“I paint the things I see and believe.” — Henry Ossawa Tanner

Posted on June 21, 2025 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

When I lived in Philadelphia – a million years ago, with my boyfriend who was in law school at U. Penn – I became intimately familiar with Henry Ossawa Tanner’s paintings since so many of them hang in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and we went to the museum almost every week. Or, at least a couple times a month. It’s such a great museum.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1859, Tanner was the first Black artist to break through into international fame. Although he was educated in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (he enrolled in 1879, and was the only black student), he ended up living for most of his life in Paris. I believe he is buried in Paris. (He was eventually given the Legion of Honor in 1923, France’s highest honor.) Tanner did not have to wait decades for his work to be recognized, he did not die forgotten and then his work was discovered posthumously. He was here to enjoy his success.

While at the Pennsylvania Academy, Tanner met Thomas Eakins who was busy revolutionizing American Art. Eakins saw something in Tanner, recognized his gift, and “took him on” in a powerful mentor relationship. (Tanner eventually painted Eakins’s portrait, one of only a few painters who got the honor). Of course Tanner faced racism every step of the way. He was unwelcome in almost every space he entered – although in France it was a little less restrictive. It had to have taken incredible guts and stick-to-it-iveness to stay the course.

Tanner started, as many painters do, with landscapes.


“View of the Seine looking toward Notre Dame”, 1896


“The Arch” (1919) – I saw this one at the Brooklyn Museum. It may be part of the collection there, Brooklyn-ites, take note.

There are a couple of reasons, though, why his work stands out from his fellow Impressionists. For me, looking at his work as a whole it is a reminder: Bring yourself to your work. Whatever that means. Do your thing, and do it as best you can, but don’t leave yourself out of it, because the only thing that is unique about you is your you-ness. That’s it. Only one of you. So BRING IT. I learned this young, because of pursuing acting. It helps you keep your perspective during cattle-call auditions, where it feels like you’re wandering in a wilderness of hugely talented people (and this is TRUE). All you can do is believe in yourself and that your unique-ness has value and that someone will want it, and if others DON’T want it, oh well, someone else will. SO. Tanner began painting small homey scenes showing people of color living their lives, doing simple activities, like praying before dinner, etc. This shattered stereotypes of depictions of black life. Even saying that is an understatement. Basically what Tanner was doing hadn’t existed in American art before he came along – at least not to the level at which he was doing it. He had an international reputation (mostly because of his later religious paintings, which I’ll get to in a second). He was famous. His paintings went around the world, under-cutting the racist depictions of black Americans for a very wide audience.

His most famous painting, to this day, is “The Banjo Lesson”.


“The Banjo Lesson” (1893)

The painting is very beautiful, but it’s also revolutionary, in a quiet insistent way. Most importantly, the painting challenges the minstrel context inherent in banjos, etc. The normal context of banjos in the racist context is a black man performing, being a clown, being happy with entertaining others. Tanner’s painting, however, shows a tender inter-generational scene, connoting continuity and family bonds – and – even more important – brings up questions/contemplations that go far beyond what is portrayed: had the father or maybe grandfather been a slave? Considering the year “The Banjo Lesson” was painted: Most probably he was. What we see here, then, is a man – who is poor, who lives in humble conditions, etc. – but he is free, he is a man free enough to have a little bit of leisure time to spend passing on to his grandson how to play the banjo.

One thing about Tanner’s use of light: Tanner’s work features so many instances of different light sources coming into shadows or hitting black skin, light pouring in from different quadrants. Tanner’s use of light is quite intricate. My boyfriend and I used to look at his paintings and try to figure out the light sources. Look closely at “The Banjo Lesson” and try to track where all the light is coming from. Because it’s not just from one place.

Later, Tanner moved into religious territory. Many of his religious paintings could also be classified as landscape paintings, and so it makes you think about the religious stories depicted in different ways. He’s giving you a different perspective, an Impressionistic and non-literal perspective, on a very familiar story. Like here: “The Good Shepherd”:

Isn’t that just stunning?

Two more:

He did many paintings of Mary, and all of them are haunting, beautiful, moody, with deep rich colors. His work makes you re-think Mary. Like here:

And the gorgeous “Flight Into Egypt”:

I am leaving the best for last: Tanner’s painting called “The Annunciation.”

