“I think a fear of portraying something negatively ends up creating more stereotypes.” — Sophia Takal

Posted on May 12, 2026 by sheila

It’s Sophia Takal’s birthday today.

“You probably can’t tell this from “Green,” but I actually think that art should have a sense of humor about itself. Art is very important and it can change lives, but it doesn’t actually save lives. So I think it’s important for art to have a sense of humor about itself and not be super-snobby. Artists shouldn’t think that they’re better than everyone else. Fluxus really plays with the idea of what an artist really is and what art means. That’s how I interpreted it, at least, and that’s what I really responded to. I had this idea that art should be repeatable and it shouldn’t just be for the elite and I feel that that’s true.” — Sophia Takal

I’ll just say this up front: I did not like Takal’s re-make of the cult classic Black Christmas, which got a lot of scathingly negative attention at the time of its release (the negativity seemed REALLY out-sized to me. Like, calm DOWN, everybody.) I think it’s important to be honest when things work and/or don’t work. Too much “stan” culture is not good for criticism. HOWEVER: I had been paying attention to Sophia Takal for years, and I was excited for Black Christmas, and bummed out when it didn’t highlight her special qualities as a filmmaker. (Takal’s husband, Lawrence Michael Levine, is also interesting – they collaborate on most everything. His most recent film, Black Bear, is dedicated to Takal. I get into their artistic partnership in my review.)


Always Shine (2016)

What really turned me on to Takal was her 2016 film Always Shine. I reviewed for Ebert. It wears its influences (Persona, Mulholland Drive, Three Women) on its sleeve – but it also shows Takal’s specific sensibility (or, what I would come to know as her sensibility, once I watched the rest of her work). I REALLY love Always Shine.

As the hype for Black Christmas ratcheted up, making me feel uncomfortable – there was something about it that felt off – not necessarily Takal’s fault, but the marketing – I felt this weird urgent sense that I needed to write about Takal’s work as a whole, because I feared what was coming – a bunch of newbies trashing her new film, without having seen the rest of it. This is a new and young female filmmaker, who has been making films for over 10 years at this point. Let’s put this shit into perspective.


Green (2011)

So I wrote about Takal’s work for Film Comment, and really zeroed in on what I think makes her special and for sure someone to watch. Listen, you direct a film like Always Shine, it’s gonna take a lot more than one bad film to turn me away. I’m not a stan, but I am an admirer, and I look forward to seeing whatever it is she does next. Sophia Takal is the real deal.


Always Shine (2016)

 
 
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“My dear child, I’m sure we shall be allowed to laugh in Heaven!” — Edward Lear

Posted on May 12, 2026 by sheila

Edward Lear (the “father of nonsense”) was born on this day in 1812 in London.

I could recite from memory a lot of his stuff when I was pretty close to the age I was in the “candid” photo above. The Big Golden Book Of Poetry was so read in our family that the cover faded completely, the binding fell apart, and I can still see all of the illustrations, and where they were placed on the page. (My mother still has the book.)

When I read those poems now, I hear in my father’s gravelly voice.

“The Owl and the Pussy-cat” is still a favorite. The verse rocks and sings.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat
by Edward Lear

I
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

II
Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

III
‘Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

QUOTES:

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets writes that Lear, and Lewis Carroll (Lear’s younger peer) wrote “nonsense verse” which

“[Lear] strays into the musical zones that Longfellow mapped with his self-propelling meters.”

Was Edward Lear the inventor of the term “snail mail” in this whimsical letter to Evelyn Baring? The letter itself reads, along the twists of the snail shell:

Feb. 19. 1864 Dear Baring Please give the enclosed noat to Sir Henry – (which I had just written:-& say that I shall have great pleasure in coming on Sunday. I have sent your 2 vols of Hood to Wade Brown. Many thanks for lending them to me – which they have delighted me eggstreamly Yours sincerely

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Lear’s masterwork is his first volume, A Book of Nonsense (1846), replete with his unique limericks and his mysterious lyrics of visionary nonsense that fuse Shelley and Tennyson in quest-poems that are at once laments for lost love and yet weirdly boisterous.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, November 24, 1965:

The great Victorians for me are Tennyson, Browning, Lear, Fitzgerald, Arnold and Hopkins.

William Pitt:

“Don’t tell me of a man’s being able to talk sense; every one can talk sense. Can he talk nonsense?”

Carolyn Wells:

In regard to his verses, Lear asserted that “nonsense, pure and absolute,” was his aim throughout; and remarked, further, that to have been the means of administering innocent mirth to thousands was surely a just excuse for satisfaction. He pursued his aim with scrupulous consistency, and his absurd conceits are fantastic and ridiculous, but never cheaply or vulgarly funny.

George Orwell, “Funny But Not Vulgar”:

However, there are subtler methods of debunking than throwing custard pies. There is also the humour of pure fantasy, which assaults man’s notion of himself as not only a dignified but a rational being. Lewis Carroll’s humour consists essentially in making fun of logic, and Edward Lear’s in a sort of poltergeist interference with common sense. When the Red Queen remarks, “I’ve seen hills compared with which you’d call that one a valley”, she is in her way attacking the bases of society as violently as Swift or Voltaire. Comic verse, as in Lear’s poem “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo”, often depends on building up a fantastic universe which is just similar enough to the real universe to rob it of its dignity. But more often it depends on anticlimax — that is, on starting out with a high-flown language and then suddenly coming down with a bump.

From Michael Sala, Lear’s Nonsense:

Edward Lear, a skillful illustrator of science books (botany, zoology), started his literary career by chance. As a matter of fact, “most of Lear’s limericks were not written with publication in mind, but rather as gifts for specific children” (Rieder 1998: 50). He was persuaded toward their publication by the enthusiastic reaction of his young audience.

There was an old person of Rimini
Who said, “Gracious! Goodness! O Gimini!
When they said, “Please be still!” she ran down a hill
And was never once heard of at Rimini.

There was an old person of Sestri
Who sat himself down in the vestry,
When they said “You are wrong!” – he merely said “Bong!”
That repulsive old person of Sestri.

This is a typical example of Lear’s limericks, and a perfect example of what is intended by nonsense, that is to say, “language lifted out of context, language turning on itself [a] language made hermetic, opaque” (Stewars 1979: 3), language that “resists contextualization, so that it refers to ‘nothing’ instead of to the word’s commonsense designation [and] refusing to work as conventional communication ” (Rieder 1998: 49). In other words, what happened to the old person of Rimini? What is wrong with the person of Sestri? It is impossible to answer, because, despite the perfectly grammatical use of the words, they don’t tell much. They are just bizarrely arranged so as to sound appealing. If there is a shadow of a story, usually it is nothing more than that: only a shadow of a story (without causes or consequences). In Lear’s limericks, words introduce “a number of possibilities, including dangerous and violent ones, and at the same time disconnect those possibilities from the real world, that is, from what goes on after the game is over” (Rieder 1996: 49).

