“A ‘smartcracker’ they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy.” — Dorothy Parker

Posted on August 22, 2026 by sheila

“Oh, good Lord, what’s the matter with women, anyway?”
“Please don’t call me ‘women,'” she said.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “I didn’t mean to use bad words.”
— Dorothy Parker, “Dusk Before Fireworks”

It’s her birthday today.

I cannot tell you how many times, in my life as a writer, I have thought of her words: “I hate writing. I love having written.” Nobody said it better. I feel this every day of my life.

Dorothy Parker, near the end of her life, speaking of the Algonquin Round Table:

These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days — Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them. It was not legendary. I don’t mean that — but it wasn’t all that good. There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn’t have to be any truth.

Dorothy Parker was famous for her wit, sharp tongue, and incisive (sometimes brutal) opinions. She spoke and wrote the way her her mind worked: fast, caustic, competitive, and lethal. There are so many anecdotes about her, and who knows if they are all true, but I prefer to believe they are true. Parker could crush an opponent using only language. It may not be a lovable quality, but it is certainly a theatrical and literary quality.

“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, ‘You’re all a lost generation.’ That got around to certain people and we all said, Whee! We’re lost. Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that, although the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.” – Dorothy Parker

There is a sadness in Parker’s later interviews, an awareness that she was perhaps pigeon-holed, or she had pigeon-holed herself. Here she is, during an interview with The Paris Review in 1956:

Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated – as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture.

Bitter, but making bitterness funny (“magnificent gesture”). A survival skill.

Another quote from the same interview:

I don’t want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I’ve never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself…There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

She addresses her central struggle in a short piece called “I Don’t Feel Funny”, written in the annus horribilis of 1939.

I don’t think these are funny times, and I don’t think Franco is funny. I don’t think I can fight fascism by being comical, nor do I think that anybody else can… I know many silly people, because I have known them for years, and I cannot keep my face shut when they talk peculiar idiocy; when they say everybody should keep very quiet and do nothing about anything, or when they shake their heads and sigh that unions are all rackets, or when they murmur, “Oh, well, I’m content to stay in my ivory tower”– oh God, oh God, that dreary ivory tower, the only window of which looks out on the fascist side.

Her short stories are devastating, even when they are funny (and sometimes they are not funny at all): miniature portraits of loneliness and urban life. Single girls trying to survive, living in rooming houses, sometimes succumbing to the dark side, the Edward-Hopper-ian loneliness of the insomniacs, the poor. She’s excellent on the interrelationships of men and women, how we try to communicate, how we fail, how we come to things with different expectations. (Her story “The Sexes,” told only in dialogue – with no narration, no exposition, is quite brilliant.) I love “Arrangement in Black and White,” (a kind of “Radical Chic” story for the 1920s set), “Big Blonde” (probably her most famous short story), “Song of the Shirt, 1941” “Here We Are”. I love “The Banquet of Crow.” Some of her stories are first-person monologues, funny, frantic, stream-of-consciousness (the one about a woman waiting for a man to telephone comes to mind). And throughout are these zingers of lines – lines that blare from the middle of the page with a kind of clarity, announcing the VOICE behind it. A random sampling:

“The young woman was of those unfortunates who remember every word.”
“her bearing had always that calm that only the correctly attired may enjoy”
“her words fell like snow when there is no wind.”
“The men wore the garb they could by now easily call Black Tie. (The steps in social ascent may be gauged by the terms employed to describe a man’s informal evening dress: the progression goes Tuxedo, Tux, dinner jacket, Black Tie.”

“Nobody can write such ironic things unless he has a deep sense of injustice – injustice to those members of the race who are the victims of the stupid, the pretentious and the hypocritical.” – Franklin P. Adams on Dorothy Parker’s short stories

Other sequences I love:

From “The Little Hours”:

Well. This way lies galloping melancholia. Maybe it’s because this is the zero hour. This is the time the swooning soul hangs pendant and vertiginous between the new day and the old, nor dates confront the one and summon back the other. This is the time when all things, known and hidden, are iron to weight the spirit; when all ways, traveled or virgin, fall away from the stumbling feet, when all before the straining eyes to black. Blackness now, everywhere is blackness. This is the time of abomination, the dreadful hour of the victorious dark. For it is always darkest – Was it not that lovable old cynic, La Rouchefoucauld, who said it is always darkest before the deluge?

From “Sentiment”:

I wonder why it’s wrong to be sentimental. People are so contemptuous of feeling. ‘You wouldn’t catch me sitting alone and mooning,’ they say. “Moon” is what they say when they mean remember, and they are so proud of not remembering. It’s strange, how they pride themselves upon their lacks. ‘I never take anything seriously,’ they say. ‘I simply couldn’t imagine,’ they say, ‘letting myself care so much that I could be hurt.’ They say, ‘No one person could be that important to me.’ And why, why do they think they’re right?

