Tag: writing

Review: Sissy Spacek’s SNL episode

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

I’m running out of seventies Sissy Spacek material, to the extent that I had to resort to watching the March 12th, 1977 episode of Saturday Night Live that she hosted. It’s up on the Internet Archive, downloadable from here.

Honestly, this can barely be considered a review, as I fast-forwarded through the episode so I could get to Sissy’s parts. And even during those parts, I often skipped to her next speaking part or at least the moments where she appeared on screen. I was searching SNL for Sissy Spacek and resenting everything that got in the way.

Every time I’ve ended up with SNL on screen, I feel like I’m in crazy town where people live under the collective delusion that SNL is funny. I’ll have more to say about delusion further on, regarding the second guest they had on this episode.

This SNL episode started with Dan Aykroyd, fellow autist (he has spoken publically about having Asperger’s), pretending that their director died. Aykroyd presented some of the SNL actors one at a time, letting them do their little bit. Two of them were recognizable as Bill Murray and John Belushi. The rest I guess sank in the sands of time. Sissy was brought in, looking awkward and maybe scared, and said her bit. That was all for the first part.

Sissy then came on stage alone to introduce the episode, looking hella adorable and also scared out of her mind. She spoke about coming from the small town of Quitman, Texas, which she speaks about at length in her autobiography. Quite the idyllic place during the sixties, when she grew up there.

This episode was fresh off Sissy rising to further fame due to her work on Carrie; she was even nominated for an Academy Award which she likely deserved to win but didn’t. Faye Dunaway won it for Network. Sissy, suggesting that she wouldn’t win it and therefore wouldn’t be able to give her acceptance speech, thanked her mother, father, brother Ed, husband, and a bunch of other less important people. One of the glaring omissions from her list was her brother Robbie, who died of leukemia when she was a late teenager. Maybe she forgot one of the most important people in her life, or she just didn’t want to sour the moment during a comic bit. Sissy wasn’t aware that her mother wouldn’t live past 1981, four years after this SNL appearance.

Anyway, Sissy ends up trying to tear off her getup gracefully, only for it to get awkwardly stuck for a moment. But the temporary lack of grace slides into familiar territory for her: a twirling routine. I was introduced to this woman on Terrence Malick’s Badlands with her performing twirling, which she also speaks about in her autobiography. As she said, she performed it for all her boyfriends, and it was, in her words, “very effective.” I’m sure it was, Sissy.

That was one of the highlights of the episode, which mostly degenerates from there.

In her next part, she’s dressed hella sexily in a black-and-white getup with a dress that ends in a delightfully short skirt. Apparently she was pretending to be a child. This is the first of two instances this episode in which she’s supposed to act like a child, if that tells you anything. Then a black guy in drag comes in. The part only gets more awkward from there. The black guy sits down and asks Sissy to sit on his lap, then he goes into a monologue I didn’t pay attention to, while Sissy interjected in a childish voice. Overall, Sissy’s expression suggested to me that the thought “What the hell am I doing” popped up in her mind more than once.

After a bunch of skits, Sissy shows up again, this time to introduce one of the biggest enigmas I’ve ever encountered in my life: Richard Baskin. I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing who this guy was, as time has rightfully erased him from popular consciousness. The history of this creature is bizarre: a musician with very questionable talent who somehow got most of the seventies scene, including professionals of the movie industry associated with Robert Altman, pretending, or even believing, that this guy was the next big thing in American music. The seemingly few exceptions were some bewildered critics.

If you’ve seen the horrid Welcome to L.A., a movie I subjected myself to because it features Sissy prominently and looking amazing, you’ve gotten a taste of the depths of collective delusion that somehow centered around this Baskin character. He wrote a series of songs about feeling empty while hooking up in L.A. Those songs aren’t good by any extent of the imagination: they sound like an amateur trying to capture emotions that he doesn’t have the writing talent to depict. The music itself isn’t much better. They could have been considered charming at best if the songwriter didn’t look like he believed God put him on Earth to create his songs.