Vivien Noakes:

In the limericks [. . .] to an extent difficult for us now to imagine, Lear offered children the liberation of unaffected high spirits [. . .]. Here are grown-ups doing silly things, the kind of things grown-ups never do [. . .]. for all their incongruity, there is in the limericks a truth which is lacking in the improving literature of the time. In an age when children were loaded with shame, Lear attempted to free them from it.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, January 4, 1960:

Your poem [“Brazil, January 1, 1502”] is one of your most beautiful, I think–wonderful description, the jungle turning into a picture, then into history and the jungle again, with a practical, absurd, sad, amused and frightened tone for the Christians. I have been re-reading [Edward] Lear whom you like so much. I guess it would be far-fetched to find his hand here; yet I think he would have enjoyed your feeling, your disciplined gorgeousness, your drawing, your sadness, your amusement.

Susan Chitty on Lear’s ballads:

Like the limericks, they celebrate the outsider. Their principal characters are socially unacceptable.

Sir Edward Strachey:

Mr. Lear was delighted when I showed to him that this couple [the Owl and the Pussy-cat] were reviving the old law of Solon, that the Athenian bride and bridegroom eat a quince together at their wedding.

More information on Edward Lear here.

 
 
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“I know that for myself, what is deeper than I understand is often the most pertinent to me and the most lasting.” — Lorine Niedecker

Posted on May 12, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

I had not heard of Lorine Niedecker, until 2010, when I took the Norton Anthology out to Block Island with me, in the hopes it would help me get back to reading again. It worked. And it was fun to re-read things like “The Waste Land” and also struggle through some of Pound’s Cantos, stuff like that. It was a tough time for me and so I needed tough stuff to read. And somehow, I came across Lorine Niedecker. There is a brief introductory note for her, not a long one, since she lived in the same place her entire life, not many “events” to speak of, but her poems are incredible.

I am so glad I encountered her.

She was born in 1903 in Wisconsin and spent her whole life on Black Hawk Island. She lived with her parents, and took care of them when they became elderly. She went to college briefly. She had many jobs, some menial, some not. Somewhere along in here, she started writing poetry. In 1931, she read Louis Zukofsky’s “Objectivist” issue of Poetry magazine, and traveled to New York to meet him. They ended up carrying on a long correspondence. The “Objectivists” wanted to create poems that were not sentimental or ornamental – simple, clean, clear. Lorine Niedecker is a classic example of an Objectivist poet, although she had some ambivalent feelings about the movement became so associated with. Her poems have no “needless words”, they almost feel like haikus: miniature little sketches, with minimum subjectivity. There were a couple of Objectivist anthologies published in the 30s, and her work was not included. Her first volume was published in the 1940s.

“Condensery.” — Lorine Niedecker’s term for poetry

There was another side to her, though, a surrealist side, an expressionist side, where she experimented with language, with what it could do and express. She admired Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. She was pulled towards their experiments, how reality itself broke down in the language, attempting to express something else beyond the literal surface of things, of OBJECTS, again. How about the inner life of objects? Gertrude Stein wrote a whole book attempting to do that (Tender Buttons: Objects).

She was a well-read curious intellectual woman, and her poems are not about flowers, and leaves, and emotions. She wrote poems about Darwin, the Chinese poet Li Po, the North American explorers, and in this way, she is an heir of Ezra Pound, whose poems have a similar collage effect, full of references to existing material.

While I was out on Block Island, I read all of her work anthologized, the first one being her long poem on Thomas Jefferson. To get into Niedecker, you need at least a baseline knowledge, reference points in history. She expects people to be familiar with the events of Jefferson’s life (or Darwin’s life, or whoever), and her references come fast and furious. She doesn’t slow down for people who didn’t pay attention in school. There are footnotes in the Norton Anthology: with Niedecker, at times, you really need them.

But Niedecker waits for no one.

Niedecker uses quotes and fragments from the letters of Thomas Jefferson in order to create the poem (if you’ve read his letters, you’ll recognize a lot of this).

Thomas Jefferson

I
My wife is ill!
And I sit
waiting
for a quorum

II
Fast ride
his horse collapsed
Now he saddled walked

Borrowed a farmer’€™s
unbroken colt
To Richmond

Richmond How stop
Arnold’s redcoats
there

III
Elk Hill destroyed—
Cornwallis
carried off 30 slaves

Jefferson:
Were it to give them freedom
he’d have done right

IV
Latin and Greek
my tools
to understand
humanity

I rode horse
away from a monarch
to an enchanting
philosophy

V
The South of France

Roman temple
€œsimple and sublime

Maria Cosway
harpist
on his mind

white column
and arch

VI
To daughter Patsy: Read—
read Livy

No person full of work
was ever hysterical

Know music, history
dancing

(I calculate 14 to 1
in marriage
she will draw
a blockhead)

Science also
Patsy

VII
Agreed with Adams:
send spermaceti oil to Portugal
for their church candles

(light enough to banish mysteries?:
three are one and one is three
and yet the one not three
and the three not one)

and send slat fish
U.S. salt fish preferred
above all other

VIII
Jefferson of Patrick Henry
backwoods fiddler statesman:

“He spoke as Homer wrote”
Henry eyed our minister at Paris—

the Bill of Rights hassle—
he remembers . . .

in splendor and dissipation
he thinks yet of bills of rights”

IX
True, French frills and lace
for Jefferson, sword and belt

but follow the Court to Fontainebleau
he could not

house rent would have left him
nothing to eat

. . .

He bowed to everyone he met
and talked with arms folded

He could be trimmed
by a two-month migraine

and yet
stand up

X
Dear Polly:
I said No no frost

in Virginia—the strawberries
were safe

I’d have heard €”I’m in that kind
of correspondence

with a young daughter
if they were not

Now I must retract
I shrink from it

XI
Political honors
“splendid torments”
“If one could establish
an absolute power
of silence over oneself”

When I set out for Monticello
(my grandchildren
will they know me?)

