La Bare (2014): A Doc About “The Most Popular Male Strip Club in the World.”

Posted on June 27, 2014 by sheila

large_rkO5QXP5NXfIsFsIVkMcbIvRORD

La Bare, the club, is in Dallas. La Bare, the movie, is a fascinating backstage look at the dancers, who they are, what they’re about. It was directed by actor Joe Manganiello, who was in Magic Mike, not to mention True Blood (his role in Magic Mike made him curious to learn more about the world of the mostly-straight male dancers in these strip joints). Some interesting things here about objectification, sexuality, female fantasy, and the difference between strip clubs catering to men and those catering to women. You know, right up my alley. I enjoyed the film. I very briefly dated a Chippendale’s dancer in my 20s. The guy was a RIOT. On our first date we went to see a documentary playing at The Music Box in Chicago, something super-serious and earnest, and afterwards, as we walked to get ice cream, he regaled me with stories about the Chippendales and he made me laugh so hard I was in tears. During a rehearsal, the dance coach said bluntly to my date, “You’ve got a little too much Liza going on.” It was not a compliment. Like, he was doing jazz hands and stuff. I’m laughing as I type this. I’m still friends with that guy on Facebook. He’s good people.

After seeing the doc, I’d like to visit La Bare. Looks like fun.

La Bare opens today.

My review is now up at Rogerebert.com.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

R.I.P., Eli Wallach

Posted on June 25, 2014 by sheila

His career spanned 60 years. An inspiration to many young actors (including myself as a kid), he worked nearly until the very end. He and his wife of 66 years, Anne Jackson (married since 1948), often performed together over the years, and created a small show of scenes and poems interspersed with their humorous banter. They would perform it at churches, schools, synagogues, YMCAs, benefits and charity functions. I saw their show about 10 years ago and was totally charmed by it. They have a son and two daughters, both of whom are members of the Actors Studio as well.

eli-anne-ctr.jpg

Francis Ford Coppola came to Eli Wallach to play Don Altobello in the long-anticipated Godfather III. Perhaps trying to sell Wallach, a great American actor, on the importance of the part, Coppola said to Wallach, “You are an old, old, old, OLD friend of the Corleone family.” Wallach thought a bit, and then replied, “Francis, if I’m such an old, old, old, OLD friend of the Corleones …. then why wasn’t I in the other two movies?”

In 2003, Wallach’s agent called him and said that Clint Eastwood (his old colleague) wanted him for a small part in a movie he was directing. Wallach was nervous. He hadn’t been in front of the camera in a while, at least not in a major motion picture, and he was old, and nervous about all sorts of things: remembering the lines, and also the possibility that his one scene would be cut (always a fear of any actor who plays only one scene in a film). I love how he describes his experience on Mystic River in his memoir The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, (published recently).

I flew up to Boston on a Wednesday knowing nothing of the story or the script. I found that I was to play a liquor store owner. I memorized the three pages of dialogue that were given to me and prepared to act in the scene the following day. On Thursday morning I walked out to the set. Clint greeted me warmly. “I’m happy you agreed to do the cameo,” he said, and told me that I’d be playing opposite two wonderful actors – Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne.

Clint waited patiently while the scene was lit, then walked over to me and whispered, “Any time you’re ready, Eli.” Not one word of direction was given. I felt relaxed and happy to be before the camera again. Bacon and Fishburne assured me that my scene would not be deleted in the final cut.

“You give us an important clue to the solution of the crime we’re investigating,” Kevin Bacon said.

One of the deals with his cameo was that Wallach would go uncredited, and that his name would not be used in any of the advertising. It was a smart move because for those of us like myself – who love Eli Wallach, and who have been watching his movies since they were in their teens, who have the entire scope of his career locked in their brains forever – to suddenly see his twinkling mischievous face in the middle of that dark movie was a wonderful surprise, like running into an old friend. The audience around me spontaneously responded to him with warmth, recognition, and approval.

eastwood_wallach.jpg

Eli Wallach was born and raised in Brooklyn. His family was one of the only Jewish families in a primarily Italian neighborhood, perhaps a propos for this actor who would end up playing so many memorable Italians.

14wass2_184.jpg

Wallach went to college in Texas and it was around that time that he started contemplating being an actor. It was really the only thing he wanted to do. He moved back to New York and studied acting at the Actors Studio, and it was there that he made all the contacts which would end up mattering to him in his career. He was on the cusp of the change in the acting world. If he had been a studio player in the 30s and 40s, he would have played crotchety small character parts, but in the 50s, things were changing. A new style of acting was being practiced, made famous by people like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Wallach was a part of that. Not to mention the fact that very early on, he got himself connected to Tennessee Williams, one of the most important relationships in Wallach’s entire career.

061206_article_dvd.jpg

Wallach did a bunch of plays in New York, one of the most formative being Tennessee Williams’ short haunting play called “This Property is Condemned”. A young vivacious funny actress named Anne Jackson played the female lead. The two hit it off. They hit it off so well that they moved in together (and this was in the 1940s!) and were married the following year.

Wallach spent his days studying sense memory at the Actors Studio, and his nights playing small parts on Broadway. There are very funny moments in his memoir where he talks about trying to combine what he was learning at the Studio with the more practical concerns of being in a show that played 8 times a week. Once, he was so fired up from his own emotional preparation that he just couldn’t wait and said his line, cutting 14 lines of his co-stars. He was devastated. He went to Lee Strasberg, his teacher, and said, “I was ready to say my line THEN … what should I have done?” Strasberg thought a bit and then said, “Wait for your cue.”

As a young man, he was an unlikely romantic lead. He was short, stocky, and not classically handsome. But women testify to his sex appeal time and time again in their own memoirs and autobiographies (Carroll Baker’s comes to mind). He treated women with good humor and curiosity; it made him a Chick Magnet. He wasn’t cool or aloof, but emotional and impulsive, which really goes a long way to explaining his huge hit in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, Wallach’s big break. Wallach played Alvaro, the hot and sexual truck driver who ends up shacking up with Serafina, the lonely sex-starved mystical widow who speaks mainly in Italian (played by Maureen Stapleton, in the role that made her a star). Talk about unlikely casting!! The story of how Stapleton got that part is one of those situations where an actress, in the audition process, just kept “showing up” with all her talent and powers at full force until they really had no choice but to cast her. Stapleton had a plain face, a dumpy body, and wasn’t seen as a romantic lead in any way, shape, or form. Stapleton said, “People looked at me onstage and said, ‘Jesus, that broad better be able to act.'”

Wallach got spectacular reviews in The Rose Tattoo, and also won the Tony Award for Best Actor. Eli Wallach, the Jewish kid from Brooklyn, was off and running.

