I have quietly been looking out for director Gabe Polsky ever since I saw – and LOVED – his feature film directorial debut (a credit he shared with his brother Alan), Motel Life (I reviewed for Ebert – and then interviewed Alan onstage at Ebertfest after the film’s screening). Gabe Polsky, whom I did not meet at Ebertfest, has gone on to direct a series of really REALLY good documentaries – for me, namely, The Red Army and Red Penguins – both of which I have referred to a couple of times over the years. I referenced The Red Army in my Film Comment piece on the “miracle on ice”, about hockey movies (timed for the anniversary of the 1980 American win in Lake Placid). The Red Army is the story of the miracle on ice, told from the Russian side. Polsky is the child of Ukrainian immigrants. He speaks Russian. So he conducts all the interviews himself, traveling through Russia, tracking everyone down. It’s fascinating. About five years later came Red Penguins: here, Polsky’s “voice” is solidfying: he has a real style. I discussed both of these docs on Nic Rapold’s podcast, The Last Thing I Saw, which we filmed during lockdown – I can tell by my voice I’m bouncing off the walls.
I didn’t get into all of this in my review of Polsky’s latest, The Man Who Saves the World?, but that’s the background noise. I dig Polsky’s films. He’s on my radar. This is different from anything he’s done before, but it has that same FEEL, the free-wheeling curious but also a little concerned vibe – which is funny, so honest. Patrick McCollum, the subject of the doc, is not like anyone I’ve ever seen before. I highly recommend it
Music is reflection of self
We just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail
It’s fucked up, ain’t it? How we can come from practically nothin’
To bein’ able to have any fuckin’ thing that we wanted.
That’s why we sing for these kids who don’t have a thing
Except for a dream and a fuckin’ rap magazine,
Who post pin-up pictures on their walls all day long,
Idolize their favorite rappers and know all their songs.
Or for anyone who’s ever been through shit in their lives
So they sit and they cry at night, wishin’ they’d die,
‘Til they throw on a rap record and they sit and they vibe.
We’re nothin’ to you, but we’re the fuckin’ shit in their eyes.
That’s why we seize the moment, try to freeze it and own it,
Squeeze it and hold it ’cause we consider these minutes golden
And maybe they’ll admit it when we’re gone, just let our spirits
Live on through our lyrics that you hear in our songs.
— Eminem, “Sing for the Moment”
It’s his birthday. If you’ve hung around these here parts, you know my feeling for the man. In fact, the third post I ever wrote on this here site – way back in 2002 – !!! – was blathering over how I couldn’t wait for 8 Mile to come out. This is why it’s funny to me when new readers who consider me just like them get shocked or “disappointed” when I write about him in the way that I do. I can’t help it you’re new around here.
Some other things I’ve written about him:
In the summer of 2020, in the heaviness of lockdown,I wrote a MONSTER post about him, this one percolating for YEARS. Eminem helped me get through the first year of quarantine. Writing the piece took me months, was a steadying factor.
This one was fun: on Eminem’s love of Alfred Hitchcock. I pitched it to Film Comment in early 2020, after the release of Em’s Music to be Murdered By – inspired by Hitchcock. Film Comment was intrigued but then they ceased operation because of the pandemic. Finally, I just wrote it.
There’s way more in my archives, but here’s a link to the first in-depth thing I wrote about him: “Am I Too Loud For You?”. If you want my take on one of the most notorious songs in his notorious catalog, there it is.
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It’s his birthday today. Such a superb actor. Such an influential career … with such a tragic ending. But still. He inspired a generation.
Here’s a link to an enormous archive of quotes about him and by him that I put together. (Unfortunately, in my WordPress upgrade I lost so many photos – and I am in total denial about it.) So much good stuff there though – about his acting, his friendships, his early years, his tormented sad later years. The anecdote about what Elizabeth Taylor did when she reached the accident scene where Clift had crashed his car is one of the most moving things I’ve ever heard. Not surprising though: She was true blue.
Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe in “The Misfits”
Frank Taylor, producer of The Misfits said:
Monty and Marilyn were psychic twins. They were on the same wavelength. They recognized disaster in each other’s faces and giggled about it.
Happy birthday to the luminous otherworldly gorgeous brilliant actor, the one who inspired the next generation of actors, who made James Dean possible, the one whom Marlon Brando came to see PERSONALLY after the horrifying car accident and pep-talked him along the lines of: “If you give up acting, who will I compete with now? Cut this SHIT, Monty.” And Monty did cut the shit, and went back to work.