How are my young
chestnut trees—

XII
Hamilton and the bankers
would make my country Carthage

I am abandoning the rich—
their dinner parties—

I shall eat my simlins
with the class of science

or not at all
Next year the last of labors

among conflicting parties
Then my family

we shall sow our cabbages
together

XIII
Delicious flower
of the acacia

or rather

Mimosa Nilotica
from Mr. Lomax

XIV
Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed
to father and sister in Paris

by way of London—Abigail
embraced her—Adams said

“in all my life I never saw
more charming child”

Death of Polly, 25,
Monticello

XV
My harpsichord
my alabaster vase
and bridle bit
bound for Alexandria
Virginia

The good sea weather
of retirement
The drift and suck
and die-down of life
but there is land

XVI
These were my passions:
Monticello and the villa-temples
I passed on to carpenters
bricklayers what I knew

and to an Italian sculptor
how to turn a volute
on a pillar

You may approach the campus rotunda
from lower to upper terrace
Cicero had levels

XVII
John Adams’ eyes
dimming
Tom Jefferson’s rheumatism
cantering

XVIII
Ah soon must Monticello be lost
to debts
and Jefferson himself
to death

XIX
Mind leaving, let body leave
Let dome live, spherical dome
and colonnade

Martha (Patsy) stay
The Committee of Safety
must be warned€

Stay youth—Anne and Ellen
all my books, the bantams
and the seeds of the senega root

QUOTES:

Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960s:

You and Jonathan have thrown off the shackles of the sentence and the wide melody. For me the sentence lies in wait — all those prepositions and connectives — like an early spring flood. A good thing my follow-up feeling has always been condense, condense.

Lorine Niedecker, letter to Mary Hoard:

I had spoken about Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivist Movement…Objects, objects. Why are people, artists above all, so terrifically afraid of themselves? Thank god for the Surrealist tendency running side by side with objectivism.

Mary Oppen:

New York was overwhelming, and she was alone, a tiny, timid, small-town girl. She escaped the city and returned to Wisconsin. Years later we began to see her poems, poems which decribed her life; she chose a way of hard physical work, and her poetry emerged from a tiny life. From Wisconsin came perfect small gems of poetry written out of her survival, from the crevices of her life, that seeped into poems.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

It is one of the great ironies of modern literary history that Pound, an anti-Semite, living in and supporting Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, inspired the left-wing Objectivist American Jews–Oppen, Zukofsky, and Charles Reznikoff–as well as Bunting, the one prominent British member of the Objectivist group, and the American Lorine Niedecker, the only woman.

Carl Rakosi:

With her the external world, the object is primary, it is most out front, and the subjective is most subsumed, so Objectivist is appropriate for her.

Louis Zukofsky, letter to Lorine Niedecker:

Don’t read French Surrealistes, nor Carroll, nor etc — lemme tell you. Read the newspaper, talk more to people.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Niedecker did not appear in [Louis] Zukofsky’s 1931 issue of Poetry, but when she read it, she traveled to meet him in New York. Niedecker’s free verse, like Oppen’s, exhibits precision and compression, silence and riddling ellipses. Some of her crystalline poems are about nature, while others are made up of “found” materials–collagelike sequences that fit together quotations from historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin.

Lorine Niedecker, letter to Harriet Monroe:

Certain words of a sentence — prepositions, connectives, pronouns — belong up toward full consciousness, while strange and unused words appear only in subconscious…in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives, etc. are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity.

Lorine Niedecker, to Clayton Eshleman, 1960s:

I know that my cry all these years has been into – into – and under — close your eyes and let the music carry you — And what have I done? — cut — cut — too many words…

Lorine Niedecker, note to herself:

I’m going back to the Imagists, to the wordy ones and the strange rhythms, I have suppressed myself too long.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Niedecker is a second-generation modernist whose aesthetic can be traced back through Objectivism to Ezra Pound’s Imagism, and beyond that to the wit and cryptic asceticism of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Like other Objectivists, she aims at precision, compression, and hard, clean images–images unclouded by authorial sentiment.

Lorine Niedecker, letter to Mary Hoard:

I have said to Z that the most important part of memory is its non-expressive, unconscious part…We remember. A nerve sense, a vibration, a colour, a rhythm.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Sometimes abandoning the sentence, she juxtaposes images, phrases, and words in parataxis. Like Imagist poems and East Asian haiku, Niedecker’s poems are exercises in miniature, whether at the level of poem or of strophe.

Lorine Niedecker:

There must be an art . . . somewhere, somehow entirely precious, abstract, dehumanized, and intense because of these [qualities].

 
 
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“If you are going to do good work, you have to risk failing badly.” — Natasha Richardson

Posted on May 11, 2026 by sheila

It’s Natasha Richardson’s birthday.

I have seen a couple of live performances I will never forget, performances where I think as they are happening: I am so lucky to have witnessed this.. It’s rare. Natasha Richardson, in Cabaret, gave one of those performances.

In all my life, I have never seen such a performance. Before or since. I feel so fortunate I went to see it with my friend Brooke, and we got such amazing seats, right up front (this was in its earliest run, when you sat at little tables like you were at the Kit Kat Club).

I wrote about Richardson’s performance of Sally Bowles on House Next Door, as a tribute, a couple of days after she died, tragically, way too young.

Two clips of Richardson’s performance below:

 
 
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.

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“Maybe it’s a generational thing but I never wanted to be the best black dancer in the world. I wanted to be the best.” — Judith Jamison

Posted on May 10, 2026 by sheila

“The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn’t know what it looked like. I didn’t want to see it. I had to start in the dark.”
― Judith Jamison, Dancing Spirit

I feel so fortunate I saw her on Broadway in Sophisticated Ladies! I was a kid and had no idea what was going on, really, but I appreciated every second of it (it was only the second show I saw on Broadway). There is quite a bit of footage of Sophisticated Ladies, but, sadly, due to an injury Jamison was out of the show during filming. But it lives in my head!

Years later, I studied at Alvin Ailey, which is just wild, considering I am NOT a dancer. My grad school’s movement classes were held at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater on West 55th Street, and we were taught by Ailey company members. I completely understood the honor of all of this. It took me about a month to get over my sense of awe. I was there three mornings a week so it did become normal. But still, there was an element of, oops, sorry, let me just sneak in and out of the locker room and not get in anyone’s way. We were trained in Lester Horton’s famous “flat back series” (a standard part of Ailey’s training, and really great for posture, sturdiness, and making strong shapes with your body). We all still reference this experience to each other (“Oh God, doing the flat back series at 8 a.m. before coffee, member?”). You had to have the bravery to launch yourself across those massive studio floors – without thinking, without hesitation – doing flat back with all your might – even if you felt shy. And the teachers would yell from the other side of the studio as you flat-backed your way towards them, “YES. THAT’S IT. YES. YES.” Grateful to all of them.


My great friend Shelagh and I, lying on the Alvin Ailey studio floor, at some ungodly hour of the morning before class. In winter, it was dark out when I got off the subway on my way to class.

It was incredible getting to be in the presence of all these people, and that legacy, not to mention – or TO mention – getting to attend the performances of their famous repertoire, including Jamison’s legendary dance piece “Cry”. (I didn’t see her do it, but it is an integral part of their repertory.). Amazing to get to be around all this, even in a tangential way.

^^ The only footage I’ve been able to find of Jamison dancing “Cry”.

Great interview with Jamison here:

I took classes there during Jamison’s time as Artistic Director, so I would sometimes get a glimpse of her in the hallways, surrounded by people, talking/listening seriously, and she was imposing and beautiful, sometimes with a long silk scarf draped around her neck and shoulders falling down her back – her posture so erect and graceful, something only years of dance training could create.

