This is for my Supernatural family. Would be tough going for anyone else, and might be tough going for those of you who grooved to these seasons. I am not here to tell you you’re wrong. People have different feelings. I’m just saying – strongly – my experience of it, in this first full re-watch (albeit done backwards). Binging seasons bring some clarity to what some of the problems – as I deem them to be – were. This is a litany of negativity, but (if you can believe it) – I am enjoying this experience. And after re-watching Seasons 12-15, I am SO excited to start Season 11.
I’m not posting this at the end of the month because clearly the binge is out of control and I’ll need to break this up.
“I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether its a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together.”
— Bunny Yeager
It’s the birthday of model and pin-up photographer Bunny Yeager. She is most famous for her photographs of Bettie Page, and was instrumental in getting Bettie Page the 1955 Playboy cover. There weren’t too many women running around taking nude pin-up photos. There also weren’t too many pin-up models who also were photographers. It was Yeager’s lifestyle, her mission, her reason for being, her passion. Nude pin-up photography was the Wild West already, and Yeager’s work stands out from the pack. Bettie Page has moved into a category beyond stardom or even “notoriety”. There are as many – if not more – photographs of Bettie Page as of Marilyn Monroe. (Here’s my review of the recent documentary Bettie Page Reveals All.)
Bunny Yeager was born Linnea Eleanor Yeager in 1929, and renamed herself “Bunny” after Lana Turner’s character in Weekend at the Waldorf. Her family moved to Florida when she was a kid, and she thrived in the sun, she loved the beach culture. And the beach culture loved her too. She had a classic pin-up figure, she wore bikinis, she got a lot of attention, which she loved. Her first job as a model was a small gig for a local bakery … so she got her start – literally – in “cheesecake” photography. She wanted to be good at modeling. She felt the best way to learn was to experiment in photographing herself. These weren’t early versions of the “selfie.” They were rigorously self-directed photo shoots. During these experiments with her own image, she became a photographer.
She said, “If you don’t study yourself, you’re not getting a true idea of how you look.”
Through this process, she found her way. She had a knack for it. She would approach women she thought looked promising. On the beach, at a busstop, at a breakfast counter, wherever she found them. She would ask them if they were up for a photo shoot. Male photographers have been doing this since photography was invented. Sometimes their intentions are honorable, sometimes not. Bunny Yeager was a model who understood the appeal of the pin-up world, its eroticism, its tease and promise. Yeager liked to photograph her subjects outside, at the beach, in the trees, with animals.
In a 2012 interview with Youri Mevs at the Miami International Book Fair, there was the following exchange:
Mevs: “In your book there’s a statement … where you confirm that it would be a very boring place if all women looked alike –”
Bunny: “Our Maker was very clever about this — because sometimes that’s the little tweak we see in another person and fall in love with, perhaps – the thing that’s wrong with them.”
In this context, objectification was a good thing, a healthy and a fun thing (if everyone’s consenting). There is nothing dirty about sex: nothing dirty about wanting it, about wanting to look at beautiful girls in bikinis, about being a beautiful girl in a bikini, there is nothing dirty about desire. Society has turned these healthy positive things against us (women in particular suffer, although men suffer too). During the time when Yeager was working, you could be arrested for this stuff. There were raids on photographers’ studios. People were arrested. (There’s a great story about Bettie Page being arrested for “indecent exposure” during one of her photo shoots. She protested. Not by saying “They forced me to do this!” or “I needed money for rent!” She protested the word itself: “indecent.” To her, there was nothing “indecent” about being naked. Like, THAT was her beef with the arrest.) This is sex positivity that has almost gone by the wayside, except in burlesque circles – and those are good circles to be in, with their spirit of playfulness and generosity.
Yeager said in 2013, “I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests. I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together. That’s more important to me than anything.”
When she finally met Bettie Page, she found her soulmate and muse.
Bunny Yeager, Bettie Page, cheetahs
Yeager said of Bettie Page, “She was the best model because she not only had perfect facial features, but a great body and wasn’t ashamed to show it. It was impossible to take a bad photo of her. Bettie Page was always ready for the camera’s eye.”
Yeager could bring things out in models that other photographers couldn’t. Perhaps it was because she was a woman. The models could relax in her presence, be themselves, let out their playful funny sides. When sex is a two-way street, it’s so much better. In fact, sex that isn’t a two-way street should be abolished. What’s the point, then? Yeager worked right up until the end. She was planning her next shoot when she died.
While she will always be known for her collaboration with Bettie Page , her work encompasses much more than that. She worked out of South Florida and her photos were often drenched in sun and natural light.
You look at her photos and you can hear the laughter that must have been going on, in front of and behind the camera, you can hear the waves crashing, the seagulls calling. There is life there in the frame. Lightning captured in a bottle.