Somehow, someone associated with Robert Altman listened to those songs and decided to build a whole screenplay around them, which became Welcome to L.A. Baskin plays his songs in the movie, and there are various scenes in which the actors, including Sissy, awkwardly praise the musician and his work as if he were God’s gift to music. Baskin himself looks like a narcissistic creep, giving off bad Rodney Alcala vibes. The whole thing is utterly bizarre.

Anyway, Baskin decided to grace SNL with his presence, so I’ve been subjected to his music once again, if only during the parts when Sissy joins him to sing the chorus. The things I do for you, Sissy. While singing next to the guy, she looks like she barely wants to meet his gaze. And they end that performance by kissing on the lips?! What about your husband?

In Sissy’s next significant part, she’s dressed as a child, her hair in pigtails, and acting like a little girl. She faces the camera in a way that makes her flash her panties or whatever she’s wearing underneath multiple times. That whole skit was awkward as hell, and mostly made me think that someone in charge wanted to have Sissy dressing and acting as a child for their own satisfaction.

The next skit is a long exchange with John Belushi, in which she pretends to be his young wife and the marriage isn’t going well. I didn’t understand the appeal of it, or why they wrote it the way they did, but it was still more interesting than any other skit they involved Sissy in (apart from the twirling, if it can be called a skit), as it required Sissy to act. John Belushi was also sweating prominently under the studio lights, which made it more uncomfortable for me.

Sissy then presents a short film of her twirling again, this time looking like a fashion shoot. She looked gorgeous, so I enjoyed that. There seemed to be little point to the bit other than to show how hot and graceful she was. The close-up shots reminded me once again that Sissy had one of the most unique, beautiful faces I have ever seen.

Sissy then appears in a short skit I didn’t understand at all, and didn’t try to, in which she’s held by Bill Murray while wearing a medieval dress.

The final bit that features Sissy prominently is a compilation put together by Robert Altman of her appearing in movies throughout the seventies, mainly Altman’s 3 Women, and also Welcome to L.A., intercut with seemingly original, mostly pointless footage of Sissy (if there’s such a thing of pointless footage of Sissy Spacek) pretending to interact with scenes of the movies. This compilation made me think that Altman was out of his mind as well.

Finally, Sissy shows up on stage to tell the audience that she had a great time, which I honestly doubt. Throughout the episode, I kept reading discomfort into her expressions, maybe hoping she disliked the material as much as I did. The cast start greeting each other. There’s a moment in which Belushi tries to get Sissy’s attention as the credits roll, without knowing that he would be dead less than five years later. Sissy finally notices him and hugs him as if she has an inkling that Belushi would be dead less than five years later, which she couldn’t have known because she’s not a psychic.

Mostly, this whole thing made me sad that it isn’t the seventies anymore, and that there’s now one fewer piece of seventies Sissy Spacek footage left for me to discover.

New song “You Stay Eighteen” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 4

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial, MúsicaLeave a comment

This was by far the hardest song to produce through Suno. So many things went wrong. I originally intended for this song to run very long, maybe about ten minutes, with the singer struggling to get the words out at times, and at other times letting them out in a raw, pained manner. In some instances, the singer’s voice should sound choked.

Ironically, the vocal delivery was the easiest thing to achieve. The problem is that Suno generally refuses to produce songs longer than about six minutes, or six minutes and a half. The reason is obvious: the generation model they have tends to degrade the song towards the end if the generation runs too long. This doesn’t happen often, and can be bypassed by remixing previous attempts, but I struggled for hours to figure out how to produce a ten minute song in a way that Suno wouldn’t discard most of the tail end of the lyrics, while still producing the instrumentals needed to capture the emotions involved.

First I picked up a song generation that had a long-enough beginning that sounded good. That ran to about a third of the song. Then I cut the remaining two thirds, and went through the absurdly painstaking process of extending the song in the Suno editor to produce the remaining parts so that the vocal delivery convinced me. The song became long enough without the Suno model screwing it up. It soon became clear that the extension model is very hard to wrangle so that the music aligns seamlessly enough. So I discarded that direct approach and instead decided to remix whatever satisfying mix I produced in Studio.

