Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  July 2002

  Night on Earth: New York

  As the opening credits for Night on Earth begin to roll, we are informed that the film is a Locus Solus Production. A curious name, no doubt unfamiliar to most people, but one that reveals a great deal about Jim Jarmusch’s sensibility—what might be called the “Jarmusch touch”: that inimitable blend of deadpan humor, off-the-wall shenanigans, and exquisitely crafted images. It turns out that Locus Solus is the title of a novel by the eccentric, early-twentieth-century French writer Raymond Roussel, a book admired by the Surrealists and, a generation later, by the American poet John Ashbery—to such an extent that Ashbery and fellow writer Harry Mathews founded a magazine in the late fifties called … Locus Solus.

  Few people know that Jim Jarmusch started out as a poet and that as a student at Columbia he served as one of the editors of the undergraduate literary magazine, the Columbia Review. The primary influences on his early work were Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, and other poets of the New York School. Against the prevailing formalism and academic dryness of American poetry in the 1950s, various insurrections were taking place around the country: the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and, most subversively of all, the gang in New York. A new aesthetic was born. Poetry was no longer perceived as a dull and ponderous quest for universal truth or literary perfection. It stopped taking itself seriously and learned to relax, to poke fun at itself, to delight in the ordinary pleasures of the world. The notion of high art was abandoned in favor of an approach marked by frequent shifts in tone, a penchant for wit and nonsense, discontinuity, and an embrace of popular culture in all its myriad forms. Suddenly, poems were filled with references to comic-strip characters and movie stars. It was a homegrown American phenomenon yet, paradoxically, the sources of this transformation largely came from Europe, in particular France.

  From the start of his life as a filmmaker, Jarmusch has adhered to the principles he learned from these poets. Although his style has continued to evolve over the years, one thing has been constant throughout: his films resemble no one else’s. Unlike most American directors, he has little interest in narrative per se (hence the so-called European flavor of his work), choosing instead to recount shaggy-dog stories filled with loopy asides, unpredictable digressions, and an intense focus on what is happening at each particular moment. Although his dialogue has an off-the-cuff, improvisational quality (in the manner of the New York School poets), it is in fact highly written, acutely sensitive to the nuances of spoken language, the work of a real writer. So much so that some of his most memorable characters are foreigners struggling to master English. Roberto Benigni in Down by Law, for example, or Armin Mueller-Stahl in the New York episode of Night on Earth.

  Which brings me to the subject at hand. Just twenty-three minutes long, the second episode of this five-part film is quintessential Jarmusch, one of the purest, most neatly executed examples of his philosophy of filmmaking. Nothing happens, or so little in the way things traditionally happen in stories that we can almost say there is no story. A man takes a cab from Manhattan to Brooklyn. The end. But every moment of this hilarious, poignant, zany sketch is unforgettable.

  The male characters in Jarmusch’s films tend to be laconic, withdrawn, sorrowful mumblers (Bill Murray in Broken Flowers, Tom Waits in Down by Law, Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai), with an occasional live-wire motormouth charging in to dominate the action. No live wire is more alive, no motormouth is in higher gear than Giancarlo Esposito in the second part of Night on Earth. His performance is so energetic, so tightly sprung, one feels that his entire body might explode at any second. After a languid montage of introductory shots, detailing a number of inanimate objects around the city (a glowing pay phone, a graffiti-covered truck), there he is, standing in the middle of Times Square on a freezing winter night, an oddly dressed black man wearing a grotesque fur hat with dangling earflaps, desperately trying to flag down a cab. It’s a widely known fact of New York life that black men, even black men dressed in suits and ties, have great difficulty getting taxis to stop for them. Esposito shouts at each passing cab, frantically waves his arms, implores each one to stop, but his efforts appear to be doomed. Then, a miracle. A cab pulls up, but when Esposito announces that he wants to go to Brooklyn, the driver steps on the gas and speeds off. This is another widely known fact of New York life, and as a longtime resident of Brooklyn, I can vouch for its accuracy. Taxi drivers are reluctant to take passengers from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Growing more and more agitated, Esposito pulls a wad of money from his pocket and holds it up in the air, proving that his intentions are honest: he can pay; all he wants is to go home. After another cab ignores him, he calls out in frustration, “What, am I invisible, man?” Note the subtlety of the line. The word racism has not been mentioned, but how not to think of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, the classic exploration of what it means to be a black person in America? Whether Jarmusch is making a conscious or unconscious reference to the book is unimportant. The words are delivered in a natural, even humorous way—and yet they sting.

  A moment later, salvation comes in the person of Armin Mueller-Stahl, a neophyte cabbie who has just started working that night. With a kind and open expression on his face, he addresses Esposito in an unmistakable foreign accent: “Come in, sir.” It is a magnificent turn. From invisible man, Esposito has suddenly been transformed into a gentleman. The irony being, of course, that the person who has spoken to him in this way is ignorant of the rules. No American would use the word sir. It has taken a know-nothing immigrant to humanize and give dignity to our unfortunate traveler.