“The Annunciation” is quite literally overwhelming when you see it in person.

Look at how far beyond the normal edge of symbolic allegorical painting Tanner had gone! Seek out “The Annunciation” if you’re ever in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’ll take your breath away. I seriously gasped the first time I saw it.

Tanner died in Paris in 1937. Happy birthday to this pioneer.

 
 
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 Art/Photography, On This Day | Tagged | 5 Comments

“I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.” — Paul Muldoon

Posted on June 20, 2025 by sheila

“I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already know.” – Paul Muldoon

It’s his birthday today.

Like Seamus Heaney was, Paul Muldoon is a giant in modern poetry, and, also like Heaney, a rural Ulster man. He grew up on a farm in County Armagh, a Catholic in the middle of a Protestant majority. His parents tried to shield the family from the political realities of the moment, although they were nationalists. The Troubles reverberate through Muldoon’s verse. He’s published over 30 books of poetry. He is now a professor at Princeton. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize. He’s won every prize.

He went to Queen’s University Belfast, where Seamus Heaney was one of his teachers (post on him here). It was a hot time in Belfast, not just politically, but also in the literary scene, and Paul Muldoon was very much a part of that. Some of the names at the time: Michael Longley (post here), Derek Mahon (post on him here), Ciarán Carson (post here), Medbh McGuckian (post on her here), Frank Ormsby, Muldoon – they were all part of a writer’s workshop in Belfast called the Belfast Group. Much of Heaney’s earliest work came out of it.

Muldoon is a big risk-taker in his verse, just like Frost was. He is dazzling, but not showy. The pages of today’s poetry journals are filled with Muldoon imitators. Muldoon is a brainiac, as most autodidacts are. He is voracious in curiosity and scope. Information is there to be used, messed with.

With all of this, Muldoon is also an eloquent poet of “the Troubles”.

While he often writes long poems, today I’m posting a brief one. It’s only five lines. Five lines is all you need to describe an entire WORLD … if you’re as good as Paul Muldoon, that is.

Ireland

The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it’s lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.

QUOTES:

Paul Muldoon:

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

He was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1951 and brought up near the Moy, a village to which his poems return. Muldoon’s mother was a teacher with strong literary interests, his father a farm laborer friendly to the Republican cause, a Lawrentian formula that resulted not in Sons and Lovers but in poems about complementarities and incompatibilities. Fruitful and tragic misalliances are a recurrent theme in his poems, wired and triggered by ironies that can be unexpectedly savage or heartbreaking.

Roger Conover, Eire-Ireland:

Muldoon’s is a poetry which sees into things, and speaks of the world in terms of its own internal designs and patterns.

Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, on Muldoon’s Mules:

A strange, rich second collection.

Adam Kirsch, New Republic:

If virtuosity is all that a poet can display, if his poems demand attention simply because of their elaborateness and difficulty, then he has in some sense failed.

Michael Schmidt:

[Paul Muldoon] read Frost with special attention, though the American’s impact on his prosody and narrative strategies is limited, except when he is producing, as in “The Mountain” ironic connections.

Paul Muldoon:

[Robert] Frost was important to me early on because his line, his tone of voice, was so much a bare canvas.

William Logan:

Muldoon is … in love (not wisely but too well) with language itself. … Too often the result is tedious foolery, the language run amok with Jabberwocky possibility (words, words, monotonously inbreeding), as if possibility were reason enough for the doing.

Adam Phillips, London Review of Books, on Muldoon’s lectures:

[The lectures] are about poetic influence more than anything else … Muldoon is generous and expansive in his naming of names; he is the exemplary poet as fan.

Michael Schmidt:

Muldoon often builds with baroque delicacy a trellis of ironies over the rather rudimentary themes and subjects. He likes the Metaphysicals, he likes conceits.

Clair Wills, Times Literary Supplement, on To Ireland:

[There is] something irreducibly esoteric about this trip through the weird and wonderful land of Irish letters, and the quirkiness, bordering on whimsy, will no doubt alienate many readers. This is unfortunate, because the book also contains some of Muldoon’s most forthright reflections to date on the relations of history, literature and politics.