He made his screen debut in another one of Tennessee Williams’ projects – the highly controversial (as in condemned by the Catholic Church controversial) Baby Doll. It had a screenplay based on Williams’ one-act 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. The movie is basically a comedy, albeit with its sicker elements (a grown woman lying in a crib sucking her thumb). In the play, she is obviously mentally disturbed, a stunted person who has the bodacious body of a full-grown woman. Baby Doll is treated like a sexual object while obviously, inside, she is about 10 years old. It is disturbing. In the play, Baby Doll (or “Flora”) is ruined. In the film, she (played by Carroll Baker) is set free. It’s still disturbing, and Wallach is great in it as Vacarro, the sexually-charged neighbor. One of the most memorable scenes is a seduction scene on a porch swing between Wallach and Baker.

Directed by Elia Kazan, Baby Doll was filmed on location, with locals as extras. Tennessee Williams called 27 Wagons a “Mississippi Delta comedy”, which gives you some sense of where his mind was at. Kazan and his cast (Eli Wallach, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden) do capture that. Karl Malden is a ridiculous cuckolded figure, Carroll Baker is funny and sweet and unconsciously sexy, and Eli Wallach is manipulative and sexy.

babydolllaughing1.jpg

babydollporch.jpg

Eli Wallach never stopped going back to Broadway, even though his film career had also taken off. He appeared in premiere productions of Teahouse of the August Moon, Mr. Roberts, Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real and others.

He was part of the troubled cast for John Huston’s The Misfits, and he traveled to the desert of Nevada for the shoot, with his family in tow. His daughters were just babies. The shoot ended up being long-drawn-out and very problematic. Clark Gable would die just months after completion. The entire production was shut down so that Marilyn Monroe could recover in the hospital from her exhaustion (brought on by insomnia and addiction to sleeping pills) and everything was insane and chaotic. A wonderful book has been written about that shoot, called The Making of the Misfits.

Of all the things Wallach will be remembered for, it will be for his participation in the “spaghetti Western” genre. Sergio Leone cast him in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – probably one of Wallach’s best-known performances. Wallach had already been cast as a Mexican bandit in The Magnificent Seven, and there are funny stories about Wallach trying to figure out how to ride a horse, and all that, while on location. You’d never know he was a novice.

tuco_01.JPG

Eli Wallach’s memoir, The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage is wonderful. It’s a great mix of the personal and the professional: how he and Anne Jackson, who both had careers, made it work, or, let’s say, just muddled through it, Jackson doing plays, Wallach doing movies, trying to raise a family and keep the household going.

When Baby Doll came out, he and Anne Jackson went to the premiere. Wallach writes in his memoir:

As for my wife’s review of the film, Anne sat next to me at the premiere. The moment I played my first scene with Karl Malden, she observed, “Never have two noses filled the screen so completely.”

The book is a real actor’s book, because, in the end, Eli Wallach, with his diverse and sometimes bizarre career, was always all about the acting. He was not a huge star. Not like Brando or McQueen. He had leading roles, but he never was in that heady echelon of actors who become symbols or manifestations of a Zeitgeist. So Wallach was always focusing, pretty much, on the job at hand. Each job has its challenges. It is the actor’s job to make all of that comprehensible, to face each day with a problem-solving attitude, to look at a scene that might not be working and think to himself, “What can I do to make this happen?” Wallach’s book is all about moments like that.

Tennessee Williams had written a new play in the early 1950s. It was called Camino Real. One of Williams’ most difficult plays, it predicts the experimental theatre of the 1960s, embodied by the work of Lanford Wilson. It’s surreal, not a strict linear play, it takes place in an imaginary place, and the stage is filled with people at all times: the misfits, the beggars and whores of the fringe, not to mention cameos by fictional characters like Casanova and Lord Byron. These people all hover on “the Camino Real”, a way-station for the lost of the world, the lonely. I understand why it is difficult to stage, but I love it. It also has, in it, my favorite lines that Williams ever wrote:

Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.

Wallach was passionate about Camino Real. He was cast as the lead, a guy named “Kilroy” (after the grafitti messages of the time). To Wallach, it was the most important project he had ever done, the one he was most passionate about. He turned down the role that Frank Sinatra ended up playing in From Here to Eternity (and won an Oscar for) in order to do Camino Real.

One of the reasons I love the following excerpt is because: Camino Real was NOT a hit. As a matter of fact, it was a flop. After the great run of hits Williams had written – Glass Menagerie, Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke and The Rose Tattoo – all wonderful works, but with a more classical structure – Camino Real was seen as incomprehensible, self-indulgent, a mess. This was the start of the ongoing story where Williams was constantly judged against his earlier work, as though he was supposed to continue repeating himself. The critics were never kind to him after the 50s … everyone was like, “Well, this is no Streetcar Named Desire …” and Williams would respond, “Of course it isn’t. I was a younger man when I wrote Streetcar. I’m older now, I have different concerns.”

Time has vindicated Camino Real, but its initial failure frightened Williams. He did “go back” to writing more traditional plays after that, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Night of the Iguana, Sweet Bird of Youth. But Camino Real is one of his best.

Eli Wallach’s section in the book about Camino Real is my favorite part.

majorbarbara.jpg

(That’s Wallach and Jackson in a production of Major Barbara).

So today, in honor of this wonderful hard-working beloved American actor, a man I already miss, here is an excerpt from his book about his commitment to Camino Real, a play that was savaged upon its opening

EXCERPT FROM The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Cheryl Crawford had fallen in love with Camino and was determined to bring it to Broadway, even though it seemed like quite a gamble. Camino was unlike any of Williams’s other work. It was a fantasy set in a dirty plaza somewhere below the border. It was filled with gypsies, pimps, panderers, fascist police, and a host of legendary characters: Lord Byron. Margerite Gautier from Camille, the Baron de Charlus, Don Quixote. I was to play the role of Kilroy, an ex-boxer and ex-sailor who first appears at the top of a flight of stairs. On a crumbling wall, there is a message scrawled in chalk: “Kilroy is coming.” Kilroy crosses out the word coming and replaces it with here.

I enjoyed working with Kazan; he often used sly means to build tension during rehearsal. One time during a rehearsal, he took me aside and told me to approach a group of strangers onstage. “You’re alone and you’re scared,” he said, “so go on and make friends.” Meanwhile, he told the actors playing a motley crowd of peasants, “Ignore this stranger; he’s a gringo, and he has bad breath.”

Kazan worked long and hard shaping Tennessee’s play into a bold and startling fantastic extravaganza. Rehearsals were long and exhausting and yet strangely exhilarating. All of us in the cast felt we were embarking on a trip to a world we had never encountered before. Even though Camino was a fantasy, Kazan told us that the play would be stronger if each role was performed with a sense of truth.

For me, the play was very physically demanding. At one point, I had to jump offstage while police chased me, then run through the audience screaming, “Where the hell is the Greyhound bus depot?” I’d run up one aisle, then down another. People would have to stand to allow me to pass. Then I’d run up to the balcony, enter the box seats, climb over the rail, and jump directly onstage, just like John Wilkes Booth did after he’d shot President Lincoln. Once I was caught by the police, I was ordered to kneel onstage and a clown’s hat was clapped over my head. Fastened to the hat were eyeglasses with long string attached to them; the nose was a red Ping-Pong-ball-shaped bulb.