  Then the fun begins. As the two make their way to “Brookland,” the journey is marked by a steady stream of comic mishaps and verbal misunderstandings. To start with, Mueller-Stahl has no idea how to drive a car with an automatic transmission. Using both feet, he alternately presses down the gas pedal and the brake, lurching forward at a ridiculously slow pace. Esposito is so miffed that he threatens to get out and find another cab, but the sad-sack Mueller-Stahl begs him to stay. “You are my most best customer. It is very, very important to me.” Esposito relents, but only on the condition that they switch places and he do the driving. When Mueller-Stahl protests that it isn’t allowed, Esposito bluntly declares, “Yeah, it’s allowed. This is New York.”

  So there we are, the two of them sitting side by side on the front seat, a former clown from East Germany by the name of Helmut and a black man from Brooklyn named YoYo, sporting nearly identical hats on their heads. From this simplest of setups, Jarmusch spins out a series of gags and inane comments worthy of Laurel and Hardy at their best, and whenever there is a lull in the conversation, we see the cab floating through a spectral New York, accompanied by Tom Waits’s impressive and evocative score. Just when we have settled in for what promises to be an entertaining ride, however, a third character appears, and all hell breaks loose. There goes Rosie Perez striding down a street in lower Manhattan, decked out in a black miniskirt and a bright orange jacket. She happens to be YoYo’s sister-in-law, Angela, and he is beside himself with irritation at seeing her out alone. In one of the finest visual moments of the film, YoYo stops the car and rushes to the corner to cut off Angela. The point of view remains with Helmut in the taxi—a long shot of the two Brooklynites arguing in the street—and then the camera cuts to a close-up of Helmut, grinning in fascination at the ferocity of the quarrel.

  YoYo wrestles a struggling Angela into the back of the cab, and when he takes off again, the tone of the sequence abruptly shifts. No more odd-couple banter from the two men in front: a war has broken out between YoYo and Angela, an infantile shouting match that ranks as one of the silliest, funniest, most rambunctious exchanges in all of Jarmusch’s work. Rosie Perez doesn’t merely yell or scream—she shrieks, and in such a high-pitched, nasalized, barely human register that one’s first impulse is to cover one’s ears. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Nearly every word that comes from her mouth
is fuck. And when it isn’t fuck, it’s asshole. Interspersed with such choice tidbits as “You’re wearing your ass on your head.” Or, noticing the nearly identical hats worn by the two men: “What is this, the fuckin’ Rocky and Bullwinkle show?” Not to speak of: shut up, shut up, shut up.

  Nevertheless, Helmut is smitten with Angela and finds her beautiful. When he plays her a little song on his two clown recorders, she finally laughs. And then, almost magically, there is a brief pause as the taxi crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. An awed hush at the beauty of everything around them. And then the fight starts again. YoYo complains that Angela is like a Chihuahua, always gnawing at his ankles. Angela replies that she’ll take a big fucking bite out of his big fucking ass, and Helmut smiles and mutters to himself, “Nice family,” as if he really means it.

  Inevitably, the ride comes to an end. After receiving a final Fuck you! from Angela, YoYo stays behind and does his best to instruct Helmut on how to steer himself back to Manhattan. By way of response, Helmut sticks a red clown nose on his face. The cab takes off, lurching forward in its old brake-and-pedal two-step, and when it comes to the first intersection, it turns left instead of right. Helmut is alone, lost in an unfamiliar world. “Learn some English,” he tells himself. Dark streets, sudden bursts of light, the noise of sirens in the distance, but for the first time the car is no longer jerking along. It appears that Helmut has overcome the problem of the automatic transmission.

  The cab is gliding through the night now, an endless night on earth, and as Helmut removes the clown nose, the expression on his face is one of fear and anxiety. He drives past a traffic accident and a number of police cars. A moment later, he whispers to himself, “New York … New York.”

  And so ends Jim Jarmusch’s little poem about the city he loves.

  2007

  Joe Brainard

  I can’t remember how many times I have read I Remember. I discovered the book soon after it was published in 1975, and in the intervening three and a half decades I have gone back to it once every few years, perhaps seven or eight times in all. The text is not long (just 138 pages in the original edition), but remarkably enough, in spite of these numerous rereadings, whenever I open Joe Brainard’s little masterwork again, I have the curious sensation that I am encountering it for the first time. Except for a few indelible passages, nearly all of the memories recorded in the pages of I Remember have vanished from my own memory. There are simply too many details to hold onto over an extended period of time, too much life is packed into Brainard’s shifting, swirling collage of recollections for any one person to remember it in its entirety, and therefore, even if I recognize many of the entries the instant I start to reread them, there are many others that I don’t. The book remains new and strange and surprising—for, small as it is, I Remember is inexhaustible, one of those rare books that can never be used up.