One of the most important (if not the most) actors of his generation. Still an inspiration.
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 early 2016, it was all Rita Hayworth all the time at my humble abode, due to the research I did for my essay on Gilda, included in the Criterion Collection release of Gilda.
Gilda represented a breakthrough. The radical nature of the breakthrough in Gilda is startling when you watch her films in chronological order. Not only did Gilda make Hayworth a white-hot supernova-star, the role was different from any other role she had ever played (although you could see glimpses of it in Howard Hawks’ 1939 film Only Angels Have Wings, one of my all-time favorite movies. I wrote extensively about Hayworth in that film here.) Gilda came 9 years after Only Angels Have Wings. In the interim, she played plucky ingenues, rosy-cheeked young women who went toe to toe with the best male dancers of her day (and any day). (She also was great at clowning around, as this wonderful number from 1944’s Cover Girl shows.)
And here:
A famous mash-up, showing various clips of Rita Hayworth dancing throughout her career, all to the disco-beat of The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.”
This was a woman who started dancing, every day, all day, before she learned to read. Her “way in” to Hollywood was as a dancer. Late in his life, Fred Astaire admitted, reluctantly (probably not wanting to piss off Ginger Rogers), that Rita Hayworth was his favorite dance partner. (There are multiple clips of her dances with Astaire – they appeared in two movies together – in the above mashup. Here’s one of the dances in full.) I linked to her most famous number, “Put the Blame on Mama” from Gilda, on Facebook and my pal Greg Santos commented:
To me, she always was ‘full out’. Almost to the point of ‘reckless abandon’. The arm bends a little too much. The hair flips a little longer than expected. Terribly exciting and so. damn. HOT.
Extremely insightful. Despite her technical brilliance, there was a certain beautiful mess in her style. It made her such an exciting performer. Compare Hayworth to the other dancers of her day, equally as brilliant, but with different styles and energies: Cyd Charisse, with her legs for days, and an almost celestial sense of self. She was sexy as hell but in a contained way: like fire in a bottle. (Check out my favorite Cyd Charisse number here.). Or Ginger Rogers, who floated when she danced. It’s hard to believe her feet were actually doing all those steps, her style was so airy. Then there was someone like Ann Miller (Miller and Hayworth were lifelong friends), a furious tapper, arms always out, athletic and extroverted. Each of these ladies brought something different to the table.
Hayworth danced like a natural phenomenon, like a volcano blowing its top, a tidal wave crashing into shore. It’s tremendously exciting watching her: she’s so good in all the essentials (specificity of step, appropriate and fluid gestures, perfectly-timed head-flips and turns) but she brings to it a wild unfettered energy. Because Hayworth did not hold anything back, and because her internal engine was always so activated, there was something truly personal going on for in her dancing. I’m not saying that Cyd/Ginger/Ann didn’t bring their own personality to their work. They clearly did. I am not saying any of this to set up an “either/or” with other dancers. I know the Internet (and people, in general) gravitate towards “either/or” like a magnet, but I am not interested in that at all.
I am trying to point out what made Hayworth unique.
Here is one of the famous Rita Hayworth pin-ups beloved by American GIs during WWII.
You can see why a soldier, 18, 19 years old, crouched in a wet jungle, stationed thousands of miles away from everything he knew and loved, unsure if he would die the next day, would look at that photo and become determined to make it home.
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.
For TCM Diary, I wrote about onscreen chemistry, using the SMOKIN HOT chemistry between Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier as one of my examples.
She is “my kind of actress”, which may deserve some explanation. She was private, hard-working, talented, and consistent. She could be difficult, but her persona onscreen was alive, easy, lovable and adorable. She was not self-important. Acting was not easy for her (at least the act of acting: she had tremendous stage fright and insecurities) – a fact that is amazing when you see the easy and entertaining results onscreen. Once she finally came out of her dressing room, she left her demons behind. I admire that. When she walked onto the set, she owned what she was doing. There wasn’t a lot of drama with her. Whatever demons she had that made her afraid to emerge from her dressing room are completely invisible in her performances, which are charming, funny, moving, poignant – sometimes all in the same moment. She was a gifted comedienne.