“Light your nose,” the policeman would say, and I would press the button to light my nose, which kept blinking on and off as the theater lights went down.

Audiences were puzzled by some of the scenes. And in early previews, many walked out. The play was savagely attacked by the critics. Leading the charge was Walter Kerr, critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who ended his review with a terse sentence: “Williams is our greatest playwright. And this is his worst play.”

After the reviews had come out, Tennessee sat down and wrote a letter to Cheryl Crawford, the producer:

Dear Cheryl,
Whenever I talk about you I say, “Cheryl is a great fighter. She’s always there when you need her.” In China, in the old days, they used to give an old man an opium pipe. I suppose now they just shoot him. I think we should show fight in this situation. I’m enclosing a letter I just wrote to that critic Walter Kerr.

Dear Mr. Kerr,
I’m feeling a little punch drunk from the feared, but not fully anticipated attack at your hands and a quorum of your colleagues. But I would like to attempt to get a few things off my chest in reply. What I would like to know is, don’t you see that “Camino” is a concentrate, a distillation of the world and the time we live in?

Mr. Kerr, I believe in your honesty. I believe you said what you honestly think and feel about this play. And I wouldn’t have the nerve to question your verdict. But silence is only golden when you have nothing to say. And I still think I have a great deal to say.
Cordially,
Tennessee Williams

I don’t believe Kerr ever answered Tennessee’s letter. But there’s one line in the play that affected Anne and myself so greatly that we decided to adopt it as our motto. “Lately,” Lord Byron says, “I’ve been listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees instead of the single pure stringed instrument of my heart. For what is the heart, but a sort of instrument that translates noise into music, chaos into order. Make voyages, attempt them, there’s nothing else.” Anne and I decided that we would always make voyages and attempt them.

Camino‘s end came quickly, with a crisp closing notice posted on the backstage bulletin board. We had just completed our fifty-sixth performance. The closing of a play is like a death in the family, and it leaves a deep scar on an actor’s ego. I remember packing up all my belongings in the dressing room, then walking out into the rainy night. “Why me?” I thought. I loved the cast, the writing, the direction, but thankfully Camino didn’t die. Over the years, many regional theaters have given Williams’s fantasy a second chance.

I’ve never regretted the choice of doing Camino Real instead of From Here to Eternity. To me, Camino was the greatest experience I had in the theater.

Posted in Actors, RIP | Tagged | 2 Comments

Solstice iPod Shuffle and Some Personal Snapshots

Posted on June 24, 2014 by sheila

— Part of managing my mental health is managing sleep. I had a rough winter in that regard and have been working hard to course-correct. I bought a sleep mask at Bed Bath & Beyond which has really helped. I thought my bedroom was dark. Only when I put on that damn mask did I realize how much light there really was. So my sleep has been much better and I’ve been dreaming again, my first dreams in 15 years. I’m not used to it!

— Part of getting healthy mentally also means tolerating emotional boredom. Where are the highs and lows? They can be awful but, more importantly, they can be exhilarating and productive and make life worth living? Where are the wild fluctuations? It’s a common thing with “people like me” and must be combatted. Sleep helps combat everything. Everything has to calm down.

— The change in light is problematic for those with my Big Bad Diagnosis, and everything got messed up for me last year with the light change in the fall. It’s annoying. It makes me feel like I’m a freakin’ vegetable or something. The solstice is good because the nights will be getting longer again and that’s always good news for vegetables like myself.

— It’s been a busy time for me. I had jury duty for two days last week and welled up with prideful tears when I was sworn in. It was a bonding experience. Quite humorous in many ways, and rather awesome, as well as annoying.

— I’m working on a long interview I did with an Irish filmmaker about a documentary he’s done that is now out on iTunes, it’s wonderful, and will also be released on Hulu and Netflix later this summer. I’ll provide a link to it when it goes up at Rogerebert.com.

— I’ve also been busy exercising and crushing on someone. You know. Your basic summer.

— I wish I could wave a magic wand and make the big things I yearn for (with my book, my play) just manifest but that ain’t how the world works. So it’s a lot to handle and manage. I’ve been going to the beach a lot as well in the past week, sometimes just for a couple of hours. It helps. I can be a little workaholic. I need to be reminded to chill-AX.

Here’s the music that has come up on my glorious iPod shuffle during this last solstice week, as I tore around to jury duty, to the beach, to Manhattan, and back.

Shuffle is a fun reminder to be open to whatever comes.

So here goes.

“Women Do Know How to Carry On” – Waylon Jennings. Somehow he makes you know it’s a compliment. I love him. Sexy song.

“Drama Queen” – Green Day. Another confusingly complimentary song for a girl person. Sung for an adolescent daughter. Touching.

“What’s Your Sign?” – the wonderful Des’ree. Member her? She’s lovely. Sort of a one-hit type of person, but this is a good song too. She sings: “I’m a Sag, I’m a butterfly, I like to play, I’m always aiming into the sky, I point my arrows extremely high.” As a Sagittarius, I like that a lot. Such a pretty voice.

“You Know My Name” – The Beatles. I love it when they scream. The whole song degenerates into silliness with a soft jazz beat.

“Treat Me Nice” – bratty Elvis making some demands in Jailhouse Rock. You can hear him tapping on the guitar for syncopation.

“Ascot Gavotte” – from the Broadway production of My Fair Lady. Ah, shuffle, you never cease to crack me up.

“The Interlocutor” – Squirrel Nut Zippers. I was really into them for a while. They’re a lot of fun. This is zippy and frivolous, in the best sense.

“Dancin'” – Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly in the masterful and hard-hitting Xanadu. The “rock band”‘s counterpoint song is SO offensive it makes me laugh. Dude, believe me, I get to say whether or not you “take a back seat”, okay? Stop bossing me around. “Don’t want to hear what you want, it’s gotta be all my way.” oooookay, psycho. Also: You’ve “got some dancin’ to do”. Good for you. Then dance, for God’s sake. Stop telling me you’re gonna dance and just DO it.

“Something Special” – Randy Newman. He cracks my heart in two. I find him almost unbearable. But comforting, too. I don’t know. When I’m wounded, I can’t deal with him at all, it’s too raw. I’m so glad his music exists.

“An Angel Stepped Down” – Jane Siberry, from New York Trilogy III, her Christmas show at, I think, the Bottom Line. She had a big cast, they sang Christmas carols (traditional and non-traditional), she hosted, and there’s a recording of it. I highly recommend it. I wish I had been there, sounds like a great night.

“Under Pressure” – Queen, live at Wembley Stadium. Frankly, it’s overwhelming.

“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” – Annie Lennox’s kick-ass version from her wonderful Christmas album a couple years ago. The video is great, too.

“Black Betty” – Ram Jam. YES. Good for working out.

“Person to Person” – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. It is impossible to listen to him and remain in Neutral. The man sings directly from the fires of hell and lust and dirt. He howls up from the muck. He is unbelievable. Such a showman and madman.

