letter to Jim Jarmusch

Dear Jim

I don't know you, but your film, Paterson, knows me. It gets me. 

First the name; your man Paterson is played by Adam Driver. Driver plays a driver, the original driver, Adam. That's odd, to have the actor, himself, bringing the right name for playing a part, the bus driving ur-citizen of William's ur-town. 

The movie is, in part, through the character of Everett, about what it means to be an actor, how acting is tied to personal drama, so the fact that the actor, Adam Driver, is tied into the drama, by his very name, is noteworthy. And more than this, the actor is tied into the film via the character, having been partly written for him. This is evinced in the scene after the heroics in the bar in which you see a photo of Adam Driver in his marine uniform. This is not a staged photograph for the film, right? The actor himself, like Paterson, was in the service. Or perhaps its better to say Paterson, because the actor who played him was in the service, is in the service. Paterson's twin is, in this sense, the man playing him, Adam Driver, and vice versa, just as we are always, in a sense, the character we play.

I am an Adam too (A twin of sorts. Adam 2? Adam 12?). I love to drive. Once I put out a book of poems about driving cab in San Francisco on Kevin Ostedal's Blue Press called, "Men Who Found Out." In that book there is a poem for Ron Padgett.

Ron is a friend and mentor. Once, via an e-mail with Bill Berkson, Padgett claimed that I cheated on a test about how many "Fs" are in a particularly tricky sentence by using the double F in my last name as a "viewfinder." Twin Fs. I can't help but see that now as a precursor to all of that twinning in Patterson.

I also had a memorable moment with Ron standing in front of a group painting by George Schneeman of him and his friends 40 odd years ago, naked and sitting around a living room. I asked him if he remembered it. He said, "I sure do! It was my birthday." He was in his birthday suit.

I don't want to digress TOO much here, but I really want to tell you the story Bill Berkson told me at that show about the glorious Schneeman portrait of Bill, also naked, looking like a god, and how it got its curious yellowish color. It was rescued from an apartment fire. But maybe you've got to see that specifi color of yellow for this story to have any meaning. I've never seen another yellow like it. Speaking of yellow, the first time I met Bill he told me he liked the yellow of my shirt. So that's a hint of how I feel about Bill. 

Okay so back to the movie and driving. My initials are AWD. I see my initials all the time on cars, as if they belong there. I drove taxi-cab in San Francisco all through the 90s. "Very poetic". Like a bus driver, like meteorologist, like a doctor, like a film-maker. Aha!

I loved that you put your own words into the mouth of a ten year old girl in the movie, and the way Laura says about this poem that it is "almost like" Paterson's, which is to say, I suppose, that Jim Jarmusch's poem is almost like Padgett's. That was a nice touch. 

But the thing that gets me is that the girl is so much like my daughter, Sofia, who is 8, and the girl's poem reflects one of hers. "It's almost like one of yours."

Here's the poem. First, some background. One day Sofia and I were looking at the moon behind some clouds and Sofia said it looked like a ghost moon. I said that would be a good name for a band, Ghost Moon. I asked her what would be a good name for the title of the first album and she immediately said, "A Wishing Swirl." I said that was a good title, but now we needed a song with that name. She made up the lyrics and a melody then and there and I tried to keep up writing them down. 

A Wishing Swirl

A wishing swirl falling down a waterfall

As delicate as a rose petal

As strong as a marble hall

How far it falls from way up tall

How far it falls from way up tall

The misty mist has a strange and twisted twist

Like a monk's last kiss 

Like Mona Lisa's fist

Opening into bliss

Opening into bliss

A swirling wish fluttering in the sky 

As if it were a butterfly

On a starry starry night

In different colors very bright

And everything is going right

The actress that plays Laura is a ringer for my wife. There was the scene where Paterson and Laura go to the movies. (I always like going to the movies in a movie.) They watch the movie and Paterson points out that Lara looks like the woman in the movie, "The Island of Dr. Moreau". And suddenly I'm thinking about my wife as a reflection of Laura, who is a reflection of the "Panther" woman in Dr. Moreau, and how strange that kind of exoticism is, and how I'm implicated in this strangeness. I wasn't really so conscious of it before this movie, just how much attraction is based on impulses we are not aware of. I mean I always just thought it was her smile that got me, but if I'm honest it was more than that. And yet, and yet, to echo Paterson's poem to Laura,"There is no one in the whole world like my own pumpkin. And if I lost her I'd rip my heart out and never put it back. How embarrassing."

Pumpkins. Here's one more poem for you before I sign off, more of a song really, about pumpkins.

Pumpkin Seeds

See them grow, watch them grow,

Pumpkin seeds from nothing.

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

Pumpkins shining in the sun.

See them glow, watch them glow.

Jack o' lanterns from nothing.

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

From pumpkins to jack ' lanterns

Carve 'em up with a knife.

Scare all the kids on Halloween.

Betty Lu, she's my grandma.

Betty Lu makes pumpkin pie. 

Pumpkin pie from nothing. 

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.  

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

From pumpkins to pumpkin pie.

Serve it up with cool with cream,

straight from cow, from breast of cow.

 

Thanks for capturing it all in a film. 

Aff,

Adam DeGraff

P.S. Oh yeah, how about when I saw Wu Tang in the city and the sound went out and so they had to do the show a capella? It was better that way! It was like Method Man practicing his Paul Lawrence Dunbar rap in front of the washing machines. A great memory. I love the easter egg in that scene too, the sly reference to Dunbar's poem "The Paradox"