“People ask me: ‘What is punk? How do you define punk?’ Here’s how I define punk: It’s a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It’s just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn’t being dictated by a profit motive.”
— Ian MacKaye
It’s MacKaye’s birthday today.
Ian MacKaye is one of my brother Brendan’s heroes and inspirations. He’s written a lot about him, both as frontman for Minor Threat as well as Fugazi, so I thought I’d share those pieces here (again). I posted my brother’s music writing from his old blog here – Music Monday – which included his list of 50 Best Albums – and it’s a pleasure to share this stuff again. He wrote three pieces on MacKaye and his bands Minor Threat and Fugazi:
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.
“The secret of Mack Sennett’s success was his enthusiasm. He was a great audience and laughed genuinely at what he thought funny. He stood and giggled until his body began to shake. This encouraged me and I began to explain the character: ‘You know this fellow is many-sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo-player. However, he is not above picking up cigarette-butts or robbing a baby of its candy. And, of course, if the occasion warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear—but only in extreme anger!’ I carried on this way for ten minutes or more, keeping Sennett in continuous chuckles. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘get on the set and see what you can do there.’”
— Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography
Some years ago, I wrote an essay about Charlie Chaplin and what it means to “be funny,” and also how Chaplin’s example served as inspiration for subsequent generations of comedians/comics/funny people. It’s in the details. The details may be planned, or they may come out of the performer’s tuning-fork sense of what is right. Either way, this kind of attention to detail cannot be taught. For instance, in the famous dinner-roll dance scene above: notice the way he looks all the way to the right. And then, what makes it funnier, is the small eyebrow-raise as he looks down, like, “Yup. Check out that move. I know. It’s awesome.” There’s a mix of pride and faux-humility in that eyebrow raise that gets me every time.
It’s like perfect pitch. Either you have it or you don’t.
Here’s my essay (re-built on my site, since Capital New York and its archives vanished earlier this year):
We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.
For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.
We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!
And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
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.
“I feel like directing is more about who the individual is rather than if they’re a man or a woman. It’s kind of hard to generalize and group all of us female filmmakers into one group, like we’re all going provide you with the same thing, because we’re not. We’re all individuals.”
— Reed Morano
Louder for the people in the back.
Reed Morano started out as a cinematographer before segueing to the director’s seat (although she continued to shoot her own films). Because of The Handmaid’s Tale, which was “her” project, or at least “hers” in that she was responsible for setting the tone, mood, and look of the series – Morano’s profile went through the roof. The “look” of Handmaid’s Tale is part of its fascination (although I stopped watching after Season 1 – I had major issues with the adjustments made to the story). But you really can’t find any fault with the feel of that series, its tightly-controlled color scheme, its striking visuals, its claustrophobic close-ups … all of that is Reed Morano’s fingerprint.
I love Reed Morano’s career because it is a good example of “just doing the work”. Just do your work. There will always be bullshit, there will always be naysayers, there will always be obstacles. Take a second to feel bad about it, sure, but move forward and “just do the work”. Be the best possible whatever-it-is that you can be. There are many cinematographers-turned directors, and – similar to all the editors-turned-directors … having this other skill, working a job so crucial to the making of any movie/television show, a job that puts you in intimate contact with the director, serving the director but also serving the story … all of this gives these people an edge. They are accustomed to fulfilling another person’s vision. They are highly skilled at this. They think in pictures and rhythms already. It is the nature of the job. And so once they segue to directing – if they ever do – they have all that knowledge within them. They probably know how to communicate with other departments, they know how to work with cinematographers – since they’ve been one – or editors – since they’ve been one.
I interviewed Reed Morano on the occasion of her directorial debut – Meadowland, starring Luke Wilson, Olivia Wilde, John Leguiziano, Giovanni Ribisi … with Elisabeth Moss in a memorable cameo – and so I felt something almost like pride when everything happened after that, the rise of Handmaid’s Tale as a cultural phenomenon, its fortuitous timing, the rise of 45 and the awful specter of the people in charge who seemed to view Handmaid’s Tale not as a cautionary tale, but a How-To … And Reed Morano was at the helm, establishing the powerful mood and atmosphere and look of that series. I was happy for her. I remembered our conversation, her intelligence, her kindness, her toughness. She deserves all the success.