Seamus Heaney:

Robert Frost, a poet whose roguery and tough-mindedness are admired by Paul Muldoon, once wrote about the art of filling a cup up to the brim ‘or even above the brim’. This impulse to go further than is strictly necessary is presented by Frost as the most natural thing in the world. It’s why young boys want to climb to the tops of birch trees and why grown-up poets write poems.

William Logan, on Hay:

Everyone interested in contemporary poetry should read this book … In our time of tired mirrors and more-than-tiresome confession, Muldoon is the rare poet who writes through the looking glass.

Paul Muldoon:

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing – that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one’s door.

Seamus Heaney:

“This work [Paul Muldoon’s book ‘The Annals of Chile’] gives the impression of coming clean and being clandestine at one and the same time. It is Joycean in its combination of the everyday and the erudite, but it is also entirely sui generis, a late-twentieth-century work that vindicates Muldoon’s reputation as one of the era’s true originals.”

Michael Schmidt:

His formal and verbal inventiveness leads away from self. In Madoc he risks rewriting the lives of Coleridge and Southey, as if they had fulfilled the ambition of Pantisocracy and set up their community on the banks of the Susquehanna. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks to Stephen Hawking comment tersely and in character on the enterprise. It is very funny, very learned, a high-table game. He speaks for a while histor of thought, talked down, as it were, but not trivialized. “I’m interested in ventriloquism, in speaking through other people, other voices.”

Seamus Heaney:

[Muldoon is] one of the very best.

Paul Muldoon, who talks a lot about Robert Frost:

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

And finally:

“It’s Never Too Late for Rock’N’Roll”
By Paul Muldoon

It may be too late to learn ancient Greek
Under a canopy of gnats
It may be too late to sail to Mozambique
With a psychotic cat
It may be too late to find a cure
Too late to save your soul

It may be too late to lose the heat
It may be too late to find your feet
It may be too late to draw a map
To the high desert of your heart
It may be too late to lose the poor
It’s never too late for rock’n’roll

It may be too late to dance like Fred Astaire
Or Michael Jackson come to that
It may be too late to climb the stair
And find the key under your mat
It may be too late to think that you’re
Never too late for rock’n’roll

We have to believe a couple of good thieves can still seize the day
We have to believe we can still clear the way
We have to believe we’ve found some common ground
We have to believe we have to believe
We can lose those last twenty pounds.

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“Some of the time, when you’re walking out there where the air is thin, you just hope you can walk back again.” — Gena Rowlands

Posted on June 19, 2025 by sheila

It’s her birthday today. The quote in the headline was Rowlands talking about playing Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence, but it could be said about many of her roles, particularly the ones she did in her husband’s films. Far far out there on a limb, or on a mountaintop, without an oxygen tank, without a net, whatever metaphor you want. That’s how far out she goes.

I’ve written so much about her, my favorite living actress, and here’s a roundup:

For the Criterion release of Love Streams, I wrote and narrated a video essay about Rowlands’ work with Cassavetes. Here’s an excerpt from the video (the whole thing is in the Special Features on the DVD):

When Gena Rowlands received her Lifetime Achievement Oscar, I was hired to write the narration for the tribute reel played at the ceremony. Angelina Jolie read what I wrote. Unfortunately, it isn’t online. (It was a trophy moment, personally to hear “Angie” saying MY words.)

Here’s Gena Rowlands’ highly entertaining speech at her Lifetime Achivement ceremony, complete w/Bette Davis anecdote (they did an amazing TV movie together, “Strangers.”)

I wrote the booklet essay – reprinted here – for Arrow Film’s release of Another Woman (part of a Woody Allen box set) – it’s one of her best performances, and it’s rarely discussed.

Here’s my report for Rogerebert.com on a QA she did after a SAG screening of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Witness to a Legend: The Career of Gena Rowlands

Also for Rogerebert.com, I wrote “Gena Rowlands: A Life in Film,” to highlight the career entire, not just the films she did with John Cassavetes.

When I interviewed Dan Callahan about his The Art of American Screen Acting, we discussed Gena Rowlands, of course.

