I’m in a room and Jim Jarmusch is in the same room. My inner teenager screams: in the same room, the same building, the same city. The same planet. (A slightly fake looking globe like in “Night on Earth” probably.) He’s trying to make tea. There is no music.
How excited we were in our corner of the schoolyard when “Coffee & Cigarettes” came out and “Ghost Dog” aired on TV for the first time. And maybe “Down by Law” was the first subtitled movie we saw? Maybe?
Jarmusch has made a new movie, the first in four years. “Only Lovers Left Alive” quietly celebrates things like old books, looking closely at actual things and not forgetting the past. It doesn’t denounce anything. Tender Luddism. It’s also about vampires.
I tell Jarmusch that Richard Hell told Lester Bangs that he read Lautréamont every night when he thought he was a vampire. “Les Chants de Maldoror” very nearly were lost. He gets very serious: “Just imagine. Or just imagine all the Lautréamonts we don’t know.”
If anybody is an “Architect of Cool” it’s him, though no sane person would ever tell him that. I have lived in a world he helped create for many years. Now I want to go back to there. Jim Jarmusch is really just an enthusiast. His world holds up. Why did he want to drink tea though?