An Actress With Doubts, but Not About Directing

82 Pages·2017·3.61 MB·English

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Gord Downie, Frontman for the Tragically Hip, in His Final Act
Northern Exposures
New Video Game? Who You Gonna Call?
A Day Out With the Architect Moshe Safdie
An Actress With Doubts, but Not About Directing
Maestro With the Turtle Tattoo
The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson
Lorne Michaels Looks Back on ‘Saturday Night Live’
The Pop Life: Alanis Morissette Reveals Her Trials as a Teenage Star
The World of Wonders of Robertson Davies
Unarrested Development: The Actor Michael Cera Is Now Writing and
Directing, Too
A Warrior Architect Wrestles His Demons
The Many Faces of Tatiana Maslaney
INTRODUCTION
WHEN WE SAT DOWN TO compile a book of major Canadian cultural figures
profiled in The Times, we came up with an astoundingly diverse set of people. There
was the French Canadian conductor with a tattoo, a 50-something rocker with the
soul of a poet, an architect with Blackfoot roots and a rebellious Indie actress-
director. Diverse, yes, and many of them no longer living in Canada, but
nonetheless, all very Canadian.
It’s clear that Canada has informed these influencers’ work in so many ways —
culturally, architecturally, aesthetically, musically. The vast spaces, small towns and
spectacular landscapes of their native land show up in written passages and musical
refrains, or it just lingers at the fringes of what they say and do.
Drawn from the pages of The New York Times and The New York Times
Magazine, and spanning the past 35 years, these profiles provide snapshots of 13
notable Canadians at various points in their careers. As is the convention in daily
journalism, most of these write-ups were prompted by the release of a new book,
movie, album or television show.
The earliest is John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1982 piece about Robertson Davies; the
most recent, a 2016 portrait of The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie by Melena Ryzik.
If you feel that vast numbers of important cultural figures have been left out, you
are right. Many wonderful Canadians in the arts are not included, because this is by
no means a comprehensive selection, just a taste of Times profiles. We hope you
savor them.
— DANIEL J. WAKIN; Deputy Editorial Director, NYT Global
GORD DOWNIE, FRONTMAN FOR THE TRAGICALLY
HIP, IN HIS FINAL ACT
BY MELENA RYZIK
AUGUST 21, 2016
IN AN UNPARALLELED MOMENT OF national pride laced with sorrow,
Canada stopped for a few hours on Saturday night to venerate the Tragically Hip,
the band that for many has come closest to defining that country’s cultural identity.
“Thank you,” Gord Downie, the Hip’s frontman, told the crowd from a stage in
Kingston, Ontario, “for keeping me pushing, and keeping me pushing.” In late May,
Mr. Downie, 52, revealed that he had terminal brain cancer. Far from retreating, the
band instead planned a short summer tour, by turns jubilant and wrenching, that has
transfixed much of Canada for the last month.
Kingston, the group’s hometown, was the last stop.
Mr. Downie arrived onstage at the Rogers K-Rock arena — on The Tragically
Hip Way — in a suit and jauntily feathered hat, and, with his four bandmates of over
30 years, tore through a three-hour set of blues-rock hits and lyrical deep cuts. The
mood was triumphal: The concert started after a spontaneous audience rendition of
“O Canada” and ended with three encores.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said he had been a fan since high school,
was there, in a black Tragically Hip T-shirt. “This is a moment that’s going to be
extremely powerful for all Canadians, I know,” he said in a live interview with the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before the show. “Gord and the Tragically Hip
are an inevitable and essential part of what we are and who we are as a country. And
tonight we get to say thanks, and we get to celebrate that.”
With a nationally televised live stream on Saturday, people gathered to witness
what could be Mr. Downie’s last major outing with the Hip, a rock act that is “our
Stones, our Hendrix, our Zeppelin, our Bob Dylan, all wrapped up in one awesome
band,” as one Kingston fan, Wes Guidry, put it.
There were viewing events in hockey arenas, town squares, clubs and restaurants
from the Yukon to Nova Scotia, and in United States towns near the border, like
Plattsburgh, N.Y. “Dear World,” the Toronto police wrote on Twitter on Saturday
morning. “Please be advised that Canada will be closed tonight at 8:30 p.m. Have a
#TragicallyHip day.”
In terms of national attention, the Kingston concert was “analogous to the Super
Bowl,” said Randy Lennox, president of broadcasting and content for Bell Media, a
major Canadian broadcaster.
Mr. Lennox, who previously ran Universal Canada, the Tragically Hip’s label,
and who has known the band members since 1988, said that Mr. Downie is to
Canada what Bono is to Ireland. “This is indigenous, this is a band that is our soul,”
he said. (Mr. Downie has declined interview requests.)
