Finders Keepers

Ryan Gosling: living with Bianca

Interviewer*:  This is a pretty unique film.  You play this young man who lives in a garage apartment, painfully shy.  I guess you could say he's somewhere on the autism spectrum.  Avoids a lot of human contact.  He doesn't like being touched.  He ends up getting a full-sized sex doll and introducing it to his family as his girlfriend.  The town, for reasons that begin to unfold as the film develops, kind of plays along in a way.  When you looked at this filmscript, why didn't it seem ridiculous?  How did you see this work?

Ryan Gosling:  [Laughs]

Interviewer:  When you describe that to somebody they say, "I'm not going to see that movie!"  And it really works.  I think it's a terrific movie.

Ryan Gosling:  Look, I felt the same way the whole time I was reading it.  I thought, "This shouldn't be working.  But it is."  I'd like to take credit for that but it was a really well-written script.  Nancy Oliver is a very special writer. It worked.  It worked as a script potentially more than it was going to work as a film.  If you look at a book like "The Velveteen Rabbit," or something, and you talk about a kid who loves a bunny so much that it becomes real, that makes it real.  That's an easier thing to imagine than it is to visualize.  To try and shoot that you have to get into "how do we make it real?"  Do we use CGI [computer-generated imagery]?  Do we use a puppet?  But then it turns into something else.  The idea of a guy... In the script she became real.  When you're reading it, the more real she was to him and the more the town treated her like she was a real person, the more real she became to you.  When you're watching it, it's a guy talking to a doll and she never becomes real.

Interviewer:  Right.

Ryan Gosling:  You know, it's never going to happen.  It's always going to be a guy talking to a doll no matter how much I believe it.  It doesn't make her real.

Interviewer:  Let's listen to a scene.  This is a scene where your character, Lars, has just told his brother and sister-in-law he has a visitor, his girlfriend, and she's from abroad, and she needs a wheelchair.  They're very excited to hear this because they think he's actually met someone.  And they invite the friend, Bianca, in and they discover that indeed she is a sex doll though she's fully dressed. They're not quite sure how to react.  They say, "Well, we're having dinner."  And so the scene we're going to hear is where you're all sitting at dinner and they've set a place for your friend -- your doll -- Bianca.  You're beginning to explain to your sister-in-law and brother (played by Emily Mortimer and Paul Schneider), and there are some moments in the scene when you whisper an aside to Bianca the doll.

Ryan Gosling/Lars:  So, you're never going to believe this... Bianca's from the tropics.  Well, she's Brazilian.  One half-Brazilian, one-half Danish, that's right?  And somebody stole her luggage.

Sister-in-law:  Oh?

Lars:  Yeah!  And they stole her wheelchair.

Karen:  That's terrible! 

Lars:  Yeah!  Can you believe that, Gus?

Gus:  I can't believe it.

Lars:  Right!  Well, it makes me angry.  Anyway, I wanted to ask you a favor.   (Aside, to Bianca:  She doesn't mind.  I promise.)  Karen, you don't mind lending Bianca some clothes, do you?  She doesn't have any.

Long pause.

Lars:  Do you?

Karen:  I'm not sure we're the same type, Lars. 

Lars:  Well, that's okay, Karen, because Bianca doesn't really care about superficial things like that, so it's okay.

Pause.

Karen:  Sure!

Lars:  Well (sighs).  That's fine!  (Aside, to Bianca:  See, I told you.)  Thanks!

Interviewer:  How do you get this... how...

Ryan Gosling:  She's still in my living room, by the way.  She is.  She's reading a book by the window. I don't know what to do.

Interviewer:  I don't know whether you're kidding me or not. 

Ryan Gosling:  I'm not kidding.  What do I do? Put her in the garage?  Just feels weird.  Feels like she'll be lonely out there. 

Interviewer: ... Do you ever talk to her?

Ryan Gosling:  No, I don't.

Interviewer:  Ahhh.  That's reassuring!

Laughter...

Interviewer:  I don't know if this is true but I read that when the film was being made that the sex doll, Bianca, had her own dressing room with magazines to read.  Was she sort of treated as a cast member? 

Ryan Gosling:  Yes.  We tried very hard -- the director did, I'd say, and I appreciated it -- to make her as real as possible, so the crew could go on the same journey that we, the cast, were being forced to go through.  She had a trailer.  She had her own, like, contract with nudity clauses and all the things actresses would have.  And I'll tell you, I've worked with actresses that have given me less!

