, more like it – is to perform, to bring that song to its full potential, the potential that already lives in him: he does not rely on lights or choreography or fancy sets or camera work. Part of his job is controlling audience-engagement:
1. Give them a GREAT time.
2. Make sure they follow him through the peaks and valleys: everyone must be in sync – emotionally – at all times.
HE wants to get something out of the song, too: it’s the only way he can do it. He is searching for a catharsis, too. The apotheosis of his expression. His personal experience of performing that song would be meaningless without the two-way current running between him and the crowd. NO ONE IS HELPING HIM in the performance except his partner – the audience.
I am only pointing this out ad nauseum because most performers need help. They need choregraphy/costumes/lights to help them (and, perhaps, also hide them, pump up a sense of engagement when there isn’t much there). But here, whatever goes on in that room, it is only Little Richard who is responsible for it. He is in charge of every mood-shift, every explosion, every switch-back, every intimate almost whispery “Okay, so let’s go over this one more time” …
Follow the Leader. And they follow him into mass-psychosis.
The stories of Little Richard on tour with Sam Cooke (as told in Peter Guralnick’s biography of Cooke) are so funny and so absurd you almost distrust the accounts. But there are multiple sources, everyone who was on that tour with them, saw it. At the time of that tour, Little Richard had become convinced that rock ‘n’ roll was the devil’s music. He devoted himself to Jesus (actually, devotion is too mild a word), but he was still touring with packaged “rock” shows when this born-again-twice experience happened. He now felt that everyone around him – including the audiences – was evil and/or lost souls who needed to be saved, but his tour-contract hadn’t run up yet. He drove everyone on that tour insane. The promoters and managers were not thrilled that Little Richard was turning rock ‘n’ roll shows into revival meetings. There are stories of Little Richard reading the Bible backstage in a booming voice while wearing a cape.
That tour was the in-between time where Little Richard was still billed as a rock ‘n’ roll star, even though he was performing gospel songs (annoying audience members who wanted him to sing his hits). After the tour ended, he poured himself 100% into gospel music, putting out a couple of great gospel albums (some of his best stuff, I think).
But finally Little Richard switched back again. He succumbed to the inevitable draw. The draw his audiences felt too. In other words, he accepted Satan back into his life. He roared back into the secular scene.
As with all those country boys – white and black – who changed American culture, Little Richard was never far from his Jesus-loving roots. Elvis, Ike Turner, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown, Howlin’ Wolf … their sexual/emotional ferocity was another kind of expression of what went on in the little country churches – Baptist, Pentecostal, Assembly of God – on dusty corners through the American South. This was heresy to say at the time, and probably still heretical in some circles now. We are still split: the divine and the secular, the holy and the profane … kept in separate rooms. But these guys … they kicked down the walls between separate rooms, creating one big room.
Being saved is for the NEXT life, not this one.
There was precedent for this in Little Richard’s life. His father was a deacon in their Baptist church by day, and a nightclub-owner and bootlegger by night. The scales of Good and Evil were balanced (uneasily) in him, as they would be in his son. Jesus and Moonshine and Rhythm & Blues walking hand in hand. It was not hypocritical at all (and this was something Northeast secular-minded critics couldn’t get a handle on at ALL because it wasn’t their world. If you’re raised, oh, Episcopalian, or Unitarian, if you grew up in the suburbs in Connecticut… how are you going to understand these Southern boys? With their Jesus and their pink suits and their unashamed sexuality?).
And that’s what you can see in this 1963 performance. Little Richard sings about shaking bodies and orgasmic expression but what he’s doing is taking all of those people to CHURCH.
“Elvis may be the King of Rock and Roll, but I am the Queen.” — Little Richard
One of my favorite covers of all time:
Here he is doing it live at The Today Show in 1997.
LR singing “Tutti Frutti” in Alan Freed’s 1956 film Don’t Rock the Knock.
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“When I go to the cinema, I want to have a cinematic experience. Some people ignore the sound and you end up seeing something you might see on television and it doesn’t explore the form. Sound is the other picture. When you show people a rough cut without the sound mix they are often really surprised. Sound creates a completely new world.” — Lynne Ramsay
It’s Lynne Ramsay’s birthday today.
In a better world, this fascinating complicated director would have a larger body of work. But she is independent, fiercely so, and she develops her own projects. It’s my kind of work, she’s interested in the darker side of things, the ambiguities, the wordless and sometimes incomprehensible (to outsiders, that is) response to crisis. The opening sequence of her 2002 film Morvern Callar is a case in point. I saw that one in the theatre, and I was stunned by it (I hadn’t seen Ratcatcher. I went into Morvern Callar pretty much cold). The opening sequence is just astonishing – but what is even more astonishing is what happens after, what Morvern (the brilliant Samantha Morton) does AFTER that opening scene. You keep waiting for an “appropriate” response from her, and it never comes. Social norms are a very thin veneer indeed, and mostly for people who can easily fit into its little boxes. John Cassavetes’ films – although they take place in a very different landscape, and exist on a very different wavelength than Ramsay’s films – exist too in that netherworld where social norms just seem insane, or at the very least, so far away as to be irrelevant. Sane people watch Faces and think, exasperated, “These people all need to go home, take a long bath, and get a good night’s sleep.” Yup! But that’s first of all not interesting or dramatic, and second of all, beneath the “appropriate” veneer is a vast swirling chaos, of impulses we can barely control, of pain we can’t face, of the things we do to just shut up and endure. This is Lynne Ramsay’s wheelhouse.