Since its first studio album in 1989, the Hip, as the band is widely known, has
risen from a riff-driven bar band to one whose dense lyrics, touching on hockey
players and heroes of the Canadian wilderness, now invite close reading — “a
proletarian group with an intellectual sensibility,” as the Canadian cultural essayist
and novelist Stephen Marche wrote in The New Yorker. “Small-town hockey fans
howl their biggest anthems in parking lots after games; assistant professors of
Canadian literature listen to their later work while jogging.”
Though they’ve had a few legs up — in 1995 Dan Aykroyd, a longtime fan and
fellow Canadian, brought them to play on “Saturday Night Live” — their success
never translated south. But being a uniquely Canadian phenomenon (they’re on a
stamp) has endeared them even further at home.
“We’re a country that hasn’t really embraced its history just yet,” said the
musician Kevin Drew, of Broken Social Scene. “We’re still trying to figure out what
makes us Canadian, and we have one of the loudest neighbors in the world, so this
band helped a country, and Gord helped people lyrically, slowly start to try to define
themselves.”
With Dave Hamelin, Mr. Drew was a producer on the Hip’s most recent album,
“Man Machine Poem,” which was recorded, he said, before Mr. Downie’s December
cancer diagnosis, and released in June, shortly after the band announced it.
In the studio, Mr. Drew said, he saw the fluidity of three decades of musicianship
among the Hip’s other members: the bassist Gord Sinclair, the guitarists Paul
Langlois and Rob Baker, and the drummer Johnny Fay. “I saw them write a song in
three minutes once,” he said. “It blew my mind.”
And Mr. Downie was as open and gung-ho as a novice. “He would be pacing
around, saying, ‘Let’s go as far as we can,’” Mr. Drew said.
More than 15,000 fans packed the Market Square area of downtown Kingston, Ontario, to watch a live stream of the
Tragically Hip’s concert. (J. Adam Huggins for The New York Times)
“Gord pushes you to be your best,” he added. “That’s why people come to his
shows and sing their guts out, because they feel like their best selves.”
The Hip has had a deep impact on the Canadian musical scene. Allan Reid,
president and chief executive of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences, which presents the Juno Awards, the Canadian Grammys, called the Hip
“the best rock band this country has ever seen.” (The band has earned 14 Junos.)
Geddy Lee, frontman for Rush, for whom the Hip once opened, praised them in
an email for their “blues based, sinewy, guitar rock combined with Gord’s original
poetic style of lyrics.”
He attended one of their Toronto shows this month — “an incredibly heartfelt
and moving experience,” he said, “one I shall never forget.”
And band members continue to mentor younger acts, like Arkells, which opened
for them recently. “There’s a Gord line I love,” from the record “Now for Plan A,”
the Arkells singer, Max Kerman, wrote in an email: “‘We don’t want to do it. We
want to be it.’ Gord committed himself to a life of music and performance art in an
incredibly profound way.”
At a Pearl Jam concert in Wrigley Field in Chicago on Saturday, Eddie Vedder
dedicated the song “Light Years” to the Hip.
Fans scrawled messages to the band on a giant Canadian flag outside Rogers K-Rock Center in Kingston. (J. Adam
Huggins for The New York Times)
“Their poetry is staggering,” said Sarah Polley, the Canadian actress and
filmmaker, who covered the Hip’s song “Courage” for her 1997 film, “The Sweet
Hereafter.” “They are the soundtrack of this country in so many ways.”
Ms. Polley was also at one of their recent Toronto shows.
“It’s been such a gift that they’ve let us say thank you with this tour,” she said in
an email. “I bought a grilled cheese sandwich yesterday and the guy serving me
started talking about them and the two of us just stood there and wept together
without apology or embarrassment.”
The tour has also become a fundraising mission: Mr. Downie, whose cancer,
glioblastoma, is not curable, started a brain cancer research fund at the Sunnybrook
Foundation, a health center affiliated with the University of Toronto, and the
Canadian Cancer Society was also expecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in
donations this weekend, a spokeswoman said.
“The gesture and the courageousness of doing what they were doing wasn’t lost
on anyone,” said Mr. Drew, who was at shows in Toronto and Kingston. Though
Mr. Downie relied on teleprompters for help with lyrics, and was not as kinetic as in
the past, the performances “were exceptional,” Mr. Drew said. “The detail, the care
— they were there and they were present. They pushed themselves.”
In the final moments of many of their recent shows, Mr. Downie has been alone
onstage, looking out into a roaring audience. “It’s an implicit goodbye, without being
overt,” Mr. Lennox, the media executive and Mr. Downie’s longtime friend, said.