A true pioneer.
She died in 2014 at the age of 85.
“I was just confident my work was good.” — Bunny Yeater
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.
In Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe paints a pretty brutal picture of Jack Kerouac, at a party in New York, when the Hippie Bus rolled into town. (Robert Stone was also at that party. He describes it below.) Kerouac was cranky, sat on the couch, and drank beer. He just wasn’t into this “scene,” a scene he had helped … create? There was a wavering line from “The Beats” to the hippies, but something was lost in translation. (There’s home movie footage of this particular party, showing Kerouac on the couch, a thundercloud over his head.)
Reading On the Road, it is difficult for me sometimes to understand or “grok” the seismic impact it had on a generation.
“On the Road”, 1957, first edition
Please don’t misunderstand me. My words have nothing to do with the book, really. Or they do, inasmuch as it is a book so of its era – hell, it CREATED the era – that context in this case is decisive. And I need help with the context. I squinted at the book’s pages, trying to understand. I didn’t need to squint at the next-generation version, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That existed with or without said context.
My dad talked about On the Road to me. He gave me his perspective of someone who grooved to the book as a young man. And I trusted my father’s words. In the book, Kerouac gave an indelible image of a capable young man, saying “No” to what was expected of him, and in the Eisenhower-conformist era, much was expected. Post-War America was extremely conventional, as the country was solidified into a superpower, its wealth unimaginable, wealth that everyone felt, almost everyone’s standard of living was raised enormously. And with that came a Status Quo. What does it mean to say “No” to all that comfort? And go “on the road” and hang out with eccentrics and train-jumpers and the underclass, those who were also outside the mainstream? It was a CHOICE for Kerouac, who was a prep-school boy. And having it be a CHOICE as opposed to a NECESSITY is what gives the book its weird tone (at least in my opinion). There is a love affair with “the road”, that can only come from an outsider, who has a “way back” to the suburbs if he wanted it. The encounter with Dean Moriarty (i.e. Neal Cassady, the Muse to a generation … hell, two generations … he was ON the damn Hippie Bus) was a galvanizing homoerotic experience. Here was a man who walked the walk, who COULDN’T “fit in” if he tried. So there’s all that.
Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac
Some of the adventures and parties in the book feel totally random, a privileged boy on an extended bender – but my father’s words and context helped me “get it.” The book went off like a BOMB in the culture. There’s one moment when Kerouac waxes poetic about the revelatory moment when he ate ice cream with his hands. I mean, this is … like … so what, dude? BUT: to maintain a sense of childlike playfulness in the era of The Man with the Grey Suit was, again, a revelation, and it showed a generation “the way”. Say “no” to the confines of career/wife/marriage/conformity. DON’T grow up. My father said that if he could have done it all over again, he would have taken some time off to bum around like Kerouac and his friends did. I never forgot him saying that. It was the only time my father said that maybe he had other worlds and lifetimes in his head.
And so I understand the impact, even though for me I can’t feel it. For me, books like this are important: books like this shift conversations, create entire scenes, and unintended consequences – like the Summer of Love for example – unfurl from its pages. There’s also the fact that all this opting-out is being done by a man, a man with the keys to the castle, a man who is within the citadel, saying NO to it. THAT’S powerful, particularly for men, who are basically encouraged to never have emotions, or express things, or daydream, or loll about, or do any of the things that make life worth living. These things cannot be dismissed, and it’s why I find all of those poorly written hot takes about why such-and-such is overrated to be STUPID. You – with your freedoms, your options, your taking-things-for-granted that other people had to fight for – have benefited from books like On the Road. Whether you like it or not. It helped blast open the wall, it provided alternatives. It was a road map (literally) on how to opt OUT of the great prosperity of the most successful nation on earth.
But the story, to me, on a larger scale is a sad one. Kerouac couldn’t go the distance. He was strictly about youth. He couldn’t tolerate middle age. He was the coolest dude to ever walk the earth for a brief shining period. When all those hippies showed up in New York, rolling into town in their hand-painted bus, getting naked en masse, doing acid, shaking tambourines … he withdrew into himself, he felt old, he felt out of touch. He hated everything. He did not live long after that.
From novelist James Salter’s gorgeous memoir Burning the Days: Recollection. Both Kerouac and Salter attended Horace Mann Preparatory School. Kerouac was a glamorous untouchable upperclassman. Salter remembered him as a “swaggering Lowell boy”.
