Bladders n' Synch: A Screening of Werner Herzog's Happy People

I was in Brad’s Café, the Columbia Journalism school hangout, when I overheard a student mention the name Werner Herzog. I swiveled my chair to interrupt his conversation. One cannot afford to pay heed to social conventions when important matters are possibly at stake. This was Werner he was talking about.

“What did you just say about Werner?” The kid was taken aback by the sudden intrusion, but he understood; this was Werner.

“Oh, well he’s coming to the MFA Film department tonight to present his newest film.”

“Okay, where do I get a ticket?”

His name was Jimmy and the two of us walked through the pouring rain to the MFA building. I had never been there before. If journalists and fictionists are to be caught commiserating on Columbia’s campus there is sure to be trouble. We found out the tickets were reserved strictly for MFA students, so we begged a few of them in the hallway to procure us two. My day had just become much more exciting. I was going to see Werner at 6:30.

I left campus shortly thereafter to go to the divorce attorney’s office where I have a gig filing documents and running papers to the court clerks. While sorting through child support documents and scornful emails between exes I recollected my previous private Werner screening, which occurred in early October.

He was showing his other latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker who has been making films for nearly half a century, but more recently he has made Hollywood movies (Rescue Dawn, Bad Lieutenant: The Port of Call – New Orleans) and ‘documentaries’ (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World), which are more like film essays that he narrates himself. German accents have a way of obliterating any grace within the English language, but Werner’s voice avoids this pitfall. The emphatic manner with which he states his words washes out a portion of the normally abrasive German accent, and the final outcome is something that can be poetic, insightful, obnoxious, or comical, or even all of the above, depending on the context and tone. Personally, I can’t get enough of it.

Throughout the day I bothered my girlfriend, Shula, with text messages of fake Werner lines. “Why is it that human beings love pools and lakes, but yet many of us despair the rain? We always want abundance, and so it seems little droplets just won’t do.” When six O’clock rolled around, I filed away the last prenup and made my way back up to Columbia to the Dodge building. Outside the screening room on the fifth floor, the hallway was filled with hipster-like film geeks, perhaps more my speed than know-it-all news geeks. I could have perhaps been one of them had I not missed the application deadline. But no regrets, I have made peace with the Journalism program. Before the film was to begin, I looked for the nearest restroom.

The bathroom was small and though there were panels between the two urinals to protect for modesty, the layout was such that I was uncomfortably close to the pisser to my left. While peeing I noticed that as the man next to me peed, he was sighing and grunting, lost in relief. Washing our hands in the one sink behind us, the man asked me if I had the time. He had an un-kept look; long frizzy black hair and a slight gap in his front teeth. I told him the time. I was curious about these film kids. Who was I dealing with here?

As a journalist I have found that the best way to get a quick cultural gauge of an unfamiliar group of people is to act brashly and then observe the response. When you have to play guinea pig though, there is risk involved. If humor and wit align, there is potential for instant kinship; if not, there can be consequences.

“Pardon me for saying so,” I told the man, as we dried our hands on paper towels, “but that sounded like a good one.”

“Oh, you mean like a good sniffle?” Apparently, he had just sniffled, but I didn’t notice and I have no idea what a good sniffle is.

“No like a good pee.”

“What did you say?” The man was incredulous.

“I said it sounded like you just had a good pee.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Were you just observing my pee?”

“I wasn’t observing your pee. I just noticed certain noises you were making, like a deep sigh, which says to me that you were enjoying the pee. I can’t turn off my senses when I walk into a bathroom, so I noticed it; it’s a good thing. You should be happy.” The man was not happy.

“I don’t expect some dude to be observing me when I’m in the bathroom.”

“What do you think people plug their ears and close their eyes when they are in public bathrooms? Is that what you do? I asked, raising my voice to match the rise in his.

“Well, nobody’s ever said anything to me about my peeing.” I turned to move towards the door.

“Well, how does it feel?” As the door was closing behind me he caught my eye with his.

“Awkward!”

Time for Werner. There was no sign of Jimmy, but someone I was in line with had been nice enough to save me a good seat. I settled in just before Werner walked in to introduce Happy People, a title he told us he loathed but had been asked to keep. The film was not his, he told us, but rather an 89-minute version of a four-hour Russian documentary made by a filmmaker named Dmitry Vasyukov. Werner explained that he had loved the film and offered to cut it down to make it marketable to an international audience. He had also changed the music, used English translators to speak the translations instead of subtitles, and of course, added his own narration. The movie was a fascinating look into the lives of fur-trappers in Siberia, a wilderness one and a half times the size of the United States.

