“Life feels like a gift you didn’t ask for. You appreciate the gesture. You just don’t know what to do with it.”
Eli (Tom Dunne) is a self-described “traveling man”. He is on a journey to walk to the ocean from the arid desert outside of Los Angeles. He cannot see to travel by car or bus or plane. Why does he need to do this? Well, he is a compulsive and inveterate questioner, and his questions make up the majority of the haunting voiceover that seems to follow him, or drive him on. The questions he asks are the big ones: Why am I here? What does God want from me? Is there a God? Is He for me or against me? What is expected of me? What does it mean to love? To hope? What is the nature of things? What is my place in the universe?
Perhaps he walks because these questions take time to percolate. Rilke tells us that we must “live the questions”.
When asked why he is walking to his destination, Eli replies, with a slight question in his voice, “To prolong hope.”
Eli is the protagonist of Jim Akin‘s striking feature debut, After the Triumph of Your Birth. Eli’s story is woven through with the stories of two other wanderers, dreamers, wounded souls.
Jim Akin is a musician and still photographer. Coming out of Akin’s love of the striking image, the possibilities inherent in proper framing (not to mention plain old excellent location scouting), After the Triumph of Your Birth sounds, on the face of it, like it might be a visual collage set to beautiful music (composed by Jim Akin and his wife, the legendary singer Maria McKee, who also plays one of the key roles in the film). And yes, there is a collage aspect to After the Triumph of Your Birth. The images are unforgettable. Sometimes they are disturbing, alienating. They call up the poetic resonances of Haskell Wexler’s best work, or of Wim Wenders’ dreamy version of America, put so palpably on film in Paris, Texas.
Eli walks through a landscape both familiar and dreamlike. After the Triumph of Your Birth is a story of California, too, Los Angeles in particular. It’s the Los Angeles peeking through the cracks in Mulholland Drive, in parts of the Valley portrayed in Punch-Drunk Love. Los Angeles is often portrayed (or thought of) as a place of glittering boulevards, glamorous palm trees, sports cars, beautiful rich people, the movie industry. But there is another Los Angeles, coursing alongside the familiar: gritty industrial outskirts, old-school signage, tired and yet still-vibrant back-lot energy, wide open spaces blasted by sunlight and architectural wonders like viaducts, canals, abandoned bridges damaged by earthquakes and general weather-related age, empty storefronts. California was always a place of dreams, long before Hollywood co-opted that position. It is the great Western border, the end of the road. It took great gumption and fortitude for pioneers to make it that far. Eli, with his dusty boots and battered suitcase with a cloth handle, is in that pioneer tradition.
He’s not running from anything, although he is haunted along the way by memories, of his “cool cat” father, of his rather monstrous and yet beautiful mother. There is a sense that he must keep moving forward. A preacher joins up with him for a bit, talking to him about Jesus and salvation. Eli listens politely. The preacher asks, “And what is it that you are doing with your life?” Eli responds, simply, “I’m trying to find it.”
Jim Akin’s eye roves the landscape, finds the interesting, the unique, the memorable, the evocative. One of the great pleasures of the film is the photography:
Although Eli is the clear lead, the other characters help us burrow deeper into the themes of searching and questioning for meaning.
When we first meet Eva, played by the wonderful Tessa Ferrer (granddaughter of Rosemary Clooney and Jose Ferrer, making her feature-length debut here), she is talking to her sister Millicent (Maria McKee) about her writing class. She is working on a story and she is not sure what to do with it. She is “stuck”. We also come to see that she is stuck in her life, too. At night, she works in what looks like an old-school dance hall, going home with men for money. The money helps. She won’t be doing this forever. She is also a singer, and carries her guitar around. But she says to Millicent that she feels like a “spider in a bathtub”, an image of helplessness and being trapped. You get the sense that Eva is trying to write her way out of that bathtub. (There were times, watching the film, when I wondered if all of the characters were being “written” by Eva, if everyone we saw were “rough drafts” of the stories Eva was working on.)