It was the field on which I recall Kerouac, in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running in games against Peddie and Blair. In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind… Kerouac was only one of the postgraduate students, “ringers,” brought in every year to man the school teams. Older, less fine, with faces already showing the shadows of manhood, they were the heroes of the school and at the same time outsiders. I never spoke to any of them; there was nothing to say. A year or two ahead of us, they drank beer, carried their books carelessly in one hand, and knew how to drive. Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional act. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character…
Among those schoolmates who achieved some notoriety there is Julian Beck … I met Beck several times afterwards but the level was superficial; in a real sense he declined to talk. He had stepped over me and was unwilling to be confronted on the same level.
With Kerouac, though I never saw him again, it was the same. I recognized his photograph, sensitive down-turned face, in a bookstore window on the jacket of a thick first novel. It was THE TOWN AND THE CITY. I read reviews of it after, filled with praise. By then I had tried to write a novel myself and failed. His was lyrical and repetitive and, to me, crushing. What he had done staggered me.
In an interview read later I saw the side of him that had been so unsuspected. He was asked about haiku and enthusiastically said, Yes! Then, before one’s eyes, he proceeded, like a man peeling an apple in one unbroken strip of skin, to compress an incident – a leaf blown onto the back of a tiny sparrow in a storm – into three succinct lines through trial and error, crossing out words in midair, so to speak.
Author Robert Stone said:
I was in the right place at the right time to see that [the Beats]. It started out with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when I was still in the navy. My mother recommended the book to me. I am probably the only person who had On the Road recommended to him by his mother. It is very hard to go back and think about what on the Road was saying to me. I pick it up now and all I can see is Neal Cassady. I got to know him. It was a wonderful rendering of him, but I don’t see much else in it Now it just reminds me of someboody writing on speed. That may be uncharitable, but frankly I find it very sentimental. As I say, I am not sure now what it was that moved me. I suppose there was that tradition of the American road. I can almost rmemeber what that was like… I didn’t know [Kerouac] well. And I didn’t travel on the bus. I saw the bus off and greeted the bus when it arrived on Riverside Drive. We went to a party where Kerouac and Ginsberg and Orlovsky and those guys were, and Kerouac was at his drunken worst. He was also very jealous of Neal, who had shifted his allegiance to Kesey. But Neal was pretty exhausted too. I saw some films taken on the bus – Neal looked like he was tired from trying to keep up with the limitless energy of all those kids. Anyway … Kerouac at that party was drunk and pissed off, a situation I understand very well. The first thing I ever said to him was, Hey, Jack, have you got a cigarette? And he said, I ain’t gonna give you no fucking cigarette, man, there’s a drugstore on the corner, you can go down there and buy a fucking pack of cigarettes, don’t ask me for cigarettes. That’s my Kerouac story.
In Rolling Thunder Revue, there’s a touching scene where Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visit Kerouac’s grave, sit in the grass, and read poetry. Paying tribute to a man who had meant so much to both of them.
And here’s my review of Big Sur, the so-so film adaptation of Kerouac’s psychologically terrifying book, which sounds like it was written in the throes of delirium tremens.
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.
CLARE. [to Kip] I’m about to deliver a lecture to him on making concessions in art.
KIP. For or against?
CLARE. I think any kind of artist — a painter like Van Gogh, a dancer like Nijinsky –
AUGUST. Both of them went mad.
CLARE. But others didn’t, refused to make concessions to bad taste and yet managed survival without losing their minds. That’s purity. You’ve got to respect it or not.
Vaslav Nijinsky was born in the late 19th century and was recognized as extremely gifted very early on during his time at the ballet school in St. Petersburg. He was chosen by choreographer and ballet master Serge Diaghilev to be the lead dancer in his company, the Ballets Russes. (See the fantastic documentary, The Ballets Russes for the story of this legendary company.)
Nijinsky was only in his early 20s, but he was already creating his own work, in particular three ballets that one can say without exaggeration changed the world: The Afternoon of a Faun, Jeux, and The Rite of Spring. The Rite of Spring, with its score by Stravinsky, is the most famous: at the ballet’s first performance in Paris in 1913, the audience rioted in outrage. Literally. The performance caused a riot. The Rite of Spring was part of a much larger artistic “movement”, representing the avant-garde, the experimental, slowly infiltrating the art world. (1913 was also the year of the famous Armory Show in New York, another “and nothing was the same after that” event. 1913 was a big year). Old forms were breaking up, 19th-century traditions shattering. Literature, music, dance, art, architecture, fashion, social mores: all were going through massive upheavals. In 1913, Gavrilo Princip stands in the wings, waiting for his entrance.
Ballet is one of the most conservative artforms on the planet. Opera is probably a close second. Tradition is key. The iron-clad form is how it survived. Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring, though, confronted tradition and pushed on past it. It strolled into the future. It CREATED the future. The Rite of Spring came OUT of a tradition, but didn’t bow down before it. Hence: RIOTS.