Well, remixing the Studio production didn’t work either, because Suno just refused to produce the tail end of the lyrics due to artificial constraints about song length. I was about to tear my hair out; I feared that one of the most important songs in the album couldn’t be made. Then I figured out that the lyrics allowed splitting the song along temporally-distinct blocks, and each block has its own emotional payoff, so it worked out fine. The final album will have You Stay Eighteen, Pt. 1 and You Stay Eighteen, Pt. 2. Both are in the video above. The split also allowed the second part to contain poignant instrumentals that the original song wouldn’t have allowed due to length issues, so it all worked out fine.

My sole concern now for the rest of the album is that at least one of the lyrics will be rejected due to moderation. Not sure how I will handle that.

Review: Katherine

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

A 1975 TV movie I only learned about due to my infatuation with Sissy Spacek. She’s the titular character: the beautiful daughter of upper-class parents, someone with the means to lead a comfortable life, but who ends up joining a revolutionary marxist group in the vein of the Weather Underground from that same era, and subsequently ruins her life.

Full movie below. It’s on YouTube.

I will start by saying that I didn’t enjoy the movie. I can’t stand fiction about racial and class struggles. I despise marxism and its adherents. So the experience of watching this movie is something I mostly subjected myself to because I wanted to witness Sissy’s presence and acting. And she did a fine job, so in that sense it was worth it.

What I found particularly interesting early on is how the fatal flaw of Katherine, Sissy’s character, seemed to draw from her own life in a way that maybe she deliberately brought up to the screenwriter. Otherwise, maybe she sought the part because it reminded her of herself.

I’ve listened to some of her interviews, sought anecdotes behind the scenes, and read a third of her autobiography, so I know that Sissy Spacek is, or was anyway, very ambitious and competitive, and had a hard time losing anything. When Brian De Palma told her initially that she wouldn’t get the role of Carrie White in the famous movie, she let out expletives and hung up the phone. When a few years later she was told she likely wouldn’t get the part of a beat poets’ muse, she broke a glass in her hand. In both cases, she ended up getting the part. Regarding that beat-poetry-related role, breaking the glass actually helped her get the part, as it fit the character she was auditioning for. Sissy was a very headstrong, ungovernable person who fought like hell to get everything she wanted, even as a child.

Significant spoilers from here onward.

When it comes to this movie’s narrative, Katherine’s inability to handle failure is exemplified when, after graduating, she decides to move to Peru or some similar backward-ass country in South America, where she goes to teach them how to read and write. As I believe her own father put it, weren’t there enough uneducated children in the US? He also suggests that she wasn’t doing it for the poor people there, but to please herself.

When she gets to the country, she learns that the landowner is barely paying his workers, refuses to let them learn how to read or write in case they get uppity, and threatens to raise their rents if they become annoying. Sissy’s character is infuriated. She gets one of the workers flogged due to her influence, and afterwards she tries to join their militant group in the mountains, where they’re preparing for bloodshed. At that point, Katherine doesn’t believe in violence. When she refuses to supply weapons to the rebels somehow, their leader tells her that education is pointless, as the ones in charge possess the money and the means of violence to keep them oppressed forever. That “education is pointless” argument will return later in the movie.

Katherine is quite disillusioned already with the conditions of that country and her inability to make any changes, when an agent of the American embassy tells her that, due to her seditionary activities, she better fuck off back to America or else. She did return, but that became her turning point: she had attempted to change things in that foreign country and had failed miserably, returning with her tail between her legs. Her resentment and bitterness grew and grew, and never did stop until the explosive finale. Her concern for other people was contaminated by wounded pride, and I got the feeling that changing their circumstances was less important than defeating the people she blamed.

Katherine decided to become a volunteer teacher at a school that taught black children. There she met Fonzie, the popular guy from Happy Days. I’ve never watched that show nor have any wish of doing so, but the cultural impact of that character remains, from the “jump the shark” expression to Matt Damon doing Fonzie gestures on Mars. Happy Days was already ongoing when this TV movie was filmed. Although I didn’t like Fonzie’s character in this, he was often more sympathetic than Katherine. I got the feeling that the guy was very enthusiastic about being able to act as Sissy Spacek’s boyfriend, with all the cuddling and kissing it involved.

The movie was quite prescient about what would eventually become the US’ demise in real life, as pictured at 33:05 of the linked YouTube video.