“I Hear Voices” – Hey, look, it’s a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cluster. He scares me a little bit. He’s just so in it.

“Field of Guns n’ Roses” – the wonderful Mike Viola. He’s one of my favorite songwriters writing today. His band is called The Candybutchers but he has a lot of solo stuff too. My talented sister Siobhan O’Malley opened for him, and he’s one of her idols. It was a major moment.

“Until It’s Time for You to Go” – Elvis Presley, one of his semi-drippy 70s ballads. But it’s extremely personal for him, you can tell. Everything he did always was.

“Galaxy Song” – Monty Python. Ha. And a perfect button to the Elvis song. Elvis loved Monty Python. But then again, who doesn’t.

“Lifetime” – Beth Hart. She kicks ass. I discovered her years ago and I can’t remember how. Maybe a quick blurb in Interview magazine that sounded intriguing. She doesn’t have that much out there. But her songs, her voice. It’s so authentic. She clearly has been through a lot.

“Bigelow 6-200” – the great Brenda Lee. I love her. A rockabilly queen.

“You’re Right I’m Left He’s Gone” – A rockabilly cluster! Wanda Jackson, covering Elvis, on her tribute album to her former beau and inspiration, I Remember Elvis. More on Wanda and Elvis here. If you get a chance to see her live, do so. She’s a legend. She’s still touring. I love that song title so much.

“Digging for Gold” – Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines. Did that album really happen? Did he wear tights? Did I just dream that? But no, I have the album, so it must have happened.

“The Pretender” – Foo Fighters. I’m just glad they exist. They give me a lot of happiness.

“God Is Love” – Lenny Kravitz, on his album Circus where many went, “What the hell is THIS? It’s so DARK. Where’s the hippie-boy in bell bottoms?” I love Circus. He’s an artist.

“You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” – Leo Sayer. OMG.

“Bass Goin’ Crazy” – the awesome Albert Ammons doing some grooving piano boogie woogie.

“There are Worse Things I Could Do” – Stockard Channing, aka the heartbroken world-weary Rizzo in Grease. It’s classic.

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” – The Platters. So beautiful. So peaceful. So romantic. And what a voice.

“I Believe In the Man in the Sky” – Elvis Presley at his most godly. I wrote a post about his religious music. The thing about him is he represented the two most extreme poles of human existence – the Sacred and the Profane. And BOTH were equally sincere in him, as they are sincere in all of us (however you define Sacred. We’re talking spirit vs. flesh, the ultimate split.) And our culture still cannot reconcile those two poles, and yet there Elvis is, in human form, embodying that integration. The culture wasn’t ready for him then, and it’s still not ready.

“I Love You Porgy” – Nina Simone. A live concert take. She is so intense. She slows it down, wayyyy down.

“Fight For Your Right” – The Beastie Boys. Another regular on my workout mixes. I love them. I miss Adam Yauch.

“39” – Tenacious D. I adore them. I adore him. It’s so stupid and so funny. Very Van Morrison. “She’s 39 … I’m in my underwear …”

“Lazing On a Sunday Afternoon” – Queen. JOY.

“The Way I Feel Inside” – The Zombies. Beautiful! I love this anecdote from Rod Argent about stopping by Graceland to see if Elvis was home (he wasn’t, but Elvis’ dad let him have a look around) and realizing that Elvis had their albums on his jukebox. It blew their minds.

“Free Speech for the Dumb” – a really relaxing chilled-out number by Metallica.

“I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” – Britney Spears covering the Rolling Stones. People treated it like it was one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. How dare she. I think it’s pretty great. Super dumb, you realize, but also pretty great.

“Dogs of LA” – Liz Phair, from Whip-Smart. I listen to her lyrics sometimes and think, “How does she know … how does she know my deepest secrets … how does she know what it’s like for me?” I wrote about Exile in Guyville here.

“Hold On, Help Is On the Way” – Whitney Houston, from The Preacher’s Wife soundtrack, which is great stuff. I miss her. I wrote about Whitney’s iconic “Star-Spangled Banner” performance when she passed.

“Symphony No. 4 Tragic in C minor” – Franz Schubert, by the Wiener Philharmoniker. I don’t know crap about classical music, but I love this piece very much. H.L. Mencken, one of the crankiest men to have ever lived, wrote a lot about Schubert.

“She’s Fine” – Count Five. It has almost a calypso beat which is so crazy and fun. Clear Beatles influence too. All of their songs are about 2 minutes long. Get in, get the hell out. I love Count Five, and of course I think of Lester Bangs’ huge insane piece about them.

“Let’s Have Sex” – Pat McCurdy. An old friend of mine who is a huge local star in the Illinois/Wisconsin/Minnesota circuit. He plays over 300 shows a year. The man is BOOKED and has been so for 20 years now. I knew him way back when. He wrote a duet for us, I’m on one of his CDs, he thanked me in the liner notes for one of his albums and I still don’t know why. You’re welcome? I performed with him at Milwaukee Summer Fest for 3,000 people, definitely a high watermark in my life. One of the funnest experiences ever. Here we are, crammed into a photo booth at Lounge Ax in Chicago, with Ann Marie, a great friend. Lounge Ax is no longer there, sadly, although it was immortalized in a scene in High Fidelity when they go see Lisa Bonet perform. That’s Lounge Ax. That’s where I spent my Monday nights for the entire time I lived in Chicago. (Monday nights were Pat shows. Good times. Made lifelong friends like Ann Marie through Pat. And Phil. And others.)

“Washing of the Water” – Peter Gabriel. Ouch.

“All Across America” – Reverend Freakchild. Hot.

“Dream a Little Dream” – the cast of Glee. I have probably 15 versions of this song by various artists. It’s a lovely song and this is a beautiful and sweet version of it.

“Not Everyone” – Pat McCurdy again. I have so much “Pat” that sometimes Shuffle gets a bit much. You again, Pat? Go away.

“Big Boss Man” – Elvis Presley. One of his sexiest tracks. Yowza. And listen to what he’s doing between the lyrics. The grunts, the little echoes … it’s almost embarrassing. But not really at all. I mean, he’s in the zone with his hot self. Put it out there. 100%.

“Potiphar” – from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. And this, right here, is why iPod Shuffle is awesome.

“Hello Darlin'” – the great Conway Twitty. Swoopy guitar. His aching voice.

“Galileo” – Indigo Girls. Listen, I’ve been a fan since college. I still am. This is one of their best songs. They’re up and down for me, but there are always a couple of gems per album.

“She Said” – Longpigs. I heard this song on the radio randomly one day and flipped OUT for the song and this guy’s performance. I went out and bought the tape immediately. He is fanTAStic. And for some reason I have never investigated further. It’s indefensible. There are other great songs on this album but this is the keeper.

“Ain’t That Peculiar” – Marvin Gaye. So jamming.

“He Can Only Hold Her” – Amy Winehouse. What a loss. Every time she comes up, I think, “DAMMIT, AMY.”