I loved Meadowland, which I saw at Tribeca in 2015 (its premiere) – Merano shot it as well as directed. I highly recommend it.
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.
“As a writer, I am always trying to get past abstraction, the world of ideas, and putting actual objects in my writing — paintings, photographs — really helps with that. They’re beautiful tools with which to think.” — Olivia Laing
It’s Olivia Laing’s birthday today.
Every generation needs a new voice bringing a fresh interrogation on art with a voice speaking to where we are, where we’ve come from, where we might be going. Big Picture, but also minute and personal. It is hard to do: many try, most fail. Like a Susan Sontag. Or Ellen Willis. Or Camille Paglia! Hell, Tom Wolfe. Mencken.
You may not even like some of these writers. Whether or not you like them is irrelevant. Someone bringing something new to the table doesn’t come along every day (or every generation): when they do, pay attention! Engage with it, even to say “I disagree”. I’m so tired of people DISMISSING other peoples’ voices. Boring.
Today is Hungarian director Lili Horvát’s birthday. The timing is fortuitous. I am overjoyed for the people of Hungary today, and also thinking of the theatre artistswho have been resisting within increasingly rigid and risky parameters. Back in November, during the Hearth gathering, my friend Derek and I were discussing the whole vibrant underground rebellious theatre scene in Hungary. In fact, I told him to watch THIS movie. So the timing is fortuitous to celebrate one of Hungary’s artists.
I believe I made clear my love for Horvát’s Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time, in a lengthy piece on my Substack.
It’s been a while since a film has grabbed me so deeply. I felt shaken up by it. I watched it three times in a week.
Joan Acocella, longtime dance critic for The New Yorker, and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books died in 2024 at the age of 78, and I did not mark her passing. It’s her birthday today. Acocella brought a lot of great things into my life. I love dance, but I’m not at all learned in the subject. I would check out her columns to see what was going on. She was also a very elegant and pleasing writer. Her prose flows, and it’s filled with information, spiky with criticism (beautifully phrased). I come out of any Acocella essay better-informed. I am so glad I discovered her work.
I read a couple of things of hers before I put it together who she was. She wrote an enormous profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov for The New Yorker called “The Soloist”, where she accompanied him on his first trip back to the Soviet Union. I inhaled it.
Years later, I read an article about a biography of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia. I read the biography and believe I bitched about it here somewhere. This would be back in the early 2000s. Acocella went after the very concept of this biography, validating my own feelings about it. I don’t think I put together that “Joan Acocella” was the same one who also wrote the huge piece on Baryshnikov.
But then, somehow, I put it all together. Joan Acocella is a dance writer, primarily, and has written about almost every major figure in American dance in the 20th century, but she also has written many in-depth essays and book reviews, as well as introductions to re-issues of novels (like Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity). Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, a collection of all these articles, is essential reading. I give it my highest recommendation possible. It gives the full picture of Acocella’s power as a writer and thinker.
Her focus overall seemeed to be on writers in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly Austrian writers writing from the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and others. Once the Empire was gone, the Jews were on the run, no longer protected. In Acocella’s work on artists in general, the same themes emerge: where does genius come from? What does context add to our understanding of someone like Jerome Robbins? What does it mean to be an innovator? Her taste is eclectic, but with a motivating principle behind all of it. Perhaps all of her work will be collected in one volume. There’s so much of it.
She wrote about M.F.K. Fisher. Balanchine. Bob Fosse. She wrote about famous cases of writer’s block. She wrote about Martha Graham, Mark Morris, Suzanne Farrell. Stefan Zweig. Primo Levi. She wrote a book on the Victorian phenomenon of “hysteria”. All beautifully written. I learned so much from her.
Every collection of Seamus Heaney’s work that I own, the poems, the essays, were given to me by my father. When I read Heaney’s poems, I hear Dad’s voice.
One of his most powerful poems:
Casualty
I
He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes, on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.
But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.