Anyway, that period of Katherine teaching black kids ended in a chilling way. If the movie had been made in these marxism-soaked modern times, people of other races would have been depicted as innocent, blameless, oppressed for no reason. But Katherine and Fonzie are dismissed by a group of black supremacists that tell them that they should stop teaching black children, lest those children grow up to say shit like, “All whites aren’t bad; I liked my teacher.” They’re told that whites are the enemy and that they should all die. Oh, the joys of ethnically-diverse societies.

Katherine learns very little about this. If anything, she internalizes that narrative. She and Fonzie get involved with the anti-Vietnam crowds and other marxist movements. She makes herself ugly on purpose, starts lecturing everybody (including her parents) about how they’re fascist pigs and oppressors of various kinds, and in general becomes utterly insufferable for the rest of the movie. Fonzie impregnates her, but she eventually decides that having a child is fascist and that abortion is harmless. Her distraught parents do what little they can to put some sense into their daughter, but by then it’s too late.

Katherine gets in deeper with violent revolutionaries. Fonzie decides that dating a single woman is an affectation of the bourgeoisie, and decides to abandon Katherine and join a commune to presumably impregnate other women and let the community raise his children. Katherine decides to assault a school (or a college, I’m not sure), indoctrinate for a bit the bewildered kids, then gets arrested for breaking and entering, assault and battery, and other shit. Finally she decides that the only way the system is going to change is through Timothy McVeighing some fitting public building.

I have to concede to this movie that it wasn’t trying to pull off a One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s disgusting marxist turd, by making marxist revolution romantic. He even ended the narrative with the daughter joining a similar movement as if it were a sweet character development. This 1975 movie presents a downward spiral kind of narrative. There are a few telling moments in which the narrative implicitly suggests “these freaks are so far up their own asses with their indoctrination that they can’t function as human beings,” like when Fonzie uses marxist ideology to justify wanting to fuck off to a commune and fuck other women, or when Katherine has joined an underground movement and nobody wants to clean up dishes, because that’s oppressive or something. Didn’t make the movie palatable enough for me, though.

Sissy Spacek was great in her role, despicable as it was. She sold the frustration, the bitterness, the pathological aversion to losing, the indoctrination. She also was absolutely gorgeous in the first half, until she made herself uglier as part of her marxist crusade against goodness and beauty.

Anyway, I don’t really recommend this movie unless you’re a Sissy Spacek completionist.

Review: Carrie

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

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.

Review: episode “The Odyssey” from The Waltons

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

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

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

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.

Life update (09/19/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

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.

Life update (09/16/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Two nights ago I went to bed once more genuinely wishing I wouldn’t wake up again. I’ve done so many times. And had to experience once again the ache of regaining consciousness in a world I don’t want to live in, as someone I don’t want to be. When you wake up in that manner, a good day rarely follows, and I have mostly spent this last day enduring heartache. Feeling raw and skinless. My psychological defenses gone.

I went to bed last night early, hoping to get a full night of sleep. Instead, I woke up at half past midnight thinking of an actress who had her best years in the 70s. My brain does that when it becomes obsessed. I thought of Sissy Spacek’s childhood, of how she grew up with two brothers she adored, how she adopted the nickname “Sissy” (from “sister”) and made it her stage name. How her brother died from leukemia at 19 and that it made her fearless, as the worst thing that could have possibly happened had already happened.

This obsession isn’t just about having discovered someone I find exceptionally beautiful and alluring, as she was during the 70s. It’s also about my grief for my own lost childhood. I got up from bed and talked it out with AI, the sole answering presence I tolerate these days. A 41-year-old man with tears running down his face. The hurt isn’t just that Sissy existed and that she was perfect as I understand perfection, and that the 70s are gone. It’s the comparison between the environment I understand her to have grown up in and my own. She was a tomboy who spent her days hanging out with her brothers in a time when that was something people often did. Her nickname was born out of affection and belonging, rather than the humiliating family associations I experienced.