Also from “Sentiment”:

“Go out and see your friends and have a good time,” they say. “Don’t sit alone and dramatize yourself.” Dramatize yourself! If it be drama to feel a steady – no, a ceaseless rain beating upon my heart, then I do dramatize myself. The shallow people, the little people, how can they know what suffering is, how could their thick hearts be torn? Don’t they know, the empty fools, that I could not see again the friends we saw together, could not go back to the places where he and I have been? For he’s gone, and it’s ended. It’s ended, it’s ended. And when it ends, only those places where you have known sorrow are kindly to you. If you revisit the scenes of your happiness, your heart must burst of its agony. And that’s sentimental, I suppose.

People who only think of her as a wisecracker haven’t read enough of her work.

“Ah, satire. That’s another matter. They’re the big boys. If I’d been called a satirist, there’d be no living with me. But by satirist I mean those boys in the other centuries. The people we call satirists now are those who make cracks at topical topics and consider themselves satirists – creatures like George S. Kaufman and such who don’t even know what satire is. Lord knows, a writer should show his times, but not show them in wisecracks. Their stuff is not satire; it’s as dull as yesterday’s newspaper. Successful satire has got to be pretty good the day after tomorrow.” – Dorothy Parker

The opening paragraph of “The Banquet of Crow”:

It was a crazy year, a year when things that should have run on schedule went all which ways. It was a year when snow fell thick and lasting in April, and young ladies clad in shorts were photographed for the tabloids sunbathing in Central Park in January. It was a year when, in the greatest prosperity of the richest nation, you could not walk five city blocks without being besought by beggars; when expensively dressed women loud and lurching in public places were no uncommon sight; when drugstore counters were stacked with tablets to make you tranquil and other tablets to set you leaping. It was a year when wives whose position was only an inch or two below that of the saints – arbiters of etiquette, venerated hostesses, architects of memorable menus – suddenly caught up a travelling bag and a jewel case and flew off to Mexico with ambiguous young men allied with the arts; when husbands who had come home every evening not only at the same hour but at the same minute of the same hour came home one evening more, spoke a few words, and then went out their doors and did not come in by them again.

She says in the Paris Review interview:

Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead is a great book. And I thought William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness an extraordinary thing. The start of it took your heart and flung it over there. He writes like a god. But for most of my reading I go back to the old ones – for comfort. As you get older you go much farther back. I read Vanity Fair about a dozen times a year. I was a woman of eleven when I first read it – the thrill of that line “George Osborne lay dead with a bullet through his heart.” Sometimes I read, as an elegant friend of mine calls them, “who-did-its”. I love Sherlock Holmes. My life is so untidy and he’s so neat. But as for living novelists, I suppose E.M. Forster is the best, not knowing that that is, but at least he’s a semifinalist, wouldn’t you think?

She said once that humor needed “a disciplined eye and a wild mind”. To me, that perfectly describes her verses, which are tight as a drum, the rhyme schemes and rhythms almost a throwback to Longfellow, who writes rhymes so perfect, that they must be read out loud for the sheer joy of them. You can also hear the influence of Edna St. Vincent Millay, particularly in the love lyrics, but Parker’s verses are bitter, angry, funny. There’s so much good stuff to discover in her poetry, not just the usual suspects (the one about suicide is probably her most famous). Also, the TITLES of her poems are unexpected, often driving the point home once you finish reading the poem. A sampling:

A Very Short Song
Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.

Anecdote
So silent I when Love was by
He yawned, and turned away;
But Sorrow clings to my apron-strings,
I have so much to say.

Unfortunate Coincidence
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying –
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

Comment
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

Men
They hail you as their morning star
Because you are the way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They’ll try to make you different;
And once they have you, safe and sound,
They want to change you all around.
Your moods and ways they put a curse on;
They’d make of you another person.
They cannot let you go your gait;
They influence and educate.
They’d alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired.

Bric-a-Brac
Little things that no one needs —
Little things to joke about —
Little landscapes, done in beads.
Little morals, woven out,
Little wreaths of gilded grass,
Little brigs of whittled oak
Bottled painfully in glass;
These are made by lonely folk.

Lonely folk have lines of days
Long and faltering and thin;
Therefore — little wax bouquets,
Prayers cut upon a pin,
Little maps of pinkish lands,
Little charts of curly seas,
Little plats of linen strands,
Little verses, such as these.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The pure and worthy Mrs. Stowe
Is one we all are proud to know
As mother, wife, and authoress-
Thank God, I am content with less!