I wrote about Minnie and Moskowitz for my Substack.

For my column at Liberties, I wrote about Cassavetes and Rowlands, Opening Night, and Tennessee Williams’ Two-Character Play: John Cassavetes, Tennessee Williams, and Intelligent Insanity

And finally, because it was only right, I wrote a tribute to her when she died: A Woman Without Peers.

Even that tribute wasn’t enough, so I wrote another one.

“When Gena and I are home together, we’re husband and wife. On the set, we’re deadly combatants. We have great respect for each other, like enemies do.” – John Cassavetes

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

“There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it.” — James Weldon Johnson

Posted on June 17, 2025 by sheila

“Nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.” – James Weldon Johnson, preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922)

It’s his birthday today.

An extremely important figure in 20th century American culture, James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871 and died in 1938. He is often lumped in with the Harlem Renaissance, but he was a little bit older than that generation. His work was not really a precursor; seen in the timeline of events, it’s almost like he was “preparing the space,” he was enlarging the room to include more voices. Those clamorous years of the ‘teens and 1920s were so jam-packed with events it’s hard to tell who was influencing whom, and what came first, but seen with the benefit of retrospect, Johnson’s work was essential to basically laying down the ground rules of the Harlem Renaissance. Things were already happening, things were changing, but his project – to codify, catalog, capture, explain – was very important, because it set the stage, it gathered together voices that had been ignored and dismissed, especially from “genres” like hymns and sermons, not considered literature. Someone had to make the case for the material’s relevance and worth. This was what James Weldon Johnson did.

He did it all. He was a teacher, a civil rights activist, a diplomat, a lawyer, a poet, an editor. He served as secretary for the NAACP. He was the first African-American to be accepted into the Florida bar. He eventually became the first African-American professor at New York University. He also taught at Fisk University, lecturing on literature and art. He grew up with formidable parents, particularly his mother, who was a teacher in a public school and passed on to her two sons a love of education, language, and English literature. Just as Jean Toomer did, he spent time as a teacher in rural Georgia, a crucial experience for him, witnessing the poverty, illiteracy, racism of a backwoods world. He was responsible for extending the education in black schools in the area to the 10th grade, so that kids had options, a place to stay where learning could conceivably continue. He also traveled to Haiti, under occupation by U.S. Marines at the time, and wrote a book about it. He was appointed consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua. It’s about 10 lives in one!

I haven’t mentioned his collaboration with his composer brother, J. Rosamond Johnson!

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Music, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” — William Faulkner

Posted on June 16, 2025 by sheila

Happy Bloomsday to those who celebrate.

I’ve been celebrating Bloomsday for 20 years, in the real world, and here on my site. If you’ve been visiting here for any length of time, you know this. There are too many posts to count, and James Joyce has his own category. Not just a tag, but a CATEGORY. Writing about him – and his books – has been a great pleasure, especially since I am not a scholar, I’m just a reader – and writing about his books have been a really fun way to enter into them on my own terms.

But for today I’ll link to four things:

My annual Bloomsday post, where I talk about the book, the reaction to it, positive and negative, and Joyce’s place in the sphere of things.

The piece I wrote on my Substack in 2023: yes I said yes I will Yes: Families, actual and chosen, and Bloomsday

It’s about Dad, and reading the book for the first time. It’s about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to since 2004 at Ulysses pub down in the financial district. It’s about finding your people. And how I found mine.

And finally: years ago, I wrote about Before Sunrise taking place on Bloomsday.

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Happy Birthday, Vilmos Zsigmond

Posted on June 16, 2025 by sheila

One of the best cinematographers ever.

He shot Deer Hunter, Deliverance, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These alone would put him in the history books. These are some of the most influential films ever made, and how they LOOK is a huge reason why. He worked up until the end. One of the last films he shot was Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, starring Gena Rowlands.

Some of his shots rank as my favorite of all time.

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Glenn Kenny wrote a beautiful tribute when he died in 2016. Zsigmond not only worked in a flexible way, adjusting his style to the material, he was a personal artist himself: he shared with us how he saw the world, how much he understood light and what light meant to any given atmosphere (so many people take light for granted), as well as his ability to morph into the mindset of the director and the story.