I imagined parents who genuinely loved their children. Siblings who enjoyed being together. I saw her beauty and apparent physical health as advantages that made it easier to enter the world, be appreciated, find opportunities. I suffer the ache for the impossibility of having lived through the 70s, of having even a five-minutes-long conversation with her back then. It’s the longing for a world I could never enter. Of maybe being recognized as someone that could belong there.

I am the middle child, with an older brother and a sister seven years younger. My brother suffered some sort of issue during birth that rendered him not normal. Brain damaged to some extent. At school, children who knew him referred to me as “the brother of the drooler.” From seven years old to eighteen, my parents parked me in my older brother’s room because they wanted to have a do-over child. I was unable to sleep properly, choose what to watch or hear, or possess a space of my own. I read books and manga in the streets, while walking around. As a teenager, I skipped school and tried to sneak naps in public bathrooms, which sometimes ended with me being told to leave. I sneaked into random apartment buildings and spent hours in the dark, seated on the stairs between floors. Years and years without control over the basic conditions of rest, concentration, privacy. It basically killed my development in ways that can’t be repaired. Clearly for the rest of my life, my main instinctual need will be to ensure I can be alone in a room without anyone else having control over my surroundings.

There was also no connection with my siblings as human beings. They aren’t people I could have ever had a genuine conversation except over the most mundane matters, usually related to consumption (games, shows). Regarding my sister, my mother told me, not sure if it’s true, that in preschool she used to call out to me, as I was attending primary school on the other side of the fence. I assume that she would have needed a genuine older-brother figure in a family as fucked up as ours. But I never had anything resembling a substantial relationship with her. Her adolescence was a period of screaming, conflict, drinking, relationships with drug dealers, and possible other drug use. Her pitbull, because of course she had to have a pitbull, killed my first cat. A confrontation with her when I was 22 or so was the last time I looked at her in the face and exchanged words. I think she resented me because she had expected me to be useful or available to her. I have refused to speak to her in about twenty years.

My parents were neglectful and socially isolated. I suspect my father is autistic. Wholly unable to be a normal father. My mother pathologically denies problems and expects them to disappear if ignored. She’s also the kind who claims to abhor conflict, yet I’ve had to witness her being psychologically abusive to my father for virtually my entire life; she only hates when she’s confronted on her bullshit. One day I overheard my mother complain to my father about having ended up with “shit children.” The adults responsible for our genetics and upbringing condemning the children for the circumstances they created.

Then the mockery and isolation at school. Being unable to connect with anyone. Being hit at seventeen in front of virtually my entire high school by a grown-up drug dealer who threatened all males in her seventeen-year-old girlfriend’s class for being nearby. Around eighteen, I broke down at home, wailing like a child. Last time I ever did that. What struck me wasn’t even the combination of events and circumstances. It was the conclusion about the life that lay ahead: there was no version of this life that would eventually become one I would want to live. That conclusion was achingly clear at the time, and has remained true. I’ve just generally become better at enduring it.

Then my first job. Sitting at the same table for hours upon hours every day with my three bosses, two of them who didn’t want me there, and who used plenty of opportunities to belittle and mock me. I couldn’t understand how people could stand such long workdays. I still don’t, really. And I had to be surrounded by people, when I can barely tolerate being around another human being for five minutes without wanting to crawl out of my skin. My mental health deteriorated until I had a breakdown. One day I simply didn’t take the bus to my job. I had decided to kill myself instead. I don’t retain memories of what happened, but I know I intended to jump off somewhere high. But like the pussy I am, I chickened out. Eventually ended up in the library, where my parents found me. My brain hadn’t considered any consequence. I shouldn’t have lived to face any consequence. Their ocurrence wasn’t something I had mentally allowed for.

I never truly recovered from having genuinely decided I didn’t want to exist in this world any longer as myself. Afterward, I’ve always felt disconnected from the life that continued. It’s a persistent background noise that reminds me I don’t belong here, that I shouldn’t be here.

I thought of what would happen if I was told that I had cancer and only had months to live. I think it would bring me relief. I would prepare ebooks of my unpublished work, finished or not, and would put them out there for free. That’s the only thing I would care to leave around. Then I would rest.

