Author: Jon Ureña

Spanish writer, author of My Own Desert Places and We're Fucked. I have also written plenty of short stories and poetry, as well as two books in Spanish called Los reinos de brea and Los dominios del emperador búho.

Review: Carrie

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I was born in 1985. Growing up, I didn’t watch movies from before the eighties. I had no control over what I could watch on TV, as I lived in my older brother’s bedroom. After I hit my twenties, I only watched a handful of movies from the seventies and earlier. The big ones, mainly: Jaws, Chinatown, Taxi Driver. I was aware of Carrie from popular culture. I knew that its protagonist was a shy girl who got bullied in school, lived with her religious nutcase of a mother, got deceived into going to the prom, had pig’s blood dumped onto her head, then proceeded to slaughter everyone inside. I didn’t know who Sissy Spacek was. The times I heard her name, I wondered who would have been so thoughtless as to call her child “Sissy.”

Recently I realized that I somehow managed to miss all of Sissy Spacek’s work from after I was born. Literally the only thing I briefly caught her in was Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod. She played Samberg’s mom. I didn’t even remember her from that movie, and by then, she was already old; sorry to say, I’m not attracted to old people. Hell, I’m not even attracted to most women my age. Also, I turned off the movie not even halfway through because I found it too goofy, and I was only watching it because Andy Samberg somehow managed to marry Joanna Newsom, with whom I was obsessed at the time.

Recently, as a forty-one-year-old man, I had the misfortune to come across Terrence Malick’s haunting Badlands, experienced Sissy Spacek properly for the first time, and I was struck in a way I couldn’t deny. Where had this girl been all my life?

Now I’ve watched Sissy’s Badlands, 3 Women, the godawful Welcome to L. A., Prime Cut, Ginger in the Morning, and two episodes of The Waltons she starred in. I was running out of her big roles from the 70s.

I didn’t want to watch Carrie. I hate horror movies, I don’t like Stephen King, and I didn’t want to see Sissy Spacek get abused. But tonight I put my big-boy pants on and started watching it. Sissy’s Carrie gets harassed by seemingly her entire class of girls for being bad at volleyball. In a strangely-erotic scene, we witness Sissy caressing her breasts as well as the rest of her beautiful, pale, freckled body in the shower, before she experiences menstruation for the first time. When Carrie, who had no clue what was happening to her because her mother is a sickening nutcase, begged her classmates to help her, they mocked her relentlessly and threw tampons and pads at her as Sissy curled into herself in a corner of the showers. Then a teacher came and slapped Carrie. Then she got called into the director’s office, who proceeded to call her Cassie four times.

By then I was done. I didn’t want to keep watching. People are terrible, I have had to deal with and witnessed terrible behavior at school, but I had a hard time believing that Carrie had happened to land in a class where virtually all the girls were sociopaths. I didn’t buy that the school director, principal or whatever that careless fuck was would get her name wrong four times after getting corrected. This was just piling on for some purpose that didn’t sit well with me.

It already hurt to see Sissy Spacek behave like a scared wild animal who can only expect to be mistreated. But I continued watching nonetheless. Thankfully, the rest of the movie is more nuanced than that. There’s cinematography and imagery to praise, particularly a sequence involving a circling camera during the prom dance. There’s a surprise along the way that I don’t want to spoil regarding the circumstances around Carrie getting invited to the prom. But in the end, I got mostly what I already expected to encounter: a shy, traumatized girl gets bullied, eventually invited to the prom, ends up on stage as the prom queen, and gets pig’s blood dumped onto her, which convinces her that every human being in sight deserves to die. I can’t exactly blame her for breaking.

The prom scene is extremely memorable, but simultaneously way sillier than I expected. Some general spoilers from now on. I got the sense that the filmmakers, when trying to put it together, ended up thinking, “She’s telekinetic, yes, but how on Earth would she use telekinesis to murder all these people?” So we have some silly moments with Carrie controlling a hose and spraying people. Electricity gets involved, someone dies who didn’t deserve it, and eventually the whole place seems to burn.

Looking back, I doubt that Carrie tried to kill people in the beginning. She went directly for the hose and went around spraying whoever was available. She could have launched any objects in sight as projectiles, but didn’t. Then, some people got electrocuted, and she pivoted to murder as if thinking, “Oh well, I’ve already caused some people’s deaths. May as well go all the way.”

Also, a couple of bastards get their car and themselves blown up after they attempted a little hit-and-run on the bloodied prom queen. Good riddance to those pig fuckers.

Before I watched the movie, I didn’t know what happened to Carrie after she returned home, and now I wish I still didn’t know.

What maybe hurt the most regarding Carrie is that, leading to the prom, she had started to assert and believe in herself. She put her abusive mother in her place, she made a beautiful dress for herself, and hoped that for once in her tragic life, she could spend a single evening in public without being abused.

Sissy did an extraordinary job playing Carrie. She inhabited all the fear, pain, hope, gratitude, murderous revenge. I understand how everyone for decades remembered her as “the girl from Carrie,” although this is a role completely unlike her as a person, as far as I can tell from interviews and her autobiography. And of course, Sissy was hauntingly beautiful on this movie. Also, her mother didn’t name her “Sissy.” That comes from the nickname her brothers used for her as their sister.

Travolta was also in the movie, playing a dumb motherfucker. Didn’t like him one bit, but I guess Travolta played him just fine.

I don’t have the kind of temperament that would allow me to like this movie even if I wasn’t obsessed with Sissy Spacek to begin with; seeing her being bullied and abused isn’t something I would do for fun. People liking this movie seems to me more like bonding over shared trauma. I can admire what the film accomplishes. Enjoying the experience of watching it is another matter.

Carrie White is a Medusa of modern times. She deserved better.

New song “A Man of Trash” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 4

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Figuring out the fitting genre for this song was the hardest to nail down of every song on this album. I tried alt-country, art punk, alternative metal, dub-weighted boom bap, milonga, sophisti-pop, rembetiko, and cantautori. Only when I tried the obscure tishoumaren the result felt right, and I had to discard some of my original assumptions about what emotions the song should render. I’m quite happy with the final result.

New song “Knife-Beard Dreams (psychedelia version)” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 4

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This is the second song of the fourth album, after the wild opener “A Tribute a True a Work of a Art.”

Both “Knife-Beard Dreams” songs were produced about two years ago, during the tail end of the Udio era, and it shows, sadly: the musical composition is way more elaborate than what Suno produces natively or what you can coax out of it as far as I can tell. Whether that makes for better songs in general, I’m not entirely sure, but my OCD nature misses that old workflow.

Review: episode “The Odyssey” from The Waltons

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I’ve now watched the second and likely last episode of the Waltons I’ll watch in this demented life of mine. Not because the show was bad; I found it compelling for what it was trying to do. But I have no other reason to watch it other than because a precious angel haunted two of its episodes: 70s Sissy Spacek.

You can download the episodes freely from the Internet Archive.

Sissy plays a sheltered girl who couldn’t wait to get out of her strict, religious nutcase of a mother’s clutches. In the previous Spacek appearance (“The Townie,” from the first season), she swore she would marry our wannabe-writer protagonist John-boy if only he asked, and days later she was already falling for a John Dillinger-wannabe. She convinced him to run away with her and get married, only for her to change her mind the moment that arrogant kid crashed his car. The girl is trouble, reckless not in a fun way; despite my obvious allegiance to Sissy, that John-boy is just too good-hearted of a kid to have to deal with that shit.

Anyway, the episode starts with John-boy being unable to write because his family home is full of crotch spawns who actively hinder the protagonist’s creative impulses. He decides to head off for a couple of days to a cabin somewhere uphill. We see him travel for a while decidedly not uphill. The plot made a big deal about a storm coming, and the production had to blow some leaves in John-boy’s face while he pretended to hear thunder, even though the sky was California blue. I’m surprised that the fans themselves didn’t appear in the shot. I’m not insulting the show, though; I’m sure they did the best they could with early-seventies resources. They could have paraded Sissy around until some financier fell in love with her and threw hundreds of thousands at them, like it happened for Ginger in the Morning.

John-boy reaches that isolated cabin only to find out that someone is hiding there: Sissy. He soon learns she’s run away not only from her mother but from her current legal guardians, who, according to her, were exploiting her. We never really find out if Sissy’s character exaggerated it. Given that her main preoccupation is marrying someone who could save her from a life of servitude, this girl and her romance-addled brain likely just hurried to get themselves acquainted with the first bad boy they could find.

Then, the episode reveals a twist that actually shocked me for a show as wholesome as this. I guess I had mistaken wholesome for sanitized. The second half of the episode deals with increasing complications that force Sissy to act out troublesome emotions and exertions. It would benefit this post if I could be more specific about it, but all I would want to mention are spoilers about the second half of the episode, and I don’t want to ruin the experience of discovering something new for anyone who may be reading these words.

I think Sissy did a fine job with the material that fell on her pale, freckled shoulders. One of the saddest points of that ordeal was Sissy’s character clearly realizing that John-boy would have made a fine husband. Just not for the kind of ambitious girl she was then.

The ending also left me unexpectedly sad. Partly because this was one fewer glimpse of seventies Sissy that I have left to discover, but also because I would never find out what else happened to that reckless girl who had gotten herself in such a mess of a life. We are told that she and John-Boy remained friends into adulthood, but we never get to see the life she made for herself. In the same way Sissy’s haunting loveliness inhabited this show for a short time, we only got to witness a small part of a fictional life likely full of hardship, poverty, and terrible decisions.

Review: episode “The Townie” from The Waltons

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Now, why would I watch a random 1972 episode from a long-dead TV show? Why, because Sissy Spacek starred in it. It seems I’m in my “dig up episodes of a long-dead TV show to see more of her at that age” part of my obsession.

The episode is freely downloadable from the Internet Archive.

Sissy’s haunting loveliness inhabits a sheltered girl living alone with her religious nutcase of a mother, who has been raising Sissy’s character alone after her husband died. The episode starts with Sissy dating a certain John-boy, whom I assume is one of the main characters of The Waltons. A guy named John who’s a wannabe writer, because fuck me sideways.

Sissy is sick of being subjected to her mother’s impositions and restrictions. She wants to get married and leave as soon as possible. She even tells John-boy that she’d marry him in a heartbeat if only he asked. But John is a sensitive, sensible young man who only hears foolishness in such reckless behavior. Sissy is more in love with the notion of a passionate life waiting for her somewhere away from home than with our John-boy, so she starts dating this John Dillinger wannabe with a fancy period car. Initially she seems like she’s just trying to make John-boy jealous, see if he’d grow a pair. When he even gives her his blessing for dating that other guy, she clearly resents John’s pussyness. Will she choose that arrogant new man as her ticket out of their small town?

I appreciated Sissy’s acting here. She showed the raw hurt of her character in a scene in which she refused to grow up to become like her mother. In another scene, I noticed that she had a smiling fit in a moment when she definitely shouldn’t have been smiling. In any case, seeing her on screen is plain haunting.

I was struck as well by how this TV show earnestly tried to tell a human story. The Waltons came out seemingly before TV shows, and movies for that matter, became vehicles for subversion in order to further the goals of some groups. Better times, like most everything I experience from the 70s.

Sissy only stars in another other episode of The Waltons, in the second season, so I’m likely watching that next.

Covers of “Tricera Girl” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 1

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A couple of weeks ago or so, I uploaded a YouTube video that contained four covers of this song, from the middle-school period of William Griffin’s life. He’s the protagonist of the Odes to My Triceratops song cycle. But I found issues with the audio quality, caused by a faulty pipeline. Although that’s now fixed, I’ve needed to fix the songs involved, and I also created two more for good measure, so the new video has six covers.

“Tricera Girl” is one of my favorite songs of the first album. It embodies very well the wonder and desire of an early teenager who realizes he’s found the love of his life and doesn’t quite know how to handle it.