Nijinksy and Diaghilev were lovers, and for a time it was a productive love affair. They were both working at the top of their forms. Their breakup was stormy and then Nijinsky married a woman named Romola, who sounds like a wretched human being. Nijinsky was fired from the Ballets Russes, and things really started to spiral out of control. Perhaps he had always been a little bit mad, but as long as he had the outlet of his art, and the protection of Diaghilev, his madness was used for creative purposes. Perhaps. These are the things people still discuss when it comes to Nijinsky. Was he mad? Could his tragic end have been prevented? So WHAT if he was a little bit mad? He was hospitalized repeatedly. The treatment in those “hospitals” was brutal. If you weren’t sick when you entered the hospital, you sure as hell were MADE sick during your stay. Romola would park her husband in a sanatorium and then travel the world, living it up, eating out on his name, lying to the press: “He’s getting ready for a comeback!” Meanwhile, Nijinsky was in a locked room, dozing off, his head drooping into his bowl of soup . He painted the walls with his feces. He was given hundreds of shock treatments and insulin treatments, which probably caused irreversible brain damage. It’s just a fucking devastating story.
His diaries were eventually published: The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. I read them in high school with a sense of queasy curiosity. They haunted me. There were pictures of people visiting Nijinsky in the asylum and making him jump for them. It was so awful. His face is blank, he is an old stout-ish man, with a deteriorated mind, jumping in place to satisfy visitors he didn’t know. I consider his diaries a must-read: they are an extended rant about what it is like to be him, his hallucinations, his fantasies. He felt he was God-like, he was paranoid, he felt persecuted (understandable), and in moments of lucidity mourned all he had lost. The scariest part is he knew he was losing his mind.
Auden, in his great poem, “September 1, 1939”, writes:
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
The myth of Nijinsky is so gigantic – which is fascinating – since there is almost no footage of him dancing. ALMOST. There’s a rare clip of him from 1912 performing Faun.
You squint at the blurry image, trying to catch that flame of transcendence.
But most of his work comes to us through the myth of its reputation, the impact it had on those who were there. It’s like Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in the original production of The Glass Menagerie. There’s no footage of that performance. And so we must take people’s words for it, those who saw Nijinsky and had literally life-transformative experiences from it. They went out changed.
The words to describe Nijinsky by those who saw him dance, make one ache for a time machine. Professional writers struggle to find the words to describe his effect on audiences, and what it was he was actually doing. People talk about him being energy in the flesh, but also say that his persona onstage, and his ability as a dancer, touched the Gods. He is one of the greatest dancers of all time, and nobody alive today has seen him dance. Additionally, unless someone painstakingly wrote down all the steps, the actual ballets are lost to us. Attempts have been made to re-create his choreography, with varying degrees of success. Although he was classically trained, his ballets pushed the form towards modernism. The silhouettes were different, primal, flat, sharp-angled. He moved away from the flow and grace of ballet’s tradition. This was one of the things that was seen as so outrageous with The Rite of Spring (but, as Joan Acocella points out in her New Yorker essay about Nijinsky: the furor that erupted around The Rite of Spring is often presented as a reaction to Stravinsky’s score, which makes sense because the score still exists, we can listen to it, we can judge for ourselves. But the dance is lost. We only have eyewitness accounts as to what Nijinsky created, and tiny bits of footage. Important to remember that it was the music AND the dance that were controversial. Just because we can’t SEE something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Of Nijinsky we have only one twelve-minute ballet, The Afternoon of a Faun. Still, it is a great ballet – a watershed – and, together with Nijinsky’s other, missing ballets, it influenced later choreographers, notably hi sister, Bronislava Nijinska, whose reputation has had a tremendous reflowering in the past decade, and who claimed that everything she did came out of his work.
Beyond the question of his place in ballet’s historical record, Nijinsky’s life commands our attention by the sheer romantic force of its events. What a story this is! An awkward young boy who practically overnight becomes a world-famous dancer, then creates three ballets that change dance history, then jilts the world’s foremost ballet impresario, switches sexual orientations, marries a groupie, and goes raving mad, not without leaving behind an account of his conversations with God and a thorough inventory of his sexual practices: no wonder Romola thought this should be made into a movie. (It was, after her death – Herbert Ross’ dreadful 1980 Nijinsky.)
Whatever Nijinsky was in reality, he is by now a legend, a major cultural fact, and not just because of his extraordinary story but because of the way that story ties in with certain critical issues in ballet. Ballet’s relationship to time – the fact that the repertory, unanchored by text, is always vanishing, just as the dance image on the stage is always vanishing – forms a large part of the vividness and poignance of the art. We are always losing it, like life, and therefore we re-create it, mythologize it, in our minds. Nijinsky’s life – his rapid self-extinction and the disappearance of his ballets – is like a parable of that truth. If dance is disappearance, he is the ultimate disappearing act. Accordingly, he is held that much dearer. If many people today still believe that he was t he greatest dancer who has ever lived, that is partly because there are so few records of his dancing. Until recently, there were no known films of him. (Ostwald says that a short 1912 film of Nijinsky dancing in The Afternoon of a Faun was recently televised in Russia.)