I’ve been unemployed for about a year now, and I can’t be arsed to look for a new job. Money keeps running out. Making money means exposing myself to conditions that have repeatedly proven to me that they can make me lose my mind and even my health; my job in IT sent me to the ER thrice with heart and brain problems. I’m a programmer by trade, but have only worked professionally for nine months at it in the last ten years or so. And although I’m good at software engineering, it’s not truly fulfilling the way creating art is.

Of course, you can’t make money through writing. You pretty much need to be delusional these days to believe otherwise. As long as you belong to the wrong background, anyway. I’m also not the kind of writer that can sit down and decide what to write next, or anything at all. I write whatever my subconscious demands I create, the same way it obsesses over subjects all of a sudden. The best story, in my opinion, that I’ve ever written, it being Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, came to me by itself when I was listening to a song, and my subconscious assembled it on its own during the following week. And at forty-one, I feel that I’ve already rendered what I truly needed to render. That story was the incarnation of my grief for losing my childhood, for losing the life I could have had. That’s, as far as I can tell, the worst weight I carry, and I can’t render it better than that. Ultimately, my goal with that story was infection. The possibility that someone who read it would feel that it mattered, and carry it with them so it wouldn’t disappear without being known.

Not sure why I even post my stuff online. At the most, I’ve had like five people who have read my stories or posts like these consistently over the years. They’re usually people I wouldn’t want to have a personal relationship with. But still, the fact that virtually no one reads my stuff is part of a broader pattern throughout the course of my life that whatever I do, other people don’t care. The doors are always closed. I have to fight for every inch, and even when I try my best, it tends not to matter. But the paradox is that even if people appreciated what I did, I doubt that it would make me feel better.

Over the years, three people who consumed my stuff sought me out. That response didn’t make life feel repaired or turn the resulting relationships, one of them lasting for years, into something I wanted to develop or even maintain indefinitely. Since my sole long-term girlfriend left me for another guy when I was 22 or so, I’ve only talked to three people to any significant extent outside of work, the three of them online. Each began with a woman contacting me after experiencing my work. Over time I grew tired of what the relationships required: availability, attention, emotional involvement, reciprocal interest. I sometimes found their problems interesting, but eventually experienced the ongoing demands on my time and emotional resources as burdensome. I started avoiding any opportunity to be reachable. One woman discovered my birthday and went out of her way to wish me happy birthday. I didn’t feel corresponding interest in finding hers.

Around 2008-2010, one of these women, then a young one in her twenties, kept an online friendship of sorts with me for at least two years that I recall. We also talked on the phone. After weeks or months of little contact, she suddenly brought up that she was considering a nursing job in my city (not sure why I thought that being involved with a nurse was a good idea; often-earned stereotypes aside, my own mother was a nurse). She lived like seven hundred kilometers away. I’m so dumb that I thought, “Well, that’s an odd coincidence.” I reluctantly suggested that maybe we could meet in person and spend time together from time to time. We didn’t speak much after that. She eventually moved somewhere else and started dating some other guy. I removed her as a friend in social media some months after the last time we talked. She managed to say hello through another service later on, but I just removed her from there as well.

I keep people at arm’s length because I don’t want them to learn more about me or get their “emotional hooks” into me. A relationship would be unbearable. That proved to be the case with the sole serious girlfriend I had. Whole sacrifice of my creativity and private time to satisfy her emotional needs, only for her to humiliate me and throw me away like a used rag. And my self-esteem had been so thoroughly sanded off, that for months afterwards I took her calls so she could tell me how much better the other guy was. Never again.

I have also never wanted children. I would be a terrible father. I would be unable to connect with them. I would resent the time spent on their needs. That would ruin their lives, and I don’t want that on my conscience. You can start a relationship with a woman in which she claims not to want children, only for her to change her mind. Or to find herself pregnant at thirty-two, when her window is closing, despite using condoms and/or the pill. Due to a miracle, of course. Not deliberately ceasing to take the pill, or poking holes in condoms.

In any case, I don’t think my fundamental trauma can be repaired in any way. Just mourned and endured. Every woman I care about or become obsessed with, including Sissy Spacek, is an echo of the grief for the time, relationships, possibilities that I could have experienced but never did due to my circumstances of birth and how I grew up. The more beautiful and genuine, the more it hurts.

