The Poetry of Everyday Life?

"Wow, a bus driver who likes Emily Dickinson!"
Spoken by a precocious seventh grader, a twin, these words, maybe not quoted exactly, are the premise of Jim Jarmusch's latest film, "Paterson," which we saw a few evenings ago.
Paterson, the bus driver, whose first name we never learn, turns his very ordinary life into very understated poems, in the idiom of William Carlos Williams, and the viewer can't tell whether Jarmusch thinks (or we are meant to think) that they are good poems, or just prosaic meanderings by an extremely introverted and unambitious man, of whom we know little or nothing beyond what we see in the movie.
And obviously the same goes for the film itself, in which almost nothing happens, in the usual sense of things happening in a movie. You might call Jarmusch's style "deadpan," never quite telling us what he thinks, so that we have to figure out what to think by ourselves.

The movie is full of little jokes on itself, so it manages to be, simultaneously, a comment on the emptiness of modern American life in a depleted city like Paterson, NJ, and a celebration of life, lived by ordinary people, who care about each other and express their concern for one another in conversation and action.

One striking thing about the movie was the natural way that people of all kinds related to each other, African-Americans, Hispanics, white people, and Asian immigrants. Indeed, one of the film's jokes on itself is the tale of woe, constantly told by an Indian immigrant, "Donny," the bus dispatcher - he has serious troubles, and more of them every day, but his litany is also funny, in the cruel way that humor sometimes is.
Another striking thing about the movie is its subtlety. Laura, Paterson's wife, begins the movie by telling Paterson about her dream, in which she had twins, and the movie is full of twins. Perhaps Paterson, who drives a bus in Paterson, is a kind of  twin of his home city, as Lou Costello, the short Italian-American, born in Paterson, was the twin of Bud Abbott, the tall, White Anglo-Saxon.
At one of the high points in the film, Paterson quotes a famous short poem by Williams. Taking words that could have been simply a note dashed off by someone unknown to someone else unknown, Williams arranged them to make them pregnant with meaning.
I think Jarmusch has done the same thing in his film.

This Is Just To Say

Related Poem Content Details

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Fine Musicians and Personal Growth

I have probably met more accomplished musicians than any other kind of artist, as teachers and conductors, and I have even had the privilege of playing with musicians so much better than I, that I am humbled.
Recently my wife and I heard one of these, the young Israeli pianist, Omri Mor, play in a trio with the bassist Gilad Abro and the Andalusian violinist Elad Levi. They were performing a unique kind of Andalusian/jazz fusion, and I don't think any three musicians could play any better than they did.
During the years when the late Arnie Lawrence (about whom I wrote a book) was giving free musical workshops, which I attended as often as I could, Omri, who was then 15 or so, used to come, and, even then, he was an astonishingly gifted musician. Since then he has finished a degree at the conservatory in Jerusalem and gone on to master, in addition to jazz, Andalusian music (and who knows what else).
Last Thursday night we heard Omri again, in Ashdod, playing with the Andalusian orchestra in a concert dedicated to the late Moroccan Jewish composer Sami Almaghribi. That's where I took the photograph I've attached.
Before the concert in Ashdod we attended a small symposium about Almaghribi, led mainly by Edwin Seroussi, a professor of ethnomusicology. I'm glad we attended that, because we are not exactly well-informed about the music of North Africa, and it helped us understand what we later heard. Seroussi spoke briefly about Almaghribi's stint as a popular musician in Morocco, before he became a cantor in Montreal, saying the obvious: musicians have to make a living.
It's probably always a matter of compromise between playing the kind of music you absolutely love to play and playing the kind of music people will pay you to play - a compromise in all of the arts, of course.
Omri is largely a brilliant improvising musician, with a phenomenal musical memory, and Andalusian music, like jazz, demands improvisation. To the degree that musical performance is self-expression, improvised performance is that even more so. Though, of course, the improviser must remain within the parameters of the musical genre with which he's working. The greatest improvisers expand those parameters by their playing, and sometimes their innovations are rejected by traditionalists.
Of course performers of classical music, who strive to play every note the composer wrote, and only those notes, must also be expressive of themselves, perhaps the way a great actor, playing a part, is, at the same time, also expressing herself.
The challenge for a gifted young musician like Omri, as well as for Sami Almaghribi when he was a young musician, is to keep growing and expanding as an artist. And we ordinary people, who aren't super-talented in any one field, also must keep stimulating ourselves and growing.