I look forward to every single new film she does. I feel a bolt of excitement when I hear she’s got a new one coming down the pike.
Ratcatcher
Morvern Callar
We Need to Talk About Kevin
You Were Never Really Here
A couple years back, she made headlines walking off a film she had helped develop. She looked around, realized the producers wanted her to change things, wanted a happy ending (fuck these people and their happy endings) … and finally just figured out, “Oh. They actually don’t want me to be making this film for them.” Ramsay is not – never – ever – a “hired hand”. So she walked off, with no notice. People were outraged, how dare she, etc. I really love this interview with her – not just about that situation, but about her career in general.
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.
Someone said that Didion’s (seemingly) simple sentences are like a perfect puzzle. If you remove one line from a paragraph, everything falls apart. Her writing is that well-constructed. She was a notoriously painstaking self-editor. She would work for months on a single paragraph.
My friend Rebecca introduced me to Joan Didion. We were working at this crazy startup together, sitting side by side at a long table, lined with computer monitors. I was new(ish) to New York, only in the city two years. She and I were somehow discussing our experiences of New York, and how vivid it was. The wine bars we loved, the dance nights we loved, the brunch places we frequented … we both came from elsewhere (although both New Englanders). She asked me if I had read “Goodbye to All That”, by Joan Didion. I said no. The next day, she brought me a Xeroxed copy. I read it in one sitting, then and there. It’s one of those essays that enters into your own personal experience, explaining inchoate sensations to yourself, an essay which also changes its shape as you gain other experiences. I could not believe how perfectly she described New York, and the vivid impressions of my first years there. But there was uneasiness in my response too. Because Didion’s essay was “goodbye to all that”, it was an intimation of the future, of times changing, of the ephemeral nature of youth, and there is a point where you realize your youth is over. I didn’t feel young then, but I was young. Unlike Didion, I would stay in New York. But she was right. There was a point when it all ended. And still I stayed on.
One of the fascinating parts of this Rebecca backstory is that Allison (whom I didn’t know at the time) introduced Rebecca to Joan Didion. I met Allison through Rebecca shortly after this. Allison is now one of the most important friends in my life. We were close almost immediately. In fact, the very first post written on this here blog was written from Allison’s apartment and described the day we just had – which, more irony, was a very New York kind of day, the kind of day Didion described so memorably in “Goodbye to All That.” It wasn’t until a couple years later that we put all this together: Rebecca passed Joan Didion on to me, and she got it from Allison. It was like Allison and I were connected by Didion before we even met. Allison grew up in Malibu. Didion’s essays about Malibu speak so strongly to Allison.
A couple years ago, Christian Lorentzen wrote a piece about her political novels, and her political writing, in three of her astonishing novels: A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, and The Last Thing She Wanted. These complicated novels are in the process of being erased, even with the recent film adaptation of one of them (which was not well-received). The erasure is (in my opinion) due to the unfortunate Oprahfication of her legacy brought on by the masses of readers who only came to her through her grief memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. The Year of Magical Thinking is a wonderful and important book, addressing the unreality and hallucinatory nature of grief. But if that’s all you read of her, it would give you the impression that Didion was a “personal essayist” and “memoirist” primarily. Those late-comer readers would be taken aback by her novels, by her political writing (she went on the campaign trail numerous times). Her novels capture the paranoid cynical 1970s, the shady dealings of the CIA’s involvement in Third World political eruptions, eruptions and civil wars and assassinations financed by the United States. Joan Didion did write personal essays – the aforementioned “Goodbye to All That” a famous example – but they were a small portion of what she wrote about. She wrote about dams, war, freeways, nuclear power, Nancy Reagan, California history, crime, and politics. Her main subject was California. Magical Thinking was an anomaly. In Lorentzen’s very important piece, he expressed concern about this erasure, concerns I share.
This famous picture shows Joan Didion standing in Golden Gate Park in 1967, while she was there trying to figure out *what was really going on* with all the “hippies” flocking to San Francisco. The essays she wrote about this time – mainly “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album” – are masterpieces. Look at the contrast. She’s wearing white tights. She does not blend in.