It was surreal and moving, since I had the vivid memory of being a gaga kid, sitting in the balcony at the Lunt-Fontaine theatre, drinking in the stunning show and the dancing, and the striking silhouettes she created just with her body, silhouettes filled with power and intention: you knew who she was, even when she was backlit. And there she was, years later, right in front of me.

What an honor it was, to be – briefly – in the orbit of such an artist.

 
 
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.

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“Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.” — Austin Clarke

Posted on May 9, 2026 by sheila

“He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term ‘Anglo-Irish’ is meaningless.” – Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets

Austin Clarke was born in Dublin on this day in 1896. He is the leading Irish poet in the generation after W.B. Yeats. John Montague called Clarke “the first completely Irish poet to write in English.” He had a similar journey to other Irishmen at that time. 1916 radicalized him (he was in college at the time), although the pump was already primed, his parents were nationalists. He went to University College, Dublin – and I think ended up teaching there. He is a very Irish poet, his topics are Irish, his language and phrasing recognizably Irish. The problem was, as it was for so many, is that he sounded nothing like Yeats, and Yeats basically defined Irish poetry. Many Irish writers have made their names in opposition to Yeats. (See: Patrick Kavanagh. See: Austin Clarke.) Yeats had to be dealt with. Yeats is a fearsome influence, to this day. Clarke imitated him a bit in the beginning (unavoidable), before setting himself free. Yeats has a mystical lyricism, which Clarke doesn’t share at all. His attitude – and language – is much more grim.

Penal Law

Burn Ovid with the rest. Lovers will find
A hedge-school for themselves and learn by heart
All that the clergy banish from the mind,
When hands are joined and head bows in the dark.

More after the jump. Clarke is difficult. But worth it! And important!

Continue reading →

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“As long as politics is this confused and evil, turning away from it would be cowardly.” — 20th century hero Sophie Scholl

Posted on May 9, 2026 by sheila

“I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best that I could do for my nation. I therefore do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct.” — Sophie Scholl

She was born on this day.

In an atmosphere of almost phantasmagorical mind control and propaganda, how does one keep one’s bearings? George Orwell’s 1984 clearly breaks down the difficulty of not just resisting, but to even have a CONCEPT of resistance, when the society around you is so totalitarian – the State is so total – that no aspect of life remains untouched. There is no way out – not just for the citizens, or the State’s victims, but there is no way out for the MIND. Totalitarian states all devote a lot of time and energy and money to imprisoning peoples’ minds.

Sophie Scholl is a reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way. Scholl, a German college student, saw what was happening in her country during the world war Hitler started, and resisted it, calling for other Germans to resist too. In 1943, for these actions, she was beheaded by the Nazis. She was just 21 years old,

“It is possibly the most spectacular moment of resistance that I can think of in the twentieth century … The fact that five little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.” — Playwright Lillian Garrett-Groag

As a member of the Weiße Rose (White Rose), a resistance group made up mostly of students at the University of Munich, Scholl devoted herself to passing out leaflets, covering walls with anti-fascist graffiti, warning other Germans about the Nazis, calling for a larger and more widespread resistance. The White Rose protested the war, and accused the Nazis of committing war crimes. They called on Germans to join their extremely small numbers.

One of the White Rose pamphlets reads:

“Our current ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we don’t need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don’t you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?”

Another pamphlet reads:

“And now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present ‘state’ in the most effective way….We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end: Sabotage in armament plants and war industries, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organizations of the National Socialist Party. Obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine….Try to convince all your acquaintances…of the senselessness of continuing, of the hopelessness of this war; of our spiritual and economic enslavement at the hands of the National Socialists; of the destruction of all moral and religious values; and urge them to passive resistance!”

Leaflet #2 read:

Since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way … The German people slumber on in dull, stupid sleep and encourage the fascist criminals. Each wants to be exonerated of guilt, each one continues on his way with the most placid, calm conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!

Leaflet # 4 read:

“We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

Sophie Scholl was one of THE heroes of the 20th century. Because of Sophie Scholl, no one can comfortably say: “Well, we didn’t know what was happening …” “How could we have known what was really going on?” or: “I knew things were bad, but what could I do? There was no way to fight back.” Well, Sophie Scholl knew. Sophie Scholl fought back. Do not erase Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans Scholl, and their friends. She risked her life. She lost her life. She knew what the consequences would be for what she did. She did it anyway. And, perhaps most importantly: she herself was not at risk. She was a German citizen. She was not Jewish. She was not in any threatened minority group. She and her siblings, like every other child in Germany, had been involved in the Youth Movement, eventually known as the Hitler Youth (one of the many examples of how normal German institutions were morphed into the State propaganda, how the State tentacled itself into every aspect of German life, co-opting everything). She had enjoyed the Youth Movement activities, the camping, the hiking, the community. When she 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, literally anyone who isn’t the dominant group (and even the dominant group isn’t safe). Basically: care about other people enough to take risks for them. That’s the REAL heroism.

In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James wrote of Sophie Scholl:

The world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous young woman from the same period. In addition to an image of how life can be affirmed bya helpless victim, we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn’t have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were.

Sophie Scholl was born in 1921 in Forchtenberg, the fourth of what would eventually be six children. Her parents raised their children in an atmosphere of political debate, open discussion, and, most importantly, the blinding light of rational critical thinking. Mr. Scholl included the children in discussions of moral and ethical issues, debating things at the dinner table, talking about the issues that faced Germany. Her brother Hans, three years older than Sophie, had become completely disillusioned with “Hitler Youth” and, by extension, the Nazi party. He was outspoken about it and was arrested for his dissident views in 1937. Meanwhile, Sophie Scholl found school increasingly difficult because the curriculum was now totally about indoctrination into Nazi ideology. (Was she able to have this awareness because of the open environment at home? Because of her father’s views? We don’t really know, and ultimately it doesn’t really matter.)


Hans and Sophie Scholl, left, and Christoph Probst, right, in Munich in 1942

Scholl and her brother Hans both attended the University of Munich. Their circle of friends were artists, philosophers, all politically aware. They talked about the dictatorship in which they lived. They knew it WAS a dictatorship, which, again, is something many people claim they hadn’t realized at the time, swept away in the brainwashing fervor of all the propaganda. This was where their White Rose activities began. Getting paper during wartime for the leaflets was terribly difficult. So was finding a printer. Every single thing they were doing – using a printing press for their own anti-government purposes – was incredibly dangerous. They knew it. Distributing the pamphlets was treacherous for them. They knew it.