“Is There Life Out There” – Reba McEntire. Old-school. A storyteller. I will never forget her appearance on the Tonight Show, where she performed this. She wore a waitress’ uniform, there was a set, and she hit it out of the PARK. But what was so memorable was that Patrick Stewart was also a guest and he was crushing on Reba so hard it was so charming and adorable. And what I remember vividly is that when she performed “Is There Life Out There”, you got a glimpse of the darkness of the desk area, where Leno and Patrick Stewart were – and Patrick Stewart had stood up and moved out further, so he could watch. It was such a gesture of professional respect – but also “I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS WOMAN” – it was awesome. I just found the clip on Youtube.

“Blackjack” – Ray Charles. Great makeout song.

“96 Tears” – Question Mark & The Mysterians. Classic. Groovy.

“Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” – Oscar Isaac, from the wonderful Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack. Loved the film.

“Doth I Protest Too Much” – Alanis Morissette. Don’t ask questions if you don’t want an honest answer, Alanis.

“God Is Dead?” – Black Sabbath. Love the question mark. Also love those simple eerie opening chords. Get ready. 9-minute song coming up.

“Suppertime” – Levi Stubbs, from the movie Little Shop of Horrors. Gloriously fun. Such a great vocal performance.

“My Darling Child” – Sinéad O’Connor, from Universal Mother, an album I love. She has a new one out, I believe. Haven’t bought it yet. I will follow her to whatever lunatic landscape she wants to explore.

“Beale St. Blues” – Eartha Kitt. This song is in the Top 25 Most Played songs in my entire collection, so that should tell you how much I listen to it.

“My Love and Devotion” – Doris Day. I have a huge collection of her greatest hits. She was so smooth, so talented, such a beautiful voice. I got Mitchell talking about Doris Day (and others) here.

“Blood Red Roses” – The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. The soundtrack of my childhood. I knew all of their songs by heart by the time I was 4 years old.

“Words of Love” – Buddy Holly. So sweet and hopeful-sounding.

“Rich Woman” – Robert Plant & Allison Krause. What a great album. One of my favorite albums of that year. The pairing seemed surprising, before you had heard the tracks, and then when you heard them, it made total sense. I’m a huge fan of both of them. Robert Plant said an interesting thing that one of the reasons he was drawn to the project was that it would give him a chance to sing the harmony-line, something he never had to do as the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. So every time I hear him gently take that harmony line, I smile. Wonderful album.

“’97 Bonnie and Clyde” – Eminem. Good times. So sweet. So fucking sick.

“Sister Anne” – MC5. Ferocious. Love them.

“Think It Over” – Buddy Holly. That’s right, Buddy, throw it back in her court. If she’s playing hot-cold with you, call her on it. I love the boogie-woogie piano break. It’s not time-capsule music. It’s alive, fresh.

“This Little Girl” – from the Broadway musical Matilda, which I have not seen, but I absolutely love the music.

“Pick a Little, Talk a Little” – the ladies from Music Man. I grew up on musicals, and Music Man was my favorite. It was a family favorite. I remember my mother and father ROARING at the line-reading of “Ballllllzac” in this song, and I didn’t get it, but I knew they thought it was funny. Now I understand. My sisters and I can sing the entire musical beginning to end.

“Joe Bean” – Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, one of my favorite albums of all time.

“In With the Old” – my incredibly talented sister Siobhan O’Malley, from her album Alibi Bye. She never ceases to amaze me.

“I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” – Merle Haggard. He’s the best.

“Jet Lag” – Brendan Benson, a guy I LOVE. I have Apple to thank, I guess, for introducing him to me because they used one of his songs as the music for an iPod commercial and I immediately had to Google him. And what a treat to discover him. He’s prolific too. Lots of albums. He is incapable of writing a boring or stock song. I adore him.

“Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)” – Glass Tiger. Oh my God, I own this?? With Bryan Adams swooping in at the end?

“But Not For Me” – Dinah Washington. She has such a sexy voice, such perfect phrasing. She’s not just a singer. She’s a musician. Her voice is an instrument. I love her stuff.

“Rocking” – Shawn Colvin from what I refer to as “her suicidal holiday album.” Seriously. These are songs you want to play on a Christmas when you’re all alone, have no family, and are contemplating ending it all. Perfect accompaniment.

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” – Elton John. I was extremely into him in high school and college. Not so much now. But Betsy and I going to an Elton John concert in college is a treasured memory.

“woman down” – Alanis Morissette. I make fun of her but I love her. It’s strange. I love her latest. I like her best when she’s PISSED, like here. And, of course, I will love her forever for this.

“Take What You Got” – Andy Kelso and Stark Sands from Kinky Boots, another show I have not seen. But I love the music. I love Cyndi Lauper, and her Tony acceptance speech made me weep. Stark Sands was great in Inside Llewyn Davis!

“Overture” – for Big River. My sister Jean and I can sing Big River in its entirety from start to finish. And we have. We have driven other people out of the room because we can’t stop. I understudied Big River at the Walnut Street in Philadelphia, my first Equity points ever.

“Time Stands Still” – Pat McCurdy. One of his most romantic songs. Heartbreaking. From Showtunes, the album I’m on. Because, yeah, it’s all about me.

“Can’t Fight This Feeling” – REO Speedwagon. Dying. What the hell, Sheila.

“Blackbird” – The Beatles. Perfection.

“Fuck Time” – Green Day. Isn’t it always fuck time? This is from ¡Dos! – I get confused. They put out three albums on the same day or something like that, I’m still making my way through them. This is great. Macho sexual posturing. Bring it.

“The Main Event” – Barbra Streisand. I honestly don’t think I could be happier than I am right now hearing this.

“Don’t Just Sit There” – Lucius, one of my recent discoveries. They are fantastic.

“Feel” – Robbie Williams. I was wondering when Robbie would show up. I have missed him. Superstar. One of the best things going right now.

“Speic Seoigheach” – The Chieftains. I think I tapped out to listening to them at around age 6, it was the air I breathed at home, but whaddya know, I still have all their stuff.

“Girl” – The Beatles. That breathing in … it freaked me out when I was a kid. And rightly so. The lyrics are pretty disturbing! Abusive relationship! Run!

“Shop Around” – The Miracles. Good advice.

“Your New Clothes” – John Wesley Harding. This song was on some long-ago mix tape given to me by a boyfriend. The relationship ended. The cassette tape was lost along the way, in all my moves. But suddenly – and recently – this song came into my mind. I knew it had something to do about clothes, and that “your new clothes” was repeated at one point and the words “mythic Tarot” were also included. Through those meagre clues, I tracked the song down. It’s as wonderful as I remember. Listening to it again felt like reuniting with an old friend. That boyfriend came racing into my mind again, three-dimensional, the way he smelled, the way his hands felt … all as I listened to the song. Music can be incredible that way, memories erecting themselves with the song.

“Symphony of Destruction” – Megadeth. Oh YES. Must be blasted at 11. Otherwise you just can’t understand.

