Not news-peggy and that's okay

My column at Liberties: some thoughts on "voice"/style/sensibility and what I am at least trying to do

Kate Mulvany as Marion Keisker, Elvis (2022; d. Baz Luhrmann)

My new column at Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics has really filled a void left in me from the shuttering of Film Comment and my biweekly column there. In “Present Tense”, I was given pretty much free rein to follow my passions wherever they went. This is a rarity. Liberties is a quarterly journal, but they recently launched an online site, without a paywall, and managing editor Celeste Marcus reached out. She was looking for regular columnists. Celeste has been amazing, and open to my pitches. There’s no overall theme to the column or single subject matter. I’ve been writing things I’ve wanted to tackle for years, ideas rattling around in my head. Some of you may be aware of all of this, since you follow me elsewhere on social media- but I figured I’d provide some links here on the newsletter, to get the word out (not just about my stuff, but about Liberties in general). Their roster of writers is daunting and impressive, and I am proud to be a part of it.

My stuff has never really been what I call “news-peggy”. This has been an asset and a detriment (probably. I have no confirmation, just assuming). “Responding” to big news in real time, or weighing in on the hot topic of the day, has never been my thing as a writer. It’s totally fine if it is other people’s “thing”, and there is clearly a huge market for it. I’ve usually spent my time writing about long-dead actors, old movies, old theatrical productions (which I haven’t seen, since they premiered on Broadway 70 years before my birth, etc.), and all of the things I’ve basically been passionate about since I was a yearning tween discovering this whole WORLD of culture/theatre/acting/creating existed before I was born. There is an audience for this kind of thing! Those of you who were around during the “blogosphere” heyday - 2004-2008 (pre-social media) will remember! People had entire blogs devoted to trains in cinema, or pre-Code film, or different studios of the 1930s era. Film noir sites. Screwball sites. Horror sites. You could just wander around this eccentric neighborhood, stopping by each “house” to see what everyone was talking about. Very very little of it was news-peggy. It was glorious. Social media eradicated that kind of thing, at least as a collective experience.

The places where NON-news-peggy pieces can find a home are dwindling fast. There’s a kind of piece I’ve always wanted to write - and attempt to write - sort of a mixture of cultural commentary and personal writing, tilted more towards the commentary part of it, but where you can feel the writer - as an individual human - behind it. Kate Zambreno writes like this. Joan Didion wrote in this way. Olivia Laing is a great example. If you read John Waters’ essays, he writes like this: You can feel his vast knowledge of basically every movie ever made, every book ever written, and every outfit ever worn by anyone who has ever been in the news in any capacity, and yet you feel him in all his eccentricity in every line. This is not reporting. Not exactly. It’s biased, in that you can feel the obsession nagging at the writer to be investigated: like Laing and urban loneliness, or Laing and alcohol/writing. Laing was interested in those things for very personal reasons, and she went after it like an investigative reporter/archaeologist, while still including herself in the narrative. This is extremely tricky and when it’s done poorly it’s awful. What makes the difference is voice. Not every writer has a “voice”. You know it when you see it.

I am not saying I succeed in doing all of these things, but it is, at least, my goal. When editor-in-chief Nic Rapold asked me write a column for Film Comment, he explicitly wanted that from me, he liked my tendency to weave in all these different disparate elements into, say, a regular film review. Not everybody does. Whatever comes to mind. Like a Hank Williams lyric, or an aside about Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Nic liked that aspect of my writing (nobody had really called it out before). I read so much. I didn’t “go to school” for any of this stuff. I have zero academic background in cultural subjects (I think I took a poetry class in college, but other than that: no. No film studies courses either, zip, nada, zero. Everything I’ve read or seen I’ve done just because I wanted to read/see whatever it is, and I’ve got to put that info SOMEwhere. It’s a relief sometimes to include some random thing, if it fits. Like: “Oh God, I’ve been wanting to use this quote from Clifford Odets for 23 years.” Or “Ooh! John Keats’ negative capability thing might work as a reference point here?” or “Yay! I can FINALLY throw in a reference to Holly in Land of the Lost and her centrality to basically everything in my life.”

She is EXTREMELY important. CRUCIAL.

I’ve tried to do that here on my Substack in the pieces I’ve written, and it’s been wonderful, so far, to have the space to explore things in my own way at Liberties.

The pieces so far:

I launched the column with an essay called The Question, where I discussed my early years as an actor, my time at the Actors Studio, and then segueing years later to film criticism, and how those things inform each other, my history with both. It’s something I’ve spoken about at length, or referenced here and there in pieces across a number of years, but this was the first time I really put it all together.

My second essay was on Carole Lombard, someone I adore but whom I had never really devoted much time to in print! This one was so fun to research and it gave me an excuse to watch all of her films again (which I do on the regular, anyway).

This was so much fun: I interviewed playwright/writer/horror fan (and old pal dating back decades) Sean Abley about his new book (just published) Queer Horror: A Film Guide.

I was almost afraid to write this one, since it was so personal, and because it had been percolating in my head for 15 years? Longer? It’s about John Cassavetes’ Opening Night and Tennessee Williams’ Two-Character Play - and how they are almost the same work of art, in my head and in my associations with them. I wrote this essay just a couple of weeks before Gena Rowlands died. I’m so glad I finally got to it.

This one just went up and it’s another piece I’d been wanting to write for about 10 years: Marion Keisker Loved Elvis First. I believe Marion Keisker was the first person to record Elvis Presley, not Sam Phillips. The image at the top of this post is Kate Mulvany, who played Marion Keisker in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Luhrmann’s presentation gets at what I believe Marion’s role actually was, and her importance to the narrative.

I just returned from Scotland and promptly got bronchitis. Scotland, I love you, and I wish I could have stayed longer. I walked out of my hotel at 8 o’clock one foggy morning, looked to the left and saw …

I stood there on the wet sidewalk and just stared. In the fog, the buildings and atmosphere are so gloomy and romantic and ghostly. Rich and beautiful. I want to go back!

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