Frank Capra, who directed her three times, said of her:
Jean Arthur was an enigmatic figure because she doesn’t do very well in crowds, and she doesn’t do very well with people, and she doesn’t do very well with life, but she does very well as an actress. She’s afraid. She’d stand in her dressing room and practically vomit every time she had to do a scene. And she’d drum up all kinds of excuses for not being ready. Well, I finally got to know her. All I had to do was push her out into the lights, turn the camera on, and she’d blossom out into just something wonderful, very positive, certain. An assured, poised, lovely woman. And she could do anything, could express love or hate or anything else. And when the scene was over, she’d go back into that dressing room and cry. She certainly had two sides to her: the actress, this wonderful actress, and this person, this shy personality that she was in reality. She’s quite a study.
She has a moment in George Stevens’ Talk Of the Town with Cary Grant, where Ronald Colman, a stalwart proper judge, busts her sneaking around in her own house at night. She has a right to be there, it’s her house, but she is also up to no good. Her reaction to being “found out” is a mini-masterpiece of comedic behavior. Her eyes go completely devastated and panicked, and a manic smile hovers on her face as she tries to regain her footing. She LOOKS so damn guilty. She is so busy throughout the film, trying to placate the dignified Ronald Colman, all while harboring the fugitive Cary Grant in her attic. She lies to everyone repeatedly, and seems to RUN her way throughout the film, dashing down the stairs, around corners, back up the stairs, lying, lying, lying. It’s a tour de force. Is there room in today’s Hollywood for such an actress today? I think there is – Emma Stone has some of these qualities, it’s just that the material isn’t as good. Jean Arthur is a leading lady, full-stop, but with a hard humorous edge. She’s nobody’s fool. She’s not a girl, she’s always a woman. She played an ingenue maybe once. She hit her stride in her 30s.
I think she’s best when she is “found out”. She often played women who had “been around”. Not “trampy”, but women who made their own money, and had seen a bit of the world, and maybe had one or two cherished illusions about things already shattered. Joan Blondell had similar qualities. Arhtur was good when she played a woman with lots of defense mechanisms in place, defense mechanisms that served her well out in the world but held her back in her personal life. So when she is “found out”, and revealed, all kinds of possibilities for humor and pathos open up.
Here’s a clip from Talk of the Town, with Jean Arthur racing around – in her pajamas – lying, and panicking, and putting on a facade, and failing …
This “being found out” dynamic is used to huge comedic effect in Only Angels Have Wings, one of my favorite movies of all time. Arthur plays Bonnie Lee, a showgirl stranded in the fictional banana republic of Barranca where the fledgling airline runs the mail over a treacherous mountain pass. It’s an all-male environment of adventure and risk-taking (typical Howard Hawks milieu), and Bonnie Lee’s arrival throws everyone into a tizzy. Everyone, that is, except the boss, Geoff, played by Cary Grant at his cranky sexy best.
I’ve written extensively about Only Angels Have Wings, you can look through my archives for all of the posts about it. I know that Howard Hawks had some issues with Jean Arthur’s performance. He found her a bit difficult, she wasn’t giving him exactly what he wanted. He tells the story that years later, years and years, Jean Arthur called him up. She had seen Only Angels Have Wings on television and wanted him to know that now she could see what he was talking about, that he was right all along. (You always have to take these Hawks stories with a grain of salt, he was a notorious raconteur and most of his anecdotes involve him being “right” about things). I think Jean Arthur is spot-on perfect in that part. Yes, not as sulkily insolent as Hawks’ ideal leading lady Lauren Bacall, and not a fast-talking smart-headed dame like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, but a woman who has been around, seen a lot, has a sense of humor, and finds herself completely out-of-control in her crush on Cary Grant. She is a showgirl with a novelty act, so she’s no dummy about men, but in Cary Grant she has met her match, and the entire film involves her falling to emotional pieces just trying to get close to the guy. She can’t bear it.
I love the honesty in her portrayal of this. Any woman who has ever been SLAYED by some guy in that manner will totally understand her neuroses.
Cary Grant’s Geoff sizes her up immediately. He has no use for women, at least not a woman like her. She realizes this, but she just can’t help falling for the big lug. She is totally undone over the course of the film. Watch the morning scene where she sits in the bar having breakfast, when she was supposed to have gotten on the boat the night before. Watch how Grant barks at her: “Why aren’t you on that boat?” She can’t even lie, that’s how bad is it for her. She looks up at him, panicked, unhappy (when Jean Arthur is panicked and unhappy, more often than not we in the audience laugh – it’s a wonderful and rare gift). She picks at her eggs half-heartedly, and stumbles out some awkward words, “Don’t worry, Mister, I’ll be on the next boat. I know now to get bitten twice in the same spot. I’m cured.”
It’s so damn vulnerable.