“Waitin’ in School” – the wonderful Ricky Nelson. From Megadeth to Ricky Nelson. You can’t get better than that.

“Eleanor Rigby” – The Beatles. “Eleanor Rigby” HAUNTED me as a child. Every line. Every image. The song felt so grown-up. I knew it was not a happy song. But I did not understand. I understand now.

“Old Before I Die” – Robbie Williams. I had never heard of him before (which now seems completely insane I love him so much) and then went to Ireland in the late 90s and “Millennium” was on every radio every 20 minutes. It actually got to be annoying. I asked my sister, “Who the hell is this person?” She gave me the lowdown. I bought the CD at a Tower Records in Dublin. I’ve been a fan ever since. I honestly thought he might flame out early, because he is such a bad boy, and had problems with drugs and alcohol. But he got his shit together, he’s a superstar, and is now coming out with albums of swing music classics, and it’s not done ironically, or tongue in cheek – he really is a Rat Pack guy, he really can handle such material. He’s awesome. I look forward to whatever he does. So let’s close out with him performing “Old Before I Die” live.

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

The Books: Arguably, ‘Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent’, by Christopher Hitchens

Posted on June 24, 2014 by sheila

Arguably Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Any big reader will have gaps in their reading, authors they never got to, authors they somehow missed, especially if said authors are not taught in school. Evelyn Waugh was one of those for me. There’s really no excuse for why I never read him, and I had certainly seen the gigantic mini-series of Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons, back in the day, and had quite an obsession going on about it, but still I just never picked up the book. No excuse. There are other authors on my list. I am fully aware of the people I should have read, and I will get to them someday, is my view. But then I read a piece by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic on Evelyn’s Waugh’s novel Scoop (excerpt here), and Hitchens’ review made me laugh out loud, so I immediately picked up the book.

Scoop, of course, is a brilliant lampooning of that animal known as “the foreign press,” with journalists pouring into a fictional country where supposedly a revolution is in place, and they race around looking for the “scoop”. Scoop is so funny that when I was reading it on the bus I made a spectacle of myself. I wrote about it here. It is, hands down, one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life. I began to read his other novels, and they are equally as funny. But humor is not the only thing that Waugh brings to the table. He is vicious, one of the most vicious writers to ever put pen to paper, and his sentences are devastating. In Hitchens’ various writing on Waugh, he will describe an episode in one of the books, and then make the observation along the lines of: “You see how many words I had to use to describe the event? Waugh does it in one sentence.” There’s Decline and Fall, his pitiless book on education (thoughts here), there’s A Handful of Dust, which is really about the rottenness of Empire and class, there’s Vile Bodies, his brilliant evocation of the mania in the youthful generation between the World Wars, their desire to just have a good time, their parties, their blatant disregard for what was starting to loom again on the Continent, and many more. And then of course, there’s Brideshead Revisited, which certainly has some humorous sequences (the cruise ship pitching through the sea is one hilarious scene), but is really an elegy for a world that was disappearing. The Downton Abbey world, if you will. Evelyn Waugh hated the modern world. He hated modernism and technology, he had nothing but contempt for all of it. Imagine a rigid conservative man seething with hatred. That’s Waugh.

However, on the flip side, he was one of the primary writers of the Jazz Age, he wrote about it, he described it, he looked at it from a lofty perspective, he understood it in a way that those lost in it couldn’t, and Vile Bodies stands up there at the tippity-top of the heap of Jazz Age writing. Obviously Fitzgerald owns that territory, but Waugh is there too.

Evelyn Waugh

Speaking of which, Waugh gave what is now known as “the most ill-natured interview ever” with the BBC, which has been released on CD. I don’t have the CD, but you can read some choice quotes here. The interviewer got off on the wrong foot with Waugh (perhaps there was no right foot at all with such a cranky man!), and he showed increasing annoyance at each question. Some of the quotes! Crazy! He hated the world.

Thank God he was so hilarious!

The hatred, though, came from a keen experience of loss on a culture-wide level. Brideshead is one of the most elegiac books ever written. Howards End comes close, although it’s an entirely different style. But it has the same vast-ness at the center of it, the death of the old England, the death of Empire, the death of the old ruling classes. Good riddance, many people would say. I, on occasion, would say that. I’m Irish, I don’t have sentimentality towards those horrible people. But when you read Forster, or Waugh, on the topic, what they are really talking about is the death of certain concepts, concepts like honor and loyalty and goodness and safety, all things that were completely shattered by the cataclysm of the first World War. Brideshead has a hell of a lot going on it besides that. There’s also the debauched spectacle of Sebastien, one of the most touching and tragic portrayals of what it must have been like to be gay in that time, in that era, and not to be able to express it. There is also the redeeming nature of the Catholic Church (Waugh was Catholic). The second half of the book starts to keen with a kind of exquisite agony, as you realize what is happening, what is dying, what has been lost. It’s really a masterpiece. (Some thoughts here.)

Waugh wrote a lot. There’s still much I have not read. I have a collection of Waugh’s letters which I have not read, but I will. He was BFFs with the brittle and cynical Nancy Mitford (one of the “creepy Mitford sisters,”, who was also a novelist), and the collection is filled with chatty letters to her. He was such a rigid Catholic that everyone thought he was crazy, reactionary (which he was), and he joked to Nancy in private that nobody could imagine how horrible he would be if he were not a Catholic. Hahahaha.

He was a master of the English language. He used it to devastating effect, both hilarious and tragic. His political opinions are often alarming. He was often dead-wrong – but a lot of people were in those chaotic years, the 20s and 30s. And his stuff was often quite prophetic.

Hitchens’ piece here, which was in The Atlantic in 2003, is a larger examination of the tensions in Waugh’s work as a whole: the politics, the social stuff, the humor and satire, the Catholicism, the homoeroticism, the hatred. He starts off by describing the notes Orwell had written, basically on his death bed, for a future review of Brideshead, a tantalizing prospect that never came to pass, we only have the notes. (There are quite a few connections between Orwell and Waugh, so much so that a book came out recently called The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. I read it. It was very good.) Hitchens calls Waugh out on some of his flaws as a writer (his horrible purple-prose sex scenes, for example), but those are really quibbles when you consider the magnificent whole, as Hitchens does. (Hitchens is quite funny, though, on those sex scenes.) The final third of this very long piece is a book review of Waugh’s The Sword of Honour Trilogy, which I have not read, but I really must.