Fulfillment
For this my mother wrapped me warm,
And called me home against the storm,
And coaxed my infant nights to quiet,
And gave me roughage in my diet,
And tucked me in my bed at eight,
And clipped my hair, and marked my weight,
And watched me as I sat and stood:
That I might grow to womanhood
To hear a whistle and drop my wits
And break my heart to clattering bits.

Two-Volume Novel
The sun’s gone dim, and
The moon’s turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn’t love back.

The Lady’s Reward
Lady, lady, never start
Conversation toward your heart;
Keep your pretty words serene;
Never murmur what you mean.
Show yourself, by word and look,
Swift and shallow as a brook.
Be as cool and quick to go
As a drop of April snow;
Be as delicate and gay
As a cherry flower in May.
Lady, lady, never speak
Of the tears that burn your cheek-
She will never win him, whose
Words had shown she feared to lose.
Be you wise and never sad,
You will get your lovely lad.
Never serious be, nor true,
And your wish will come to you-
And if that makes you happy, kid,
You’ll be the first it ever did.

And finally:

Oscar Wilde

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

“I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.” – Dorothy Parker

 
 
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.

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , , , , | 18 Comments

“The thing I really wanna say is—and really, really mean is that real things last. Any way you look at it. Real things last.” — Dale Hawkins

Posted on August 22, 2026 by sheila

Dale Hawkins, 1957, playing on the Louisiana Hayride radio show (just a year after Elvis completed his world-shaking run on the program)

It’s his birthday today. Time moved really fast in the mid-50s rock-rockabilly world. Elvis exploded and made everyone irrelevant almost overnight. He turned everyone into wannabes, generating a million copycats, some of which rode his coattails to some success (at the very least financially). But it was one of those events that EXPLODED overnight and then deflated almost as quickly. It almost never happens that way. Buddy Holly was on a bill with Elvis in 1955, and his style almost immediately veered away from country into Elvis-land, a sharp right-angle – he was like “oh wait, I need to be doing THIS.” This happened across the board. For perspective: Elvis was an unknown less than a year before. He recorded “That’s All Right’ in July 1954. It made local waves. His Louisiana Hayride appearances launched him regionally. This is still 1954, though – 1955 he started his tear through the Southwest and Southeast. This is where all these future legends like Holly encountered him. The culture veered Elvis’ way, unstoppably. Buddy Holly “hit” in 1957, which doesn’t sound like it’s a long gap – 1955 to 1957 – but in the fast-moving 1950s rockabilly world it was an eternity. By 1957, Elvis was a movie star. Wild. His style almost immediately moved into what we now would probably just call “pop” – but he also put out a Christmas album, a gospel album, he did whatever the hell he wanted to do, and don’t let anyone tell you different. But the point is: He couldn’t be considered pure rockabilly. He never was. But he was a comet with a long long tail.

The field became extremely crowded almost overnight. The gold rush. Sun Records became a single-artist operation, causing tension with other artists like Billy Lee Riley, Johnny Cash, etc. Jerry Lee Lewis was the new shining star but he flamed out almost immediately with the scandal of his marriage. Sun Records didn’t have a crowded roster anymore. Charlie Rich came and went. It was no longer the Mecca.

“I was raised by my grandparents in Louisiana. That led, I think, to a lot of the types of sounds that I do music wise because I was in the melting pot of good music. In the saloons, the front would be where the white people were, and if you swing the door, you’d hear Hank Williams sing “Lovesick Blues.” And then on the other side, you’d hear Elmore James “Dust My Broom,” or, you know, some good classic blues. Plus the churches. I mean, people don’t realize that all of the churches with the exception of the Catholic and Episcopal sang the same hymns but sang it with different feeling.” — Dale Hawkins, 2008 interview

Dale Hawkins is a tail-end-of-the-comet figure, but that doesn’t mean he was derivative. He wasn’t a pale imitation of anybody. He grew up in a musical family. He loved blues music. He was a kid but he was smart. Elvis was the game-changer. Dale positioned himself adjacent to the Louisiana Hayride, parking cars in the Hayride lot. That’s as close as he could get at first. He got to know some of the Hayride musicians (D.J. Fontana primarily, who then got sucked into the Elvis Monsoon). He got the attention of Stan Lewis at Chess, and went into the studio to record a demo, the song by which Dale Hawkins is primarily known to this day: “Susie Q.” The song was written as an instrumental by a kid named … James Burton (speaking of which, and speaking of the Louisiana Hayride to Elvis Pipeline). (Burton wouldn’t hook up with Elvis, though, until the 70s.)