And then there is Millicent, played by Maria McKee. This is her feature-film debut as well, and she is gorgeous onscreen, honest and raw. Millicent is a survivor, but she is barely holding on when we first meet her. Millicent is a music teacher, working out of her own home, teaching guitar to children. She loves her work. She is dedicated to the kids she teaches. She is also unable to recover from a broken heart. She ruminates, obsesses, weeps, over her lost love, whose name was Joseph. She, too, is “stuck”. She lies in the pew of a church, hand over her face. She re-reads his last letter, sobbing in a way that tore at my heart. She has heartfelt deep conversations with her friend, Sister Roisin, a nun, played by the gorgeous and talented Irish actress, Maria Doyle Kennedy. I’ve been a fan of Kennedy’s for some time (starting from The Commitments, and she has a small part in The Matchmaker, which is hilarious and sweet: “I do have a room for you, although it is a bit ……. bijou.”) I was thrilled recently to see her in a big juicy meaty part as Mr. Bates’ vindictive ex-wife on Downton Abbey. Millicent and Sister Roisin walk through a park on a foggy night, talking about the nature of love. It is a tough conversation, and Sister Roisin’s advice is not what Millicent wants to hear. Akin lets the conversation play out, lets us linger in it. It’s a bold choice, one that is so refreshing in today’s quick-cut short-attention-span universe. People do talk like this “in real life”, and so why don’t we see it more often? It’s not cinematic? Bull shit it’s not.
While Millicent’s life is stopped dead in its track by the dissolution of her love affair, life of course goes on. She has one student, a little boy named Paul (a remarkable young actor named Dean Ogle). His mother is a floozy, always meeting up with men at short notice, leaving the boy alone in the house. He walks the couple of miles to Millicent’s house for his lesson. Millicent worries about him. She doesn’t have children herself, but she is a parent to this young lonely boy. He sees her as a safe haven. He writes songs with lyrics that disturb Millicent, in their expression of despair and hopelessness.
These three characters intersect, reflect, and converge. One night, Eli dances with Eva at the dance hall where she works. They go to a motel. They negotiate price, but with an undercurrent of real tenderness in the exchange. When they make love, Eva tells him to turn off the lights. It’s easier to dream in the dark. When they wake up the next morning, they talk about their lives, where they are going, and why. They go for breakfast. They walk through a deserted industrial landscape, talking, jesting, lots of word-play and deflection. Eli seems to want to get to know Eva. What does SHE want? He knows what HE wants. He wants to get to the ocean. But what about her?
Eva seems uncomfortable with the questioning. We think back to the first time we saw her, telling Millicent how “stuck” she feels, how trapped. It is the human condition.
In such a film, filled to the brim with questions, it makes sense that it would be haunted by a surreal character known as The Answer Man. The Answer Man wears a slick suit, a fedora, black-and-white spats, and mocks Eli’s internal questions with glib answers. He shows up everywhere. He lives nowhere. He is the voice inside all of us that tells us we can’t amount to anything, our quest is pointless, we deserve nothing more than what is right in front of us. The Answer Man is played by former Possum Dixon member Rob Zabrecky. He dances on the horizon like a vision of death.
The Answer Man’s words unfurl across the screen, like a sing-along at a late-night movie house. It makes a mockery of seriousness, of depth, of internal uncertainty. He is often accompanied by two tap-dancing gun molls, corrupt, seductive, and identical.
The device of The Answer Man could easily have tipped into parody, but somehow it does not. Jim Akin uses it sparingly, hauntingly. You forget about The Answer Man for long stretches of time, lulled into the dynamic between Eva and Eli, or caught up in the situation with Millicent and her young student. But The Answer Man always returns. He is around every corner, lurking in the shadows of wet alleys, waiting for you.
Answer Man sneers: “What is love? What does God want? I think God is sick of your fucking questions.”
After the Triumph of Your Birth is filled with music. There are soulful songs, playful songs, terrifying songs, with themes re-visited again and again. I’ve been a fan of Maria McKee for years. A singer and a songwriter, her voice aches with pain and loss, but also a burning desire to express, to share, to communicate. The music is used artfully here, with a couple of actual “numbers” performed. Everyone here is musical. Many of the characters, although articulate, find themselves in a wordless state. Eva is a writer who can’t write. Eli is a man of few words. Millicent is competent in her teaching, and falling apart in her emotional life. Little Paul is neglected by his mother, and fearful of his peers. Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.
After the Triumph of Your Birth is a poetic film, in the way that poetry can burrow into the truth of things by focusing on the unique, the small, the seemingly casual. The film is surreal, on the border of dreams and nightmares, and deeply personal. It’s not afraid to lighten the mood with the goofiest of humor (two ferrets have an existential argument about Life? Oh yes!), and it’s also not afraid to swim in the questions, to let the questions lie there, unanswered, and yet fully explored.
The first time we see Maria McKee as Millicent on screen, she is reading poetry to her young student, Paul. It is Pablo Neruda’s poem “Poetry”:
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
The whole film can be said to be an extension of Neruda’s imagery. Everyone is summoned, everyone wants to be a pure part of something. A heart “broke loose on the wind” seems to be the desired result, and yet don’t forget that pesky word “broke”. Nobody escapes without pain in this life. In Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, the name “Eli” is a variant of “God”. There is a Biblical aspect to Eli’s time in the desert, the 6 days it takes him to get to the ocean. It’s a lonely world out there. Eli must keep moving. He is looking for redemption, solace, freedom. His heart breaks loose on the wind, propelled on by “fever or forgotten wings”.
Maybe it’s time to stop forgetting. Maybe it’s time to remember those wings.
The Fun of It is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.
Oh, Roger Angell.
He is, to this day, a regular contributor to The New Yorker (that’s how I first got to know him), and was also its fiction editor for years. He is in his 90s now, but still around. And if I see he has written something, anywhere, anytime, I clear the deck to make room for it. His pieces require room. Not because they are daunting or difficult, but because they are internally vast. He writes about sports (mainly), and baseball in particular (mainly). His essays on baseball rank among the most beautiful sports writing in existence. There is so much competition in sports writing, so many voices clamoring to be heard, so many people trying to describe what it is about baseball that hooks its fan so deeply. Roger Angell is the bar, he’s the one to beat. Nobody does it like him. His pieces are so pleasing, too, not just in nerdy detail and sweeping knowledge of his topic, but in format and voice. It pleases me to read him in the same way I find iced coffee pleasing on a hot day, something to savor and linger over.
I remember in the week following 9/11, New Yorker writers each wrote a couple of paragraphs. Much of it I avoided (too raw), although I still remember John Updike’s piece, and I raced towards Angell’s, because I felt an enormous and urgent need to hear what he had to say. Not that he would tell me what to think, or how to interpret, or reflect my own feelings, nothing as boring as that. But because I knew his prose would be perfect, I knew he would provide a vast space for reflection: the man always always rises to the occasion.
The following piece is short (as most “Talk of the Town” pieces are), and dates from spring training time, 1998.
Roger Angell (although he doesn’t name himself in the piece until the final paragraph where suddenly he blazes forth with the “I” narrator – a startling and emotional device) travels to the Giants’ spring training stadium out in Scottsdale, Arizona. Willie Mays, now 66 years old, sits in the clubhouse. Rookies stream in and out of the locker room, talking to reporters, hanging out at their lockers, and Angell says he has a desire to pull them aside and say, “Do you have any idea how this man played?”
With only a couple of paragraphs, Angell sets the scene. Willie Mays is a long way away from his starting years in the 1950s, and when reporters come up to him to ask him about his legendary career, or the same old plays he is always asked about, he either pretends not to remember or seems uninterested in the discussion. It is a typical athlete move: you know Willie Mays remembers, you know Willie Mays has no doubt of how great he was, but it’s poor form to sit around bragging. Sure, athletes on occasion pound their chests and shout, “I am the greatest”, but baseball players tend to talk more about teamwork, and “well, it was a good effort from all of us, although yeah, that grand slam felt good …” Anyone who spends baseball season watching those post-game press conferences knows what I’m talking about.
So Roger Angell, who doesn’t name himself, but coyly says “a visiting senior writer from back East”, happens to bring up one play that sparks Willie May’s memory. The famous Billy Cox play.
What I love about Roger Angell’s writing is, yes, its easy elegance, its clear emotional quality, but also … how suddenly it can launch you into the nerdiest of geeky excitement. He is not afraid of it. That is why he became a writer in the first place, to express those types of feelings, to try to put into words what baseball is, to the players, to the fans, to everyone.
The astonishing feat of Willie Mays’ throw that day reminds me of another miracle of space-time three-dimensional awareness only given to genius athletes – the mid-air pause (a post about Rudolf Nureyev and Coco Crisp, of all things.)
And watch how Angell brings in the “I”. It’s a bold move. It works.
Mays, in self-protection, has developed a selective memory and conversational openers from his visitors about his celebrated overhead catch against Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series or the four-homer game in 1961 no longer light up the Proustian hot stove. Nor do knowing references to any of the other lifetime six hundred and sixty dingers bring much response – not the homer that beat Warren Spahn, 1-0, in the fifteenth inning (eyeroll, with incomprehensible murmur), or the monster blow against the Astros’ Claude Raymond after Mays had fouled off thirteen consecutive fastballs (“Grmpf. How’d you know about that?”). This year, though, a visiting senior writer from back East got lucky when he brought up an early Maysian catch and throw against the Dodgers – the Billy Cox play.
“Damn!” Mays cried excitedly. “You saw that? You were there?”
Yes, the writer had been there – as a fan at the Polo Grounds. “August, 1951,” he said. “Cox was the base runner at third. You caught the ball running full tilt toward right, turned in midair, and threw him out at the plate. You threw before you could get turned around – let the ball go with your back to the plate. The throw went to the catcher on the fly – it must have been Westrum – and he tagged Cox out, sliding.”
“You got it!” Mays said. “I’ve been sayin’ this for a long time, and nobody here believes me.” He was kidding, of course, but his voice had come up at last, almost the old, high Willie piping. “Now, tell ’em how it was.”
I told it again – it was easy because I’d never seen such a play, before or since – and, as I did, it seemed to me that Willie Mays and I could still see the long, curving flight of the white ball through the afternoon light, bang into the big mitt, and the slide and the amazing out, and together remember the expanding moment when the staring players on the field and those just emerging from the dugouts, and the shouting fans, and maybe even the startled twenty-year-old rookie center fielder himself, now retrieving his fallen cap from the grass, understood that something new and electric had just begun to happen to baseball.
If James Joyce had met Nora Barnacle on June 15, then Bloomsday would be on June 15. But, as it happens, James and Nora went out walking through Dublin on June 16. That is why Bloomsday is celebrated on the 16th. Got it?
I posted this photo on Facebook to express my annoyance. My mother and my sisters showed up to commiserate. The conversation went as follows.
Me: It would be like celebrating July 4 on July 3.
Mum: ????
Siobhan: Totally cheating. It’s not on freaking June 15th!
Me: Exactly!!
Jean: Hate this!
Jean: They should at least say “Bloomsday Eve”…
Me: I haven’t seen so many annoyed O’Malley siblings in one place since they re-worded the Nicene Creed.
Elvis and his father, Vernon, in the half-filled pool in the first house Elvis bought, on Audobon Drive (I drove by the house on my last visit to Memphis). Elvis had a swimming pool dug, and was basically in the process of filling it via garden hose. Adorable. Absurd. Wertheimer got such great shots. This one borders on the surreal. Wertheimer had to borrow a swimsuit to join his famous subject in the pool.
I have not read Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (although I love the movie Adaptation), but judging from the “Talk of the Town” pieces she’s written, included in this collection, I think I finally need to check her out. I love people who sniff out the odd weird story, I love people who see something random, or who ask themselves questions, and then set out to find the answers. Of course I care about these things more if the person can write about it in a compelling way. Like Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote Seabiscuit (and I have not read her latest but so many people have told me to read it). She’s a phenomenal writer, but she’s also a person who senses great stories, she is someone who sniffs out major stories that have not been told yet. Once you read Seabiscuit, you cannot believe that someone hadn’t gotten to the story first!! How had this not been told already??
Susan Orlean’s stuff is more delicate than Hillenbrand’s, more ephemeral. That was the joke of Charlie Kaufman’s script Adaptation. He literally went crazy trying to adapt The Orchid Thief (which, if I recall correctly, started as a New Yorker article). He finally just put his own struggles with adapting her work INTO his screenplay. I love that movie.
The following “Talk of the Town” piece, from 1987, displays her gifts. Not just as a writer (and she is a very fine one), but as someone who would look at signs in a grocery market, and wonder: “Who wrote these fabulous signs? There’s a story there.” She observes, she’s like a blood-hound, sniffing around for the unique, the special, the not-yet-told.
So. Fairway Produce Market, here in New York City.
It’s rightly famous, it’s a great grocery store right in the middle of OUTRIGHT CHAOS, with great selections of produce, breads, cheeses, and every other damn thing. Seriously, if you live in New York City then you know what grocery stores are normally like, mid-city, and this one is particularly good.
BUT. Susan Orlean notices that the signs that are placed in the middle of displays of food have a certain … how you say … unique voice. I won’t try to put it into words, the excerpt does a great job with examples. But she wonders: who the heck is writing these fascinating signs at Fairway? She finds out. She talks to the guy. She hears all about his life, his philosophy on food (he’s mainly a Cheese guy), and also his viewpoints on the proper qualities of SIGNS. He’s famous.
It’s a wonderful little piece. Here is an excerpt.
Mr. Jenkins’ specialty at Fairway is cheese, but his real passion is writing chatty and enticing signs for all the store’s products. A few of the Fairway signs just do their job – they say something simple, like “NEW CROP YAMS” or “CRISPY WESTERN ICEBERG SOLD AT COST PRICE” – but those are made by the other Fairway partners, who figure that a sign’s a sign, especially when you’re in a hurry and there are crowds stretching from the cash register to the back door. Mr. Jenkins’ signs have become something like required reading among shoppers in the neighborhood – they can be informative, argumentative, comic, autobiographical, or sassy – and whatever time he finds between checking cheese orders he spends making them.
The signs are about five by seven inches and are made of white tagboard. Mr. Jenkins hand-letters them with bright-red or orange or blue or purple laundry markers. One of his signs that day said:
HOOP CHEESE: NO FAT! NO SALT!
AN INTRIGUING MARRIAGE
OF WET COTTON AND LIBRARY PASTE
“I’m very opinionated about cheese,” he explained to us, and he pointed out another sign, which said:
MIMOLETTE: HARD, BLAND. DE GAULLE’S
FAVORITE,
WHICH FIGURES. I DON’T KNOW WHY,
IT JUST DOES.
WE STOCK IT BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE
CHEESE.
His all-time favorite sign is no longer in service, but Mr. Jenkins was so pleased with it that he saved it for display. It’s stapled to the store’s back wall, and says:
RAW SEX
FRESH FIGS
SAME THING, 49 CENTS
Some of Mr. Jenkins’ signs acquaint shoppers with people who supply choice items or who figure in his interest in food. On signs here and there throughout the store are mentions of Ted and Sally (makers of Wieninger cheese), Laura (California chèvre), Jane and Bo (pie bakers), Nana (Mr. Jenkins’ grandmother, who introduced him to kohlrabi), Dr. Scott Severns (his dentist), and Al Grimaldi (bread baker). “I think it’s important to know where food is from – that’s why I name some of the suppliers,” he said. “I wanted to write about my grandmother because she really taught me about the value of fresh foods, and my dentist just asked me to order sorrel for him, so I thought I’d mention him, too.” Some signs have won Mr. Jenkins gratitude from customers. His treatise “NEVER WASH A MUSHROOM!” was very popular, for example. Other signs, however, have been controversial. A sign on some Illinois goat cheese asserting that the cheese was exciting but Illinois was really boring offended so many shoppers that for a while he had to post a note beside it admitting that he was from Missouri and considered it even more boring than Illinois.
Mr. Jenkins, who is late-thirtyish, curly-haired, blue-eyed, and barrel-chested, told us that he moved to New York fourteen years ago to become an actor. His career went well – he played the Dean & DeLuca counterman in “Manhattan” and had a shot at a major role in the soaps – but he soon realized that his day job as a cheese man was making him happier than his acting did. He decided to get serious about food, and he discovered that the thing that made him happiest of all was driving around Europe looking at food and finding the villages that his favorite wines and cheeses were named for. He also liked finding towns famous for their sauces. He more or less gave up acting, and seven years ago he joined Fairway. Today, Mr. Jenkins has credentials in cheese – he is America’s only Master Cheesemonger, which means he’s an elected member of the Guilde des Maitre-Fromagers, Compagnon du Saint-Uguzon – and he manages to satisfy his hunger for an audience by making signs. He recently described this professional odyssey in a sign for cornichons:
WHEN I GOT STARTED IN THIS BUSINESS
13 YEARS AGO, I
THOUGHT CORNICHONS WERE LITTLE
CORN COBS.
AND NOW LOOK AT WHAT A GOURMET
I’VE BECOME.
MY GOD, LIFE IS AMAZING.
Here is the ongoing Shuffle I’ve had running for a couple of weeks. I pop in and out of it, as I travel by bus, by car, or take a run along the cliffs. The Shuffle is eternal, always waiting for me when I return to it. This is a particularly wacky one. I mean, “The Purple People Eater” shows up, okay?
I’ve been wanting to write about him for a while! I love him. Been following his career from the start. I love The Royal Tenanbaums, Darjeeling Limited, and I also love The Wedding Crashers, Marley & Me, and Starsky & Hutch. And, of course, The Internship, which I loved in an unabashed fashion.
David Thomson concludes his entry on John Sayles in his The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by saying that he believes the novel may be “his true calling”. David Thomson is sometimes spot-on, and sometimes he is completely way off, but I think that’s an interesting observation. John Sayles has taken such an independent individualistic path. He started out as a novelist and a short-story writer. He got a MacArthur Fellows grant (the “genius” one). He directed shows in summer stock. He wrote screenplays for Roger Corman. He had a full life and career before he threw his hat into the film-maker ring. His first film was Return of the Secaucus 7.
He wrote and directed the film. It was made for $40,000 (money Sayles had earned from his writing). The film made back that money tenfold. It came out in 1980 and was an important symbol for the independent film movement. It’s a quiet story, friends talking, playing basketball. You can see how many of the films that came out in the 80s that were similar (The Big Chill, even the John Hughes pictures) were inspired to some degree by Secaucus 7.
Sayles also stood out for his crowd-pleasing streak, and even today, the movies he writes, directs, and edits are designed to appeal to anyone interested in involved stories and complex characters. But it all started with the directly conveyed, fundamentally entertaining Return Of The Secaucus 7, which presents a reunion of former student radicals and surveys how the free-love generation deals with a developing desire to settle down.
I think the first Sayles movie I saw was Baby It’s You, and that was sheerly on the strength of Roger Ebert’s recommendation. But I went on to see all of them, Lone Star, Secret of Roan Inish and the others. I like his dedication to talk, in this oh-so-visual medium (as everyone keeps telling us), and I like his core group of actors, his ensemble.
The following “Talk of the Town” piece, by Veronica Geng, is from 1981. Secaucus 7 was playing for a “brief run” at the Quad Cinema (which is still there, and still showing independent films. My cousin Mike’s film Certainty had a “brief run” there as well.) Geng meets up with Sayles to talk with him about his career, his writing, horror films, and Secaucus 7. The entire piece is one long quote from Sayles, which is fantastic. There’s no editorial comments, nothing in between us and him. It’s a good format, especially if the interviewee knows how to tell a story and talk, which Sayles clearly does.
Here is an excerpt where Sayles talks about working with actors and the editing process.
I love the detail about how Sayles bought an editing machine and spent a night reading the manual. That’s how guerrilla this whole thing was.
I had no pressure but from myself, and a responsibility to the actors – that they look good. If you’re an actor in a film, you don’t have an audience to tell you whether it’s working; you only have a bunch of technicians – who are worrying about focus and stuff – and the director. I’m the only net they have. So I told them, “Any time you feel you have a better take in you, tell me. I will always use the best acting take when I start editing. If it’s not the best technical take, that doesn’t matter.” Because the important thing about this film – it isn’t true of horror movies necessarily – is that you believe in the people. It helped that we were living together in a ski lodge and that they had to cook together and play volleyball together. I was paying them about eighty dollars a week and room and board, which is about what they had been getting in summer stock. I said, “If this movie makes any money, which I doubt, you’ll get up to Screen Actors Guild minimum for the year.” The same with the technicians.
Editing is the best part. You are just there with the film, making the story out of the film. You learn what you covered wrong. You learn things about writing, because you realize that a scene plays without all this dialogue or that you need more dialogue here or some sound in the background. I rented a flatbed editing machine and spent a night going through this damn manual – it was like Christmas Eve and trying to figure out how to put a bicycle together. I cut for one or two hours a day; I was doing all this screenwriting to pay for the editing machine – five hundred dollars a month. With a couple of sequences that are pure editing – a basketball sequence and some diving – I was able to play around. Most of it was salvaging. The time transitions are in the lines, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to shoot a lot of footage and carve a movie out of it. Film stock – on most budgets it’s a tiny fraction of the budget, on ours it was a third. In Poland and India, they shoot about four to one – they just don’t have much Kodak film. In Poland, they’re on the state, so there’s no overtime; they just rehearse the hell out of things, with the camera but without pulling the trigger and exposing the film, and when they’re ready to go they shoot it. So very often they get great stuff in one take. But it would cost a fortune to do that here.
The main thing I don’t like about the film business is that you do too much work that doesn’t have anything to do with filmmaking. It’s like Karl Wallenda saying that when he’s on the wire he’s alive and the rest is waiting. When you’re writing or directing a film, you’re alive, and the rest is advertising.
Although many “Talk of the Town” pieces have to do with famous people, notable celebrities doing something interesting in the New York area, there are also pieces that have nothing to do with famous people. The point of the “Talk of the Town” is to give small slivers of glimpses into certain sub-cultures in New York. They are meant to be “in-miniature”. A couple of features that were ongoing over the years were letters from someone referred to as “the long-winded lady”, and her letters would be posted periodically in all their gossipy fascination. If something like a Gourmet Food Show is happening, a New Yorker person will visit, and find an interesting unique “way in” to the event. Put all together, you get a great sense of the bustling craziness, all the shit going on in this gorgeous and intimidating metropolis. Sure, famous people hang out here, and visit here, and tour here, but the “Talk of the Town” always had a wider scope than just reporting on the lives of the rich and famous.
The following piece is from 1977 and is by Mark Singer. He opens with a confession that he has let his subscription to the magazine Taxi Drivers Voice slide, and he misses it, because it is one of the best ways to put “your finger on the pulse” of New York. Taxi Drivers Voice is the magazine for the Local 3036 Taxi Drivers Union, and deals with all things Yellow Cab. Singer mentions he picked up a copy and came across an op-ed column about “taxi driver jokes”. The op-ed columnist, a taxi driver himself, of course, said that yes, comedians love to make jokes about taxi drivers, but we should try to have a good sense of humor about it and not take it personally. Singer says that reading the op-ed column made him think that taxi drivers see themselves as “an oppressed minority”, which is hysterical. Singer then thinks to himself about all of the “taxi driver jokes” he knows, and realizes that … Huh. I don’t know any taxi driver jokes. Is there a surplus of jokes about taxi drivers of which he is wholly unaware? How could that be??