There are two things I love about Werner documentaries: one is they are fascinating; and two is Werner. He knows how to connect to his subjects so that they instantly become whole characters. When Werner questions scientists, he not only asks about their area of expertise, but about their dreams and they answer him without missing a beat. No matter what his films are about on the surface, they are always journeys into something much deeper and universal; they plunge into the unconscious. And then of course, there is his narration. All of Werner’s documentaries, or film essays as they have been called, have one or two moments where his voice is so serious, resounding, and intense about something that is visually implicit, that it borders on comedy. In one scene of his film Encounters at the End of the World, a scientist explains that penguins sometimes get confused and run away from the ocean and into the mountainous interior of the arctic. When Werner’s camera finds one such penguin waddling off into the mountains he chimes in. “…with 500 kilometers ahead of him, he is marching towards certain death.” Happy People, has these classic Werner moments too. At one point the filmmaker interviews a veteran from the Soviet War who becomes too overcome with emotion to continue speaking. While the man cries on camera Werner says in voice over, “This man has been so traumatized by the war, that he cannot continue to speak about it.”

His interactions with audiences also have a peculiar humor to them both because of the way he strings sentences together and because of his ardent tone. Over the course of the 30-minute Q&A that followed the screening of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, unfazed by the New York audience, Werner bashed New Age philosophy, psychotherapy, and yoga, which he called, “an abomination.” After the Happy People screening he again took a shot at yoga, and stressed the importance of traveling on foot, “and not with these ridiculous backpacks and sleeping bags and all that, but just a rucksack and you go.” My favorite line of the evening was when after stressing the importance of reading, Werner listed a few of the books that were required reading for anyone who enrolls in his film school in the UK. There were some odd choices in the mix. Someone questioned him about one in particular to which he answered:

“Yes, absolutely, I require all of my students at the Rogue Film School to read The War on Commission Report.”

On a more serious note, as fascinating as Happy People was, I was equally enthralled with the story of how Werner came across the original four-hour Russian documentary. He was driving by his friend’s house in Los Angeles and noticed that there was a parking spot. “There is never a parking spot there,” he tells us, “so I took it.” After knocking on his friend’s door he was invited in. His friend paused the film he was watching so that they could chat but before leaving, Werner told his friend to play part of the movie. “And I ended up staying to watch the end of this four hour Russian film about hunters in Siberia.” As soon as it ended Werner asked his friend to rewind it back to the beginning to watch again.

“And I thought one should make an international version of it,” he explained.

I chatted with Werner briefly before leaving and he said that by living his life through his intuition he frequently stumbles upon “gifts” such as this film. Even in going to see Werner films, I have had strange serendipitous experiences. In order to acquire a ticket to the screening last month, I waited in an hour-long line outside of a box-office that was selling tickets to at least 20 other events as part of the New Yorker Magazine Festival. The woman one spot in front of me was not only also in line to get tickets to the new Werner film, but she had also spent time in working in the Locations departments in the film industry (albeit a bit higher up than me; she is Woody Allen’s NY Location Manager). The two of us formed an instant bond. More recently, having impressed myself by sneaking into the sold-out Halloween Phish show based on an intuitive sense that I could, I have noticed my own intuition bearing fruit. Hearing this lesson from Werner was very timely. Even the way I happened to hear about this screening from Jimmy was a random occurrence. And, that’s not all.

Before making the hour-long trip home to Brooklyn, I thought it a good idea to relieve myself. I went back to the same bathroom and took the one open urinal; the one on the right, where I had relieved myself pre-Happy People. Looking to my left, I did a double take. It was him; frizzy hair, gap in the tooth, shaggy look. He had to have noticed me, yet he didn’t say anything. There was, however, no way in hell that I was not going to comment on the situation. Werner had taught me otherwise. What makes this happening even weirder is that he didn’t even go to the Werner film. This wasn’t just the pre-relief, post-relief encounter of two men attending the same event. This was something grander; bladders in-synch. I looked at him closely to make sure he was in fact the guy, and then I cut in on the sound of our respective streams.

“Come on. What are the chances? This is funny. You can laugh.” He looked at me blankly, zipped up, then turned around to head to the sink. “Just admit it, it was a great piss you had earlier. Am I wrong? Why can’t you admit that you had a great pee?” At this point I was at the sink too. He looked at me blankly.

“Who are you?” He asked. “I’ve never seen you. You’re just here for the event, right? I nodded.

“Figures.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Figures what? Do you like Werner?”

“Eh, I could take him or leave him.” He was drying his hands now with a paper towel.

“Ok, I see. So you’re saying figures that I would like him. You’re saying you can take or leave me? You don’t like me, do you?”

