Today would’ve been Prince’s 67th birthday. Maybe Neil Young is right: It’s better to burn out than to fade away. That’s what happened to this performer, and I miss him.

This is why he never made 67, in a performance of what might be my favorite Prince song, maybe because of its Freudian undertow.

Outlandish, isn’t it? His dancing—great leaps and diving sprawls—was electrifying, but the result was chronic hip and ankle injuries, and surgeries, that left him in constant, isolated pain in his final years. Fentanyl finished him.

But not before he’d gifted us all with music. It’s said he played 27 instruments. He was largely self-taught, beginning on drums, then piano. Here, at Paisley Park, in contrast to the video above, he understates. Still, he plays with the audience, but he never really looks at them. He’s inside the song. He’s enjoying himself.

Back in the MTV days, this might’ve been when I first met him. I’d never heard anything like this song before. I found out later that he was tiny, and the heels he wore—you can see them here— contributed to his stage injuries. That was in the future. In this “Official Music Video,” I found so many things that were compelling, including the way he slings his guitar behind his back, like a samurai and his killing sword. It’s cool. And then there’s it’s the beat, established so vividly by synthesizers and a drum machine, the faintly disturbing fascist/lesbian backup singers, Prince’s spins, and his oddly appealing —yes, I chose this adjective— androgyny. All of this was new, back in the Eighties. It was revelatory.

Twenty-seven instruments. That includes the guitar. This 2004 solo, in a George Harrison tribute, literally stole the show. Prince riffs while Dhani Harrison and Tom Petty look on. At first, I thought Petty, whom I love(d) as well, was miffed. Then, near the midpoint of the solo, you seem him surrender: it’s brief, but it’s big: a smile lights up Petty’s face.

Me, too. Prince’s music—its audacity, its wickedness, its energy, its originality–these things make me smile.

This is the first point that needs to be made. She is enjoying herself.

She still includes a banjo. I like that, it’s a wonderful throwback to her musical roots. And I like her lyrics here: Quirky, self-contradicting, clever. The backup singers are sublime,and this song demands them.

Now maybe we forget how young she was when she started. “Tim McGraw” was her first hit song. She was sixteen, and that’s why I still like this high-school song. (And, again great backup singers on the chorus.)

Yeah,, there’s those stupid umbrellas. But the neener-neener of the chorus and the interplay of her solo and the percussive instruments is, well, sparkling (?) So’s the whole lighty-uppy thing. COOL!

I love this song. It wails and does the be-bop thing in the chorus. I like her hat.

She’s not afraid to reach out to some people who are marginalized. Here she is at New York’s Stonewall Club, the scene of the 1969 that pitted the NYPD against the City’s gays. If you’re a fan of Modern Family, note who’s singing with her.

But that doesn’t mean that cops don’t love her, too.

Cynics would say her interaction with others is cultivated, but I think she really likes people. She’s working the audience in this performance of “Love Story,” on Letterman, but at about 2:45, look for her reaction to the little brunette girl. That’s genuine.

And, of course, there’s her cause: Childhood cancer. I think that’s genuine, too.

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Look at her competition: Myrna Loy. Veronica Lake. Rita Hayworth. Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Lauren Bacall. Even Hedy Lamarr. I never forgave them for the Mamie Eisenhower haircut they gave her for Shane. But of all the beautiful actresses from Hollywood’s Golden Age, Jean Arthur, along with Ginger Rogers, endures with me.

It’s because I am a man, and therefore vain. What Arthur did, in nearly all her films, was to make her leading man better.

She restored James Stewart’s courage in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). She convinced Stewart, in You Can’t Take It With You (1938), even after his wealthy, snobby and dyspeptic family had met her wildly eccentric family in You Can’t Take It with You, that he made exactly the right choice in falling in love with her. Director Frank Capra made the right choice in casting her.

She talked Gary Cooper out of committing suicide in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).

In Only Angels Have Wings (1939), she sticks by Gary Cooper’s reckless Andes mail pilot and tempers—at least at little—his Hemingwayish appetite for self-destruction.