American cinema of the 1970s, with its influential and distinctive diversity of style, helmed by exciting new directors like Hal Ashby, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, John Boorman, Michael Cimino, Steven Spielberg, was helped along in the look/feel of the images by two emigre cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács. Both hailed from Hungary. They were friends. The Russians rolled into Budapest in 1956 to crush the revolution against Soviet rule. It was a brutal crackdown, enraging other nation-members of the USSR. It was an ominous harbinger. (The crackdown enraged the world. Elvis dedicated his performance of “Peace in the Valley,” in his final appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957 to the people in Hungary, calling for Americans to make donations in support of the Hungarian people. Ed Sullivan announced the address where to send donations, and millions of dollars poured in. Recently, because of that support 50 years ago, a park in Budapest was named for Elvis, and he was also granted posthumous Hungarian citizenship. Like I keep saying, stating the obvious, Elvis is everywhere).

But back to the subject matter: Kovács and Zsigmond, two Hungarian cinematographers, living in Budapest in 1956, roamed the streets, filming the violent crackdown with an Arriflex camera using the last of their 35-mm film. They smuggled the footage out of the country (footage which would soon be seen around the world, and is still part of our collective – or should be – understanding of that event). Kovács and Zsigmond transported their footage by train as far as they could go, then jumped off, and walked into Austria on foot. Eventually, they moved to America. They both got their start shooting biker pictures for Roger Corman (an unofficial film school for so many people). A documentary was made about their friendship, and my friend Matt Zoller Seitz reviewed it for The New York Times.

So let’s rack up the major projects shot by these two emigre-cinematographers from Hungary.

And let’s take particular note of the fact that they continued working on major projects even after the heyday of the 1970s subsided. Their style adjusted to the story. THIS is artistry, as well as professionalism. Style is sometimes obvious, and style is sometimes invisible, but no less valuable to the story.

László Kovács
Easy Rider
Five Easy Pieces
The Last Movie
What’s Up, Doc?
The King of Marvin Gardens
Paper Moon
Shampoo
New York, New York
Paradise Alley
Frances
Ghostbusters
Mask
Say Anything
My Best Friend’s Wedding
Miss Congeniality

László Kovács died in 2007.

Vilmos Zsigmond
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Deliverance
The Long Goodbye
Scarecrow
The Sugarland Express
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Deer Hunter
The Rose
Heaven’ Gate
Blow Out
Real Genius
The Witches of Eastwick
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Jersey Girl
Melinda and Melinda
Black Dahlia
Cassandra’s Dream

Zsigmond died in 2016.

Here’s an interesting 1980 Rolling Stone interview with Vilmos Zsigmond, after he finished shooting the wildly out-of-control ambitious Michael Cimino film of Heaven’s Gate (a movie shoot so out-of-control it brought down one of the oldest production companies in America, United Artists. An entire book was written about the Heaven’s Gate shoot.)

In 2016, Blow Out screened at Ebertfest, and the great Nancy Allen was in attendance. This was right after Vilmos died. In the QA afterwards, I asked if she had any stories about him she wanted to share as a tribute. My question comes at around the 30 minute mark, but the whole thing is worth your while.

One of Vilmos Zsigmond’s last films was Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks (2014), starring Gena Rowlands as an old lady who decides to take dance lessons, realizing she had given up on having new experiences,. It’s not a very good film, mainly because the script had not been sufficiently adapted from the theatre-script, but Rowlands is great in it (and it’s fun to see Rita Moreno too as Rowlands’ nosy downstairs neighbor in their Palm Beach old folks’ condo-complex.) The film was clearly shot on a low budget. It takes place mostly in interiors, showing its roots as a theatre production, and it’s pretty uninteresting in terms of the visuals, not a lot of flourishes with the camera. Scenes have a dead quality. I went to a SAG screening of the film, with a QA with Rowlands afterwards. They filmed the entire thing in Zsigmond’s country of origin, Hungary, even though it takes place in Florida (hence, all the interiors), so they needed to light those scenes as THOUGH the rooms looked out on the beach with all that pinky-purple ocean light. There is one scene (and it’s worth it to see the film just for this moment), where Gena Rowlands’ character, a person who thought she was done with life, or at least done with new things, sits in a chair in her condo and stares out at the red/gold/purple of the sunrise. She is so relaxed, so peaceful. It’s one of the few moments of pure silence in the film, justified just by the fact that we always want to have the time to watch Gena Rowlands thinking about things.