He chucked the used paper towel in the trash, looked me in the eye and said, “Kid, I don’t even know you.” Then he turned and walked out.

“Just admit it,” I screamed after him, “It was a great pee.”

I wonder what Werner would have thought of all this. I think he would have sided with me. “Yes,” he would have said, “great pees and traveling on foot, these are two things essential for every man to live a full existence.” I walked to 96^th Street before hopping the subway home.

Critics of Sincerity

In his early sixties, Clint Eastwood picked up his first Oscar nomination for Best Director with his 1992 film, Unforgiven. In his seventies he was nominated for Best Director on three occasions: 2003 for Mystic River; 2004 for Million Dollar Baby, which he won; and 2006 for Letters from Iwo Jima. In his eighties Eastwood is not relenting; his boldest film, Hereafter, about people who can communicate with the dead, is in theaters now, but predictably little is being said about it. Like the rest of us humans, critics are averse to mortality, so woe to the filmmaker who tries to deal with death sincerely.

Every now and again, filmmakers take risks. Rather than choosing a project that a director thinks has a reasonable chance to get financed, draw crowds, earn money for all involved, receive critical acclaim, and guarantee a better next contract, a filmmaker will choose to focus on a subject that will likely lead to the opposite. Financing may be difficult, critics will misunderstand the work, moviegoers will misunderstand the trailer and never see the movie, and any subsequent undertaking by the filmmaker will run further risk of being viewed by ‘the biz’ with skepticism.

When passionate filmmakers take risks, the end result is not always a movie that represents the pinnacle of technical proficiency or story structure. There will possibly be moments of incoherence, or pretension, which flummox and anger both viewers and critiques. Take Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, for example. “The film is either a masterpiece,” writes The Guardian’s Peter Bradshow, “or a massively dysfunctional act of self-indulgence and self-laceration.” “I’m here to tell you that although Synecdoche, New York has its moments of brilliance,” Sean Dwyer writes for the film reviews blog, Film Junk, “overall it is one of the most impenetrable and frustrating movies I have seen in a very long time.”

Before a single frame can be shot, a filmmaker has to persuade financiers, studios, and star talent to want to take part in the project by invoking genre names or calling upon precedents. For example, if a filmmaker wants to make a horror film that is set in the woods with non-professional actors, then in pitch meetings he or she will likely invoke the successes of The Blair Witch Project—$600,000 to make $250 million gross. Among other things, a successful movie pitch from the financer’s or studio’s point of view identifies the genre, the target demographic, and what the film is ‘about.’ Easier said than done, especially for an art film budgeted at tens of millions of dollars.

In 2000, writer and director Darren Aronofsky procured the needed $70 million to get a green light to make The Fountain. It wasn’t the commercial viability of the story or genre that attracted the investment. The film is genre-less, and the story treads on new territory. The Fountain is three interwoven stories, about two lovers, spanning one millennium, as they try and find a way to be together for eternity. The film found funding when it found a star. But just before shooting was to commence, Brad Pitt dropped the role, taking half of the movie’s budget with him. Set pieces were auctioned off as years of preparatory work were scrapped. The DVD extras of The Fountain includes a ‘making of’ video, which devotes a few minutes of material to the collapse of the first attempt at production. In a memorable scene, Aronofsky announces the news to his crew that they are being shut down. After an ensuing moment of somber silence, Aronofsky chimes back in: “Anybody need a hug?”

If anyone needed a hug though, it was Aronofsky. It is often said in filmmaking that a director is the loneliest person on the set. If the work fails, is shut down, or becomes burdened by seemingly unsolvable dilemmas, the actors will find other work, the crews will move-on, and the studios and investors will find a new movie in which to invest. Worse than bearing the brunt of the blame for a failed film, the director is now an artist with images trapped drifting in the mind, pruning, desperately waiting for a new outlet to open.

The greatest directors are those with such strong visions of their work that nothing can possibly come between them and their film. Few directors could have withstood the mayhem that Frances Ford Coppolla did in the making of Apocalypse Now. After striking out with every other major Hollywood studio, a largely unknown director named Peter Jackson convinced New Line Cinema to undertake one of the largest efforts in filmmaking history (8 years, $285 million) to make Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Everything that could have gone wrong went worse than wrong in the making of the film Fitzcarraldo, but director Werner Herzog would stop at nothing to complete his film. Herzog was interviewed periodically throughout the production by a documentarian and had this to say about the possibility of not finishing his movie. "If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams, and I never want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.”