II
It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.
But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?
‘Now, you’re supposed to be
An educated man,’
I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.’
III
I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse…
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The Screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond…
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
Auden wrote of the moment of Yeats’s death that ‘he became his admirers’, and I had the strongest feeling just then of what he meant. I conjured all at once, if this is possible, the idea, the emotional image, of all of those who knew and loved Seamus, or knew and loved his work — or both — and I felt inside the ghostly trace of a circuitry. That in this one moment all over the world, and of course most densely in Ireland, in Dublin, and most overwhelmingly on his own home ground in Sandymount, this same shock of incomprehension — not yet bereavement — was being registered. I pictured one person after another, dozens perhaps, and these were only the people who I knew who had a connection. Of course there were hundreds, many hundreds more.
When I drove down to the general store the next morning to get The New York Times and The Boston Globe, that sense was confirmed. There was massive front-page coverage everywhere — the biggest I’d ever seen for the death of a writer.
Here is Heaney’s first major poem: a declaration of self, of independence. The words shiver with importance and newness, the radical feeling of a young man carving out his own path. There’s danger here, for reasons emotional, familial, cultural, political.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
I went and heard Heaney read at NYU once. It was part of a poetry seminar, not a huge public lecture. I sat in the back. Amazingly, there weren’t that many people there. Mostly students and a couple of outsiders like me. He stood there, white hair a wild nimbus around his head. The way he spoke – his cadences but also his use of language – so careful, so striking – his storytelling gifts, his sense of seriousness but not SELF-seriousness, always a sense of humor … Afterwards I approached him and had him sign my copy of Opened Ground.
“I wanted to deliver a work that could be read universally as the-thing-in-itself but that would also sustain those extensions of meaning that our disastrously complicated local predicament made both urgent and desirable.” — Seamus Heaney
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.
People get so so mad about this one, particularly the Falstaff fanboys. They refuse to accept its existence as a play, they are irritated that Merry Wives is one of the most regularly performed of the plays. they refuse to accept this Falstaff is THEIR Falstaff. Honestly, I get it. Falstaff means a lot. Falstaff is a towering figure in the Western canon. Yes. But … he wasn’t at the time Shakespeare wrote the play. Falstaff was (is) a crowd-pleaser. His “role” was done after Henry IV Part 2, even though Shakespeare wasn’t “done” with him. His absence haunts Henry V. I still remember how Branagh handled Falstaff in his Henry V, establishing his presence even in his absence.
Harold Bloom, in the quotes below, splutters in outrage at what has been done to his Falstaff in Merry Wives. Auden dismisses the play so completely he didn’t even do a complete lecture on the play (all the Auden quotes are from his celebrated 1946/47 lectures on Shakespeare, published in book form). The general critical consensus is: How could Shakespeare do this to Falstaff!! WHERE is Falstaff? THIS isn’t Falstaff.
Totally fair. The Falstaff in Merry Wives is not the Falstaff of the two Henrys. (Neither is Mistress Quickly herself and the other holdouts from Henry IV Part 2.) Falstaff here is a buffoon, a creature of fun, used and abused, mocked … thrown into a laundry basket with dirty linen, etc. He’s Falstaff with all the wit and self-awareness taken out.
So. If you can just accept that this Falstaff is not the other Falstaff, maybe you can just enjoy the play for what it is? Maybe not? Okay!
The speculation is that Merry Wives came about because Queen Elizabeth so loved Falstaff in the Henriad she asked Shakespeare personally to write a play where Falstaff was in love.
There’s also an interesting theory that the play was commissioned for a Knight of the Garter ceremony – and since John Falstaff was a knight, albeit a “fallen” and disreputable knight, the subject matter would be appropriate for such an event, at least as a cautionary tale. I mean, we’re just writing fanfic at this point.