Here is an excerpt from an early section of Hitchens’ essay.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent’, by Christopher Hitchens

Waugh was not a mere propagandist, and we would not still be reading him if he had been. The ends that he reserves for the meek and the worthy and the innocent are condemnations of the worldly and the vain, as surely as in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but they are also highly diverting for their own sake. William Boot, in Scoop, is given a thorough drubbing by reality the moment he risks leaving the shelter of Boot Magna Hall, his bucolic den. Tony Last, in A Handful of Dust, is a doomed man once he agrees to give up his country seat of Hetton and embark on a venture of overseas exploration. The element of what we glibly call noir is a fluctuating one: Both Boot and Last (cobbler’s names) are treated with extraordinary cruelty by the women they love, but the outcomes are arranged along the spectrum between pity and terror. Waugh’s mastery is most often shown by the light flick with which he could switch between the funny and the sinister. And the delicacy of this touch is shown by the breathtaking deftness with which he handled profane subjects. I have already mentioned that the gross pedophilia of Decline and Fall is so artfully suggested that an adolescent might read it unawares. And many adult reviewers of Brideshead have somehow managed to describe it as a languorous evocation of the “platonic” nature of English undergraduate affection.

But toying with his innocents, and showing how cleverly and suddenly their creator could bring them low, was for Waugh part of a serious mandate. He wanted to bring the Book of Job to life for those who had never read, or who feared, it. And he chose a time – the mid-twentieth century – when the Church he had joined was very plainly marked not just with a nostalgia for the days of Thomas More or even of Thomas Aquinas but by a reactionary modernity of its own. It is for this reason, I propose, that Waugh and Eliot still seem fresh while G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc appear quaint and antique. The plain fact is that both felt and transmitted some of the mobilizing energy of fascism.

The tweedy, fogy types who made an affectation of Waugh are generally fondest of his almost camp social conservatism: his commitment to stuffy clubs, “home” rather than “abroad,” old clothes, traditional manners, ear trumpets, rural hierarchy, ancient liturgy, and the rest of it. Their master ministered very exactly to this taste in the undoubted self-parody that adorns The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and is titled “Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age.”

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz – everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: “It is later than you think,” which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.

His face eventually grew to fit this mask, but Waugh had been very much “of” the Jazz Age, and brought it hectically to life, most notably in Vile Bodies and Brideshead. Sexual experiments, fast cars, modern steamships and airplanes – these, plus a touch of experience with modern warfare, gave him an edge that the simple, fusty reactionaries did not possess. Thus he celebrated Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia as in part a victory for progress and development, defended Franco’s invasion of Spain as a stand for tradition and property, and, in his travel book Robbery Under Law, denounced the Mexico of Cárdenas as an anti-clerical socialist kleptocracy. On some things he was conservative by instinct. (He always abominated, for example, the very idea of the United States of America.) But the dynamic element in modernism was not foreign to him, much as he later liked to pretend otherwise. And he made excellent use of this tension in his writing.

Posted in Books | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Raquel Welch and Cher

Posted on June 23, 2014 by sheila

Just because.

Does one really need a reason to revel in something as amazing as this?

Posted in Actors, Television | 3 Comments

Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 22: “Devil’s Trap”

Posted on June 22, 2014 by sheila

d44

Directed by Kim Manners
Written by Eric Kripke

For the finale, we get our first major loop-around. Sam, Dean, and, by extension, John, have spent their lives hunting the demon that killed Mom. Sam and Dean started the season by searching for their father. They found him. They lost him again. They found him again. They lost him again. Now, when they find him again, he is ALSO the “other” thing they have been chasing. The two have become one and the same. It’s elegantly set up, and works on both a plot-line and an emotional level. We’ve only seen the demon as a black silhouette in a baby’s room, no features, we don’t know yet what it looks like. So how great that in our first confrontation with this thing … it’s John.

A finale has to both wrap things up and keep the audience hanging. It has to have a satisfactory sense of closure, as well as set up the challenges for the next season. Season 1, seen as a whole, was a bit all over the place, with some major Lemons, but the show barreled on like the Impala, making its points, zig-zagging, making rest-stops, pit-stops, zooming back into the major themes before skirting away again … You know, the show is a road trip and the structure feels like one too. But everything that was set up in the pilot (search for Dad, search for demon, Family or Hunter dilemma) has to be wrapped up. Or at least re-visited in a way that will assure that the story will continue. It’s a hefty load, a huge challenge, and “Devil’s Trap” is an extremely ambitious finale, the most ambitious episode thus far, at least in terms of the multiple interlocked challenges facing everyone involved.

Kim Manners directs, and the script was by series creator Eric Kripke. “Devil’s Trap” hurtles out of the gate at 100 miles an hour, picking up directly where the last episode left off, and basically doesn’t stop until the final moment 40 minutes later. And yet it is amazingly taut, airtight, really, and there isn’t a sense, like you sometimes get with finales, that the action is being pumped up artificially to lead us to some kind of cliffhanger. The cliffhanger is certainly present, but when it comes it feels like it arrives from out of nowhere.

Our conversations in the comments section to these re-caps have been marvelous. One of the reasons I started these re-caps is because I wanted to talk about the show the way I wanted to talk about it. I also wanted to create a forum where I get to analyze the crap out of things like camera angles, camera moves, script analysis, and acting choices, the nuts-and-bolts of the business and things that have obsessed me since I was a kid. It is the whole POINT for me, and it makes me happy that like-minded people have gathered! Fun! The Story-telling tropes, and cinematic choices interest me far more than how a plot-point in Season 1 connects to a plot-point in Season 6, and how this fits with that, and that fits with this, and “but Sam said this in Episode 16, and that fits with what he said 3 seasons later …” and honestly, it’s all a bit too Inception-y for my taste. The beauty of Supernatural is that things are not wrapped up, they continue, they surge forward, they don’t make complete and perfect sense, the issues work ON the characters, the issues continue to rise up from the depths … saying “HANDLE ME”, and they think they’ve got it handled, only to realize … shit, nope, not handled. It’s not that those connections between seasons aren’t there, and I sense them constantly and of course mention them in the re-caps, but it’s not my obsession or interest. Have fun with it if it’s your thing, I mean that sincerely, but it’s just not my “way in”, or what interests me. For me, Supernatural is most powerful, though, because of the bottomless pool of un-knowability and ambiguity swirling beneath every moment (not to mention the almost slapstick level of humor, which was the initial attraction of the series for me). The pleasure, for me, in the whole thing is in breaking down WHY those moments work, and HOW they “do it.” This includes camera angles, directorial choices, and this also includes acting choices. I get into that at length below in my “Acting Choice” discussion.

And I want to thank you all for your participation in these re-caps. Seriously. It has been so much fun! Those comments sections are insane!

Continue reading →

Posted in Television | Tagged , , , , , | 126 Comments

“I’m almost not crazy now.” – Gena Rowlands, Love Streams

Posted on June 21, 2014 by sheila

It was Gena Rowlands’ 84th birthday on June 19. I was looking online for a trailer of Love Streams (1984), and there was one made although the film was never really properly distributed. But I did find a beautiful trailer put together by the Film Museum in Amsterdam, so I thought I would share it. The quality is not great, but just wait! On August 12 the Criterion Collection is releasing a digital restoration of the film, and it looks GREAT now. Love Streams, a masterpiece, John Cassavetes’ last film, was never released on DVD. So it’s a major moment. And, of course, it’s a major moment for me as well because a video-essay, written and narrated by yours truly, on the acting of Gena Rowlands, is going to be included on the Special Features of the DVD. I’ve seen a rough cut and it looks great.