Interviewer: [laughs]

Ryan Gosling:  And she had...  you know, she was given magazines between takes.  What was kind of amazing about the experience was that, by the end, people were trying it out.  I saw grips who'd take give minutes out with their coffee and you'd see them kind of mumbling to her, trying to see what it was like to talk to her.  The effect that she had was interesting.  You ended up getting into this dialogue with yourself.  It was an interesting dialogue to have.  I embraced it and I started to see people embrace it.  But ultimately the main criticism of the film that I heard was that people saying, "Well, you know, that's not possible. People in the town would never believe she was real.  They'd never go around acting like that."  In one case, maybe that wasn't true because I saw this film crew really giving it a shot.  At the same time, it was a fantasy.  It's like a fairy tale.

Interviewer:  A fable...

Ryan Gosling:  People were taking it so literally.

___

*Excerpt from an interview with actor Ryan Gosling on NPR's "Fresh Air"

Keith Richards plays Grover Norquist

..."The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws, " Keith Richards told Fortune.   "It's why we rehearse in Canada but not in the US.  A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it.  Whether to sit on it or not..  We left England because we'd be paying ninety-eight cents on the dollar.  We left, and they lost out.  No taxes at all.  I don't want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with.  We put thirty percent in holding until we sort it out."  Keith may fancy himself a symbol of '68, but he channels the fiscal policy of Grover Norquist.

The last time the Stones were out on the road, between 2005 and 2007, they took in more than half a billion dollars -- the highest grossing tour of all time.  On Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, they played to more than a million people. Few spectacles in modern life are more sublimely ridiculous than the geriatric members of the Stones playing the opening strains of "Street Fighting Man."  The arena is typically jammed with middle-aged fans, who have donned après-office relaxed-sized jeans, paid the sitter, parked the minivan in the lot, and, for a few hundred dollars a seat, shimmy along with Mick Jagger, who, having trained for the tours as if for a championship bout, prances inexhaustibly through a two-hour set, at his best evoking the spawn of James Brown and Gumby, at his worst coming off like someone's liquored-up Aunt Gert, determined to trash her prettier sister's wedding with a gruesome performance on the dance floor...David Remnick, in a profile of Keith Richards in the New Yorker

Poetry on the move

Hal Cannon
Where are you Henry?

Henry Real Bird
I’m over here along the Missouri River.  I been ridin’ here since Tuesday…so I’ve been on the road about 9 days. And I stayed last night at a town called Fraser.

 Hal Cannon
Are you on a horse right now?

Henry Real Bird
Yeah I’m riding a horse right now along Highway 2 in Montana. What they call High Line.

Hal Cannon
Can you describe what you’re looking at right now?

Henry Real Bird
Oh gosh, just a vast amount of land…just rolling hills all over to the north, and then on over to the south I’ve got cottonwood trees in the valley floor of the Missouri River, north of the river. Then across the Missouri to the south we’ve got them hills there..the breaks…just beautiful.

Hal Cannon
Henry I’m hearing cars just speeding past you. What’s the difference between the way you’re seeing what’s going on and people going 60 miles an hour?

Henry Real Bird
Oh yeah. The slow pace..you see more. I saw hills and creeks that I didn’t know existed. I mean I’ve been on this road before but I never paid attention to it but now you see all this beautiful landscape. And uh..I mean this is good traveling here.

Hal Cannon
So where did you start out Henry? 

Henry Real Bird
I started out from the Fort Berthold Indian Revervation.  We started out along the Missouri there on the trail of the buffalo, and uh, going through patches of sweet sage, eating juneberries. And I was saying that life cannot get any sweeter than this.  To be able to ride a horse for the day and then just eat the juneberries.  And when I got over here yesterday, they stopped me on the road and took me over and gave me some juneberry pie.  And I had some more again last night and I went over to the sweat lodge over here in Frazer, and prayed.  They say the sweat lodge…you use that to remember who you are.  But the whole thing is…places where my great grandfather rode over on Fort Berthold and over to Fort Union and then I just wanted to ride a horse right where they rode horses too, along the Missouri. And that’s what I’m doing, and then giving out books of poetry along the way. ...

More here...

And here...  where Henry Real Bird was asked what the Montana sky looked like:  "It's so big that you can't really put in edge to it.  That's how it is today in a vast sea of buffalo grass." 

Redman, Mehldau, and generosity

If you sit around thinking about what's the difference between art and not-art, at some point you stumble on generosity. 