Life update (09/19/2026)

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I’m reluctant to write this post, because I don’t know what acknowledging the stuff I’ve been feeling recently is going to do to me. I’ve always relied on what my subconscious brings up, or what it becomes attached to. It’s the sole true way I have of knowing what truly matters to me beyond the lawyer-like justifications of my conscious mind, to which I pay very little attention. And what should have become obvious to anyone following my last couple of weeks of posts is that I’ve become obsessed with a living person as she was in the 70s.

Obsessing over a living human being is not new to me, but it’s by far my most dangerous tendency; not because I may become a danger to others, but because it risks unraveling me completely. My biggest one was Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012. She became to me the height of beauty in terms of what artistry could achieve. When I thought of what range and depth of emotions I would need my own works to produce and whether they were even possible to render, I only had to experience Joanna’s music (mainly her albums Ys and Have One on Me). Her genuine sincerity of feeling, her devotion to her subconscious, her meticulous attention to detail to capture every little nuance of her feelings, her uncompromising individuality. It was mesmerizing to me. And although I was obviously attracted to her physically (very much so), she remained this remote, intellectual being that I couldn’t imagine myself having a conversation with without feeling like a troglodyte. She was far sillier and playful than that as far as I could tell, but it didn’t change the fact that for me she was like remote royalty.

With 70s Sissy Spacek, it’s different. She feels nearer to the possibility of companionship, not only to the beauty an artist can create. When I experience her, I feel a raw longing that tells me inequivocally “If I could love someone like that, I would be happy.” That causes in me something akin to terror. I have never loved anyone beyond that subconscious female presence I communed with in my childhood until neglect and trauma ruined my development, whom I have rendered in a myriad little ways in the stories I needed to write. I became attracted to girls in my teen years, but I didn’t feel love toward them. It was mostly biological urges. There was one girl I truly, truly liked, although I didn’t allow myself to know her enough to figure out if it could blossom into love.

I dated one young woman from 18 to 21 or so, but I never loved her. By then, I had this idea in my head that love was work, a conscious matter. You loved by being there for them, by performing love, by making it work. But she wasn’t pretty enough to the extent that I could call her beautiful and feel it. She wasn’t fascinating in a way that I would yearn to run to her side just to talk to her. She really wasn’t compelling enough just to be around. She was just a girlfriend. That experience of meeting someone in person and being utterly struck by how much I need to be with her for the rest of my life has never happened to me, and I don’t expect that it will. I’m not remotely lucky like that (in fact, my track record is having some of the worst luck imaginable).

After that relationship, with ended up in a sour, bitter note (to put it mildly), in twenty years I haven’t felt any need to be involved with another human being in an intimate way. I had three online “relationships” that were significant to me, but they were only relationships in the sense of accepting emotional exchanges, being there for the other to some extent, etc. And eventually they all fizzled out. I haven’t talked to anyone outside of work since 2023 or so. During this year of unemployment, I haven’t talked to anyone at all other than shopkeepers and my mother.

Suddenly, I had the terrible luck of coming across Terrence Malick’s Badlands and setting my gaze on Sissy Spacek. At first, of course, I thought, “My god, she’s utterly gorgeous.” But the more I’ve come to see and learn of her, it has opened something terrible in me: the certainty that I yearn to have someone like that by my side, along with the knowledge that I will die without ever experiencing it. I’m high-functioning autistic and I can barely tolerate being in the same room as someone for five minutes without wanting to crawl out of my skin. And yet, I feel that if I knew in my personal life someone with the essence of that young woman from the 70s, my main concern would be figuring out how to be with her for the rest of my life.

Before this, being without a partner did not feel like being deprived of something I deeply wanted. Now I’m dangerously approaching that point. This damn actress as she was in the 70s has made something else imaginable: not only an experience I can visit through art or daydreaming, but a relationship I wish my actual life contained. Someone I would want to be beside, listen to, touch, and come home to. Not because having a romantic partner is what you’re supposed to want, but because I would genuinely want her company. This must be basic to normal human beings, yet alien to me.

I must be losing my mind. Maybe this is part of what happens to middle-aged autists with profiles such as mine. They suddenly become achingly aware emotionally of what they were lacking all this time, and they end up throwing themselves off a bridge because they can’t take it anymore.