One last cigarette with Jim Jarmusch

February 15, 2024 3:57 PM

He calls me Paul, although Paul is not my name. He calls me Paul because he believes me to be Paul Auster, the American writer. This is why I can’t take him up on his invitations. He would see that I am somebody else. The first time he called me, I had just quit smoking. At first, I thought it was a ploy of the tobacco industry: to immediately phone up anyone who stopped smoking. from Streuselkuchen by Marc Lunghuss [European Review of Books; ungated; German original]
posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

This is fantastic.
posted by Literaryhero at 4:17 PM on February 15 [1 favorite]

Wonderful
posted by latkes at 4:19 PM on February 15 [1 favorite]

Having just read The New York Trilogy for the first time, this is terribly funny. Thanks.
posted by clockwork at 4:55 PM on February 15 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I enjoyed that. Thanks for the laughs.
posted by hoodrich at 5:14 PM on February 15 [1 favorite]

Another take on "one last cigarette with Jim Jarmusch" - this clip from the film Blue In The Face.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:21 PM on February 15 [2 favorites]

“Nothing earth-shattering really. But that doesn’t matter.“

Indeed.
posted by zenon at 8:21 PM on February 15 [1 favorite]

That was pretty terrific. It played off Auster's Auster-ness pretty beautifully.

There's some weird thing with Jarmusch and cigarettes. Coffee and Cigarettes the Blue in the Face clip, and I remember reading some interview where he claimed to periodically quit all his habits once every year for a month. Or was it every five years for one year? Whatever, smoking fell in that category - struck me as terrific advice, apocryphal or not.

A couple years ago we were hanging out with a very cultured, very German, friend and we got around to talking about movies and they brought up "Yim Yarmusch" (in German "J" is pronounced "Y") and it was a good five minutes before we figured out who they were talking about. Sadly, our interlocutor did not find it at all as funny as we did.
We still say it every now and then, "Yim Yarmusch" and crack up.
posted by From Bklyn at 12:54 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

Hey this is nice, thanks.
posted by fridgebuzz at 5:50 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

I'm going to format and print a minizine of this and leave copies around Raleigh (with a QR code to the source). Thanks
posted by gestalt saloon at 6:20 AM on February 16 [6 favorites]

> Yim Yarmusch

I worked at a video store in the late '80s / early '90s and we all called him Yim Yarmusch, too, affectionately. (This was when talking about his movies. He was not a clerk there. Or a customer.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:12 AM on February 16 [3 favorites]

We still say it every now and then, "Yim Yarmusch" and crack up.

But, surely, you're not saying something like "Dzhim Dzharmusch" instead.
posted by otherchaz at 1:42 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]

The gated version of the story loops like so:

The decline of his memory comes hand in hand with an increase in irritability. I have been observing this for a while now, but how exactly the two are connected is still not quite clear to me.

The phone rings. It is Jim Jarmusch, and he asks if I want to come over to his place. For one thing, he is baking something scrumptious. For another, he proposes that the two of us quit smoking today. One last cigarette with Jim Jarmusch. I don’t know how often he has already called me for that reason. By now, he is getting on my nerves.

And then fades into the "Subscribe..." text at the second iteration of:

I hear Jim Jarmusch light a cigarette. He takes a puff, exhales, asks: « And what was your personal approach? »

I found that quite charming, quirky, and Jarmuschian.
posted by erikred at 5:08 PM on February 17 [1 favorite]