At one point in the film, Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands) is on the phone with her soon-to-be-ex-husband (Seymour Cassel), who basically divorced her because she was so unstable. Sarah is trying to convince him that her time in Europe did her a world of good (all evidence to the contrary), and she says to him on the phone, with utter seriousness, her voice bright and excited, “I’m almost not crazy now.”

Gena Rowlands never ever EVER condescended to the “crazy” characters she played in her husband’s films. She played them as hopeful, optimistic. It is one of the many reasons why they can be so tragic, and why her work is so unique.

Again, August 12: Criterion release of Love Streams.

And happy birthday Gena, you tough tough dame.

tumblr_n7fdhpm8zY1s3mlhro1_1280

Posted in Actors | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

49th and 7th

Posted on June 19, 2014 by sheila

46226_10152261781642632_1878999055264744242_n

A bit of an anxious day yesterday. A billboard like this one is almost visibly relaxing.

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How I Know It’s Summer

Posted on June 18, 2014 by sheila

10382757_10152261294382632_146431827143185168_n

I walk into any given room in my apartment and this is what I see.

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 5 Comments

The Books: Arguably, ‘On Animal Farm’, by Christopher Hitchens

Posted on June 18, 2014 by sheila

Arguably Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens wrote an entire book on Orwell called Why Orwell Matters (it’s great, no surprise). His mentions of Orwell in print probably run into the hundreds of thousands. And not just the books, the novels and war reportage books, but all of the essays as well. I imagine if you are not familiar with Orwell, or if you only know Animal Farm and 1984, some of Hitchens’ commentary would be too complex, too shorthand-ish, to ever understand. Orwell died pretty young, and he wrote like he knew he wouldn’t be here long. His essays are high watermarks of the form, both personal (shooting the elephant, boarding school days) and political, sometimes at the same time. He has written some political essays that are so masterful they have yet to be matched. He is one of those figures that come along rarely, a figure who can see above and beyond his own time. What is incredible about him is that he was also fully immersed in his own time. He didn’t sit in a tower, observing from afar. He fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was, how you say, highly involved. But that’s the case with other similar figures – Arthur Koestler, Rebecca West.

The following essay by Hitchens was an introduction written for a new edition of Animal Farm.

af_usa_l2

The essay is broken up into three parts. One is the “Historical Background” of the novel, the “fairy story,” as Orwell termed it. It’s a damn near perfect allegory of the Russian Revolution, and yet it remains broad enough that it speaks to other revolutions, other oppressed peoples, it speaks to the totalitarian mindset in general. But for students of the Russian Revolution, it’s amazingly accurate (although, as Hitchens points out, there is no “Lenin pig.” Fascinating.) Also, you just have to consider the fact that Animal Farm was written at a time when the news coming out of Russia was not just unreliable, but flat-out inaccurate. You had to sift through the record looking for the real truth, you had to read the samizdat literature, which started coming out almost immediately. And Orwell, working with that defect, still understood all. The second part of the essay is the “Story of Publication.” Publishers did not want to touch the manuscript, sometimes because they understood the allegory and were frightened to put their name on such a thing (not to mention the fact that Russia was an ally of Great Britain at that time), and sometimes because they didn’t understand the allegory at all and were like, “Talking animals? We’re not interested in children’s books.” It also was sometimes rejected because certain editors who received the manuscript thought Stalin was a good guy, Communism was awesome, and they wouldn’t put into print such inflammatory stuff that hurt their cause.

You know. Your basic charlatans.

Finally, a small publisher was brave enough to put out a tiny edition. Orwell was paid forty-five pounds. The book, to put it mildly, did not make a splash.

Until …

And that’ll be the excerpt I post today. How the book was “discovered.”

The final section of Hitchens’ beautiful essay has to do with the “afterlife” of Animal Farm, and how it continues to be a revelation to those who live in dictatorships. There’s a reason the book is banned in Iran. It’s never been published in China, Burma, or North Korea. (Hitchens relates a quote from a citizen of Burma: “George Orwell wrote three books about our country: Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.“)

But here is Hitchens on what happened after Animal Farm was published.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘On Animal Farm‘, by Christopher Hitchens

It is thinkable that the story could have ended in this damp-squib way, but two later developments were to give the novel its place in history. A group of Ukrainian and Polish socialists, living in refugee camps in post-war Europe, discovered a copy of the book in English and found it to be a near-perfect allegory of their own recent experience. Their self-taught English-speaking leader and translator, Ihor Ševčenko, found an address for Orwell and wrote to him asking permission to translate Animal Farm into Ukrainian. He told him that many of Stalin’s victims nonetheless still considered themselves to be socialists, and did not trust an intellectual of the Right to voice their feelings. “They were profoundly affected by such scenes as that of animals singing ‘Beasts of England’ on the hill … They very vividly reacted to the ‘absolute’ values of the book.” Orwell agreed to grand publication rights for free (he did this for subsequent editions in several other Eastern European languages) and to contribute the preface from which I quoted earlier. It is affecting to imagine battle-hardened ex-soldiers and prisoners of war, having survived all the privations of the Eastern Front, becoming stirred by the image of British farm animals singing their own version of the discarded “Internationale,” but this was an early instance of the hold the book was to take on its readership. The emotions of the American military authorities in Europe were not so easily touched: They rounded up all the copies of Animal Farm that they could find and turned them over to the Red Army to be burned. The alliance between the farmers and the pigs, so hauntingly described in the final pages of the novel, was still in force.

But in the part-acrimonious closing scene, usually best-remembered for the way in which men and pigs have become indistinguishable, Orwell predicted, as on other occasions, that the ostensible friendship between East and West would not long outlast the defeat of Nazism. The Cold War, a phrase that Orwell himself was the first to use in print*, soon created a very different ideological atmosphere This in turn conditioned the reception of Animal Farm in the United States. At first rejected at Random House by the Communist sympathizer Angus Cameron (who had been sent the book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) and then by a succession of lesser publishers, it was rescued from oblivion by Frank Morley of Harcourt, Brace, who while visiting England had been impressed by a chance encounter with the novel in a bookshop in Cambridge. Publication was attended by two strokes of good fortune: Edmund Wilson wrote a highly favorable review for the New Yorker comparing Orwell’s satirical talent to the work of Swift and Voltaire, and the Book-of-the-Month Club made it a main selection, which led to a printing of almost half a million copies. The stupidity of The Dial Press notwithstanding, the Walt Disney company came up with a proposal for the film version. This was never made, though the CIA did later produce and distribute an Animal Farm cartoon for propaganda purposes. By the time Orwell died in January 1950, having just succeeded in finishing Nineteen Eighty-four, he had at last achieved an international reputation and was having to issue repeated disclaimers of the use made of his work by the American right-wing.

* In an especially acute feuilleton entitled “You and the Atomic Bomb” in Tribune in October 1945.

Posted in Books | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment