For my Substack, I wrote about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to (more or less) for 20 years, and my history with the book, and Dad, and lovable finance bro, and meeting people where the sole bond is knowing the entire score of Oliver! The piece is really about finding your people. I found mine. And I’m going to hang out with them later today, like I do every year.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
I’ve been celebrating Bloomsday for 20 years, in the real world, and here on my site. If you’ve been visiting here for any length of time, you know this. There are too many posts to count, and James Joyce has his own category. Not just a tag, but a CATEGORY. Writing about him – and his books – has been a great pleasure, especially since I am not a scholar, I’m just a reader – and writing about his books have been a really fun way to enter into them on my own terms.
But for today I’ll link to four things:
My annual Bloomsday post, where I talk about the book, the reaction to it, positive and negative, and Joyce’s place in the sphere of things.
It’s about Dad, and reading the book for the first time. It’s about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to since 2004 at Ulysses pub down in the financial district. It’s about finding your people. And how I found mine.
He shot Deer Hunter, Deliverance, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These alone would put him in the history books. These are some of the most influential films ever made, and how they LOOK is a huge reason why. He worked up until the end. One of the last films he shot was Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, starring Gena Rowlands.
Some of his shots rank as my favorite of all time.
Glenn Kenny wrote a beautiful tribute when he died in 2016. Zsigmond not only worked in a flexible way, adjusting his style to the material, he was a personal artist himself: he shared with us how he saw the world, how much he understood light and what light meant to any given atmosphere (so many people take light for granted), as well as his ability to morph into the mindset of the director and the story.
American cinema of the 1970s, with its influential and distinctive diversity of style, helmed by exciting new directors like Hal Ashby, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, John Boorman, Michael Cimino, Steven Spielberg, was helped along in the look/feel of the images by two emigre cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács. Both hailed from Hungary. They were friends. The Russians rolled into Budapest in 1956 to crush the revolution against Soviet rule. It was a brutal crackdown, enraging other nation-members of the USSR. It was an ominous harbinger. (The crackdown enraged the world. Elvis dedicated his performance of “Peace in the Valley,” in his final appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957 to the people in Hungary, calling for Americans to make donations in support of the Hungarian people. Ed Sullivan announced the address where to send donations, and millions of dollars poured in. Recently, because of that support 50 years ago, a park in Budapest was named for Elvis, and he was also granted posthumous Hungarian citizenship. Like I keep saying, stating the obvious, Elvis is everywhere).
But back to the subject matter: Kovács and Zsigmond, two Hungarian cinematographers, living in Budapest in 1956, roamed the streets, filming the violent crackdown with an Arriflex camera using the last of their 35-mm film. They smuggled the footage out of the country (footage which would soon be seen around the world, and is still part of our collective – or should be – understanding of that event). Kovács and Zsigmond transported their footage by train as far as they could go, then jumped off, and walked into Austria on foot. Eventually, they moved to America. They both got their start shooting biker pictures for Roger Corman (an unofficial film school for so many people). A documentary was made about their friendship, and my friend Matt Zoller Seitz reviewed it for The New York Times.
So let’s rack up the major projects shot by these two emigre-cinematographers from Hungary.
And let’s take particular note of the fact that they continued working on major projects even after the heyday of the 1970s subsided. Their style adjusted to the story. THIS is artistry, as well as professionalism. Style is sometimes obvious, and style is sometimes invisible, but no less valuable to the story.
László Kovács Easy Rider Five Easy Pieces The Last Movie What’s Up, Doc? The King of Marvin Gardens Paper Moon Shampoo New York, New York Paradise Alley Frances Ghostbusters Mask Say Anything My Best Friend’s Wedding Miss Congeniality
Vilmos Zsigmond McCabe & Mrs. Miller Deliverance The Long Goodbye Scarecrow The Sugarland Express Close Encounters of the Third Kind The Deer Hunter The Rose Heaven’ Gate Blow Out Real Genius The Witches of Eastwick The Bonfire of the Vanities Jersey Girl Melinda and Melinda Black Dahlia Cassandra’s Dream
Zsigmond died in 2016.
Here’s an interesting 1980 Rolling Stone interview with Vilmos Zsigmond, after he finished shooting the wildly out-of-control ambitious Michael Cimino film of Heaven’s Gate (a movie shoot so out-of-control it brought down one of the oldest production companies in America, United Artists. An entire book was written about the Heaven’s Gate shoot.)
In 2016, Blow Out screened at Ebertfest, and the great Nancy Allen was in attendance. This was right after Vilmos died. In the QA afterwards, I asked if she had any stories about him she wanted to share as a tribute. My question comes at around the 30 minute mark, but the whole thing is worth your while.
One of Vilmos Zsigmond’s last films was Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks (2014), starring Gena Rowlands as an old lady who decides to take dance lessons, realizing she had given up on having new experiences,. It’s not a very good film, mainly because the script had not been sufficiently adapted from the theatre-script, but Rowlands is great in it (and it’s fun to see Rita Moreno too as Rowlands’ nosy downstairs neighbor in their Palm Beach old folks’ condo-complex.) The film was clearly shot on a low budget. It takes place mostly in interiors, showing its roots as a theatre production, and it’s pretty uninteresting in terms of the visuals, not a lot of flourishes with the camera. Scenes have a dead quality. I went to a SAG screening of the film, with a QA with Rowlands afterwards. They filmed the entire thing in Zsigmond’s country of origin, Hungary, even though it takes place in Florida (hence, all the interiors), so they needed to light those scenes as THOUGH the rooms looked out on the beach with all that pinky-purple ocean light. There is one scene (and it’s worth it to see the film just for this moment), where Gena Rowlands’ character, a person who thought she was done with life, or at least done with new things, sits in a chair in her condo and stares out at the red/gold/purple of the sunrise. She is so relaxed, so peaceful. It’s one of the few moments of pure silence in the film, justified just by the fact that we always want to have the time to watch Gena Rowlands thinking about things.
But part of the magic is how Zsigmond filmed it, and the glow of the light on her face, intense and deep rich golden, the warmth of it, in the moment you can actually feel the warmth. I went into the film not knowing anything about the shoot itself, and when it was revealed that they filmed the whole thing in Hungary, that that light on Reynolds’ face was artificially created start to finish, I was shocked. I didn’t know Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks was filmed in Hungary and I never would have known, because of that LIGHT.
Zsigmond worked with deep and thoughtful artistry even on second-rate material because that’s who he was as a cinematographer.
Also he’s the kind of guy who knew he had to do right by Gena. And he did.
My introduction, as shallow as this may seem, was through Reservoir Dogs. “You put the lime in the coconut”, etc. My brother said to me, “It’s a stupid song, and you think it’s just a gimmick or a novelty song, but try to sing along with him. It sounds so eas but it is not easy. It’s impossible to sing along with him!” Try it. Bren is right.
It’s Harry Nilsson’s birthday. There he is up above “getting one Beatle drunk” during their four-year-long bender, where they caused a lot of trouble, made music, and heckled people at the Troubadour (getting thrown out for said heckling). Nilsson’s catalog is fascinating. I was recently listening to “Down” and I was just blown away by his vocals.
My GOD.
Nothing I can say can top my brother’s writing on Harry Nilsson. Bren got obsessed over a decade ago after watching a documentary on Nilsson. Bren was not familiar with Nilsson’s work or career (despite being obsessed with the Beatles), and he was blown away by what he discovered. How had this man not become such common knowledge that it took Reservoir Dogs to re-introduce him to a new generation?
Later, when Bren was in the throes of his Scott Walker obsession, he dug into one of the connections between the two artists, with a little Randy Newman thrown in:
Like a lot of artists whose music I own (I still like to own music: will never give it up), Waylon Jennings is on almost constant rotation. He’s always there. In playlists, first of all, but also … he recorded so much, and I have all of it, so even on Shuffle, he’s usually present. His voice touches me for some reason I can’t quite describe in words. I’ve tried. Maybe it’s his openness: you can feel it. There’s not much bullshit there, in terms of ego or facade, although he obviously had both – in spades, at times. He was frustrated (understatement) with the conservative restrictions Nashville (i.e. the country music establishment) put on him – put on everyone – down to the kind of sound you were “allowed” to use, the kinds of instruments that were “acceptable” – not to mention your own personal lifestyle. Jennings was not down with all of that. He came from a mix of musical backgrounds. Born in Texas, and befriended by Buddy Holly when he was just a teenager … rockabilly was obviously a major influence. It was how he got his start. But the “abilly” part of “rockabilly” is the country influence, the mix of genres which all these guys created. It was a revolution and he was part of it. He did do the strict “country thing” for a bit, and he’s a wonderful country singer/songwriter, but he also had a big folk music influence on him – and he marketed himself as a folk artist – his first album was called Folk Country. It was a sign of things to come. He was about to shake things up in country music in a major way, and country music would never really be the same.
A word about that: When rockabilly started to rise in the ’50s, with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Buddy Holly … the country music industry panicked. It was really Elvis who caused the panic, although it probably started with Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” – a MONSTER hit. Then Elvis came along, and in a matter of a couple of months he had something like 4 or 5 songs in the Top 5 on every chart – pop, r&b AND country … a sure sign that the boundaries between genres were dissolving. Country fans (i.e. white people) were buying rhythm & blues records, rhythm & blues fans (i.e. black people) were buying rockabilly records, and all these rockabilly boys were buying country music, and many had set out to be country-music singers in the first place, since “rockabilly” didn’t really exist as a “thing” and r&b was seen as for/by black people. So the mashup that began – with the dovetailing of these three styles, and throw in a little gospel too, had huge appeal, and that appeal crossed cultural and racial lines. Nashville panicked. THIS wasn’t country music!! Nashville’s response was racist in nature: some said it explicitly, some just implied it, but the message was clear: Some of this stuff just sounds too … black. (Little did they know that Ray Charles would come along down the line, and his Grand Ole Opry/Hank Williams influence was so strong, he made inroads into the country establishment, recording some stuff in Nashville. But that was in the future. In the ’50s, there was resistance to racial blending, in art, in politics, in the real world – but with music, the blending couldn’t be held back. You can’t segregate the airwaves.) Anyway, it was a confusing time for “the suits” and they ended up basically banning Elvis from their charts – and a couple others too – but it was mostly Elvis since he dominated their charts. This affected people like The Everly Brothers too – who were also “banned” even though their style has so much country in it. It wasn’t like a decree came down, but Nashville saw how Elvis was all over their charts in the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 slots and they had none of it, and so shut him out. Country music put up a wall around itself to shut out progress and change. Faron Young, a singer-songwriter, observed: “Elvis vaporized country music,” a comment I’ve never forgotten.
Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis, Johnny Cash
Waylon was a teenage DJ in the mid-1950s, caught up in the rockabilly thing (he was fired from a couple of DJ gigs for playing Chuck Berry and Little Richard. So you see the landscape). He was taken under the wing of Buddy Holly, and he ended up touring with them (he was on the “Winter Dance Party Tour”, the one where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper – including everyone else on board – was killed). But he was coming into an era – the 60s – when country music calcified, or at LEAST was not open to “the new” at all. It was their way or you didn’t get radio play.
“They wouldn’t let you do anything. You had to dress a certain way: you had to do everything a certain way…. They kept trying to destroy me…. I just went about my business and did things my way…. You start messing with my music, I get mean.”
— Waylon Jennings
Waylon made albums, had some quasi-hits, but eventually he shattered the wall by going “outlaw”, going rogue, with others, including, crucially, Willie Nelson. The two of them – who most decidedly did NOT “fit in” – took country by storm, as well as “crossed over”. They did a number of albums together. The country music industry wobbled on its foundations. This was the 70s.
Eventually, Waylon rejected the “outlaw” label -it was becoming too kitsch, too much of a “brand” – and country music in many ways retreated. The rise of Garth Brooks – whom I do like – represented a slick and polished version of the music … not much “outlaw” stuff going on there, right? He was a “good boy” as opposed to a “bad boy.” And his fan base, albeit huge, did not want to grow with the times. I mean, they all threw a bitch-fit when he wrote “We Shall Be Free” which included the lyrics “When we’re free to love anyone we choose…” Okay, fine, be a bunch of backwards bigots. Watch the world pass you by. Country is again revitalizing, although it is still mainly white (at least in the mainstream: get out of the mainstream and there’s all kinds of other stuff happening) … but people like Miranda Lambert and the Pistol Annies, or the mega-star and crossover wonder boy, Eric Church, who has a Waylon-type stature and a Waylon-type trajectory – are kicking ass, and reaching people outside the country-music-belljar. Eric Church looked around at the country music industry and thought, “Fuck these goody-goodies.” In one interview, he said most country music was made for “Christian soccer moms”, perhaps the biggest burn I’ve ever heard. Eric Church is a Christian but I know – and everyone knows – what he meant by that burn. And now he’s one of the biggest stars in the world. He fills stadiums in Germany, Scotland, all over.
I’ll get to Eric Church in a bit.
Waylon was a hard-living man, who drank, chain-smoked, was addicted to amphetamines in the 60s and 70s. His health was ravaged. He married four times – and the last one – to singer Jessi Colter – “stuck.” She was with him to the end. They did a number of duets together: go to YouTube and find them. As I said, there’s an openness in Waylon’s voice – a depth of tone – and this lends itself beautifully to duets. There’s so much FEELING there, and the feeling – the tenderness – is unexpected with someone who looks so WILD. Hearing him sing with a woman, his loving-ness, his openness to her … it’s tender, and pained, and human. He was a flawed man, and the best of country music is all about acknowledging your flaws. Everyone’s a fuck-up in country music. Nobody’s perfect. The songs are filled with mistakes, ruined lives, alcoholism, infidelity, bad choices, violence, regrets … You don’t feel so alone when you listen to it. We could use a little more of that today. Self-empowerment positive messages are fine, and in some cases necessary. But as a grown adult woman, with miles of bumpy road behind me, I gravitate towards flawed people, people who have made mistakes, and hopefully grown from them – but maybe not grown from them, maybe they’re just haunted (I mean, listen to George Jones) and their art is their way of dealing with being haunted. This is the stuff I love. This is where I feel, as the kids say, “seen.”
One of the first songs he recorded, I’m pretty sure he was still a teenager, was “Jole Blon”, with Buddy Holly and Tommy Allsup on guitars, and King Curtis on sax. HISTORY.
The death of Buddy Holly was a formative moment for Waylon Jennings. Buddy Holly was a big-brother figure, a mentor, an early supporter. Here they are together, in Grand Central Station, just a little over a week before the plane went down.
Waylon was on that tour, and he gave up his seat on the flight to someone who had the flu (the tour busses were freezing cold). As they parted, Buddy Holly joked, “Hope your bus freezes your ass” and Waylon said, “Yeah, well, hope your plane goes down.” All in fun, just a joke. Waylon carried guilt for the rest of his life about the whole thing. He wrote multiple songs about Buddy Holly, the first one being “The Stage”, not only for Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, but also Eddie Cochran, killed in a car accident in early 1960.
He also would perform medleys of Buddy Holly songs in his concerts. Here’s another tribute song he wrote called “Old Friend.” It’s so sad.
One of his first real hits was “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” – which holds up, as all his stuff does. It’s one of my favorite Waylons. Here he is performing it on the Johnny Cash Show. The two of them were roommates for a time. That had to be a crazy fucking apartment, let me tell you.
See how cleancut he was! There’s a rockabilly swoop to his greased-up hair, but he’s all buttoned up. The man was FINE … and has an uncanny resemblance to my Window Boy, particularly in the first photo booth picture posted above – it’s almost eerie – that’s what he looked like when I met him, a gorgeous RAKE – so there’s a visceral response there. But it’s hard to square young Waylon with the long-haired cowboy he became not long after. Then came the breakthroughs. Like he said above: being told what to do with his music made him mean. His declarations of independence came with great albums called things like Ladies Love Outlaws and Lonesome Or’nry and Mean. He was NOT “family-friendly”. His song “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” couldn’t be more clear. It’s an indictment. It’s a callback to country’s real roots … to Hank Williams … saying “Yeahhhh, I don’t know what you all are doing with your countrypolitan sheen, but Hank didn’t do it this way.”
I love that song so much.
Now we come back to Eric Church:
34 years after Waylon called up the ghost of Hank to shame country music into remembering its roots, Eric Church came out with “Lotta Boot Left to Fill”, which refers back to Waylon’s song, and then further back to Hank, re-establishing the continuum. It’s an indictment. Eric Church has said the song criticizes the country-music big-wigs who refuse to accept the “new” – which Church, with his rock and metalhead influences – his bad-boy un-family-friendly sex-pot stoner vibe – represented. In other words, “Lotta Boot Left to Fill” is the words of country fans who reject him. Honestly, the song could go either way. When I first heard the song, I put it in line with all of the other songs Church has written criticizing Nashville. He’s an outsider. The FANS picked him, not the “suits”, and the “suits” are happy to make that money, but deep down they resent outsiders who come in and shake things up.
Regardless, here is Eric Church’s rager of a sequel to Waylon’s song about Hank Williams, where he sings:
“I don’t think Waylon done it that way
And if he was here he’d say “Hoss, neither did Hank!”
Jennings and Willie Nelson were soulmates, and the clips of them performing together are wonderful. You can feel the mutual regard, the appreciation. Their voices are so different but they blend together beautifully. Here they are performing “Good-Hearted Woman”.
Oh, and wait, detour to duet with his wife, Jessi Colter.
Then the outlaw thing started to lose its appeal. Once everyone jumped on the bandwagon … once country music was transformed, with Waylon, Willie and others injecting some wildness into it, opening up the sound … Waylon got sick of it. He wrote a song called …
“Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand?”
LOL.
You know that I couldn’t let this post end without mentioning this song …
“Nobody Knows I’m Elvis”
You can practically hear the smile in his voice.
And who can forget his cameo in Follow That Bird, where he sings a duet with Big Bird, and he’s so easy and focused, you never for once remember Carroll Spinney is inside that suit.
Plus he also appeared on Sesame Street, which I find so touching.
In the mid-80s, he and Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson created a “supergroup” called The Highwaymen (another term for “outlaw”). They put out a couple of albums, and I remember watching them play at Farm Aid in 1993.
I’ll close this up but hopefully you’ve had fun watching and listening to these clips.
One of my favorite genre of song is what I call the “Bad Sport” breakup song. Songs about breakups that are not sad and regretful, mournful and longing, but pissed, and a little bit petty. Being a bad sport is just as honest as saying, “I miss so-and-so, my heart hurts.” I love the songs that are like, “I’m better off without you anyway.” (Kelly Clarkson is a master at this kind of song.)
I love Jennings’ hilarious cover of “You Can Have Her.” Every time the huge angelic chorus comes in, it makes me laugh.
He’s not just singing the song alone. He’s so over this broad who did him wrong he calls in in the big guns, the gigantic chorus is there to back him up in his Kiss Off.
Happy birthday, Waylon. I haven’t even scratched the surface here. Even your name is slightly epic, since it evokes so much. There’s only one of you. To this day, if you say the name “Waylon” everyone knows who you mean.
I’ve written enough about Kate Lyn Sheil’s projects I figured she’s due her own post. It’s her birthday today. Sheil is ubiquitous in the American indie scene – and there is still an indie scene, although distribution has changed. If Sheil came up in the ’90s, she’d be way more well-known. People probably know her from House of Cards but … You have to seek out her film catalog, you have to know it’s there and go find it. You won’t be sorry. Many of the films are low budget or micro-budget, and early on, the mid2000s, she was sometimes making 10 films a year. If she were more mainstream, she’d make 1 or 2 movies a year. She “came up” in the New York mumblecore scene, with other artists – all of whom she worked with – many of whom were her classmates at NYU. Like Alex Ross Perry. Perry and Sheil both worked as clerks at the legendary Kim’s Video. In an interview, Sheil talked about the closing of Kim’s Video:
I worry for New York City without that place existing. I would have been completely lost without it, and it changed my life very clearly. I would not have a career if Kim’s Video didn’t exist, ’cause all of my earliest projects were with people I knew from Kim’s. It means more to me than I can even really explain.
This crowd is based in New York. They all come from elsewhere, but New York is where it happened. The people in this scene all collaborate with one another: appearing in each others’ films, writing, directing … the brilliant cinematographer Sean Price Williams lives and works in this scene (he shot one of my favorite movies in the last ten-ish years, Christmas, Again. Other names: Joe Swanberg, Sophia Takal, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kentucker Audley, Dustin Guy Defa, Adam Wingard … (Greta Gerwig is probably the scene’s most famous “graduate”, and … well … I think she might have been the Eve Harrington of the mumblecore scene.) These people have been doing interesting challenging work – in all genres – for 20+ years at this point. Shiel has also worked multiple times with Amy Seimetz and Ti West.
Listen Up Philip, with Jason Schwarzman
Alex Ross Perry has reached indie-darling status, and Shiel is in Listen Up Philip and Queen of Earth … the Kim’s Video connection has served them well. (Perry and I were both interviewed for the documentary about Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed.) Sheil was in the found-footage horror anthology, V/H/S, with different “chapters” directed by this whole crowd – Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg … Shiel starred in the “chapter” directed by Ti West, who has gone to blow my mind in particular with his horror trilogy known as “the X trilogy” starring Mia Goth. Because those films are horror I thought maybe they weren’t getting the kudos they should have gotten: of course, they were hits but each one had its own style and look, steeped in Hollywood history … And the trilogy films came out one after the other … just amazing. Sheil and Ti West worked again in Sacrament.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Green
Sheil has collaborated a number of times with Sophia Takal, whom I wrote about for Film Comment. Takal hasn’t directed much, unfortunately. Her Always Shine knocked me out! Takal works with her husband Lawrence Michael Levine, including the indie hit Gabi on the Roof in July – a mumblecore mystery caper written and directed my Levine, which Takal starred in, along with Amy Seimetz and Sheil. Well worth seeking out. The gem, for me, is Green, written and directed by Takal, starring Takal and Sheil, primarily, with Levine playing the third character. Green haunts me, and Sheil plays a woman with dangerously porous boundaries, who is seemingly “taken over” by Takal’s character, a chatty-Cathy local girl who becomes a little obsessed with Sheil’s more worldly cosmopolitan character. The two women even look alike, and are indistinguishable from behind. It’s a beautiful film, and a precursor of Always Shine.
Sophia Takal and Kate Lyn Sheil in Green
Speaking of Amy Seimetz: she’s a wonderful actor and also a director and writer (I served on a jury with her at Indie Memphis). Her Sun Don’t Shine, starring Sheil and Kentucker Audley (whom I’ve written about ad nauseum: he’s a fave). Seimetz made headlines a while back for being “let go” from that horrible series The Idol, because The Weeknd thought she brought too female a perspective. Don’t get me started. You don’t DESERVE Amy Seimetz. So sick of this shit. Sun Don’t Shine takes place in sun-blasted strip-mall-littered Florida, with an aimless “couple” – played by Audley and Sheil – on the run after she murders her husband. The film has this languid flat-affect eeriness, these people seem incapable of strong feeling, both exude a scary passivity … like attracts like?
Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley Sun Don’t Shine
The film may “borrow” from every couple-on-the-run movie ever made but Seimetz’s approach destabilizes the expected tropes. It’s like the characters are circling the drain, their interiority is barred from us. Maybe because there’s no “there there”, which is an even scarier proposition. Because the characters seem opaque even to themselves, the whole thing feels like a fever dream, with characters running from a threat, but not even fully realizing what’s actually happening. These two seem capable of literally anything. The final shot, Sheil swimming in a backyard pool, and then confronted by the owner, stays with me. Terrific film.
Both from Sun Don’t Shine
Sheil worked again with Seimetz in the quietly terrifying She Dies Tomorrow, which I reviewed for Ebert. Sheil is the lead here, and she starts out in a frightening state of deterioration, completely shattered, until she sees …. it. And when she sees it, she has these moments when she looks into the camera, dazzled – but frozen – Is what she sees beautiful? Is it a gaping black abyss? We eventually know what this … swirling light … does, but before then and even after … She is caught in its glow, and the look on her face is truly mad in an ecstatic way. (Sheil would make a great nun, one of those ecstatic people who see the Virgin Mary weeping in a cave somewhere in Albania, and people flock to her for healing.) We never see what she sees. We don’t need to. Sheil works from a liminal space, much is unspoken – we see this in Green, in Sun Don’t Shine … but we are never unclear. Some of the mumblecore acting style was almost non-acting and often it lacked focus, nothing cohered – which can be valid, but sometimes it just felt like actors flailing through an improv in a small apartment. Sheil works from a deep, real, and even existential place, and the the hard-to-pin-down-ness of it makes her powerful. She knows why she’s doing everything.
Kate Lyn Sheil, She Dies Tomorrow
The nameless terror we see in her face in She Dies Tomorrow is mixed with a swoon of need … which we somehow connect with the opening sequence, pre-discovery of swirling colored lights, where she lies prostrate, outside, in a glittering green cocktail dress, beside herself with anguish. She’s already ready for the colored lights. This reminds me a little bit of the look on Jane Fonda’s face at the end of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The ecstasy and RELIEF of knowing your end is near, the nihilistic desire to be done with it all. Not too many actresses can go there, the way Sheil does.
Kate Lyn Sheil, She Dies Tomorrow
A couple more notable excellent performances – and movies – to highlight. Like I said, Sheil’s career is extensive.
Zachary Wigon’s The Heart Machine is a harrowing film about obsession and John Gallagher Jr. captures a man’s descent into monomaniacal romantic obsession in such uncomfortable ways there are times it is almost unwatchable. But so very real. A man and a woman meet up on Tinder over Skype. When the film opens, they speak every day in a totally familiar way, it’s been going on for a while. They have never met in person because she is living in Berlin for a couple months. They can meet up when she gets home.
John Gallagher and Kate Lyn Sheil, The Heart Machine
We only see her on Skype. The story is really from Gallagher’s point of view: the subway rides, the parties, the East Village bars – it’s a great New York movie and very very familiar if you lived here at a certain time in your life, before things were settled, before you “settled down”, the challenges of finding a person to date in New York. I found it a horrible adjustment after careening through the social scene in Chicago, where the men were aggressive (in a good way), and came up to you to chat you up, intentionally, and then got your phone number at the end. Maybe it’s because it was before online dating? And so if you wanted to date someone, or go on a date, or even hook up, you had to get yourself together to do it in person. The Heart Machine takes place in the Tinder era and these two feel a connection, and immerse themselves in a relationship before they ever met. I had a couple of those once I lived in New York, and once the online thing was happening. I learned a lot of lessons, one of which was: force the in-person meeting as early as possible. Don’t get into a long back and forth online thing.
The Heart Machine shows the dangers of feeling such a connection and pinning hopes on it before it’s been tested in the real world. The film is not didactic: it’s made by a younger person who knows this world well. He’s not some older person judging “the kids” for their online shenanigans. It’s so easy to meet someone you really feel something for online … but (in my experience) that way danger lies. Gallagher’s obsession is the real deal: not exactly Rupert Pupkin or Travis Bickle level but … close.
John Gallagher, The Heart Machine
I wrote a long piece about the film. (There are some spoilers there. I’d suggest going into it semi-cold.
Here, Sheil plays a mystery woman. Seen only on a Skype screen at first. She exists (again) in a liminal space: here but not exactly here, an image but not corporeal … She exudes warmth and closeness but there’s something unreachable there, and it’s seductive. Not exactly Vertigo-level but … close. A millennial Vertigo. She’s there but not there.
Kate Lyn Sheil, The Heart Machine
A film like The Heart Machine depends solely on the power and reality of the performances. You need to enter their world and relationship, you have to be pulled down into Gallagher’s obsession: you feel how crazy he’s getting, and you feel alarmed, but you’re only with him for long stretches of the film: his headspace gets more and more claustrophobic, at the same time she’s retreating into a remote idealization and maybe even something either sinister or supernatural. Gallagher is so obsessed you start to wonder if the whole thing is a delusion, if she isn’t real at all, she exists only as a fantasy of the perfect woman. I can’t say enough good things about it.
Last, but far from least, is Kate Plays Christine, by documentary filmmaker Robert Greene. The film got a lot of press and won a lot of awards when it played the festival circuuit in 2016. In fact, Kate Plays Christine was my introduction to her and I was so intrigued I went back to watch the rest of her filmography.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
The film is hard to explain as is a strange coincidence happened in 2016. Another film came out in 2016 called Christine, starring Rebecca Hall. I reviewed for Ebert. Christine was about Christine Chubbuck whose main claim to “fame” was shooting herself during a live news broadcast in 1974. She was a reporter reading the news. She had a gun in her purse. Except for one in-depth article back then, where the writer interviewed her friends and colleagues who spoke of her increasing desperation and mental problems, the entire event is cloaked in mystery and – naturally – the television station had no desire to set the record straight. They wanted to erase her memory and have people forget what happened at their station – traumatizing viewers. The film Christine is really good (for whatever reason I had reservations about it at first, reflected in my review. This is what happens when you write about a film a couple hours after you’ve seen it. Sometimes things are revealed on re-watch, and I’ve re-watched Christine many times. It is excellent and one of the best portrayals of unshakable depression – and the helplessness others feel when watching the descent – I’ve ever seen.)
Kate Plays Christine also came out in 2016, and while it is – essentially – a documentary, it also focuses on Christine Chubbuck, albeit taking a totally different approach. 2016 wasn’t an anniversary year or anything, and the story isn’t well-known at all, so what are the odds of two films coming out in the same year on this subject? They are interesting companion pieces, almost as though the Rebecca Hall version is an alternate version of the film we see being prepared in Kate Plays Christine. Kate Plays Christine details Sheil’s acting process in preparing to play the role (for a film that never happened). Christine Chubbuck was in the air. Strange.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
As I’ve discussed, Sheil works from a fluid space: she’s orbiting the earth AND she’s in the dirt. Kate Plays Christine makes this explicit. Sheil and Greene and a small crew travel to Florida to research Christine Chubbuck, in preparation for a proposed and/or potential film about Chubbuck. I actually haven’t researched whether or not Greene decided to pivot into a film about process solely, to document Sheil’s process, emotional, physical, investigative … and give up on making the actual film … or whether … they actually did plan on making a film and this was meant for behind-the-scenes footage, and Greene decided to leave as is. Either way, it’s one of the great films about acting preparation. I’m in heaven watching it.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Greene comes from a documentary background and so Kate Plays Christine also includes footage of Greene and Sheil tracking down people who knew Chubbuck, to find out their impressions, their memories, all to be used by Sheil in her portrayal. People are hard to find. People have died. People are also hesitant to talk to them. This tragedy happened in 1974 and it covered the television station in shame and infamy (the news broadcast footage is nowhere to be found. It was only seen once, and live.)
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Sheil also works on Christine’s physicality, studying the existing footage of Chubbuck from her various broadcasts (Chubbuck was not an anchor. She was a local reporter, frustrated with the stories she was assigned – strawberry festivals, etc. The stuff she was interested in was considered boring – re-districting, land laws, school board, etc. Not exactly money-makers for the station). Sheil studies Chubbuck’s walk, her posture, her odd intense physicality – the long mane of black hair, the slouched posture. She tries wigs. The process is not haphazard. The wig is important.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Disappearing into the role is the goal. Not because it will win her an Oscar but because she wants to inhabit Chubbuck, who remains a mystery. Sheil is confronted with the mystery, the gap in between what we know and what Chubbuck did ultimately. How could she have done what she did? Sheil resists the confrontation. She can’t go through with it. She can’t re-create the broadcast, she resists reaching into her purse for the gun. She confronts the gap in understanding, the abyss Chubbuck was in which allowed her to do such a heinous thing, and Sheil’s knowledge of how much she doesn’t – and can’t – know.
There’s a dream-like quality to the film. The stormy skies, the dark green gulf, Sheil in a motel room staring at footage, or wandering up to a house, wearing huge sunglasses, hoping someone will let her in and talk to her about Christine.
I haven’t written a full piece about Kate Plays Christine, although I do discuss it briefly here. I’d suggest starting with Kate Plays Christine and then watching Christine.
There aren’t too many films like Kate Plays Christine, and the film speaks to Sheil’s status in the “scene”, among her peers.
“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats was born today in 1865. Yeats is a great poet and all that, but I grew up pretty much “over” him because he was omnipresent in our household. We were made to memorize his epitaph in order to receive 25 cents for our allowance:
Cast a cold eye
On life on death
Horseman pass by.
There was a framed copy of the epitaph on our dining room wall. You feel me? That’s the level we’re talking about. He seemed like a revered ancestor.
Despite an appearance by Aimee Mann – playing herself – where she sings two songs in their entirety – O Horizon is a slow generalized chore. Plus there’s the Sackler connection, which has to be acknowledged. I reviewed for Ebert.
When Barnes called herself a “famous unknown” she may have been being elliptical or ironic, or she may have been just telling it like it is. Her writing didn’t have literal chronological through-lines and some readers found it challenging. So SHE was more famous than her WORK. Her fame came from her love affairs with women, and her immortalization in all the memoirs written by members of the vibrant bohemian lesbian ex-pat community in Paris, particularly its main scribe, the Amazon (her actual nickname) Natalie Clifford Barney. Djuna Barnes was a huge “player” in that scene, and in the ex-pat writer “scene” in general. She knew everyone. She was pals with James Joyce, Hemingway, Sylvia Beach. She was a writer and illustrator, and is most remembered for Nightwood (1936), a lesbian cult classic, written in a curlicue almost Gothic style but flavored with ironic Modernist detachment. Djuna Barnes shows up briefly in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (played by Emmanuelle Uzan) – an event gratifying to any Barnes fan. She dances with Owen Wilson, and he comments afterwards: “That was Djuna Barnes? No wonder she wanted to lead.” Ba-dum-ching.
Barnes worked on Nightwood for a number of years, giving public readings, editing, passing the manuscript around for feedback. Nobody wanted to publish. It is a difficult book. Nightwood eventually landed on T.S. Eliot’s desk. It was just ten years after his Wasteland cracked apart the certainties of the literary tradition. He was not afraid of difficult. He edited Nightwood, and eventually published it in 1936, with Faber and Faber. (He also said, famously, of Barnes: “Never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.” He wasn’t the only one who felt this contradictory way.) Nightwood is a roman a clef, with barely-disguised portraits of Barnes, her lovers, all of the women in that fascinating crowd.
“I realized that I was going to end up being my own role model. I became what I myself needed to see growing up as a kid, and I think I succeeded as Maria by never forgetting that there was some kid out there, in the outer boroughs, stressed out maybe, feeling invisible, looking to me the same way that I looked at television, trying to find someone like me.”
–Sonia Manzano on getting the role of Maria on Sesame Street
Sonia Manzano played “Maria” on Sesame Street for 45 years before retiring in 2015. In 2016, she received a Lifetime Achievement Daytime Emmy. She is also a very successful author of children’s books. I am a child of the 1970s. I was a first-generation Sesame Street fan. Maria was part of the family.
Of all of the memories I have of “Maria”, her moment in Christmas Eve on Sesame Street is the one I want to talk about today.