In 1967, Didion wrote a great essay about Howard Hughes. It’s important to see here, in the following excerpt, another version of her famous quote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, from the famous essay “The White Album”. People have interpreted that quote as “all our stories matter”, thereby totally missing the point, sidestepping it, AVOIDING it. Didion was much chillier than nursery school-level sentiments. She had her romanticisms, but her vision was cold and clear. “Stories” in her lexicon meant fantasy/narrative, often indistinguishable from lies and false narratives, or at least fantasy erected to stave OFF reality. Dangerous, in other words. Politically dangerous. She saw it in operation in late-60s Haight-Ashbury. Didion doesn’t condemn our story-generating impulses. Condemnation was not her style. Instead, she was interested in what the stories we tell reveal about ourselves. This comes into play in her essay about Howard Hughes.
By July of 1967 Howard Hughes is the largest single landholder in Clark County, Nevada. “Howard likes Las Vegas,” an acquaintance of Hughes’s once explained, “because he likes to be able to find a restaurant open in case he wants a sandwich.” Why do we like those stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the Titanic: how the mighty are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of power and money in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
“The stories we tell” is also in operation in one of my favorite pieces Didion wrote, “Girl of the Golden West”, about Patricia Hearst. The Hearst story includes the formation of California, and how this history shapes California’s citizens (whether they are aware of it or not), and how big events – like 60s Haight-Ashbury, like student protests in the late 1960s, like the Cotton Club murder, like the Manson murders, like the creation of the freeway system and/or the dam system in Californial, like the military-industrial engine of California’s economy , etc. illuminate what is really going on in California.
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” — Joan Didion
Didion was interested in the narrative beneath the narrative. As I mentioned, way too often when people quote Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” they betray their misunderstanding. People take LA freeways for granted. Didion did not and excavated their history and functionality and what all this revealed about the character of California. Geography determines character. Same with water distribution. And Patricia Hearst’s story was often understood in terms of the irrational bent of radical politics at the time. The madness of it. This is not a misreading.
But Didion saw Hearst’s story primarily as a story of “the Golden West”, a California story, in other words. It could only have happened in California, populated as it was by descendants of pioneering types (Didion’s ancestors), with backstories of Donner Party horrors, everyone driven by escapist tendencies and a longing to vanish into a future disconnected from the past.
The Patty Hearst article shows Didion’s absolute primacy in this arena. She was obsessed not with the subject itself but with figuring out what was REALLY going on.
It was a family in which the romantic impulse would seem to have dimmed. Patricia Campbell Hearst told us that she “grew up in an atmosphere of clear blue skies, bright sunshine, rambling open spaces, long green lawns, large comfortable houses, country clubs with swimming pools and tennis courts and riding horses”. At the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Menlo Park she told a nun to “go to hell”, and thought herself “quite courageous, although very stupid”. At Santa Catalina in Monterey she and Patricia Tobin, whose family founded one of the banks the SLA would later rob, skipped Benediction, and received “a load of demerits”. Her father taught her to shoot, duck hunting. Her mother did not allow her to wear jeans into San Francisco. These were inheritors who tended to keep their names out of the paper, to exhibit not much interest in the world at large (“Who the hell is this guy again?” Randolph Hearst asked Steven Weed when the latter suggested trying to approach the SLA through Regis Debray, and then, when told, said, “We need a goddamn South American revolutionary mixed up in this thing like a hole in the head”), and to regard most forms of distinction with the reflexive distrust of the country club.
Yet if the Hearsts were no longer a particularly arresting California family, they remained embedded in the symbolic content of the place, and for a Hearst to be kidnapped from Berkeley, the very citadel of Phoebe Hearst’s aspiration, was California as opera. “My thoughts at this time were focused on the single issue of survival,” the heiress to Wyntoon and San Simeon told us about the fifty-seven days she spent in the closet. “Concerns over love and marriage, family life, friends, human relationships, my whole previous life, had really become, in SLA terms, bourgeois luxuries.”
This abrupt sloughing of the past has, to the California ear, a distant echo, and the echo is of emigrant diaries. “Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can,” one of the surviving children of the Donner Party concluded her account of that crossing. “Don’t worry about it,” the author of Every Secret Thing reported having told herself in the closet after her first sexual encounter with a member of the SLA. “Don’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings – they’re no help at all.” At the time Patricia Campbell Hearst was on trial in San Francisco, a number of psychiatrists were brought in to try to plumb what seemed to some an unsoundable depth in the narrative, that moment at which the victim binds over her fate to her captors. “She experienced what I call the death anxiety and the breaking point,” Robert Jay Lifton, who was one of those psychiatrists, said. “Her external points of reference for maintenance of her personality had disappeared,” Louis Jolyon West, another of the psychiatrists, said. Those were two ways of looking at it, and an other was that Patricia Campbell Hearst had cut her losses and headed west, as her great-grandfather had before her.
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in high school and thought it was the most boring thing I had ever been subjected to in my life. I had to prop my eyeballs open. I re-read it about 10 years ago, and was totally swept away by it, not only by the thoughts/philosophy in the great work, but also the depths and transcendence of the language itself. I feel like people should be forced to RE-read what they were forced to READ in high school. 