Of course being damn good at what you do helps a lot.  Both Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau are very, very good musicians.  It's nice that they are also great friends and collaborators.  Redman has a slight edge in this piece.  What's most notable is the generosity of his playing:  what he's doing is not about Joshua Redman but about music.  That may seem like an odd thing to point out but, in this period of extremes of narcissism, doing something for its own sake comes off as extraordinarily generous.

Too damn much gratitude

“It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back,” Laurie Colwin wrote in her bite-size masterpiece, “Home Cooking,” published in 1988. “Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.”

Colwin wasn’t complaining, exactly. She liked dinner parties. But she would also have liked Margaret Visser’s observation, in her new book, “The Gift of Thanks,” that the word “host” is related through Indo-European roots to the words “hostile” and “hostage.” Dinner parties are complicated things, where obligation and gratitude collide and overlap — and sometimes crash and burn. ...NYTBR

Hostage.  Hostility.  Too damn much gratitude.

Sometimes, though, we're a little short on gratitude -- particularly the gratitude we owe.  We toss off "thanks" all the time without really meaning that we sense a real obligation.  It's more of a nudge-nudge "Love me, I'm polite" word, as Margaret Visser points out.

Ms. Visser is deft and funny about how, in our afraid-to-offend-anyone society, thanking has taken the place of commanding, as in: “Thank you for not smoking.” She’s good on how a series of “thanks” and “thank yous” are signals that a telephone conversation is coming to an end.

Genuine gratitude -- that signal that we acknowledge an obligation -- is more rare than "thanks."

“Gratitude is always a matter of paying attention,” she writes, of “deliberately beholding and appreciating the other.”

Gratitude is, fundamentally, about not taking things for granted, a kind of worldview. “Gratitude arises from a specific circumstance — being given a gift or done a favor — but depends less upon that,” Ms. Visser writes, “than on the receiver’s whole life, her character, upbringing, maturity, experience, relationships with others, and also on her ideals, including her idea of the sort of person she is or would like to be.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson -- as usual -- gets to the bottom of the matter.

“We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.”

More here...

"Ascending Bird"

"Crap cars"

The DeLorean DMC-12 of 1981-83, he writes, had an engine "so weak it would struggle to pull a hobo off your sister." Not since Raymond Chandler have I met a metaphor so much more powerful than would do.

Which is not to say that Porter slings figures of speech around indiscriminately. The body of the G.M. EV1 (1996-99), he tells us, resembles "a snake trapped under a rock," and so it does. With regard to performance, Porter turns phrases the way sports cars should take corners. The Chrysler K-Car (l981-89) may have "pulled Chrysler from the depths of financial trouble," he concedes, "but did it have to be such a weedy little griefbox?" The handling of the 1974-78 Datsun B210 was "like trying to steer a wheelbarrow full of logs."

His take on the 1993-2002 Hummer H1 holds up on sociocultural grounds alone: "Imagine if there'd been some sort of hideous Pentagon mess-up and someone had decided that the Army would go into battle driving a fleet of Camrys. . . . So why in the name of all that's holy is it somehow acceptable to cruise down to the mall in a military vehicle?"

We find a "stubby and square" Maserati here, a "bandy-legged" BMW, and a Cadillac Seville that "started in fine Caddy style with a long, flat hood and high, proud passenger cabin and then just fizzled out into an apologetic bustle." I do wish Porter hadn't likened the Suzuki X-90 (1996-98) to "a vomit omelet," because I can't get that epithet out of my head. But judging by the photograph (in which the car is set against a red-rock butte), he is not overstating the case by much. And it's sound advice he gives in connection with the Geo Metro Convertible (l990-93): "Don't buy a car that's smaller, and indeed less comfortable, than your shoes."

Which brings us to the original Volkswagen Beetle, shown here with miniskirted women frolicking around it. In my youth I had a VW Bug, $400 used, and it seemed O.K. at the time. But Porter is right, its heater was "pathetic." And one look at those frolickers should remind us what its interior failed to provide for: legs. This is a function of the critic, to make us realize that something we thought (or assumed) we liked, we really didn't.

Funny.  If pushed, we can admit our best friend has a hygiene problem, that the guy we voted for may not be perfect, that our beloved home town had lousy weather. 

But damn, it hurts to see in black and white that my VW had an imperfect heater.  I mean, of course it did.  That's one of the great things about us and VW's.  They made us hardy, mobile people and, after all, that's what an American really is.

[This was first posted at Prairie Weather.]