In a postscript to his 1996 article about Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Clive James writes:

Hans Scholl, the master spirit of the White Rose resistance group in Munich, had already turned against his Hitler Youth upbringing, but his trajectory towards outright subversion was accelerated after one of [Stefan] Zweig’s books was taken away from him by a Nazi official. Scholl thought that if the Nazis were against that, they were against the Germany he cared about. (Goldhagen’s failure to so much as mention the White Rose, incidentally, is the kind of omission that makes a mockery of his scientific vocabulary. In science, the fact that doesn’t fit the theory eliminates the theory, not the other way about. Hans and Sophie Scholl were gentiles born into a household formed by liberal German culture, were well aware that Jews had helped to form that culture, and were ready to die for it rather than betray it. If Goldhagen wants to go on asking why the German population did not rise up, he might consider the manner in which those two brave young people perished. The guillotine is a big price to pay for a conviction.)

There are a series of letters Sophie wrote to her long-time boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel, which gives us a window into this young woman’s life, who she was, the fullness of her, her thoughtfulness, humor, insights, her exhaustion with how “political” life was, that in Germany everything was infiltrated by politics, there was no space free of it (one of the main aims of totalitarianism).

Letter to Fritz, February 26, 1938

Dear Fritz! I’m actually lying in bed and have just woken up from a dream. In the dream I was at a camp. In my dreams I am normally traveling. Next to the camp there was a big lake. In the evening I went to see a woman who owned a boat. We sailed out across the lake and by then it was nighttime. The sky was completely overcast and in front of a wall of clouds hung the moon, a great pale disk that illuminated the whole lake. Illuminate isn’t quite the right word. The whole lake was a sort of pale grey. That’s nothing unusual but some distance away from the moon there was a little red dot glowing behind the clouds. “That’s the sun,” the woman explained to me. “We live in the only place on earth where you can see the sun and the moon at the same time.” I don’t know what happened after that. They say that dreams come from the noises you hear when you are asleep. That could well be true. Anyway. I like dreaming. I live in a strange world in my dreams where I am never quite happy. But still. Please don’t think I’m being silly or sentimental. I’d hate that. I’m actually quite the materialist. Good night. Sophie.

Letter to Fritz, April 9, 1940

My dear Fritz. I’ve got a feeling that a letter from you will come tomorrow. I hope I’m not fooling myself. Sometimes I dread the war and I’m on the brink of losing all hope. I don’t even want to think about it but soon there won’t be anything but politics, and as long as politics is this confused and evil turning away from it would be cowardly. You’re probably smiling right now and thinking “She’s such a girl” but I think I’d be far happier if I weren’t constantly under all this pressure. I could spend time doing other things with a much clearer conscience. But everything else comes second now. It’s just that we’ve been brought up to be political. Now you’ll be laughing again. I just want to be with you and see and feel nothing but the fabric of your suit. Is this a bad letter? It’s not a breath of fresh air in your musty room. In fact, it’s probably making it even mustier. Don’t hold it against me. Sophie.

On the 18th of February, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl took stacks of what would be the final White Rose pamphlet to a building on the campus of University of Munich and scattered the pamphlets around the building’s atrium. A janitor spotted them and reported it. Hans and Sophie were arrested that day.


The arrest of siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl

The two were put on trial on February 21st. Look at that date. To call it a “trial” is to make a mockery of the word.

On the back of her indictment, Scholl wrote one word: Freiheit. (Freedom.)

In the People’s Court on February 21, before the sadistic Judge Roland Freisler, Scholl declared bravely: “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.” She also challenged the court: “You know as well as we do that the war is lost. Why are you so cowardly that you won’t admit it?”

21 year old girl.

The two were sentenced to death and guillotined just hours later.

Clive James, in Cultural Amnesia, wrote:

She didn’t stand a chance anyway. The mere fact that the reliably fanatical Roland Freisler had been sent to preside over the court sealed her doom. But once again in her young life she was bearing witness, and to such effect that even the clinically insane Freisler was momentarily rendered speechless. When he got his breath back, he used it to remind her of his mission, which was to render her speechless permanently. Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich on February 22, 1943, at five o’clock in the afternoon. She was twenty-one years old. In life she had been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved….She radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it.

Hans Scholl’s last words before his execution:

Es lebe die Freiheit! (Let Freedom live!)

Sophie Scholl’s last recorded words were:

“Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go… What does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

Their White Rose friends, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, Hans Konrad Leipelt, and many others were also rounded up in the following weeks and months, and many of them were tried and executed too. It wasn’t a big group. It had no “reach.” But they were RIGHT. And their RIGHT-ness should shame anyone who declares “we had no idea what was going on and even if we had what could we have done?”

Friedrich Reck, a conservative establishment German – who had been disgusted by the Weimar Republic – I mean, the man was basically a reactionary – nevertheless was horrified by the rise of the Nazis, horrified by the brutality and cruelty and corruption, kept a secret journal between 1936 and 1944, where he howled out his RAGE at what was happening in his country. He actually knew many of the main players, so you get personal impressions of Himmler, etc. Reck considered the document so dangerous he would hide it in different places, burying it in the woods, etc. He was eventually arrested by the Nazis and sent to Dachau, where he died. Amazingly, his journal survived, and it has been published with the title Diary of a Man in Despair, and it is essential reading. In March, 1943 he writes:

At just this moment, I learn for the first time of the martyrdom of the Scholls.

I never saw these two young people. In my rural isolation, I got only bits and pieces of the whole story of what they were doing, but the significance of what I heard was such I could hardly believe it. The Scholls are the first in Germany to have had the courage to witness for the truth. The movement they left at their deaths will go on, and as is always the case with martyrdom, they have sown seeds which will raise important fruit in time to come. This young brother and sister went boldly about their work, almost as though they were defying death. Their betrayal came through a miserable university proctor, who was then so afraid of being beaten or otherwise punished, that he had to be taken into protective custody.

They were sentenced to death by a second example of the Rossdorfer-type. They died in all the radiance of their courage and readiness for sacrifice, and thereby attained the pinnacle in lives well lived.

He then goes on to describe their background, which he learned from some of the people who knew the Scholls. Clearly he was making his own inquiry into this astonishing act of resistance. He continues:

Their bearing before the tribunal — that of the girl, especially — was inspiring. They flung their contempt of the court, the Party, and the insane, would-be great man, Hitler, into the faces of their judges, and at the end, did something which carries the icy breath of the Eternal about it for us who survive. For, with their last words, they repeated the warning once given by the condemned Knights of the Temple to their judges, that those who were persecuting them and those who stood behind them would ‘within a year be called to judgement before the throne of God.’ The curse pronounced by the Templars were realised to the extent that before a year was past both Pope Clemens V and King Philip IV of France were dead. It remains to be seen what will happen here in the course of the next year …

But the Scholls departed from this life quietly, and gravely and with wonderful dignity gave their young blood. On their gravestones let these words be carved, and let this entire people, which has lived in deepest degradation these last ten years, blush when it reads them: ‘Cogi non potest quisquis mori scit‘ — He who knows how to die can never be enslaved.