I just don’t think these plays were looked at as precious objects then, not by Shakespeare or anyone. Nothing is sacred. They were entertainers, their theatres were constantly burning down or closing down because of the plague, they were living in an absolute monarchy after centuries of basically civil war, the Puritans were always trying to get them shut down, and so … being ALLOWED to practice their trade – at the whim of a monarch – was just the reality of the world then. Falstaff is great, but that’s even more reason to put him in another play, right? Everyone loved him, it might draw people to come see him in something else. It just seems to me like not that big a deal – or a huge betrayal of something – to “do this” to Falstaff. These plays were here today, gone tomorrow. Of course people wanted to be a success, wanted to secure their legacy. The author of the Sonnets mentions this all the time. But … I just can’t believe anyone involved in these theatrical ventures were thinking, “Ah, four and a half centuries from now some academic at a place called Yale University will be FUMING at what you have done to Falstaff.” Publishing was different then, archiving was different, it’s a miracle we have these documents at all.
Reading it on the page, and seeing it, really drives home the idea that the play is really about language being lost in translation. Shakespeare writes IN the accents. Everyone misunderstands each other. There’s a Frenchman, a Welshman, Latin lessons. At one point the Welshman starts to recite Marlowe’s poem “Come with me and be my love …” an extremely current reference that everyone would recognize. It’s a Tower of Babel.
A couple years ago, my sister and I went to an outdoor production of Merry Wives at the local community theatre (we go to their plays every summer). I’d never seen Merry Wives live before and it plays GREAT. The audience was howling with laughter for almost the whole entire thing. The fact that this slight comedy, so different from his other comedies, viewed as “lesser” by almost every critic, etc. etc. … is so popular with audiences, confounds the critics, who think audiences shouldn’t be allowed to like what they so obviously like. I see this occasionally in my own line of work, a weird resentment from critics when a film emerges from out of nowhere and becomes a huge hit with audiences, even though they all gave it bad reviews. This happened with The Greatest Showman, in the theatre for months. It happened with Elvis too, although Elvis got better reviews than Showman, with the typical “Oh God here goes BAZ again.” (spare me). Elvis was in theatres for three months: I went over 10 times during the summer of 2022 and the theatre was packed each time. Elvis packs them in, even in the summer of Top Gun. I remember critics being totally SHOCKED at what was going on with Greatest Showman, in theatres for months on end, making money. I thought, “Telling people what they should and should not like is not your job description. Your job is telling audiences what YOU like.”
Merry Wives is a hit despite the critics, even though the play has nothing elevated or nuanced and the stakes are extremely low. Merry Wives of Windsor is often called a farce, and it reads like a farce, but when I finally saw it up on its feet, performed by this riotous talented cast – I finally understood. Merry Wives of Windsor is an episode of Three’s Company. I could totally see John Ritter having to hide in a laundry basket underneath his roommates’ underwear, so he could be smuggled out of the apartment for whatever ridiculous reason.
In my research I learned a new word: fabliau! Originated in France in the 13th century or thereabouts. Described in Wikipedia as: “They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes generally critical or mocking of the church and nobility.” This genre/style would have been totally familiar to Elizabethan audiences.
The two husbands are convinced their wives are being unfaithful. They are so outrageous about it they are basically going to force their wives’ hands if they’re not careful. In the production we saw, over the course of the show the husbands’ mental states – and wardrobes – visibly deteriorated. By the end, they were total wrecks. Every entrance they seemed more out of their minds, and their outfits got more and more skimpy as they shed layers, almost like” “I can’t even deal with wearing a SHIRT anymore.” When one of the husbands staggered onto the stage, wearing little beach shorts and an open Hawaiian shirt, Jean and I lost it. Where are your clothes?? The actor who played the French doctor-suitor is also the high school librarian (bestill my heart) and he was seriously out of his mind. Like Kenneth Mars out of his mind. We were DYING. Obsessed with him. He’s in all their plays and he’s basically a celebrity to us at this point.
Here’s a pic I took from that production: it was a hot summer night, we were spraying ourselves with Off!, and this magical ridiculous play unfolded at the little platform by the river. Here is Falstaff wearing his horns in between the two wives.
I’ve seen these people in multiple shows now, and I love that part of community theatre.
Much Ado About Nothing is up next. A major masterpiece and one of my faves.
It’s Tom Noonan’s birthday. He just died last year, a huge loss.