The two of them have what I call a perfect scene, late at night on her first evening in the bar. It’s one of the sexiest scenes in all of Howard Hawks’ films, hell, in any film. She says at one point, joking, “Aren’t you ever going to get some sleep?” and he looks at her and says, “After your boat sails.”No sex scene with writhing fully-revealed naked bodies was ever as blatantly carnal as Cary Grant saying, “After your boat sails.”
You couldn’t pair just anyone with Cary Grant. He did well with funny wisecracking dames. He didn’t do well with floozies. Or, to put it another way: He was Cary Grant, he did well with pretty much everyone, but the pairing was most satisfying when the woman was a witty smart gal who gave as good as she got. Early on in the film, Bonnie Lee has a breakdown because one of the pilots died during his flight. Geoff tells her to take a walk: “Pull yourself together.” It is a tough moment for her, a moment of confrontation with the world she wants to join so badly. If she wants to make a play for this Geoff Carter fellow, then she needs to be strong. She needs to show him she is trustworthy, that she won’t fall apart. Jean Arthur finally gets herself together, and goes back into the bar where Cary Grant is fiddling around on the piano. He is annoyed by her presence, especially when she starts correcting his playing. Girls are not welcome here. She is a nuisance. He looks up at her and asks, “Grown up yet?” It’s a tough line, potentially cruel. Shedding tears for a fallen pilot is a human and normal response, but here, in the world of Only Angels Have Wings, it is “immature”. It’s a condescending line, but the way Cary Grant says it makes it sound like something else. He makes it sound like, “You ready to come out and play with us now?” Jean Arthur grins and says, “I think so.” Grant nods, pleased, says shortly, “Good,” and goes back to playing the piano.
But in the following sequence, Bonnie Lee gets to show him what she is made of, and it is a moment that shows, above all else, why I love Jean Arthur so much, and why she is “my kind of actress”.
His piano playing is dreadful, and she motions impatiently for him to move aside so she can show him how it’s done. He, immersed in a male world of accomplishment where women are seen as rather silly, is impatient and contemptuous. What on earth could SHE add to their little sing-along? She, however, has tricks up her sleeve. She turns to the makeshift musicians standing around on the piano, and gives them orders, and then begins to play like a maniac, with the band rocking out around her. Cary Grant, stunned and ‘shown up’, takes in her performance for a second, and then starts laughing. He reaches out for two glasses of whiskey nearby, and hands one to her, which she drinks as she plays.
After the song finishes, everyone erupts into applause, and Jean Arthur, pleased with herself, but knowing that she can’t look too pleased, glances at Cary Grant. She is pert, but there’s a softness there too. She’s won the battle. She realizes that for the first time he looks at her with admiration. She knows, because she’s smart, that she can’t make too big a deal out of it. That would be a turnoff for a guy like this. So there she sits, smiling at him, with the most adorable mix of pride (almost arrogance) and a soft womanly acceptance, as in: “Yes. I know I’m awesome. Thank you for finally recognizing it.” Cary Grant says, in a tone of total concession: “Hello, Professional.” She takes the compliment, but also doesn’t bask in it too much.
We’re talking about 5 seconds of screen-time here, the moment is TINY, but it’s eloquent and romantic and makes me think of so many times in my life when I was looked at like that, by this or that guy, and how special I felt, and excited, because I knew the odds were that the guy was going to make a move if he was looking at me like that, but also knowing, in my bones, that I had to keep a lid on my excitement. I had to be patient.
This is the Game of Romance. Jean Arthur, cocking her head at him, smiling, saying with that smile, “Yup. I can play the piano, Yup, I can see how you are looking at me”, basking in the glow of his hard-won approval, while also keeping herself under control, because that is what is required between Adults who are in the midst of a Mating Dance … is, to my mind, a perfect evocation of the “Howard Hawks Woman”, and his view of romance. Jean Arthur embodies it.
Here is the scene (which then leads into the “perfect scene” I wrote about before).
Watch how she looks at him when the song finishes. Watch how much she is doing in that moment, without over-complicating or indicating too much. It’s complex grounded acting.
Then, of course, there is the moment where Cary Grant busts her eavesdropping at the door of his office. He opens the door, and Arthur literally falls INTO the room. Jean Arthur IS a dignified woman, and she played women who knew how to circulate out in the real bustling world of commerce and politics and business, but when she falls in love, she FALLS APART. Nobody could fall apart like Jean Arthur. It’s what makes her such a satisfying actress to watch. She is recognizably human. She speaks to that part of us that wants to let go, not have to be so “on” all the time, be taken care of a little bit maybe.