We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves, and stand before them, ashamed.

This is the story of these two children of our race: the latest, and God willing, the first Germans of a great rebirth of the spirit.

In one of her last letters to Fritz, dated November 7, 1942, Scholl wrote:

When will the time finally come when we won’t have to focus all our strength and all our attention on things that aren’t worth lifting a finger for? Every word is scrutinized before it’s even spoken in case there’s even a hint of ambiguity about it. Our trust in other people has to give way to mistrust and caution. Oh, how tiring and sometimes disheartening it is. But no. I won’t let anything take away my courage. These trivial things will not get the better of me when I know there are other joys that surpass them. When I think of this, my strength returns and I want to cry out a word of encouragement to everyone else who is oppressed.

Clive James wrote:

You would have thought to be as good as Hans Scholl was as good as you could get. He did what he did through no compulsion except an inner imperative, in the full knowledge that he would perish horribly if he were caught. Yet if moral integrity can be conceived of as a competition, Sophie left even Hans behind. Hans tried to keep her ignorant of what he was up to but when she found out she insisted on joining in. Throughout her interrogation, the Gestapo offered her a chance that they did not extend to her brother. They told her that if she recanted she would be allowed to live. She turned them down, and walked without a tremor to the blade. The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have had. She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down, and she was gone. Is that you? No, and it isn’t me either.

No. But we can learn – we MUST learn – from her example.

Freiheit!

“We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves, and stand before them, ashamed.” — Friedrich Reck

 
 
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.

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“He sold his soul to the devil to get to play like that.” – Mississippi bluesman Son House on Robert Johnson

Posted on May 8, 2026 by sheila

It’s Robert Johnson’s birthday.

cuar02_johnson0811

“[Robert] Johnson has created a mood so delicate and bleak one feels he cannot possible get out of his song alive.” – Greil Marcus

Recently, I was walking through Times Square and suddenly Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound” came on the iPod shuffle and … the music as a soundtrack changed the scene in front of me so much it was downright eerie. The song changed my perception of reality. The song made Times Square seem as doomed as Atlantis. Robert Johnson is impossible to listen to casually.

Back in 1986 Ralph Macchio appeared in a movie called Crossroads, inspired by the Robert Johnson legend, directed by the great Walter Hill (hey, I wrote about Walter Hill’s use of costumes in his films, including Crossroads!) This movie was probably my unofficial introduction to Robert Johnson. Listen, it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you get there.

The original story about Robert Johnson goes: he was hanging around blues clubs, young and eager and ambitious, but he couldn’t really play the guitar. Then, practically overnight, he became a genius. Son House, another Mississippi bluesman who knew Robert Johnson and had a huge influence on Johnson’s playing, was the one who theorized (probably as a joke) that Robert Johnson had met up with the devil at a crossroads one night and sold his soul. It was the only plausible explanation.

Much of Johnson’s story is lost in the obscurity of his time, when so much went unrecorded, when birth records and death records were spotty (especially for African-Americans). Robert Johnson lived a short life, but it was peripatetic: there are those who report seeing him play in this or that far-flung town, or heard him on the radio in the Pacific Northwest – a region he supposedly never visited … many of these rumors cannot be substantiated. This is all part of his legend. Robert Johnson was everywhere and nowhere.

And then he was gone. He did not leave much recorded music behind, and had no commercial success while he was alive (and back then, the idea of “commercial success” was different than it is now). His scratchy recordings only saw the light of day for a wide audience in 1961 when they were released in a box set. We are lucky to have what we do. It is partly from the wellspring of terror and dread and sin and lust – expressed by Robert Johnson – that modern American culture was born. Music like Johnson’s poured into and influenced the conservative stylings of country music – which formalized the message (hello, Louvin Brothers) and it also poured into and influenced the wailing piety of the gospel tradition – which set the message free … You put it all together – gospel, country, and rhythm & blues – and you get rock ‘n’ roll.

Robert Johnson hailed from the rich cultural landscape of the Delta. The wellspring of so much of American culture. Maybe THE wellspring. The Delta is one big Crossroads.

Greil Marcus wrote a chapter on Robert Johnson for Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. The Mississippi Delta blues is a vast subject of interconnectedness, and the rare recordings we have from the 1920s and 1930s still show the power of the music. Marcus wrote:

[Johnson] sang about the price he had to pay for the promises he tried, and failed, to keep; I think the power of his music comes in part from Johnson’s ability to shape the loneliness and chaos of his betrayal, or ours. Listening to Johnson’s songs, one almost feels at home in that desolate America; one feels able to take some strength from it, right along with the promises we could not give up if we wanted to.

More:

Johnson’s vision was a world without salvation, redemption, or rest; it was a vision he resisted, laughed at, to which he gave himself over, but most of all it was a vision he pursued. He walked his road like a failed, orphaned Puritan, looking for women and a good night, but never convinced, whether he found such things or not, that they were really what he wanted, and so framing his tales with old echoes of sin and damnation. There were demons in his songs – blues that walked like a man, the devil, or the two in league with each other – and Johnson was often on good terms with them; his greatest fear seems to have been that his desires were so extreme that he could satisfy them only by becoming a kind of demon himself.

Listen.

Marcus observes:

When acceptance and celebration mean the same thing, or when the two words must fill the same space in the mind at once, we can begin to grasp the tension and the passion of Robert Johnson’s music – because when one accepts one’s life by celebrating it, one also asks for something more. In Johnson’s blues the singer’s acceptance is profound, because he knows, and makes us see, that his celebration is also a revolt, and that the revolt will fail, because his images cannot deny the struggles they are meant to master.

This literal and emotional brand of faith helped create the music that would change American culture (and the world) forever. The music came out of poverty, disenfranchisement, racial inequality, and so did the religion (Pentecostal, Baptist, and others). There was none of the upper-class emphasis on the importance of appearing holy, which you find in the Anglican church and others. Dirt-poor people – both black and white – had similar cultural releases in the era and this was what maverick record-producer Sam Phillips sensed, and tried to capture in his early years at Sun Records. With the advent of radio, white people heard black music all the time, and black people listened to the strictly-white Grand Ole Opry broadcast, and someone like Ray Charles fell in love with Hank Williams, and someone like Elvis fell in love with Arthur Crudup. The world may have been racially segregated by law, but the AIR, and the air WAVES, were not.

In Robert Johnson’s music, you can hear the fragile birth of the revolution that was to come.

His songs vibrate with terror. Sometimes it is the singing of the song that keeps the terror at bay; other times, the terror emerges from the dead-center, it IS the song, and there is no escaping it.

Robert Johnson died on August 16, 1938 in Greenwood, Mississippi, under still-mysterious circumstances. Maybe he was killed by a jealous husband (Johnson was a ladies’ man). But the cause of death is still unknown. It was thought he might have been poisoned. There are also rumors he died of syphilis. There were other rumors, though, darker ones, that the Devil had come to collect. (This is the rumor Supernatural ran with in its episode “Crossroad Blues.”)