Most well-known for playing supernatural-style “heavies” in movies such as Manhunter and Robocop 2, he got his start in the 1960s experimental theatre scene in New York City, and in many ways he never really left that scene. He established his theatre company in 1983, and it continued to the present day, where he developed projects, produced plays, had workshops, etc. His theatre company is the background for his first feature film, a two-hander called What Happened Was… First developed and produced as a play at his theatre company, where he and Karen Sillas played the two roles, he shot it very soon after. What Happened Was… is one of the great films about loneliness and one of the great films of the 1990s.
If you’ve been around here you know the story of me and What Happened Was … It played out here, and in real time.
What Happened Was… came out in 1994, won some big awards (at Sundance and elsewhere) and then sank like a stone into obscurity. It was released on DVD, but that was in 1996, when DVDs really took over, and the film was never released on DVD. And so for almost two decades it was un-seeable. I never forgot it, never forgot its impact. Years later, 2019, I wrote about What Happened Was … for my Film Comment column. I wrote that piece when the film was unavailable anywhere except for a grainy version on Amazon (it was amazing it was even there, since in the years before I’d periodically troll YouTube looking for it.)
I wrote the essay which isn’t just about the film, it’s about loneliness and Edward Hopper and living in a city. The way the light slants on the walls. I put up a link to my essay on Twitter (when Twitter was still a thing), and someone tagged Scott Macauley, who was one of the producers of the film back in 1994. He retweeted to his very large audience, which led to a flurry of activity. Many went to watch this film on Amazon because of my piece. “Watching that felt like a nervous breakdown,” one guy Tweeted at me. “I can’t believe I’ve never seen this,” he said. But I also had a long fascinating conversation with Macauley about it. The details I was always curious about. I didn’t realize that this event – my essay finding its way to Macauley – started the ball rolling.
Cut to … two years later. 2021. The news broke: What Happened Was … was being restored by Oscilloscope, and coming finally to DVD. The film would also be released into theatres again. The film showed up on streaming platforms like Criteron, etc. Oscilloscope asked me to write the booklet essay which I was thrilled to do. So. Clearly people involved in the film were “aware” of my essay. (No shit, Sheila. I’m slow to understand things sometimes.) You can purchase the film here.
The DVD release brought a lot of attention to this forgotten film. For the short run at Film Forum in 2021, the programming director invited me to interview both Noonan and the brilliant Karen Sillas on Zoom (it was still Covid-ish times). This was a major moment.
I was living upstairs at my friend’s house, and all my stuff was in storage. A very in-between and stressful time. I set up my laptop to sign on and as I got ready for the interview, I thought about me as a young woman staggering out of Facets or the Music Box in Chicago, wherever I saw it in the theatre. My reaction to the film wasn’t “that movie was good”. I honestly felt like I got a glimpse of the future. My future. The vision was not comforting, and it shook me. (I was right to be shaken. What Happened Was … is what happened. My script – July and Half of August – was, in a lot of ways, inspired by What Happened Was …). Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy but at this point who cares. It happened.) So my relationship with the film has lasted for decades now …
And there I was, meeting Tom Noonan and Karen Sillas over Zoom, doing what would have been incomprehensible to me back in the 90s, getting to participate a little bit in the long overdue release. When the three of us were chatting before the official Zoom started, I said something like, “The timing of this is so wild! I just wrote about this film a year and a half ago – and now it’s being released!” As though it was this huge coincidence. (I’m smart in some ways but dumb in others.)
Tom said, like it was nothing, totally casual, “Well, your essay got the ball rolling. It’s because of your piece that all this happened.”
He didn’t make a big deal of it. He was too dry for that. But he made sure to let me know my Film Comment piece was the spark.
How often do you get that as a writer?
How often do you get confirmation FROM the filmmaker?
Here’s our conversation on Zoom:
One lesson I learned from this experience: I don’t really write about topical news-peggy NOW subjects. Because of this I am often “left out” of the discourse. I am in my own lane. And I learned – again – because I am just this way ANYway – to just not give a shit or worry about what everyone else is doing. I don’t feel a need to weigh in on the big subjects of the current day. So what that’s what everyone else is doing?