Part of the art, and therefore part of the skill of an artist, is making the art happen. Whether or not Aronofsky was willing to die to make The Fountain is inconsequential. What matters is that when his actor and money went out the window he replaced them with a new script, less costly methods of production, and actors Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. After six long years of making a film that was supposed to take two years, The Fountain” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. When the film ended and the credits rolled, the audience booed.

After director Robert Zemeckis brought us the beloved Back to the Future trilogy, he made a much bolder attempt at the Science Fiction genre by adapting a novel by Carl Sagan. Contact follows Dr. Eleanor Alloway, played by Jodie Foster, on an exploration into the possibility of the existence of intelligent alien life. Contact is a normal-enough Science Fiction movie until about three quarters of the way through the film, when Foster’s character finds out that her lack of faith in the divine disqualifies her as a suitable representative to meet and greet the extraterrestrials. The remainder of the film explores concepts of the afterlife, culminating in a ten-minute scene on an unknown planet between Jodie Foster and her dead father, played by a wonderfully Zen-like performance by David Morse (kudos to the casting on that one). Contact is now mostly a revered film, but it was initially met with very mixed reviews. “While the movie doesn’t qualify as an awful waste of space by any means,” wrote Dennis Howe in the Washington Post, “it has so many creative black holes, you’ll have to weigh the entertainment odds before making this journey.”

In 2001 Richard Kelly came out with his remarkable directorial debut about a teenage boy named Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) who learns from his dreams that he is able to see multiple dimensions and manipulate both space and time. Kelly packaged the movie into a high school satire, science fiction, horror, thriller, and drama, called Donnie Darko. But the reviews were not flattering. "Donnie Darko has plenty of problems,” writes Todd McCarthy in Variety, “But most stem from a young filmmaker over-swinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run. This overweaningly ambitious picture will be difficult to market.” Donnie Darko has since become a cult classic.

Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s latest directing effort written by Peter Morgan, tracks the separate stories of three individuals whose lives will eventually intersect. One of our heroes is a French journalist (Cecile De France), another is a blue-collar American man (Matt Damon), and lastly an orphaned English boy (Frankie McLaren), but they are all united by a common thread: A special connection to the afterlife. Even if the movie were a disaster, Eastwood would still be due credit for the audaciousness of attempting a genuine film about death without hiding behind an inch of frivolous comedy, action, or sex. But the reviewers mostly disagree.

New Yorker film critic David Denby writes, “most of the movie is not about what the dead mean to the living; it’s about having nice little chats with ghosts, and neither Eastwood nor [screenwriter Peter] Morgan has the taste for such flamboyant stuff." Erik Childress at Cinematical called it “a unchallenging dullard.” Peter Sciretta at Slashfilm wrote that the movie ended with, “logically-laughable coincidences,” and noted that, “coincidences are bad storytelling.”

Though there are outliers, movie critics respond in predictable ways. When it comes to action movies, critics look for clever plot twists and innovative action sequences (Google: critical response to Inception). With drama and thriller films, critics tend to favor the movies with the highest levels of atrocity (Crash, Babel, Precious). But when it comes to films that make sincere efforts at grappling with something cosmic, unless the movie is science fiction, critics never like it. Roger Ebert seems to agree with this assessment. In his review of The Fountain he wrote, “The movie’s biggest aesthetic gamble: its earnestness.”

At the very least Hereafter is worth seeing if only to prompt a discussion with your buddy, date, self, or Mommy, about a topic people often like to avoid until it happens. Death. Though they are absolutely all must-sees in my opinion, Donnie Darko, Contact, and Hereafter are not flawless films, but as consumers or experiencers of art, if we do not allow artists some space for miss-steps, or even total failure, then we can’t complain when everything comes out looking, sounding, and feeling the same.

Having reached the age of 80 and continuing to direct damn good movies, if there is one man who has earned the right to direct from the heart, it is Clint Eastwood. And if there is one movie worth seeing right now it is Hereafter.

I will leave you with a portion of Roger Ebert’s review of The Fountain.

Yes, The Fountain overreaches on every level, and that's exactly what I like about it. Big subject, big canvas, big ambitions. A young director's ungainly and overwrought folly? By all means, in the sense that Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" or Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho" or Martin Scorsese's "New York, New York" or Bernardo Bertolucci's "1900" are follies.

They're all bold attempts -- some more successful than others -- by passionate young filmmakers in their late 20s to mid-30s to sum up their own sensibilities and experience, to cram just about everything they know and feel, about life and about movies, on the screen at once.

That doesn't make for smooth, comfortable viewing, but I'd much rather watch somebody shoot for the moon when the stakes are sky-high than sit back while they play it safe.