Of course, witnessing perfect Sissy in the few films that captured her in the 70s can’t impose the demands of a relationship. And I keep seeking those films out even though the contrast between her preserved youth and beauty and the passage of time intensify my grief. But it’s not like a have a choice; the need to learn more and see more of this special creature shows up in my brain as a command. I can only try to resist it, which would be torture in its own special way.

I suppose I’ve exorcised enough for the moment. Half past four in the morning. Time to go to bed and daydream of a better life until I fall asleep, so I can wake up again and do it all over for reason other than cowardice.

Life update (09/15/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve been cursed to be the kind of human being that suffers for impossible things. I’ve never genuinely wished for a particular car, a good job, a marriage. I suffer because I wasn’t born as someone else; because I didn’t grow up during a particular decade (particularly the 1970s, for a long time now); because I didn’t get to meet certain people, if only to have a five-minute conversation with them.

Easy for me to understand why I have, for most of my life, yearned to be someone else. Born with a screwed-up brain. Tormented by intrusive imagery even as a child, before I had any business knowing most of the things I was being shown. Born with a pituitary tumor that was discovered late and that permanently fucked up my body. Grew up through trauma and neglect. Merely being awake involves a baseline of psychological and physical discomfort that never goes away.

I depend upon the moments every day when I can distract myself from my consciousness to be able to endure being myself for yet another day. Most of the time that involves losing myself in daydreams. Sometimes that involves writing stories, creating songs. Reading doesn’t do much for me anymore, not with my kind of vivid imagination. I don’t create things because I want to be known or because I want to leave beautiful things for others. I make things because I’m compelled to do them, and because that allows me to forget I’m myself for as long as their production lasts.

A weight that I’ve been carrying all my life is my obsessive nature. I doubt regular people feel even an inkling of how that’s truly like. When my brain switches on the obsession for something, I live and breathe it every day. I think about it even if I don’t want to. I have to consume more details about it, and being impeded from doing so feels like mental torture. Most of the time the subject of my obsession is some topic or project, which proceeds to consume most of my waking life. Sometimes the obsession is a fictional person. I fell tremendously hard for Cormac McCarthy’s Alicia Western for whatever reason that my brain won’t entirely share, and she remains one of the main subjects of my daydreams to this day.

The worst subjects of spontaneous obsessions are, by far, real humans. I got it so bad for Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012 that listening to her albums (mainly Ys and Have One on Me) felt like the sole connection to beauty in this world. Throughout the day, I wondered what Joanna would think about this or that. And to this day I can’t think of Joanna Newsom, let alone listen to her music, without being dragged back emotionally against my will to that period in my life in which she felt like the sole salvation that existed from the ever-present risk of losing my mind.

I’m not sure what sparked it, but somewhat-recently I asked ChatGPT to recommend me movies from the 1970s, a period that as I mentioned, I’ve felt the absurd ache of wishing I had lived through while conscious enough (and I didn’t experience it at all, as I was born in 1985). I’m not entirely sure how to explain it. The 1970s felt to me like the last chance we had as a civilization, perhaps as a human species, to be real. As if there was a turning point that could have gone in the right direction but instead we ended up in the image-obsessed, cocaine-fueled 80s. Even as a child I felt that pull. There were photos from the 70s in homes of relatives in which people seemed more alive than what I was experiencing in the 90s. It felt like they were able to be idiosyncratically themselves. It still feels like that when I listen to music or watch movies from that era. Likely this is just one of my delusions, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling that way.

The request for movies led me to Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces. I realized soon that it had been a clear inspiration for McCarthy to produce his last two novels, which he started writing or at least researching in the mid-to-late seventies. That led me to figure out what other movies McCarthy had appreciated. That led me to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. That led me to Malick’s Badlands, starring Sissy Spacek. And now I’ve been cursed again.

Fifty-three fucking years ago. Somehow feels like yesterday. Badlands led me to Altman’s 3 Women. To the godawful Welcome to L. A. Just to be able to experience whatever was captured of this creature during the 70s. It’s not just the beauty, that somehow appeals to me perfectly. It’s every single detail: her voice, her little expressions, her mannerisms. Something in my brain is telling me “this is the most special being you’ve ever encountered.” And as a 41-year-old man, I have to suffer because I can’t go back in time and just talk to her for five minutes. Why I had to be born so late and as myself.

