In Which We Are Generally Afraid To Ask You

Cushioning

by LINDA EDDINGS

Q: He doesn't look after you.

A: Maybe he does help me, but that's not the same.

Q: You were playing a sort of game.

A: You have hit on a pet peeve of mine. Which is the placing of the words "sort of" where that expression should not be. Perhaps it's just an aspect of your dialect.

Q: That's fair. My own problem is with the word "just." When you consider the matter at any length, the word means little to nothing at all.

A: The game Tim and I were playing was to observe and determine the relationships of various people to each other. If you spot identical twins, it's called champagne. There is nothing better.

Q: You see a father and his daughter.

A: That's a riesling. And a mother and her daughter is a merlot. Because of mere - that's the joke anyway.

Q: "That's the joke."

A: Tim noticed an old woman bending over a doll.

Q: Is that like, toilet wine?

A: You sound like him, you really do. Context is everything.

Q: Not really. Say you were dating a man and for eleven months it was going along swimmingly. At the end of that month, he gets inebriated, drunker than you have ever seen him, and gives you a black eye. Is it over?

A: What kind of car does he drive? What color is the car, his eyes? The hardest thing to do is wait for all the information. As I said, we witnessed an old woman, most likely homeless, most certainly with no fixed address, bending over a doll. She kept nodding to herself. He explained that the reason the woman was nodding was because the doll was telling her something.

Q: What was the doll telling her?

A: I was on vacation once with my parents; I had just turned twelve and they took to me to the Riviera. I was from the city; I couldn't remember ever seeing a beach. I met another girl my age named Eloise. She showed me necklaces she had constructed of seashells, and when I encouraged her, she showed me the animal that provided one of her shells. It was seated on a tiny purple cushion.

Q: She honored it.

A: Not quite. It was a jail. But you have perhaps hit on why the woman was nodding to her doll. She may have considered it divine.

Q: Do you believe that?

A: No. But Tim showed a mixture of disgust and resignation that I finally realized was concern.

Q: "Perhaps" is another expression like that, for me. You've said it twice today. Isn't everything "perhaps", when you get down to it?

A: I know someone who would agree with you. "The closest thing to God is an individual."

Q: What did Tim say next?

A: We began to argue. He said that she belonged in hospice care, or under some supervision at least. I said that we were all taking orders from someone, and a variety of other things. Sometimes I think I sabotage my relationships, but this was not one of those times. Later, under the covers, he was more gentle than he had ever been.

Q: You don't often show your anger to those closest to you.

A: That's perhaps true, but it was something else. It was sort of that he could not decide whether he was the old woman, or the doll. And he just knew the fact that he was waiting for me to confirm his suspicions meant that he was more likely the old woman.

Q: Have you had your period this month?

A: I'm having it now. There was blood on his cock. I wiped it off before he could see it. A certain type of person never looks at herself unless she is told to, and even then.

Q: That old woman you saw. You said that she nodded her head to what the doll was saying. Did she ever shake her head? Yes? That seems like an important distinction.

A: I didn't finish the story. In the morning, he wanted sex again, but was afraid to say so. What bothered me was that he wouldn't just ask me for it. Because if it was the reverse, that is what I would do.

Q: You came.

A: Yes. But as I was coming, he was talking to me, not even about me, or what he was doing.

Q: What did he say exactly, as you came? This may be important.

A: He said, "I'm glad we didn't meet on Tinder."

Q: He sounds like an old woman. Was the animal on the purple cushion dead by the way? That seashell girl. When you were on the beach.

A: Eloise, yes. She arranged her shells by color, then by various other criteria, and then by size. She explained the virtues of each separate arrangement. Then I noticed that she moved me around her arena in the exact same fashion as the shells she held in her tiny hand. I told her that it was pointless to arrange anything by size, now. There was no real way of telling how much it would grow.

Q: When he was inside of you. When you came, you told me what he said when you had your orgasm. What did you say?

A: Nothing of any import. It felt like I was listening, not to him, to the world beneath him.

Q: Did he come?

A: Yes.

Q: What did he say when he came?

A: He asked me what time it was. As if there was none at all to waste.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Abbas Kiarostami.

"The Bones" - One Clueless Friend (mp3)

"Bird in Flight" - One Clueless Friend (mp3)

 

In Which We Close Our Legs Permanently

Caterpillars

by LINDA EDDINGS

Like Someone In Love
dir. Abbas Kiarostami
109 minutes

Watanabe is an old widower who hires a prostitute, Akiko (Rin Takanashi). When she arrives, he explains that he has prepared a sort of shrimp stew. She is aghast and takes refuge in his bed. He explains that the soup is from her home region. She tells him how much she hated it as a child. Like Someone in Love is Abbas Kiarostami's feature length tribute to the famous Japanese director and screenwriter Yasujiro Ozu, and it is always surprising, perhaps even more so for those outside of Japan than its citizens.