  A prolific visual artist and occasional writer, Brainard stumbled upon the simple but ingenious composition method of I Remember in the summer of 1969. He was just twenty-seven, but a highly developed and accomplished twenty-seven, a precocious boy artist who had started exhibiting his work and winning prizes as a grade school student in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had landed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side before he turned twenty. By 1969, he was a veteran of the New York art scene, with several one-man shows to his credit, participation in numerous group shows, cover designs for dozens of small literary magazines and books of poetry, stage decors for theater pieces by LeRoi Jones and Frank O’Hara, as well as comic strip collaborations (most of them hilarious) with a long list of poet friends. Collages, large and small assemblages, drawings, and oil paintings—his output was varied and incessant—and on top of that, he also found time to write. Before the miraculous breakthrough of 1969, Brainard had published poems, diaries, and short prose pieces in a number of downtown literary magazines associated with the New York School, and he had already developed a distinctive style of his own—charming, whimsical, unpretentious, frequently ungrammatical, and transparent. Those qualities are all present in I Remember, but now, almost by accident, he had hit upon an organizing principle, and the writing takes off and soars into an altogether different register.

  With typical nonchalance and acumen, Brainard described the exhilaration he felt while working on his new project in a letter written that summer to poet Anne Waldman: “I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I am enjoying it while I can.”

  I remember … It seems so obvious now, so self-evident, so fundamental and even ancient—as if the magic formula had been known ever since the invention of written language. Write the words I remember, pause for a moment or two, give your mind a chance to open up, and inevitably you will remember, and remember with a clarity and a specificity that will astonish you. This exercise is now used wherever writing courses are taught, whether for children, college students, or the very old, and the results never fail to summon up long-forgotten particulars of lived experience. As Siri Hustvedt wrote in her recent book, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves: “Joe Brainard discovered a memory machine.”1

  But once you discover the machine, how do you use it? How do you harness the memories that come flooding through you into a work of art, into a book that can speak to someone other than yourself? Many people have written their own versions of I Remember since 1975, but no one has come close to duplicating the spark of Brainard’s original, of transcending the purely private and personal into a work that is about everybody—in the same way that all great novels are about everybody. It strikes me that Brainard’s achievement is the product of several forces that operate simultaneously throughout the book: the hypnotic power of incantation; the economy of the prose; the author’s courage in revealing things about himself (often sexual) that most of us would be too embarrassed to include; the painter’s eye for detail; the gift for storytelling; the reluctance to judge other people; the sense of inner alertness; the lack of self-pity; the modulations of tone, ranging from blunt assertion to elaborate flights of fancy; and then, most of all (most pleasing of all), the complex musical structure of the book as a whole.

  By music, I mean counterpoint, fugue, and repetition, the interweaving of several different voices throughout the nearly fifteen hundred entries of the book. A theme is picked up for a while, then dropped, then picked up again, in the same way that a horn might sound for a few moments in an orchestral piece, then give way to a violin, which in turn will give way to a cello, and then, all but forgotten now, the horn will suddenly return. I Remember is a concerto for multiple instruments, and among the various strings and woodwinds Brainard employs in his free-floating, ever-changing composition are the following:

  —Family (more than seventy entries), such as “I remember my father in a tutu. As a ballerina dancer in a variety show at church”; “I remember when father seemed too formal, and daddy was out of the question, and dad too fake-casual. But, seeming the lesser of three evils, I chose fake-casual”; “I remember the only time I saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.”

  —Food (a hundred entries), including butter and sugar sandwiches, salt on watermelon, chewy candy in movie theaters, and repeated allusions to ice cream, as in “I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream.”

  —Clothes (roughly ninety entries), including pink dress shirts, pillbox hats, and fat ties with fish on them. (Brainard’s earliest ambition was to become a fashion designer.)

  —Movies, Movie Stars, TV, and Pop Music (more than a hundred entries), including references to Perry Como, Liberace, Hopalong Cassidy, Dinah Shore, Tab Hunger, Marilyn Monroe (several times), Montgomery Clift, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Jane
Russell, Lana Turner, the Lone Ranger, and umpteen others. “I remember that Betty Grable’s legs were insured for a million dollars”; “I remember rumors about what Marlon Brando had to do to get his first acting job”; “I remember Gina Lollobrigida’s very tiny waist in Trapeze.”

  —School and Church (roughly a hundred entries), such as “I remember how much, in high school, I wanted to be handsome and popular”; “I remember an American history teacher who was always threatening to jump out of the window if we didn’t quiet down. (Second floor)”; “I remember the clock from three to three-thirty”; “I remember two years of cheating in Spanish class by lightly penciling in the translations of words.”

  —The Body (more than a hundred entries), ranging from intimate personal confessions—“I remember examining my cock and balls once and finding them absolutely disgusting”—to observations of others: “I remember a very big boy named Teddy and what hairy legs his mother had. (Long black ones squashed flat under nylons.)”

  —Dreams, Daydreams, and Fantasies (more than seventy entries), often pertaining to sex (“I remember sexual fantasies of making it with a stranger in the woods”) but just as often not, such as “I remember day dreams of being a singer all alone on a big stage with no scenery, just one spotlight on me, singing my heart out, and moving my audience to total tears of love and affection.”

  —Holidays (fifty entries), centering around Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Halloween, and the Fourth of July. “I remember after opening packages what an empty day Christmas is.”