Robert Johnson’s songs feed into his legend. He sings about the Devil. He sings about Hell Hounds chasing him. He sings about hanging out at the crossroads. In the song “Hellhounds on my Trail”, you get a sense of increasing panic: best be moving on now, something’s coming up behind you.

I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail
And the day keeps on remindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail

If today was Christmas eve, if today was Christmas eve
And tomorrow was Christmas day
If today was Christmas eve and tomorrow was Christmas day
All I would need is my little sweet rider
Just to pass the time away, to pass the time away

You sprinkled hot foot powder, mmm, around my door
All around my door
You sprinkled hot foot powder, all around your daddy’s door
It keeps me with ramblin’ mind rider
Every old place I go, every old place I go

I can tell the wind is risin’, the leaves tremblin’ on the tree
Tremblin’ on the tree
I can tell the wind is risin’, leaves tremblin’ on the tree
All I need is my little sweet woman
And to keep my company, hey, hey, hey, hey, my company

“Blues falling down like hail”?? ACCURATE.

When you consider the history of dogs chasing down escaped slaves – and how frightening a country night could be in 1938 Mississippi if you were a black man … there’s real terror coursing through it. And not just terror, though. There’s a blunt practicality going on too, part of the appeal of the blues. He’s telling it like it is.

In “Crossroad Blues” there are verses about a sweet woman, and how he doesn’t have one and wishes he did … but the gist of the song is much darker:

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy now. Save poor Bob, if you please.”
Standin’ at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
I tried to flag a ride
Ain’t nobody seem to know me, babe
Everybody pass me by
I’m at the crossroads, baby, the sun goin’ down,
Standin’ at the crossroads, baby, the sun goin’ down
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
Lord I’m standin’ at the crossroad,
I’m sinkin’ down

Robert Johnson’s music can never be background music. If you played “Crossroad Blues” in an elevator, or as “muzak” in a supermarket, people would run screaming, or stand stock-still, pinned to the spot.

It is not just expression. It is confrontation.

 
 
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.

Posted in Music, On This Day | Tagged | 8 Comments

“You can’t study comedy; it’s within you. It’s a personality. My humor is an attitude.” — Don Rickles

Posted on May 8, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

When Don Rickles died, John Stamos and Bob Saget couldn’t stop talking about him. Rickles, famously cantankerous, had loved both of them like sons. The stories they told about Rickles, on the late-night talk-show circuit were hilarious, heartfelt, beautiful. Here they are on Jimmy Kimmel, who also had a close relationship with Rickles. At a certain point, you can tell the three men are barely hanging on. But they hold it together. My favorite bit is “All his passwords were Hitler.” Watch that bit of intel hit Kimmel. It hits, and then it hits deeper, and then it really LANDS.

Unfurling below, is a conversation Mitchell and I had about Don Rickles. It was part of a larger series. I would throw a name at Mitchell, ask him to describe that person in “one word” and then we would discuss. Here’s our discussion on Don Rickles. We had this conversation before Don Rickles died.

SOM: One word.

MF: Me.

To this day, he is my favorite comic. He makes me laugh out loud. He’s a babbling old fool at this point. Sometimes I think he loses focus and he gets laughs on his confusion and people think he’s making a joke and really he’s just confused. But there’s something about the tenacity of his personality … He’s this short funny-looking Jewish guy and he used that ferociousness. I am sure he was a son of a bitch. I am sure that his insult humor came out of surviving in New York as a kid, being short and Jewish, and I fucking relate to that. I grew up in an era of Prozac and Oprah so I took my anger and worked through it in therapy. I think he had the same thing and he worked through it and became a star.

MF:I just think he’s so clever and so funny and he somehow manages to be the most insulting person who has ever lived. He is the only person who could say “fag” and it wouldn’t offend me in any way shape or form, and that’s saying a lot. And I’ve never heard Don Rickles do that much homophobic stuff, although I’m sure that he did. He lived with his mother until he got married at 30 or 40 years old. Loved his mother, lived with her till he got married, and he got married late, and he stayed married to the same woman. She and Don and Bob Newhart and his wife are constant travel companions. They’re besties. I think he’s the best. There’s something about him that makes me laugh the second I see him. His stupid bald head, his barking. The funniest thing is him on Letterman, he’s just vicious. He has no boundaries.

MF:For some reason, he’s very familiar to me.

SOM: His tribute speech to Martin Scorsese at the AFI is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life.

MF: I have a tiny clip of him doing a roast of Barbra back in the 60s. And he was the emcee. He’s so funny. “So we’re here, is this your mother? Listen, you have a dummy for a daughter. She made it and now everyone’s schmeckling her. She’s a dummy. Basically, she’s a dummy.” It’s so funny. There are no sacred cows to him, and yet I think really that everything is a sacred cow to him, and that’s what’s funny.

SOM: At the end of the speech, he brings up Martin Scorsese’s mother and he lets his heart out. He’s a patriarch, in a way.

MF: It’s the same thing, with Barbra. At the end, he sort of concludes by saying, of course he’s joking, and he’s honored to be there, and to see all the amazing people there, what an honor it is for me to be here. He sort of always brings it back around. It would have been interesting if he had been given more acting roles. Obviously he didn’t have the time for it, because he had a busy career, but it would have been interesting if he had been used in different ways, in the way that Scorsese used him.

MF: I mean, he did a lot of movies but they were often forgettable. I can’t even see him without starting to laugh. Some people just have funny bones. Don Rickles has funny bones.

 
 
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.

“You throw your best punch, otherwise don’t do it.” — Don Rickles

Posted in Actors, On This Day | 7 Comments

“A lot of people try to equate me with guys like Frankie Avalon and Fabian, but in the old days I sold a lot of records over a period of time, and you can’t sustain that by being just another pretty face.” — Ricky Nelson

Posted on May 8, 2026 by sheila

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (Nelson) was a popular radio show in the 1940s, and an even more popular television show in the 1950s. It was a family affair. Their son Ricky was a beautiful child, and he grew up famous, or at the very least, well-known. He was talented and pretty. So I suppose it “made sense” he would be a teen idol, but … “teen idols” were a brand new thing when Nelson “hit”. He was the Platonic Ideal of the Teen Idol. The love for him was intense. Like, Leif Garrett intense. IYKYK. He grew up wealthy but his eventual wealth far surpassed his parents.

He was a teenager when Elvis hit, when the Sun rose from Memphis, and young Ricky was heavily influenced by all those people, especially Carl Perkins. He was musically inclined. He played multiple instruments. He thought he’d like to strike out on his own. In 1957 he did. He recorded an album. (This is the Nepo Baby part of the story. He said, “I’d love to record an album” and his dad hooked him up.) He recorded a couple of songs, including Fats Domino‘s “I’m Walkin'”. There were a couple of other songs which hit – like “Teenager Romance” but “I’m Walkin'” hit the charts first – AND he performed it on his parents’ show.