Monk and Coltrane together again

It's pretty fantastic:  tapes have been found at the Library of Congress with recordings of a 1957 Carnegie Hall concert.  Among the sets were eight performances, recorded by Voice of America (and apparently excellent quality), from Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane.  And "the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, Ray Charles with a backing sextet, the Zoot Sims Quartet with Chet Baker, and the Sonny Rollins Trio." 

The New York Times article notes that Billie Holiday "appeared as well, though she is not on the Voice of America tapes."

But it is Monk with Coltrane that constitutes the real find. That band existed for only six months in 1957, mostly through long and celebrated runs at the East Village club the Five Spot. During this period, Coltrane fully collected himself as an improviser, challenged by Monk and the discipline of his unusual harmonic sense. Thus began the 10-year sprint during which he changed jazz completely, before his death in 1967. The Monk quartet with Coltrane did record three numbers in a studio in 1957, but remarkably little material, and only with fairly low audience-tape fidelity, is known to exist from the Five Spot engagement.

The eight and a half Monk performances found at the Library of Congress, by contrast, are professionally recorded, strong and clear; you can hear the full dimensions of Shadow Wilson's drum kit and Ahmed Abdul-Malik's bass. It is certainly good enough for commercial release, though none has yet been negotiated.

For more on the tapes, how they were found and what else was found, read on...

Marsalis plays Coltrane

I've justed been listening to Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra play their idea of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme.

Wynton is a very good musician and teacher, but he's not a particularly good jazz musician.  He risks nothing.  He plays about jazz; he plays an idea of jazz, a riff on jazz. 

Marsalis' Love Supreme isn't bad listening; it just has no particular meaning.  Coltrane's version can drive me nuts sometimes, but I find  it brilliant and moving.

Jeanne-Claude, Christo, and Tinkerbell

You had to believe in Tinkerbell if she was to survive.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm a big admirer of Jeanne-Claude and Christo.  I met and talked with them some years ago about their projects.  But that's not what hooked me. What hooked me (as someone whose own work has sometimes been described as miniaturist, as someone who was once struck by David Hockney's little essay on postcards) was their re-sizing of Earth, their imperial seizures of whole landscapes without -- this is important:  without -- harming them. 

But there is a Tinkerbell quality to their work.   And god knows they have plenty of people clapping their hands and saying, "I  believe..."

That's what I was thinking when I read Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the 2/28 New Yorker, "Gated":

An art critic was testily perambulating “The Gates,” in Central Park, with his wife and a friend from Texas on the first Sunday afternoon of its installation when he suddenly got a load of their thousands of fellow-walkers and registered the common mood—a sort of vast, blanketing, almost drowsy contentment. He couldn’t think of any other occasion on which he had witnessed so many New Yorkers moving slowly when they didn’t have to. Each person looked strangely, nakedly personal: not a New Yorker at all, or anything else in particular. The crowd’s many-voiced sound had an indoor intimacy, like the bright murmur in a theatre, during intermission, when the play is good and everybody knows that everybody knows it. The over-all social effect, which was somewhat like that of an electrical blackout or a major blizzard, minus the inconvenience, was weird and terrific. (You could give yourself a nice scare imagining “The Gates” magically removed, and leaving the people looking as they looked—a goofball “Night of the Living Dead.”) The voluble disaffection of the art critic, me, collapsed, to the relief of my companions. I had to admit the reason for it, which was that “The Gates” is a populist affront to the authority of art critics, and to accept being just another shuffling, jostling, helplessly chummy citizen.

Of course, “The Gates” is art, because what else would it be? Art used to mean paintings and statues. Now it means practically anything human-made that is unclassifiable otherwise. This loss of a commonsense definition is a big art-critical problem, but not in Central Park, not this week. What the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been doing for three and a half decades is self-evident. They propose a grandiose, entirely pointless alteration of a public place, then advance their plan in the face of a predictable public and bureaucratic resistance, which gradually comes to seem mean-spirited and foolish for want of a reasonable argument against them. They build a constituency of supporters, including collectors who help finance the project by buying Christo’s drawings and collages of it. What then occurs is like an annual festival—Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a high-school prom—without the parts about its being annual or a festival. It feels vaguely religious. The zealous installers and minders, identifiable on site by their uniforms and chatty pride, are like acolytes. As with any ritual—though “The Gates” can’t be a ritual, because it is performed just once—how people behave during the installation is what it is for and about. Then it’s gone, before it has a chance to become boring or, for that matter, interesting.