Singer then goes to visit the Local 3036 headquarters to speak to Ben Goldberg, who is the president of Local 3036 and editor of the Taxi Drivers Voice, to get some clarification. Singer basically wants to hear some “taxi driver jokes”. As Singer sits in Ben Goldberg’s office, Goldberg’s son Larry comes in. Larry is also a reporter for Taxi Drivers Voice, also a cab driver, who does a stand-up routine at comedy clubs on the side. Singer asks him about his routine, hoping to hear about all the jokes about taxi drivers, but no, Larry tells him he mainly jokes about “dieting and television commercials”.
Singer keeps asking questions along the lines of: “Tell me a joke told on television lately by Johnny Carson about taxi drivers that may have ruffled some feathers?” Nobody can come up with one. Larry Goldberg comes up with one, but it’s not a joke about taxi drivers, as Mark Singer points out to Larry, it’s actually a riddle involving a tow-truck.
The piece is very funny, and is representative of what “Talk of the Town” does best: mini sketches of interesting people, direct quotes, and a light hilarious tone. Keep it light. Don’t pontificate. Not the point here. The point here is to give the readers a glimpse into an interesting world, and do it in only 6 paragraphs.
So while it is true that “taxi driver jokes” may not be as big a deal as that op-ed columnist seemed to think (nobody can even come up with a proper “taxi joke”), a couple of the cab drivers in the office enter into the conversation and start telling funny stories about some of their fares, and finally, finally, one of them tells a joke that is ABOUT a taxi driver. And it made me laugh out loud.
It’s purely local humor. If you don’t live in New York, you might not get why the punchline is funny.
But that’s the way it goes. This is in The New Yorker after all.
Anyone who has ever tried to get a Manhattan-borough cab go to Brooklyn, or, God forbid, New Jersey, will understand!
Good stuff. Here’s an excerpt, where people start regaling Mark Singer with funny stories on the job (but not, strictly speaking, “taxi jokes”).
“O.K., then, I’ve got one,” said Ben Goldberg, who had come in and taken a seat on the couch. “I don’t know if you’d call this a joke, but it’s a true story that once happened to me in Brooklyn. I picked up a guy at the corner of Marcy Avenue and Broadway, and I heard him say, ‘Keep on Broadway.’ So I’m driving and driving, and all the way he’s saying what sounds like ‘Keep on Broadway. Keep on Broadway.’ Finally, we get to the end of Broadway, where it runs into Fulton Street, and I turn to him and say, ‘Now which way?’ And the passenger says he wants out at Keap on Broadway – so I realized that all along he really meant Keap Street on Broadway, but I thought he’d been telling me to keep going on Broadway. Get it?”
As Mr. Goldberg finished recounting this incident, a retired driver named Howard Richman appeared in the office with a question about some union matter. ‘Hey, Howie,’ said Mr. Goldberg, “you know any taxi-driver jokes?”
Mr. Richman did not. However, he did summon up a story in the Keap-on-Broadway vein, about a young couple who wanted to be driven to a Manhattan night club but were taken instead to a garbage dump in Astoria, Queens. “What they wanted was some joint called The City Dumb, but I gave ’em the city dump. See, I take everything literally. Ya got that?” Mr. Richman was literally convulsed with laughter.
Next, the Goldbergs, junior and senior, gave us a guided tour of the union offices, and along the way we met another retired driver, a man named Harry Hoffman.
“I got one,” said Mr. Hoffman. “A guy gets into a taxi on Park Avenue and says to the driver he wants to go to London. The driver says, ‘Are you kidding?’ The passenger says, ‘No. Just drive over to the pier. We’ll get on the Queen Mary. You keep the meter running the whole time. I’ll pay you.’ So they get on the boat and cross the Atlantic and they land in England and get off the boat and drive to London, and the passenger pays him and leaves a big tip. Now the driver realizes that he’s got to get back to New York the same he came over. So he’s driving through London on his way to catch a boat, and a guy flags him down and asks for a lift. The driver says he’s going to the United States. The guy says, ‘Terrific, that’s where I wanna go. Do you happen to know where Flatbush Avenue is?’ And the cabby says, ‘Sorry, Mister, but I can’t take you. I don’t go to Brooklyn.'”
, edited by Lillian Ross
), which is probably why Roger Angell does not show up so much in this Talk of the Town collection (he dominates in the other). 