The guitar part on “Susie Q” is fucking legendary. Keep in mind: James Burton was just seventeen years old when he came up with this lick. Insane.

But the whole thing is legendary. The cowbell in the opening. There’s something nasty about all of it. It’s dirrrrrty. Dirtier than a lot of the “rockabilly” stuff going on at the time, geared towards the sock hop crowd. Genres are imprecise. This isn’t “rockabilly” although history tries to loop him into it. Dale Hawkins was a harbinger of the future. Without Dale Hawkins, there’d be no Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Rolling Stones were CLEARLY inspired by Dale Hawkins, Keith Richards for SURE (so … inspired by the song, but mostly inspired by that guitar). It’s hard to call anything the first – you have to be very careful with it – but Hawkins’ sound, made just as the first Elvis Explosion was dissipating (before going even further and longer – it was all very unpredictable) – and just as the Rockabilly Revolution spun out into space losing speed … pushed its way outside the margins, basically carving out a teeny bit of real estate which would eventually be called “swamp rock”, the dirty guitar-heavy sound of the 70s.

When this happens … when something new comes along – or “new” – it’s sometimes viewed as an anomaly, or a one-off, or a fluke. People LOVE labels, and they love it when things are NEAT. Dale Hawkins was not neat. His moment in the sun was brief and his one big hit was “Susie Q” (although his discography rewards the curious and patient. There’s a lot of great stuff there. Hawkins attracted great musicians from the jump, people who would go on to be legends – like Burton – or stellar studio musicians who became part of the Wrecking Crew. And so his tracks show a really high level of musicianship (unlike, it must be said, a lot of the other rockabilly stuff). Granted, for rockabilly you don’t NEED amazing musicianship, and in some cases high technical skill could be a detriment. But Hawkins was different.

“Susie Q” is a nothing of a song without that instrumentation. The lyrics are about a girl named Susie Q with a distinctive walk. It’s Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman”. That’s it. But the way it SOUNDS is … I mean, it sounds like SEX is what it sounds like. Sex in a moldy wet bayou shack, if I’m being honest. The song is unimaginable without James Burton’s guitar part. (Feel so fortunate I went and saw James Burton back in 2013.)


Ricky Nelson and James Burton

“Susie Q” did “chart”, and fairly well, although nothing really “stuck”, and it didn’t generate momentum – at least not for Hawkins personally. This is wild since the song is now seen as one of the most crucial and influential tracks of the 1950s. It happens that way sometimes. I think its newness and obvious dirtiness – its spare nasty sound – a cowbell, a guitar, a bass, and drums – it’s a grown-up sound, not a sock-hop sound – was threatening to the label, so they didn’t really push it. Hawkins kept recording though. He hosted a TV show for a while. He died in 2010, so he rode the nostalgia waves, and put out a couple of albums late in the game which got a lot of attention and critical chatter. He seemed to enjoy this late success.

Here’s a 1958 television performance, and this whole setup is kind of funny because … as I mentioned before, Dale Hawkins was no soda-shop good boy. It’s 1958, though: the Elvis wave was almost completely over. He was about to enter the Army. He had made 4 movies. Rockabilly burned out. “The Day the Music Died” was coming. So the proverbial “they” had him perform in an ice cream parlor set, your basic white-bread teenage set – a world he himself never belonged to. His songs don’t belong there either.

And finally, the man of the hour playing the song that inspired generations of guitarists, 50, 60 years of them.

 
 
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.

Posted in Music, On This Day | Tagged , | 8 Comments

“If you’re creating anything at all, it’s really dangerous to care about what people think.” — Kristen Wiig

Posted on August 22, 2026 by sheila

Today is the birthday of one of the greatest actors working today.

I can’t seem to stop mentioning Kristen Wiig in my writing. I mention her even if she isn’t the main subject. She’s my favorite. I am in awe of what she can do. She’s the closest we have to the great character-actresses-as-leading-ladies of the 1970s. There’s a reason she cast Jill Clayburgh as her own mother in Bridesmaids. Wiig is the artistic/creative daughter of Jill Clayburgh. With a little Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman in the mix, forming her own witches’ brew of genius.

So here’s an archive of the pieces where she comes up, either at the center, or peripherally:

Let’s talk about back-ting. Scenes where actors convey everything with their backs. A very niche obsession but I wrote about it for Film Comment. Wiig has a HELL of a back-ting moment in Hateship Loveship, a movie I highly recommend. Incidentally, along with the back-ting moment in Hateship Loveship, she also has a HELL of a “mirror moment” – which I didn’t mention in my big “mirror piece” for Oscilloscope, but maybe I should do a part 2, because I just scratched the surface with the topic.


Hateship Loveship (2014)

I reviewed Hateship Loveship for Ebert and the film was such a pleasant discovery. So many people still haven’t seen it. Check it out!

I also mentioned her prominently in another Film Comment piece, about women who “came up” in comedy, either improv or sketch comedy, who are also phenomenal dramatic actresses, some of the best, really, especially in terms of depth of character development. People with this background go deeper than most. And while Bridesmaids is obviously hilarious, Wiig is – at the same time – giving a very deep performance showing loneliness, disappointment, heartbreak, panic. That character is a fuck-up.

This very small moment:

That whole SCENE, really … I have lived it. I have been her. Repeatedly. Not so much anymore, but when I was at the stage in my life when everyone was getting married. I flushed with recognition during that scene. I wish people understood that what she does in that scene – create a panic attack/hot flash on camera, in real time, her wildly sad eyes gleaming out of her wildly laughing face … this is a Madeline Kahn level brilliance, and since I consider Madeline Kahn to be one of the few sui generis geniuses of the acting art, you know I mean it. The structure of the scene is there – Wiig knows what the moment requires – and when the moment arrives, she just jumps off the cliff into the midst of it, letting her talent and instinct do the rest. It’s SUCH a sad moment but it is simultaneously so funny. Very very few people can do that.

So she can do that and then she can do Garth and Kat.

Or the pure LUNACY of “Liza Minnelli tries to turn off a lamp”.

… and on and on and on.

Back to what I said about Bridesmaids, because this is part of Wiig’s gift, and also part of what I wrote about in that “female comedians” piece. Young actresses often want to be liked. Their entire early career is about trading on their likability. Being adorable ingenues, with the movies totally on their side. The women I love don’t care about that in the slightest, and Wiig is such a good example. Bridesmaid was a monster-hit comedy but notice how BADLY her character behaves – to everyone – how BADLY she fucks up – and yes, it’s funny – but she is also in the process of torching her own life to the ground, due to her own misery. This is not an isolated example in Wiig’s work. I must mention Skeleton Twins, because her character is next level “fucking up”. (I wrote about Skeleton Twins here.) Look at what the character does. Talk about torching her own life. She’s with this genuinely nice husband (Luke Wilson) and she cheats on him left and right, hooking up in bathrooms with strangers at the drop of a hat. She can’t stop herself. It’s compulsive. She pretends she’s off the pill because her husband is under the delusion that they both want a baby, and she can’t just come out and say, “I can’t be a mother, I don’t want to be a mother.” Lies upon lies upon lies. Horrible lies. Lies you can’t walk back. And yet … you understand her. At least I do. She’s totally fucked up. It’s amazing she’s still alive. Look at her mother. Look at her twin brother (Bill Hader). Neither of them can just settle down and accept stability, even happiness. They both walk around in a state of suicidal ideation. At the end, you’re not even sure if they’ve come out on the other side. They are all each other has. Her relationship with her husband was a way for her to pretend that she could be normal and happy, and also safe from her worst impulses. She lied to herself AND her husband. The marriage hasn’t changed her, it has just made her more secretive and devious. And so she “acted out” and ruined everything.

Skeleton Twins was marketed incorrectly and I wish these idiots would learn that they are shooting themselves – and their movie – in the foot. Skeleton Twins is not a wacky comedy starring two SNL alums. There are funny scenes – two, really – but other than that, it is a serious family drama. And she is brilliant in it. When she screams by herself in the car, screams and weeps, because she fucked up again and she can’t stop fucking up … we’re not at ALL in a comedic realm. Many people find characters who make the right choices redemptive. They say things like “life-affirming.” I am not suggesting those people are lying or shallow or wrong. But when they start assuming that that’s the ONLY way a character can be “redemptive”, that any character who does unforgivable things is a “bad example” and needs to be shown to be a “bad example”, and the character should be judged in the same way you judge a person in your friend circle … well, no. I’m gonna fight you on that. My opinion is just as valid as yours and not only do I find fucked-up characters redemptive – I reject the whole concept of “redemptive” as the be-all and end-all of art. SOME art is “redemptive” but it’s not a REQUIREMENT. Art has many purposes other than making people feel hopeful. We all need to “feel seen” and I “feel seen” by the character in Bridesmaids and the character in Skeleton Twins. I have torched my life. I have behaved badly. I have acted out. I have made it my business to make happy people feel guilty about their happiness. I don’t do this anymore, I grew out of it, but I have done that, during those very bad years. I am not proud of it and I will not defend it but to ADMIT that so-called “good” people can behave really really badly is not somehow an “endorsement” of bad behavior. ENOUGH with whether or not something “endorses” something else. Look out when political language like “endorsement” seeps down into emotional personal life. It’s a sign of tyranny and fascism. Look it up. So no: bad behavior shown onscreen does not “endorse” said behavior, but it DOES admit the truths and complexity of the human condition. And Wiig is all about that.

And finally, I reviewed Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar. It was so much fun writing that review (and seeing the movie). SILLINESS. Pure SILLINESS. Not a serious moment in it. Pure escape. A REFRESHING TONIC.

I haven’t even mentioned Welcome to Me. What an uncompromising film. It doesn’t cop out. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I kept waiting for the cop-out, the redemption. Nope. (Same thing with Charlize Theron in her best performance in Young Adult.) I need to write about both of those films. They excite me.

I’m happy she’s out there. Any time she shows up in something, you know it’s gonna be good.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day, Television | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

“I never bought a Ricky Nelson record. I bought a James Burton record.” — Keith Richards

Posted on August 21, 2026 by sheila

James Burton (born on this day) is still alive. He turns 85 today. He’s in every music Hall of Fame there is (just a couple months ago he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame). His style is so distinct you can tell it’s him even if you don’t know it’s him. He never really did anything else. He was a teenage kid when he started playing with the Louisiana Hayride house band. (See above pic). Things moved fast for him. Let’s discuss the fact that he wrote an instrumental song – which then had lyrics added to it – which was then recorded by a kid named Dale Hawkins, a little song called “Susie Q”. “Susie Q” didn’t take Dale Hawkins to the top, although the song is now recognized as one of the most important and influential tracks of the 1950s … mostly because of James Burton’s guitar lick. James Burton was 17 years old. It was the first time he ever recorded anything. Astonishing.

Burton never received credit for “Susie Q” OR royalties. Song construction is often a collaboration, and collaboration often means someone gets screwed.

Burton started so young. He left Louisiana and moved to Los Angeles, and he already had a great reputation among those who know about such things. He was 17, 18 years old. But if you heard “Susie Q”, the first thing you wanted to know was: “Who the hell is that on guitar?” Once in Los Angeles, he hooked up with THE teen idol of the moment, Ricky Nelson. He ended up playing with Ricky Nelson for over a decade. Nelson’s voice is so beautiful – perfect, really – and Burton’s guitar gave the songs a chug-chug urgency, unmistakable once you know Burton’s work. Like this, from 1958:

He was always at Ricky Nelson’s side, in concert and on The Ozzie and Harriet Show.

The solo in question really is a banger:

“You have to let your playing breathe; I think you have to treat it like a lyric. It’s not how much you play, it’s what you play and where you play it. It’s usually what you don’t play that makes it.” — James Burton

Burton was also a busy studio musician, part of the legendary Wrecking Crew, and in this capacity he played with everyone. The Beach Boys. Glen Campbell. Judy Collins. The Monkees. Harry Nilsson. The Everly Brothers, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis … (in a career spanning 70 years, he also played with Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, Tina Turner, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris … the list goes on and on.)

Burton is probably most well-known for his work with Elvis. He headed up Elvis’ “TCB” band in Elvis’ Vegas shows, starting in 1969 and lasting until Elvis’ death. Burton is always there, at Elvis’ side, grounding Elvis’ sound, digging into the dirt (“Polk Salad Annie”), but also providing lift-off. His sound is exhilarating. Elvis’ live performances are punctuated by the command: “Play it, James!”

I love shit like this: from the YouTube “reactor” community: a British guitarist “reacts” to James Burton. Art is eternal. It’s there for all of us, always. Don’t let the tech lords create memory holes, where we lose continuity with the past. We can learn from the past and appreciate it.

Burton plays (and has always played) a Fender Telecaster. Here’s a good article / interview with Burton (it’s old: thank goodness these things still live on the internet somewhere).

Keith Richards, scratching himself like he’s got fleas – it’s hilarious – inducts Johnnie Johnson and James Burton into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. “Two of the most incredible sidemen of all time … ”

There’s a lot of footage out there of Burton playing with different people, so it’s there if you want to go down the rabbit hole. I tripped over this clip, and was captivated:

And the following clip is pure BLISS. In 1987, Roy Orbison played The Coconut Grove club, and the lineup is insane. It’s basically Elvis’ Vegas band: Ronnie Tutt, Jerry Scheff, Glen Hardin and James Burton. Also on stage: Bruce Springsteen, and he and James Burton go back and forth, a round-robin of guitar “licks”. The sound is superb, just so rich and full and exciting. Testosterone-squared.

Back in 2013, I went to go see James Burton play (“Play it, James!”) at the Iridium in Manhattan. The night was absolutely magic: we were surrounded by the powerful friendly ghosts of the past, all the legends Burton played with, their fans packing the audience (and it wasn’t just a white-haired crowd. Obviously. I was there. The age range was like 20 to 80. LOVE THAT). The legends are even more present in their absence. You could FEEL them. There are some YouTube clips out there from that show. Here’s one: they’re playing “Milk Cow Blues Boggie”! (Wrote a massive piece about the different versions of this song.)

Charlie and I were right there, 10 feet from the stage.

These people aren’t going to be around forever. See them live while you still can. Burton got Covid, and also broke his hip. He’s in his mid-80s now. He’s still touring (when health allows). There was a London tribute concert last year – “James Burton and Friends”, where Burton was joined by Brian May, Ronnie Wood, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello and etc. Here they all play “Susie Q”, back to the genesis of it all.

If you see James Burton is playing at a club near you, even if it’s an hour away, GO. What the hell ELSE are you doing with your life? History lives in James Burton and every time he plays he passes it on.

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“I’m a tough little rebel.” — Linda Manz

Posted on August 20, 2026 by sheila


Days of Heaven (1978)

It’s her birthday today.

Manz died on August 14, 2020. She was HUGE to me growing up, and I have written about it on occasion. She didn’t work all that much, but her performances meant so much to me, spoke to me as a young tomboy girl. It was the era of the Tough Little Girls, and it was truly glorious (if you were a little girl then who wasn’t drawn to girlie things). So I’ve written quite a bit about her, about her performances, but also about What She Meant To Me.

First up: The major piece I wrote was for Film Comment on Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue, where she plays a young troubled girl, obsessed with both Elvis and Sid Vicious.


Out of the Blue (1983)

Her obsession has the whiff of death about it. Her whole life is death-haunted. Her only escape is her rock ‘n roll idols. Her room is a shrine to Elvis. She dresses like Elvis. She slicks her hair, she wears leather, she swaggers across the school fields.


Out of the Blue (1983)

And yet, at the same time, she is at the age when she is starting to experimenting with femininity. There’s an extraordinary scene where she – hair slicked back like Elvis – smears on lipstick. Her mother keeps begging her to dress like a girl, to get boys’ attentions. So she gives it a shot. She looks so YOUNG.


Out of the Blue (1983)

Linda Manz came up again in the first piece I linked to above about tomboy movies, an era I was fortunate to grow up in because the models for girlhood were little gangster tomboys. I had that vibe, it was very attractive to me, as was any story where girls dressed up as boys in order to disguise they were girls for safety/survival reasons. I didn’t want to be a boy. I wanted to be BOTH. The ultimate fantasy was to be one of Fagin’s little thieves, but I was actually a girl disguised as a boy. I didn’t question any of this, but the fantasies were vivid! The next best thing was getting cast as the Artful Dodger in the school play when I was 11.

Linda Manz didn’t play as many roles as, say, Jodie Foster or Tatum O’Neal – but she left a DEEP mark.


Days of Heaven (1978)

I still had more to say about tomboys, so I listed all of my inspirations for this, the performances and movies that made such an enormous impact on me, as well as the research for context.


Days of Heaven (1978)

One more thing: Days of Heaven. She’s not just an actress in the film. She is the storyteller, and she does one of THE great voiceover narrations of all-time. It’s not like any other voiceover (that I’m aware of) in existence. Terrence Malick asked her to watch the movie and just riff, improvise, make shit up. And that’s what he did. Days of Heaven is incomprehensible without her narration. I wrote a piece about Days of Heaven when it screened at Ebertfest.


Days of Heaven (1978)

Here’s the opening sequence of Days of Heaven, with the start of her voiceover. Keep in mind: she, the child, was standing in a recording booth, watching the movie unfold before her, and just making it up off the cuff.

How Linda Manz came onto my radar (since I wasn’t watching Days of Heaven when I was 10 years old) – was her appearance in a television movie called Orphan Train. That movie had everything I wanted and loved as a child. Children without parents (I loved my parents, but I LOVED orphan stories), raggedy late 1800s/early 1900s clothing, there’s also a girl who dresses as a boy (to disguise herself for safety reasons, she’s a street urchin). I “dressed as a boy”, too, and so I loved cross-dressing stories (one of the reasons Shakespeare’s comedies “resonated” with me so hard). There’s a fledgling romance between Manz and a thief named “Liverpool”, as well as a gripping story of orphans being saved from destitution (based on a true story). Oliver Twist on a train. I was obsessed (I wrote a novelization of it) and Manz was a huge part of it.