But at the end of their show in Kingston, for their much-wondered about final
song, the Hip simply played one of their biggest hits, “Ahead by a Century,” a 1996
acoustic-based pop song about childhood innocence, beloved and performed by
gymnasiums full of Canadian schoolchildren for years.
The night felt, Mr. Drew said, “hopeful.”
Michael Barclay contributed reporting from Kingston, Ontario.
NORTHERN EXPOSURES
BY DAPHNE MERKIN
OCTOBER 24, 2004
IT IS A BRILLIANTLY CLEAR Saturday afternoon in early September, one of
those days when the blueness of the sky seems to be set off to luminous effect by
drifting puffs of cloud. Time slows down everywhere at this hour on a cusp-of-fall
weekend, but here in Clinton, Ontario, a somnolent slip of a town (population 3,500)
that is easy to miss after a three-hour drive from Toronto during which you pass
nothing but mile after flat mile of fields punctuated by grazing cows and horses, the
stillness is so vast that it seems almost cautionary.
This area southwest of Toronto and east of Lake Huron is Alice Munro country,
a place that the acclaimed Canadian writer has described as crucial to her: “It means
something to me that no other country can — no matter how important historically
that other country may be, how ‘beautiful,’ how lively and interesting. I am
intoxicated by this particular landscape. I am at home with the brick houses, the
falling-down barns, the trailer parks, burdensome old churches, Wal-Mart and
Canadian Tire. I speak the language.” Thanks to Munro’s unparalleled ability to
evoke the condition of felt life at both its most essential and most particular — its
“sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations,” as
characterized in her story “Carried Away” — her terrain has become totemic, as real
and familiar as their own backyards and avenues to a rapt and ever growing audience
of readers.
She is, of course, among Canada’s best known and most feted writers, at the
forefront of a list that invariably includes her friend Margaret Atwood and goes on
from there to take in figures like Carol Shields and Timothy Findley before
splintering apart, depending on how you rate Marian Engel, say, or whether you
judge Robertson Davies to be more smoke than fire. (Munro herself dismisses him in
a word as “dead.”) Munro, whose 10th collection of short stories, “Runaway,” will be
published at the end of the month, has succeeded in putting this intractably rural,
unhurried and laconic region firmly on the literary map, rendering its human
commotion — its gothic passions, buried sorrows and forlorn mysteries — in
dazzlingly plain-spoken stories that connect directly with her readers’ interior
narratives and histories of the heart. By paying precise yet generous (although never
sentimental) attention to those aspects of women’s lives that usually go under the
undignified rubric “love troubles” and to the sexual and domestic crises that come in
their wake, Munro has made her presence felt well beyond Canada. Her books have
been translated into nearly 20 languages, including Finnish and Slovak, and she
shows no ebbing of her imaginative powers or her ability to seduce new readers.
Each of the writer’s books has outsold the one before, and although none of them
have become best sellers in the United States, Munro has won a National Book
Critics Circle Award (not to mention every literary prize Canada has to offer).
Munro’s stories have appeared in America over the past three decades, first in
The New Yorker and then in book-length collections that have emerged every few
years since “The Beggar Maid” (which was actually her fourth book) was published
by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979. Her work garnered critical huzzahs right out of the gate
for its clear, un-finicky delineation of complex adult emotions. Along the way, this
spinner of humdrum kitchen-sink entanglements, whose signature is the illuminating
ordinary detail that clarifies everything that leads up to it or the unremarkable yet
pivotal moment that changes everything that comes after it, has earned a reputation
as one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction. “Our Chekhov,” Cynthia
Ozick called her in a vaulting comparison that has become something of an
obligatory tip of the critical hat ever since, bringing ever more stratospheric
analogies to Tolstoy and Flaubert in its wake.
Notwithstanding the fact that Munro’s writing is the sort to prompt a keen
interest in the person behind the writer, she herself has remained tantalizingly out of
reach of her readers. In this age of de rigueur promotional campaigns and personal
publicity, she is famously private, someone who needs to be coaxed into giving
interviews and finds book touring an ordeal. The other point that is constantly being
made about Munro — always in a preemptive fashion suggesting that any further
inquiry into the subject of her personality is an indication of your own insatiably
vulgar TV-addled perspective — is how modest and unassuming she is. Both of these
adjectives crop up repeatedly about her, as though the mystery of who she is and how
this ostensibly contained and genteel creature came to be the excavator of our most
randy desires and our most brazen impulses — our “open secrets,” as the title of one
of her collections has it — is a negligible one. Never mind the ambition and drive,
the all-consuming focus it must take to create those stunningly observed and crafted
stories, year after year, decade after decade, on the part of a writer who, at age 73,
shows no signs of letting up on her production — or on her clear-eyed perceptions.
“I still haven’t claimed being a writer,” Alice Munro observes at our first