He was just so BEAUTIFUL. The built-in audience for Ozzie and Harriet expanded tenfold, with the teenagers now tuning in by the droves, flipping OUT about this boy they grew up with, who suddenly was this cool ROCK AND ROLL STAR. I’m sure all of this seemed a little bit silly to “real” music fans at the time, fans of, say, Carl Perkins or Johnny Cash. Nelson was “manufactured”, built for the teens, etc. True, sure. But, as he himself expressed in the quote making up the title of this little tribute, his VOICE wasn’t manufactured. His voice is so smooth, liquidy, beautiful to listen to. There’s no strain in his voice. It’s very pure.

Bob Dylan loves Ricky Nelson: Nelson makes a couple of appearances in Dylan’s autobiography:

“He sang his songs calm and steady, like he was in the middle of a storm, men hurling past him. His voice was sort of mysterious and made you fall into a certain mood.”
— Bob Dylan

Cosign, Bob.

The other song “A Teenager’s Romance” seemed programmed to be mainlined into actual teenagers’ veins. And it was. He ALSO performed it on his parents’ television show.

This is just speculation but I think Nelson – even with his talent and his outrageous good looks – even being famous – seemed fairly regular. A kid who went to high school. Played high school football. Had two recognizable parents. Middle-class vibe (even though they were rich). Elvis was exotic. Elvis was Southern. Elvis grew up poor. Elvis was remote, by comparison. He was from the Great Depression. Nelson was strictly post-WWII. Nelson was “one of us”, but with a California gleam. He was a peer. And the teenage girls went absolutely BANANAS.

These couple of hits did so well that Ricky the Rock Star was woven into Ozzie and Harriet, and he performed in almost every episode. He was still only 16-17 years old. A huge star. But still … kind of under his parents’ wing. An “employee” rather than an artist standing on his own two feet. So he put together his own band (cue: James Burton), where he could do more “rock” stuff, where he could hang out with peers, not grown adults looking to capitalize on him. He and James Burton were both teenagers. And hungry. Burton ended up playing with Ricky for the next decade (and played with everyone else too, including, famously, Elvis). Nelson sold more than Elvis in 1958-9. He was huge.

It was the late 50s. Elvis was a movie star. (We always have to state what HE was doing, since he both set the tone and departed from the group.) The Sun guys were branching out into their own thing. Buddy Holly arrived. It was a good time for young hot pop stars, inspired by rockabilly, it was still close to the source in 1957-9. Nelson had good material, too. For the time.

His fan base was super loyal and lasted until his untimely death in 1985. His daughter was on Square Pegs, and I was more aware of her than her dad, of course. I did know “Garden Party” because it was omnipresent on lite-radio. But it made no impression. I just wasn’t aware of the history, although I did somehow absorb the fact that he was famous. I remember the headlines when he died. But remained unaware of who the hell he was.

Then I watched Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks. I can’t remember when I saw it. It was on television. So I was probably in high school. The real start of my intentional movie-watching. I was already a Hawks fan. I had seen His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, and so I watched Rio Bravo. And fell madly in love with it. And it was then I put it all together. I was like, “ohhhhh so that’s Ricky Nelson. I get it now.” He wasn’t famous because of boring “Garden Party”. He was famous because of stuff like THIS. Hawks had him sing in the film, and it’s a beautiful scene. Everything pauses so we can listen and get pleasure from his voice.

Hawks said in a 1976 interview

People said, “You’re nuts for putting Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo.” He added about two million to the gross. Over in Japan they had Ricky Nelson in the middle of the posters, great big ones, over at the side were Wayne and Dean Martin.

This is the thing with Howard Hawks. I don’t believe anyone said to him, “You’re nuts for putting the biggest Teen Idol in the Western World into your movie.” I just don’t believe it. Hawks always positioned himself as a bold loner, surrounded by naysayers whom he always proved wrong. He’s my favorite director but … Of COURSE Ricky Nelson added to the gross. Of COURSE it pulled the teenagers in. The teenagers weren’t flocking to movies starring John Wayne and Dean Martin. I think it was in one of the interviews Hawks gave to Peter Bogdanovich where he said, “I put him in the movie because I liked listening to him sing. And if you have a good singer in your movie, why wouldn’t you let him sing?” That sounds more like it, at least more believable than a chorus of “You’re nuts”! Come on, Howard.

Probably Nelson’s biggest hit was “Mary Lou”, with a great guitar lick by teenage James Burton.

This reminds me of Keith Richards’ comment:

“I didn’t buy a Ricky Nelson record. I bought a James Burton record.”

Hopeful guitarists paid very close attention to what was going on with the guitarist always hovering at Nelson’s left.

The ’60s left Ricky Nelson behind. He tried to branch out into other styles, he tried to shake off the Teen Idol thing. But in the era of auteurist singer-songwriters, or bands like The Beach Boys … Nelson just couldn’t compete. People wanted him for only one thing. His “persona” was set in stone by the time he was 17 years old. He couldn’t “grow up”. Nobody would let him. Or, at least, that’s how he perceived it.

Ricky Nelson’s heyday so far pre-dates me it feels like ancient history, or at least so far removed from my time I am on the outside looking in. It’s weird: Elvis “rose” just a couple years before Nelson hit – and I have even LESS in common with Elvis, but he doesn’t feel as far away as Nelson does. Somehow. Elvis transcended. He certainly transcended – or at least seriously undercut – the Eisenhower ’50s. And so maybe, along with other rebels like James Dean, I related to his rebellion, his “fuck THIS” about … everything. Nelson didn’t have that. He had artistic ambitions and he put together a great band – obviously – when he was still a teenager, which means he wasn’t just an obedient employee or a lucky son of a celebrity. But … it lacks the edge of danger which Elvis brought, and I was always drawn to danger. And I might not have been an Elvis fan in my teens, but I knew who he was. I didn’t know Ricky Nelson. I knew his KID. Besides, I had my own Teen Idols to track. Loving Ralph Macchio was a full-time job.

But when I hear “I Wanna Be Loved”, basically his “Fever”, I get it completely. I completely understand why his numbers rival/surpass Elvis’, I understand why – for a time – he was one of the biggest stars in the world.

“I Wanna Be Loved” needs no translating, it needs no context. It’s a great track. Spare, stripped away. James Burton doing his thing. The little echo on the track. The perfect sound of Nelson’s voice. Calm and steady, “men hurling past him”. It still puts you in “a certain mood”.

Along with his daughter Tracy, Nelson has twin sons, Gunnar and Matthew, also musicians, devoted to carrying on their dad’s legacy.

 
 
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