There are so many other films I haven’t even touched on. She was a sought-after actress, and great in picture after picture. I have only touched on a couple of my favorite moments, moments I never tire of. Her funniness continues to surprise me (I still watch Talk of the Town and ROAR when Colman busts her sneaking around her own house), and her touching vulnerability still, after so many viewings, comes as a welcome shock.
I watch her defenses break down, I watch her fight gently to maintain her dignity, I watch her crack jokes at her own expense, and not only do I fall in love with her over and over again, but I remember myself what it felt like to fall in love. I watch her and I think, “Yes. I know that. I’ve been there. I’ve done that.”
Her work always rings true.
Happy birthday, Miss Arthur. You are one of my favorite actresses.
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.
His mother, Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde (aka Lady Wilde, aka “Speranza”) was an incredible woman, in the Irish literary history canon, and there before her son. (She has a cameo in a great book I read recently about Irish revolutionary, Thomas Francis Meagher, The Immortal Irishman. Her life was the sort which leads, inevitably, to endless cameo appearances in other peoples’ biographies.) My father knew a lot about Speranza, of course. She was a poet, a radical, an Irish nationalist. In 1864, the dedication in a new edition of her poems reads:
Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde
‘I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That country’s a thing one should die for at need’
Wilde’s father William was a physician specializing in the eye and ear (to this day there are procedures name-checking him, like “Wilde’s incision”, for example, or “Wilde’s cone of light”, dating back to the mid-1860s, when he was practicing in Ireland). Like his wife, like his son, he was also a writer, publishing books on all kinds of things. He published a catalog of antiquities from one particular archeological site in Ireland: that book now sits in the National Museum of Ireland. He published books on folklore, legends, wives’ tales – things his patients told him, their received history, home “cures” for their ills.
Before we go any further, I’d like to link to my review of Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince, about Oscar’s sad final years – it’s not a perfect movie, but Everett has insight and empathy for Oscar, as well as a personal understanding coming from the inside. Well worth seeking out.
Our world right now is filled with loud unrepentant dehumanizing Marquesses of Queensberry. Oscar Wilde took the fall and I’ll be damned if we bring back the world which destroyed him.
Even if you came to Gaslight clean, without knowing a thing, which is hard to believe, but let’s just pretend: Even if you knew nothing about it, it would be instantly obvious that the teenage girl who plays the maid is almost stealing every scene she’s in (and with Ingrid Bergman giving one of the great performances in cinema, this is no small feat), and you probably might think something like, “Wow. That teenage actress is probably going to work all the time.”
But could you predict an almost-80 year uninterrupted career? A career crossing mediums to an unprecedented level? That that dead-eyed manipulative teenage maid would conquer film, television, and – most of all – Broadway? That she would headline a hit television show when she was in her 50s and 60s? (Again: WHEN does this happen? If it happens NOW, then that teenage actress in 1944 is a large reason why those glass ceilings were cracked.) The teenager’s later television show would be a staple in audience’s lives for almost two decades.
As talented as she obviously was as a teenager, who could predict something like this? As good as she is in Gaslight, who – in their wildest dreams – could imagine a career like the one Angela Lansbury actually had? There were no models for Angela Lansbury. She had to just make it up herself.
If you think there is another career like Angela Lansbury’s – if you think a comparison can be made to somebody else’s career – you’re wrong. There IS nobody else. If Judy Garland were still around today, doing television and movies and Broadway, then MAYBE. But other than that: Lansbury stood alone. She never rested on her laurels, she never stopped working. She was never the same. She was a character actress but she didn’t represent a “type”. She was bone-chilling in The Manchurian Candidate. She was sassy and insouciant as Elizabeth Taylor’s teenage sister in National Velvet. She was Auntie Mame, for God’s sake. She was Mrs. Lovett, for God’s sake. She was Jessica Fletcher, dammit.
And … let’s not ever forget: She played Elvis’ tipsy Southern belle mother in Blue Hawaii.
Watch her even in the most obscure television episode or movie and there will likely come a moment when Lansbury faces the camera and exposes all the knockout passion and yearning in her soul. She could convey a sense of enormous loss in a way that offered no relief or closure for that loss, and this was the wellspring of her creativity.
Yes. YES. I thought instantly of an afternoon in Chicago, a long long time ago, when Mitchell and I turned on the television, and the 1992 TV movie Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris was on. This was when, you know, you had to watch whatever was on. We were happy though: Omar Sharif and Angela Lansbury? Count us in! We settled in to watch. We were totally charmed by it.