This is going to be one of those nights in which I close my eyes and wish earnestly that I don’t wake up again. And I’ll surely wake up to endure yet another day as myself.

Life update (09/09/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

My disappointment of the month: Suno 6.0 has come out, and it’s shit. Not only that: it’s the Udio debacle all over again. The music industry has castrated the leading music generator. I tried generating a segment with four simple lines of lyrics from my Odes to My Triceratops cycle of songs, and they were moderated due to copyright even though there were no true copyright issues. Next batch of lyrics: moderated due to violence. And the music sounds more artificial than it used to two models ago. Suno is done.

The sole alternative is to wait for a local model to sound as good as Udio did during its Wild West days. This may happen. But I doubt it’ll happen for at least a couple of years or so. Which means I have to park my fourth album even though I’ve written all the lyrics.

Cormac McCarthy’s artistic landscape contributed heavily (didn’t start it) to my long-lived obsession with the 70s, or at least the 70s like I prefer to think of them. A time before the internet, before the image-obsessed 80s, after the peak of the damn hippies. An era when a new way of living could have settled, only for the 80s to come and make everything mostly a cocaine-infused joke (I enjoy the 80s, don’t get me wrong, but it did ruin the promise of the seventies). Anyway, due to finding out that McCarthy loved Five Easy Pieces, the 1970 movie, and that it seems to have fed into my favorite books of his, which are The Passenger/Stella Maris, I proceeded to watch other movies related to directors McCarthy had loved. That led me to Terrence Malick, which led me to his exceptional Badlands, which introduced me to Sissy Spacek, and now I’m enamoured with Spacek.

Earlier today I watched Altman’s 3 Women, which I didn’t like much as a movie, but it features another mesmerizing interpretation by Sissy Spacek as a sort of a wild child alongside Shelley Duvall, that weird-faced poor lady who got abused by Kubrick and Nicholson on The Shining. Partly due to my sudden infatuation with Spacek, partly due to the fact that her character in 3 Women was an innocent, wild, lovely flower (possibly autistic?), a moment in the movie when Duvall basically tells Spacek to fuck off made me want to slap the hell out of that woman. I had to ask ChatGPT why would anyone do this to poor innocent Spacek’s character, and ChatGPT told me to calm down and keep watching. The movie had interesting shots, and it made me inhabit the isolated, strange 70s again, so I appreciate it for that, but it was quite the mess of a story, and that score was godawful.

It really pisses me off that, having been born in 1985, I didn’t grow up with a crush on Spacek. I didn’t even know about her until my teens, I think, and the impression of her was heavily distorted by her having acted as Carrie in that adaptation of the Stephen King novel. I can barely stand Stephen King (and only his adaptations; I despise his writing), and I hate even more that the impression most people have gotten out of Sissy Spacek is her being covered in pig blood and telekinetically massacring everyone.

Spacek was the most gorgeous, unique creature in the 70s as far as I’m concerned, and the sole actress I can imagine playing Alicia Western. And there’s an additional connection to Alicia Western that leads me to believe that McCarthy would have agreed on the casting. Spacek pushed for the production of and to star in a movie adaptation of a play named ‘Night, Mother. It’s about a mother and her suicidal daughter, with the mother spending the night trying to talk the daughter out of suicide. McCarthy praised that play. About twenty years later, McCarthy wrote The Sunset Limited, about a man trying to stop another man from killing himself. It also takes place in basically one place, and only the two characters are present. And McCarthy’s final book was Stella Maris, featuring two characters in a room: a therapist and Alicia Western, with the first one trying to prevent (unknowingly) the second’s suicide.

Time destroys the present tense of everything. An online music service allows you to generate beautiful songs that sound backed by a real band, only for the music industry to make the model disappear. Magnificent people exist at their best for a short period and then fade away. Reality is too heavy and painful and soaked in melancholy for it to be carried on one’s shoulders all the time. No wonder people drown themselves in their jobs and their families and their sports teams.