My favorite Jean Arthur film remains Easy Living (1937), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges. Arthur plays a young working-class New York City woman who runs out of money. She has to close her eyes to break her piggy bank. When a fur coat suddenly falls on her from a Manhattan high-rise, everybody assumes she’s rich and New York City lays out the proverbial red carpet. This film once again proves my thesis. Ray Milland is most recognizable to my generation as the cold-hearted father in Love Story (1970), and, a littler earlier, as the man who tried to have his wife, Grace Kelly, murdered in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954). He is not funny.

But in Easy Living, ir’s Jean Arthur who reveals how funny Ray Milland could be, first in a wonderful automat scene, where you learn how fast food was served in the 1930s, and later as he, thoroughly confused, begins to fall in love with her. I think it was one of Milland’s best peformances, and I am convinced this because Jean Arthur evoked that performance from him.

If she brought out the best in her male leads, she was never subservient to them. If she fell in love with them, when the film ended, you were sometimes not sure that she’d stay with them.

You wanted to stay with her. She was the tomboy you’d grown up with, caught tadpoles with, watched, awestruck, as she hit the snot out of softball. And then, suddenly, when you were about thirteen, you realized that you were in love with her. (She went to the Prom with someone else.)

The real Jean Arthur was filled with near-constant anxiety, filled with self-doubt, and acting took, for her, immense reservoirs of courage that lay hidden deep inside. Only the singer Carly Simon, I think, has experienced stage fright as severe as Arthur’s was.

Jean retired because those reservoirs were never enough to drown that fear. What she’s left to us, in the fiction of film, is who she really was. Her personal character was marked by courage, by her willingness to confront, over and over, her deepest terrors. These were qualities that became transparent in the characters she played. I hope that somehow, long after her death in Carmel in 1991, that Jean Arthur realizes how admirable she was, both as an actor and as a human being.

I remember learning that, in 1500, a squirrel—a determined squirrel, mind you—could leap from tree to tree from New York to North Carolina. The prairie grass that began at the border of what would become Kansas was so tall that a man on horseback would disappear once he rode into it, like the way the ballplayers disappeared in Field of Dreams. Thirty million buffalo filled the prairie.

I don’t know that any director, not since John Ford and Monument Valley, has had the visual instinct for what America was like seventy, 150 or 400 years ago, as Terrence Malick has shown in his films, which are lyrical and almost leisurely the latter being purposeful: the rhythm gives you time enough to enjoy the nation’s beauty and the shock of his action sequences hit you that much harder.

Here are three favorites: Badlands (1973), based on the true story of two teens, Charlie Starkweather and Carol Fugate who become killers in 1958.

For Days of Heaven (1978), Malick had to shoot in Alberta to give an authentic sense to what Texas wheatland was like in 1916.

Finally, Malick had the audacity to go back to the encounter between The First People and Europeans in 1607. This is his film The New World.

April 22 in History: In 1876, Tchaikovsky completes the composition of “Swan Lake.”

In its debut, the ballet was a flop. But, so it goes, was the film “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

Elizabeth studied ballet as a little girl and, when she was in college, met some members of the Bolshoi backstage in L.A. They all smoked Marlboros.

I cannot imagine, less the smokes, more incredible athletes than those dancers.

We once went to a 49ers game, Old-Timers’ Day, and the only veteran who wasn’t limping was Joe Montana.

The price that dancers pay, in blunted toes and bleeding toenails, torn ligaments, stress fractures in the lower vertebrae, something loud called snapping hip syndrome, in stress fractures, and in so many more injuries, rival those of NFL players.

Ballerinas are warriors.

My mother and my wife taught me this, taught me how to admire young women who dance.

My Mom had several Classical 45’s–records, yellow vinyl–and I had a big indestructible record player inside a kind of suitcase, so I’d take it out and play the yellow records when I was five or six, when we lived on Huasna Road.

I played this passage, and the Russian dance from “Nutcracker,” over and over.

And over.

SLOIFF Review: “Bring Them Home”