His ballets have likewise been mythologized in their absence. Who can say whether The Rite of Spring was in fact the great modernist masterpiece that it is now claimed to be? Perhaps it was something more like the shaggy, dull, pseudo-folkloric thing that we saw in the Joffrey Ballet “reconstruction”. Many of those who were disappointed by the Joffrey version simply concluded that its flatness was due to its having been put together from such scrappy evidence – in other words, that it wasn’t really Nijinsky. But who knows?
…
Nijinksy taps into a final myth, that of the genius-madman. He was tagged with this label long before he went mad, just on the basis of the contrast between his onstage mastery and his offstage ineptitude. Diaghilev’s friend Misia Sert called Nijinksy an “idiot of genius”. And after he went insane the formula was pumped for all it was worth. Some writers described him as a kind of Russian yurodivy, or “holy fool”, a man who, like Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, was incompetent in life because his vision of divine truth was too clear. Others invoked the moth-to-the-flame metaphor: Nijinsky was a man who tested the limits – in dancing, in choreography, in sex – and paid the price; he went farther out on the limb than the rest of us, and fell off; he died for our sins. The shadow of Christ – and of van Gogh, that modern avatar of Christ – hovers at the edge of all these images. As with van Gogh, the metaphor is reflexive: he went mad because he was a great artist, and he was a great artist because he went mad.
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.
Ezra Jack Keats was one of my authors when I was about six years old and his books were staples in my childhood. He is somehow looped in my head to Sesame Street, because the world being depicted in his classic tales (Peter’s Chair (Picture Puffins), The Snowy Day, Whistle for Willie, A Letter to Amy) was the same New York one as in Sesame Street, and it was so different from the turf farm slash beach town world of my upbringing. He made New York City look like a big wonderland – where kids lived, kids like me – with graffiti, and mounds of snow, and stop lights at intriguing brick corners. The illustrations are hypnotic – works of art.
Barry, my father’s best friend, was friends with Ezra Jack Keats, so we grew up feeling a strange personal connection to the man who wrote the books we loved.
Letter to Amy was my favorite. It tells the story of a little boy who is planning his birthday party, and everyone he has invited is a boy as well … but … but … what about his friend Amy? Even though she is a girl, they are friends. But how will that go over if a girl comes to his party? Will he be made fun of? He writes a birthday invitation to her. It is a thundery rainy day. The illustrations are phenomenal and evocative. I love rainy days anyway, and I loved them as a little girl too – and Ezra Jack Keats completely captures the watery reflective urban world of a rainy dark day. The whole journey of that book, of grade school angst, and friendship, and learning to be firm enough to like who you want to like, despite peer pressure, really touched me.
The illustration above tore at my 6-year-old heart. The gesture of despair and hurt. I remember feeling really devastated by it. I don’t think I was even going to school yet, so I didn’t have an experience of being hurt by a friend yet but … maybe I knew it was coming? Maybe it gave me a glimpse of what could happen? I understood it. I remember the feeling.
We also loved Whistle for Willie.
Ezra Jack Keats is best known for The Snowy Day, or maybe Whistle for Willie. In Snowy Day, the city shuts down in a snowstorm.
Some years ago, when we had a massive snowstorm, I was struggling through Times Square, through literally mountainous drifts, trying to get to Port Authority so I could get home – and the roads were completely shut down, no cars anywhere, and people were cross-country-skiing down Broadway. Snowball fights broke out in the middle of 7th Avenue. Sound gets muffled and also amplified by the snow, things get strangely quiet with no traffic, and the stoplights keep going – red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow … even though no cars can approach. The illustrations in The Snowy Day completely invoke that world: the strange quiet that descends over a bustling metropolis when there are mounds of snow.
Happy birthday to an American classic.
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.
Raoul Wash directed a number of great films (in a career as vast as his, the names stick out), but one also thinks of the great PERFORMANCES in these great films, often from actors who were just finding their footing, or trying to move from one level to the next: They Drive By Night (with Humphrey Bogart, George Raft, Ida Lupino – a star-making unforgettable turn), High Sierra (hugely important in Bogart’s development), Strawberry Blonde (Cagney), with White Heat, almost a decade later. When I think of Walsh, I think of actors. I think of performance. This is not to say that Walsh’s contemporaries – Ford and Hawks and the rest – skimped on the acting. Of course they didn’t. But Walsh’s films are built around performance. White Heat isn’t just a gangster movie. It’s a portrait of psychopathy and a vehicle for Cagney’s genius. I mean, that’s what you really remember. When I interviewed Dan Callahan about his book, The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912-1960, (Volume 1), he said as he was putting it all together, looking at each actors’ career, Raoul Walsh’s name kept coming up, making it clear (if it hadn’t been before) that Raoul Walsh was a very very good actor’s director. This is not something Walsh is really “known for” but it’s clear that he WAS. Many actors – already great actors – gave definitive or star-making performances under his direction.