Orphan Train (1979)

And here’s the piece I wrote when she died.

I loved her so much. Great child actress, one of the very best.

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“I knew [I was a director] from the beginning. It was just a matter of proving it.” — Martha Coolidge

Posted on August 17, 2026 by sheila

It’s the birthday of director Martha Coolidge. I have always loved her work – cherished it, really – and finally got to pay tribute to her in my Film Comment column. And it’s funny how things work out. Mitchell and I saw Rambling Rose together, when it first came out. I vividly remember our discussion afterwards. And we talked about one moment Robert Duvall has, one absolutely astonishing moment – which I consider to be the best work he’s ever done (and considering his career, that’s saying something). Cut to – DECADES later: Martha Coolidge is at Ebertfest, for the screening of Rambling Rose, Mitchell is there with me as my guest, and I got to ask her at the QA ABOUT that very scene Mitchell and I had discussed so many years before! AND the answer she gave was … so perfect I almost couldn’t believe it was happening. Mitchell was sitting there next to me! It’s like our younger teenage selves could never have guessed that so many years later we would be able to ask the director personally about how she handled that amazing scene and how Duvall did what he did. Anyway, it’s a great QA overall, and a really special moment in my memory.

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“It’s important not to indicate. People don’t try to show their feelings, they try to hide them.” — Robert De Niro

Posted on August 17, 2026 by sheila

I haven’t written about the majority of his roles – not for lack of admiration (and in some cases, awestruck wonder) – but here is what I have written:

I included his “you talkin’ to me” scene in my gigantic piece for Oscilloscope on scenes where men look at themselves in the mirror. I mean, it’s really the Grand Master of them all.

When Taxi Driver was restored for its 35th anniversary, I went to see it at the press screening – the colors of that film are overwhelming – and then wrote about it on my site.

Additionally, when I interviewed Dan Callahan about his excellent books, The Art of American Screen Acting, volumes 1 and 2, we discussed De Niro at length. I think Callahan’s chapter on De Niro in Volume 2 is one of the best things written about the actor – who is a difficult subject.

The recent thrill of my life was writing and narrating a video-essay to be included on Criterion’s 4k release of Raging Bull.

My video-essay is in the special features of the DVD/Blu release, and for Criterion subscribers it’s streaming on the website. I did a deep DEEP dive into Robert De Niro’s work, much of it was a re-tread, since we (my group of friends and I) were obsessed with him as college-age acting students. We weren’t fans. We STUDIED him. So I watched it all. I read all the Scorsese books. There aren’t too many interviews with De Niro and he’s not particularly articulate about his process. The greats rarely are. But it was a glorious experience, and even after I handed in my draft of the video-essay, I kept going on chronologically, moving past Raging Bull and on into the 80s and 90s. I’m back on the Elvis train now, so I had to take a step back with the De Niro project, but I do want to shout out Stone, a 2010 movie I missed when it first came out. Missing it was a major error, because this performance should be counted as one of his greatest. See it.

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“What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?” — James Cameron

Posted on August 16, 2026 by sheila

It’s James Cameron’s birthday today, and I haven’t written all that much about him, but I did devote an entire column at Film Comment to the sexual/romantic tension between Ripley and Hicks in Aliens – and how crucial it is to the film’s emotional resonance – it’s so much a part of it – it’s SUCH a satisfying relationship.

Present Tense: Almost Like Falling in Love

I had fun writing about it and I had fun including a favorite Liz Phair lyric, which I thought summed it up perfectly.

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The last photo and the Stutz

Posted on August 16, 2026 by sheila

Celebrating Elvis Week is not my thing, although of course I always mark it here, because what the hell else would I do with my time. Other anniversaries matter more to me. But I figured I’d share here the last photo taken of Elvis, pulling in through the gates at Graceland in his most bad-ass car, the most bad-ass of the bunch. The 1973 Stutz Blackhawk.

It makes my heart ache a little bit. He was just a man, just a human. His life was unreal but he was just a GUY.

The 1973 Stutz is the car I am most drawn to when I go “visit” them.

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“I had never seen anything like him . . . I vowed nothing would stop me from signing this boy for films.” – producer Hal Wallis on Elvis Presley

Posted on August 16, 2026 by sheila

Published during Elvis Week in 2017, here’s my piece for Film Comment on Elvis as an actor.

And here’s the talk I gave at The Memphian in Memphis, on Elvis’ acting career.

And finally: the piece I just wrote for Criterion on “Elvis’s Adventures in Hollywood“.

And of course here: I wrote about Elvis non-stop for about three years and continue to do so.

Posted in Actors, Music, On This Day | Tagged | 3 Comments