Akiko's cross to bear is her jealous boyfriend Noriaki. Everyone wants Akiko to break up with Noriaki: her pimp, her john, her colleagues. He makes her go in the bathroom and count the floor tiles, so that when he comes later, he can make sure she was there. The thing he hates most is her lying, and she lies often.

This is the kind of inching drama that was invented by a master. In Like Someone in Love, it's clear how much the Iranian-born Kiarostami sees in the legendary Ozu. It has always been obvious that the chatty, rhythm and cadence conversations that make Ozu's dramas so unmistakable inspired Kiarostami to always have something to say. Like Someone in Love's long scenes use Ozu's method of creating tension through the elongation of events into unexpected places and scenarios.

It is exhilarating to see Kiarostami freed of his native land in Like Someone in Love, and he has a great deal to see about the Japanese —who could understand a cloistered, faddish people better than an Iranian? The environments of his native Iran, much of them at least, are bleak indeed. It is his direct confrontation of these things that has helped Kiarostami acquire an unrivaled reputation in his medium.

Ozu's message about his own society was the skewering of Japan's social mores, and Kiarostami takes that up with wonder and curioisity. Like Someone in Love is the anti-Lost in Translation because any understanding the Iranian director brings to bear, even on a surface level, is devastating.

Watanabe's apartment is a sealed den, a very private place when he goes to turn away from the world and into himself. Akiko moves among his things, comparing herself to a painting that hangs on his wall. Watanabe explains that it marks the separation of Japanese art from the west in 1900. The widower has also removed himself from the urban world that occupied his life for decades, and absconded to the country.

Before a coitus that never comes (Watanabe is too shy, really), the two are practically humming at each other, exposing the innards of their respective situations without real articulation. There is no small talk in Kiarostami. The reason for this is simple — in a watched society, any exchange can occur quickly and in code, heightening the tension in any conversation.

One of Kiarostami's major talents has always been his casting. This is so much so that Through the Olive Trees begins with a director, meant to represent Kiarostami himself, casting for his new film at a girls'  school so that we can watch him do what he does best.

Here Kiarostami is obviously proud of what he can get out of actors in a different language. Takanashi's Akiko is absolutely radiant to the point where the camera often has to turn away from her beauty, and we sense that is what everyone finds so overwhelming about her.

The Japanese used fax machines long after the rest of the world forgot about them, and there are tons of little relics like that to find in Kiarostami's Japan. In Ozu's vision of the country, there were relics from even farther back, prized both because of their rarity in an obliterated place, and because they represented a more powerful Japan. Some of the people Ozu liked the most and least could be considered agents of this type.

There is something perpetually out of date about Like Someone in Love — even though its most disturbing sequence consists of playing the most poignant voicemails ever recorded. It is not that the film lacks the basic trappings of modernity. What makes Like Someone in Love a relic is that Kiarostami uses those trappings purely as a mechanism to hear how carelessly we speak to one another. 

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Summer Painter" - Bill Callahan (mp3)

The new album from Bill Callahan, entitled Dream River, was released on September 17th.

 

In Which There Is Living Proof We Got An Echo

The Sound, The Sky

by LINDA EDDINGS

It was more correct to say that he possessed the lizards at times. He made no claims on ownership.

Once there had been a skylight there.

Some of the animals liked the light, others avoided it even at the cost of their own lives. Few could be trusted to go outside and return intact. For those who could be counted on this way, he had rigged a decorative doorbell that would inform him the lizards wanted to enter.

He wasn't entirely sure what they did when he slept. Planned, he supposed.

When the skylight was there, the scar on his face would tingle at the first embrace of sunlight. It was then, but not only then, but most often then that he felt as a man like any other.

A woman came to his door one day. He invited her in and asked her what she wanted. She said that she was to survey the property and make an accounting that could be referred to by her superiors.

He asked whether there was some way around this and she shook her head. When she began to make a tour of the nursery, he could not decide whether or not to call out to the lizard they called Lead to spare the woman's life, and by the time he had made up in his mind he only heard the crunching of her bones.

He did not know what to do with her car. He could not plausibly leave it there. He wished her to come back, but this was now beyond his powers. Lead's personality became more attentive to the other lizards.

He decided to ask Lead what to do with the car, a blue sedan. The lizard resolved to take care of it on one condition. Before finding out what it was, he agreed to it.

He possessed the lizard named Tevitt and together they pushed the car into the woods one night, very late indeed. "If they find it," the lizard named Lead told him, "They will think she ran away."
 
The lizards made a kind of sense, but he remained fearful. He watched the newspapers for notice of her passing, but the woman's name never appeared. He thought it was Sheila.

At one time there had been a skylight, now there was only aluminum foil, papered over the absence on the ceiling. He asked Tevitt to go find a more appropriate covering. Tevitt agreed and suggested taking a few lizards with him to bring back what they could carry or persuade others to transport.

He did not hear the doorbell for a long time after that.

Linda Eddings is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here.

Images by Duncan Johnson.

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