There are a million stories about the filming of the great prison cafeteria scene in White Heat, when James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett flips out when he gets the news of the death of his mother (psycho killer as Mama’s Boy, a nice touch).
Pretty much anyone who was there on the day of shooting that scene gave their version of it. (It doesn’t really matter what’s the truth: all that matters is what is onscreen).
Legend has it that although, of course it was planned that Cagney was going to flip out in the scene, nobody – probably including Cagney – knew exactly how it would go. You’re only going to do the scene once, probably, and so you have to be ready for it. (This reminds me of Sally Fields’ memory of filming the scene in Norma Rae where Norma Rae is dragged by the cops out of the factory. The only thing director Martin Ritt said to her was, “Do not – under any circumstances – let the cops get you into that car.” But of course the scene required her to be put into the car. The end was a done deal. But Martin Ritt’s gentle reminder of her objective as a character just upped the stakes for Fields in playing it. I mean, look at her. They’re in the process of putting her into the car, they’ve “won,” but she is still playing the objective as hard as she can.)
In re: White Heat, Cagney wanted to make sure that the cameras kept rolling no matter what, because on some level he knew where he was going to go emotionally, and he knew it was going to be huge. Cagney knew his instrument, knew what would happen. He needed to be free to “go there” (of course he already felt free, because that’s the kind of actor he was), but he could only be as free as he needed to be if he trusted that the cameras would catch it.
In the scene, Cody sits in the cafeteria, and he gets the news. There’s a stunned disoriented moment. Then the event starts. Then it goes to the next level. Then it goes to the NEXT level. And then everything goes REALLY bananas. There is no limit to where it is going to go because there is no limit to where Cagney can go. Cagney is truly awe-inspiring. Watch, in particular, the actors around him.
As an extra or bit player, they know the scene is going to be big, they know Cagney is going to flip out. That’s the event. But they’re not sitting around rehearsing it beforehand, they don’t get a glimpse of what it will LOOK like and what it will FEEL like, to be present as it goes down. There’s a feeling of true shock and true fear in those around Cagney.
Raoul Walsh also directed Roaring Twenties, which includes my favorite death scene on film, also performed by Cagney: He is shot, and he stumbles/dances down the sidewalk, before crumbling into the church wall, clutching it. He then stumbles UP the church steps and then staggers and falls back DOWN, allowing gravity to take him down the steps, where he finally ends, lying sprawled out on his back, arms flung to the sides. Talk about awe-inspiring.
Cagney had a dancer’s understanding of how bodies move through space, what his body could do, and Walsh captures it all in one. You can’t make Cagney better than he is, you don’t tell Cagney what to do (not if you want to keep your job.) You as a director are not supposed to “help” Cagney give his performance (this reminder is mostly for director-as-auteur people). The only way you help Cagney is to make sure your camera is ready to capture whatever he does.
And Walsh did that.
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The view from my kitchen window into the back yard, into the sunrise. Window jewelry by my dear friend Luisa.
Moon over my sister’s house. We had tacos tonight.
My niece slept over. We binged Stranger Things. Up to season 3 now. Frankie quietly decided to sit on her lap. He chose her. She was so excited.
Trying to watch Twin Peaks
Sunset light at one of my favorite intersections in NY, the roads leading to the Flatiron, with Madison Square Park nestled in the middle. A lot of memories in this little patch of land, working at the internet startup across the street from the Flatiron, in the “glory” days of the Internet speculative bubble, a job I started when I was in grad school. My first New York media job. I’m still in that world. We used to go have drinks after work at this chic little wine bar half a block down from the Flatiron. Or take the subway down to Soho and have wine at the glorious Cafe Noir, which is now closed, sadly. My favorite bar in New York. Gorgeous wait staff from Brazil, Costa Rica, Morocco. Delicious food. Windows open to the sidewalks. Mayhem. Made lifelong friends at that crazy job. We were all artists. Photographers, writers, actors, musicians. It was when artists could still get jobs like this. Not corporate. But lots of money flying around. It would soon crash but I was there in its heyday. I used to go and eat lunch in Madison Square Park.
Hotel life. Hotel reading. And writing. I love hotels.