But part of the magic is how Zsigmond filmed it, and the glow of the light on her face, intense and deep rich golden, the warmth of it, in the moment you can actually feel the warmth. I went into the film not knowing anything about the shoot itself, and when it was revealed that they filmed the whole thing in Hungary, that that light on Reynolds’ face was artificially created start to finish, I was shocked. I didn’t know Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks was filmed in Hungary and I never would have known, because of that LIGHT.

Zsigmond worked with deep and thoughtful artistry even on second-rate material because that’s who he was as a cinematographer.

Also he’s the kind of guy who knew he had to do right by Gena. And he did.

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

Bloomsday past and present

Posted on June 16, 2025 by sheila

For my Substack, I wrote about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to (more or less) for 20 years, and my history with the book, and Dad, and lovable finance bro, and meeting people where the sole bond is knowing the entire score of Oliver! The piece is really about finding your people. I found mine. And I’m going to hang out with them later today, like I do every year.

 
 
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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The Plaidcast Supernatural Rewatch podcast

Posted on June 15, 2025 by sheila

I had so much fun joining Bethany and Michelle on their excellent podcast, ThePlaidcast, to talk about all things Supernatural, in no particular order: daylight ghosts, the problem of Rowena, genre- and class shifts, Jensen and Jared, the later seasons, the tormented glory that is season 9. Their work is so in-depth and I really love what they have created. It was an honor to be asked! Have a listen!

Posted in Personal, Television | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

For Father’s Day:

Posted on June 15, 2025 by sheila


Photo by Alfred Wertheimer, 1956

Because when you become a father, you never know how it’ll all turn out.

Vernon looks like an anvil dropped on him from the sky, an anvil in the shape of his famous son.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Hollywood Photo Archive/Mediapunch/Shutterstock (10195161a)
Elivs Presley
Elvis Presley Archive 1973

Lisa Marie recalled the only time her dad ever spanked her.

She misbehaved, and he told her to stop. Because she was 5 or 6, she kept doing whatever it was and he gave her a light spank on the tush. She probably cried a little bit and then bounced back and rode around on her tricycle. Whatever. Moment forgotten. A blip in her day.

Much later that night – she said it had to have been 2, 3 in the morning, Elvis woke her up, all emotional, and told her how sorry he was and he’d never do it again.

He had been sitting around for HOURS worrying about what he had done.

 
 
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 On This Day | Tagged , | 5 Comments

“That incident ruined my reputation for 10 years. Get one Beatle drunk and look what happens!” — Harry Nilsson

Posted on June 15, 2025 by sheila

My introduction, as shallow as this may seem, was through Reservoir Dogs. “You put the lime in the coconut”, etc. My brother said to me, “It’s a stupid song, and a little bit racist, and you think it’s just a gimmick or a novelty song, but just try to sing along with him. It sounds so easy, it is not easy. The breath control, and where his voice goes … it’s impossible to sing along with him!” Try it. Bren is right.

It’s Harry Nilsson’s birthday. There he is up above “getting one Beatle drunk” during their four-year-long bender, where they caused a lot of trouble, made music, and heckled people at the Troubadour (getting thrown out for said heckling). Nilsson’s catalog is fascinating. I was recently listening to “Down” and I was just blown away by his vocals.

My GOD.

Nothing I can say can top my brother’s writing on Harry Nilsson. Bren got obsessed over a decade ago after watching a documentary on Nilsson. Bren was not familiar with Nilsson’s work or career (despite being obsessed with the Beatles), and he was blown away by what he discovered. How had this man not become such common knowledge that it took Reservoir Dogs to re-introduce him to a new generation?

Here’s the first piece Bren wrote about him:

The American Beatle

Later, when Bren was in the throes of his Scott Walker obsession, he dug into one of the connections between the two artists, with a little Randy Newman thrown in:

I’ll Be Home, Cowboy: Nilsson, Walker, Newman

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