Celebrate the art you want to celebrate, even if whatever it is is unavailable to be seen. It exists. Like Linda Loman says, “Attention must be paid.”
“Attention must be paid” is basically my credo – although I didn’t set out consciously to do that.
Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was … remains a peak movie-going experience for me and one of my favorite films ever. It reached me when I needed it, but I also feared it (rightly) and the vision of loneliness it communicated. I love art that can do this. Opening Night did the same thing and around the same time, which I wrote about for Liberties. Films that challenge, provoke, and make you look at things you don’t really want to look at or deal with. The art forces the confrontation.
This is one of the goals of art. What Noonan did with What Happened Was … – what Sillas and Noonan did together – will live forever for me as one of the best examples of it.
I am thankful for Noonan’s artistry, not to mention his lifelong commitment to downtown NY theatre, for What Happened Was… and for making sure I understand the role I played in the story of its resurrection.
The trailer back in 1994 made it look like a romantic comedy/erotic thriller – total category error. Oscilloscope’s new trailer is better:
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.
“I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids. That’s what I wanted to read about when I was growing up. I wanted to read about the sort of boys and girls that I knew in my neighborhood and in my school. And in my childhood, many years ago, children’s books seemed to be about English children, or pioneer children. And that wasn’t what I wanted to read. And I think children like to find themselves in books.” — Beverly Cleary
Beverly Cleary, beloved children’s author, died in 2021 at the venerable age of 104.
Like so many other children, then and now, Beverly Cleary’s books were huge to me growing up. I read all the “Ramona” books, and also all the “Henry” books. My favorite was Ramona Forever (I still remember that moment with the mirror – haven’t read the book since I was a child). It’s so touching to me to see my nieces and nephews also falling in love with her books.
The obit on NPR is really good and this part struck me:
In her autobiography, A Girl From Yamhill, she wrote about clamping around on tin can stilts and yelling “pieface!” at the neighbor. She was an only child, who grew up in Portland during the Depression and still remembered when her father lost his job.
“I was embarrassed,” she recalled. “I didn’t know how to talk to my father. I know he felt so terrible at that time that I just — I guess I felt equally terrible. And I think adults sometimes don’t think about how children are feeling about the adult problems.”
Cleary used her crystal-clear recall to capture the tribulations of young children exquisitely in her books.
What a fascinating and complicated memory, a child understanding the pain of her father, and absorbing the pain, but not knowing how to say “I know you’re hurting, Dad” because you are a child.
Cleary’s books are filled with insightful moments like that. In fact, when you read them as an older person, outside the realm of childhood, the adults start to take on more shape. You begin to see that THEY are having complicated full lives too.
One of the interesting things is the cross-generational aspect of this, at least in my family, but considering the tributes I’ve seen it’s true for others. She started publishing books for children in 1950. Long before I even arrived on the planet. But the Ramona and “Beezus” series were a staple of my childhood, and then down the line: I’d outgrow reading them and then my younger brother and sister would start them up and then they’d outgrow them and my youngest sister would start… Almost like a rite of passage. And now THEIR children love these books!
And now it’s so funny when my nieces start explaining Ramona to me, as though the books were published yesterday … I want to say “Believe me, kiddo, I know all about Ramona.” But of course I don’t because everyone has to discover those books for themselves.
Beverly Cleary started out as a librarian (so many writers begin this way and as a librarian’s daughter I am HERE for it), and she noticed a trend: little boys kept asking her where they could find books about boys – regular boys like themselves. There weren’t many out there (see the quote above), and so she decided to write one. She wrote Henry Huggins, which was published in 1950 and was an instant hit. People are still discovering this series and the Ramona series. It doesn’t matter that it takes place “back then”, because for a child it’s all the same stuff. Parents … friends … worries … problems … school … all seen through the perspectives of children trying to understand – or rebel against – the often incomprehensible behavior of adults. An eternal subject.
Cleary’s books have never gone out of print.
My niece is named Beatrice. Her little brother calls her “Beezus”. Beverly Cleary’s is a living legacy.
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.