The iconic instantly recognizable Tiffany’s blue boxes. At Tiffany & Co. HQ. Because that’s where my weird life has brought me.
The quadrangle where I went to college. Foggy Sunday morning after church with my mother. I walked over there from the Dunkin Donuts. Nobody was around. The university library where my dad worked for 40 years is across the way, hidden in the fog. Ghosts.
I first saw her in Unbearable Lightness of Being, so so many years ago, a frighteningly long time ago. There’s the scene where she and Daniel Day-Lewis have sex for the first time, and it’s clearly her first time. Her reaction to the sex was unlike any acting I had ever seen before. Was it pain? Ecstasy? Loss? Or all of the above? You see so many sex scenes and they don’t make you feel anything. This one felt REAL. I almost couldn’t even believe what I was seeing, it was so spontaneous and so beyond language. My boyfriend whispered, “WHO is THAT.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, d. Philip Kaufman (1988)
We clearly were not alone in our “WHO is THAT?” response.
It would be a long while before I saw Mauvais Sang, from 1986, pre-dating Unbearable Lightness of Being by two years. I saw them out of order. Unbearable Lightness of Being was her first English-language film (and she has said she was barely fluent at the time), but Mauvais Sang was an international arthouse hit. So she was on the rise … AND it would be indicative of her very special career, and how she has gone about her work: she does movies in French, she does movies in English, she does movies with new directors and also with legends. She takes chances. She goes back to the theatre often (she’s won a Tony), and is also involved in dance. She did not pull up stakes in France and put down stakes in California, like so many do. She went back and forth between the two. She would not be pinned down. She would not be trapped. And she didn’t have to develop INTO that kind of person. She was that way from the start (rare in someone so young).
In Mauvais Sang, Binoche is is so beautiful and vulnerable she stops your heart.
Mauvais Sang, d. Leos Carax (1986)
Mauvais Sang is a dream of a movie, and the parachute scene is one of the most perfect visual evocations of what it feels like to be in love.
Her career is the Platonic Ideal of doing whatever the hell you want to do. There have been no fallow periods, no “careerism”, no jostling to get that role that will win an Oscar nomination. She’s not doing it for those reasons. She doesn’t care about acclaim. She could not give a shit about any of the trappings. She collaborates with people she likes. She does bold experimental films – like Claire Denis’ 2018 High Life, in which she plays scenes where it is difficult to imagine any other actress going where she goes. Her collaborations with Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, have been fascinating, first in Shirin – a meditation on women’s faces – and then in Certified Copy, not only one of the best films of that year, but in the last 20, 25 years.
There are so many roles I’m skipping over, like the one in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue, part of his gorgeous Three Colors trilogy.
Blue, d. Krzysztof Kieslowski (1993)
And then smaller American ensemble films like Dan in Real Life, where she is charming and adorable, funny, she’s quick in her responses, totally spontaneous, you never believe she’s anything other than who she says she is. Like, WHERE is the “acting”? With Binoche, you will not find it.
Dan in Real Life, d. Peter Hedges (2007)
I’d also like to point her performance in what is an extremely UN-ingratiating film about Rodin-lover-muse Camille Claudel, an incredible artist in her own right, who was confined to a mental institution in 1913, and never came out. Claudel died in 1943. The film takes place during a three-day period in 1915, early on in her confinement when she still had hope she would get out. It is a brutal film, physically and emotionally, and harrowing in its sense of helplessness and rage. I reviewed for Ebert.
Camille Claudel 1915, d. Bruno Dumont (2013)
Clouds of Sils Maria means so much to me, I’m almost afraid to see it again. I always think of Clouds of Sils Maria as “going with” Personal Shopper, also directed by Assayas and coming the following year, also starring Kristen Stewart, Assayas’ new muse. Stewart doesn’t exactly star in Clouds of Sils Maria – it’s a two-hander: Binoche and Stewart together, Binoche playing a famous actress, Stewart playing her capable assistant. Other characters come into play but the Main Event is this relationship between the assistant and the actress, who is preparing to play a role that terrifies her. I barely breathed when I saw it for the first time, it was so satisfying and fascinating and mysterious.
For Ebert, I’ve reviewed many films starring Binoche (or where Binoche has a cameo). She works SO MUCH and with such integrity. It’s such a great career. Here are the reviews, all of the films worth seeking out:
Review of last year’s – or maybe it was released this year – The Taste of Things, a miracle of a movie.
It’s the birthday of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Lloyd Price (born in 1933- he died in 2021 at the age of 88!)
He moved into a rarified level of cultural status with his 1959 mega-hit “Personality” – which became one of those meta-hits, where singer became totally associated with said hit (“Mr. Personality” was his nickname). Singers go their whole careers without coming out with a single like that, where 40, 50 years later, when you’re still touring, people request it wherever you go.