But then … There’s a scene where Mrs. ‘Arris (Lansbury) sits on a park bench and breaks down in tears. The sobs tear up out of her very depths, and it is real and it was impossible to keep our distance from it. Mitchell and I watched the scene in silence – her crying was a gut-punch – and when the scene ended, we glanced at each other and saw that we both were sobbing openly. The movie went on, five minutes passed, ten, and neither of us could recover. Mitchell sobbed “I’m trying to get past it … but I can’t …” I sobbed, “I can’t either.”
Dan wrote:
She could convey a sense of enormous loss in a way that offered no relief or closure for that loss.
That’s it. That was exactly what was going on, and it’s why Mitchell and I had such a visceral response. There was no relief or closure, for her or for us. Her crying like that was unbearable to watch. There were so many great moments in her career, but the crying on the park bench in Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris stands out as one of her finest.
Lansbury and Bea Arthur literally taking over the Tony Awards with a duet of “Bosom Buddies” is a moment for the ages, and every gay man I know knows every aside, every gesture, every quip, by heart. In my crowd, loving this clip – loving the two of them – is non-negotiable. What’s so incredible to me is how LITTLE they do, really. They shimmy a bit, they cross-around walk, they do a little step-touch with a shoulder bump … and the audience roars, and the clip will live forever. THAT’S being a star. And of course, they’re not “doing” much but … look at what they ARE doing. Their energy fills a theatre. Their mere presence is exhilarating. They are PROS.
Watch closely. This kind of thing doesn’t exist anymore. It’s part of a lost world. We are losing a connection with something precious with the passing of Angela Lansbury. She was going to turn 97 next week. Almost a century old. She worked in every decade of her life.
She conquered every medium at the highest possible level.
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.
Today is his birthday. I love him. He died in May of this year.
Paul Durcan’s poems are chatty, observant, scathing, often very funny. He uses long humorous titles: “The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986”, or “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography”. (The humor, of course, just sharpens the points he makes.) Durcan has a strong sense of life’s absurdity, and makes merciless fun of humorless prudes.
He had a rather horrifying time of it as a young man. His father was a judge, and their relationship was very challenging. To please this difficult man, Durcan went to UCD to study law, but whatever happened his first year in college was traumatic and his family essentially kidnapped him and institutionalized him. He was drugged up and given electric shock therapy. 45 years later Durcan said:
I ended up in St John of God in a ridiculous way. There was nothing the matter with me. I’m sure you saw the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Well, I was one of the luckier ones, one of the ones who flew over the cuckoo’s nest and survived it. I didn’t get a leucotomy, which would have finished me off completely, but I did get massive amounts of barbiturates, the whole Mandrax and every lethal tablet you could ever name. I think I came out of it with a kind of melancholia.”
The “cure” made him sicker.
His mother was the niece of John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary, executed after the Easter Rising in 1916. MacBride married Maud Gonne. A legend. And so Durcan was born into this legacy, the myth of Irish nationalism and martyrdom.
For about a year, I posted all the music writing my brother Brendan O’Malley did on his old blog, because my brother is such a good writer, and these pieces are all so great I wanted to highlight them. I called it Music Monday, for obvious reasons. First, I posted every essay in his 50 Best Albums series. Then I posted the series where he wrote about every concert he went to – or at least the most memorable ones – and he clustered them by club/venue.
Today is the birthday of legendary Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Gould. My brother wrote two essays about them.
The second is about Bren going to see Hüsker Dü at the Living Room, a legendary rock club in Providence, RI. If you grew up in a certain era, The Living Room is featured heavily in your memories. Bren captures it all.
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 the last year, there’s been so much I haven’t been allowed to talk about – those NDAs are powerful! I had to pretend I went to Scotland on vacation! I couldn’t post anything! Now it’s all coming out. I received my advance copy of the book last month – and they’ve been keeping it under lock and key, because the images in the book all come from the film, which hasn’t been released yet. This morning, they released a first look at the book cover.
I must shout out the genius Mike Hill, who did the cover art. Not only did he do the cover art, but he designed the creature for Guillermo’s film, and also built the prosthetics – hundreds of them – and applied them to Jacob Elordi (a 9-hour process!). Mike is an amazing artist. Look at that cover. It’s so intense. The tear in the creature’s eye. I opened the book and saw the cover for the first time and had to sit down. My interview with Mike for the book was extensive. He’s so damn creative. Inspired, really.
Seeing my name on the cover was, no word of a lie, the first time this felt real.