His “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” is a classic. He recorded it in 1952 (Elvis, of course, was hugely inspired by it), and the recording has such a jangly propulsive energy – that piano!! – the sax! – it feels like it was recorded in a juke joint on Saturday night, the dance floor crowded with people having a blast. It’s ALIVE.
For me, though, when I think of Lloyd Price, I think of his version of “Stagger Lee”.
He didn’t write “Stagger Lee”, of course. Versions of it had been kicking around forever, from before the time of recorded music. “Stagger Lee” was a huge hit for Lloyd Price in 1959, selling over a million copies. His version sounds … triumphant, exultant, joyous, even though the lyrics are some seriously scary shit (this may be why it makes such an impression). There’s a chorus behind him, with sopranos shrieking “GO STAGGER LEE GO STAGGER LEE”, pushing Stagger on, cheering him on, and they sound like the wider population rooting for a criminal on the run, because the criminal is like them, comes from where they come from, represents something important. Criminal as celebrity. Those criminals who enter legendary status, like people “rooting” for John Dillinger, since who the hell wants to stick up for a BANK?
In re: “Stagger Lee,” I need to point to Greil Marcus’ classic, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, which includes a small section about “Stagger Lee”, its history, its legacy, and all its permutations through the 20th century. It’s some of Marcus’ very best stuff as a writer and cultural critic and I couldn’t begin to approach what Marcus draws out, the connections he makes. Marcus says that Lloyd Price, in his version, got “caught up in the legend” … and he really does.
I love how Price fakes you out at the start of the song. “Stagger Lee” starts as a ballad, almost like “Gather around, kids, let me tell you a story” … it’s gentle. It pulls you in. This doesn’t last long. The second he starts the story … all hell breaks loose. The song EXPLODES. If it were a bedtime story, the kids would be lulled into a sense of safety with the opening, and by the end would be hiding under the covers, terrified and thrilled.
Price’s version is exuberance unleashed. Recorded in 1959, the song sounds as fresh as if it was released yesterday. Fresher, actually. Fresher than contemporary stuff. It LEAPS at you.
I post edited versions of this every year. I add names. I take names off if I feel like it. I enjoy compiling it. It’s not just about enjoyment. As women’s rights are up for grabs more than ever, like our right to control what happens with our own bodies, or our ability to vote, as we look at the sexist pigs and ghoulish oligarchs in power as I think of my nieces – children – growing up with these men in office, these men voted in as leaders and what that tells them – is telling them – about their value, about how they will be seen, and also tells them what they have to “look forward to” as grownup women … something like this is not an abstract context-free exercise for me. Growing up into an adult woman should not be something to fear.
These women inspire, entertain, challenge, comfort, provoke, or were “there” in my formative years as an inspiration. Holly from Land of the Lost in the same list as Hannah Arendt. The list is nothing if not idiosyncratic. And rather than scolding me for not putting people on the list that you think should be there … make your own list. The more the merrier. Lists like this should never be viewed as final.
. Both Kerouac and Salter attended Horace Mann Preparatory School. Kerouac was a glamorous untouchable upperclassman. Salter remembered him as a “swaggering Lowell boy”. 
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. I read them in high school with a sense of queasy curiosity. They haunted me. There were pictures of people visiting Nijinsky in the asylum and making him jump for them. It was so awful. His face is blank, he is an old stout-ish man, with a deteriorated mind, jumping in place to satisfy visitors he didn’t know. I consider his diaries a must-read: they are an extended rant about what it is like to be him, his hallucinations, his fantasies. He felt he was God-like, he was paranoid, he felt persecuted (understandable), and in moments of lucidity mourned all he had lost. The scariest part is he knew he was losing his mind.
, ‘After the Ball Was Over’, by Joan Acocella
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) was the same New York one as in Sesame Street, and it was so different from the turf farm slash beach town world of my upbringing. He made New York City look like a big wonderland – where kids lived, kids like me – with graffiti, and mounds of snow, and stop lights at intriguing brick corners. The illustrations are hypnotic – works of art.
, (Volume 1), he said as he was putting it all together, looking at each actors’ career, Raoul Walsh’s name kept coming up, making it clear (if it hadn’t been before) that Raoul Walsh was a very very good actor’s director. This is not something Walsh is really “known for” but it’s clear that he WAS. Many actors – already great actors – gave definitive or star-making performances under his direction.
, which includes a small section about “Stagger Lee”, its history, its legacy, and all its permutations through the 20th century. It’s some of Marcus’ very best stuff as a writer and cultural critic and I couldn’t begin to approach what Marcus draws out, the connections he makes. Marcus says that Lloyd Price, in his version, got “caught up in the legend” … and he really does.