NYC: By Foot and By Couch (Part 2 - scroll down for part 1)

The sidewalk was what was killing us. This part of Hudson St. had narrow sidewalks, with large cracks and worn concrete. At the end of the block we rolled down the handicap ramp and then swiveled out towards the middle of the street. We yielded to a biker, and then took a position behind him in the bike lane. It was not a smooth ride. The combination of occasionally harsh winters and the amount of traffic, some of which consists of heavy trucks barreling through after emerging from the Holland Tunnel heading uptown, wounds the tar. Compounding that is the fact that the five boroughs have nearly 20,000 miles of roadway, and when the city is strapped for cash, as it was now, street repair is high up on the list for cuts. Plus, we were out on the street, pointed against traffic and competing for the same commuting real estate as bikers, cars, cabs, and buses.

In the bike lane Brown and Co-Pop had begun to find their stride. We were moving down Hudson Street at a respectable pace, past Grove Street, past Barrow, and Morton, passing coffee houses, flower shops, grocers, all occupying the ground floor of brick and brownstone buildings. After studying the map I saw that Hudson Street was a commuting artery that ran along the west side and eventually met up with Chambers Street, which would permit us easy access to City Hall and finally the Brooklyn Bridge. Once we crossed the bridge the worst of it was over. It dawned on me that this feat that this crazy, beast of a man Co-Pop had dreamed up, might actually be achievable.

After a stop at the Hudson Grocery, DJ for a refill of his paper bag and Co-Pop and I for water, we were watching an intense pick-up soccer game going down at Hudson Park with a bunch of English guys, when our cheers were abruptly interrupted by a middle-aged woman with frizzy black hair.
"Excuse me, what you guys are doing, is this, like a new thing?”
"Uh, not sure, lady, we're just trying to move a couch."
"Well maybe this is going to be a new thing. You know, like people moving furniture all over the city." She had a wild excited look that permeated her face and she seemed to be shaking and even grinding her teeth, as she anxiously awaited our response.

I understood her excitement. New things were constantly popping up in New York City, one trend after the next. New fusion culinary experiments, new ways of commuting, like scooters or sneakers with wheels on the bottoms, new bohemian cultures, new hair styles, hats, types of, and lengths of, boots, color palettes, and shapes of facial hair. And these things seemed to rise spontaneously into the streets in great popularity as if it were perfectly timed and coordinated, and then fade almost as quickly as they began. It was as if we are all members of The Jets or The Sharks from West Side Story and had the ability to, without consultation, compose, write, sing, and dance, a complicated and meticulously choreographed performance without instruction or direction. What’s special about New York trends is that they are born and raised here, before migrating south and west across the states like a wave washing over the greater populous. Trends here are organic, birthed from the collective New York soul, and then merged with the elements of The City; the cityscape, architecture, sewer systems, theaters, and modern technology. The concoction is then boiled together into a vat, before emerging as art rendered into styles and practices. This fretted woman believed that she had finally, after years of mysteriously watching things come and go, that she was at-long-last borne witness to the fleeting window of conception, a new thing that was being done for the sake of the doing itself, before it could be copied, branded, and taken on by the greater populace. Though pushing a couch with dollies across a metropolis was so obviously not conducive to a city, or nationwide fad, and was perhaps a pursuit headed for a disastrous conclusion, who was I to crush the heart of this poor woman.
“Maybe ma’am,” I said, “you never know, you know?”

I hopped back on the couch and proceeded to guide us against traffic down towards the Holland Tunnel. We passed Clarkson and then West Houston and wheeled into SoHo passing a long line of multi-colored people waiting outside the immigration building. Then, we hit Vandam Street, where we were confronted with a build up of traffic, bumper to bumper. The pleasant weekend streets were now a parking lot of hate, with hostile horns and “Fuck Yous” filling the air.
“Wait here,” I said, rising off the sofa. I traversed through the cars to procure a better view of the obstruction. That's when I saw that one block up, Hudson Street was barricaded. There were work trucks and men with drills all over it. Perhaps a gas leak, or a busted pipe, but no matter, we were going to have to go a different way.

Steering through the gridlock, we booked it over towards the east side of the street, and hoisted the couch over the curb. Now on the sidewalk we banged a right onto Spring Street and crossed over Varick, gunning for a brief strip of carriage lane on 6th Avenue, next to the miniature triangular shaped Hudson Park. But the sidewalk was a mess of cracks and holes, and the street was still occluded with vehicles. As the puller, Co-Pop felt that if the couch were made to be heavier on his side then it would cease to come off the dolly as it had been doing.
"I got an idea," Co-Pop said. He untied the bandana from his head and retied it over his lips and mouth, then darted over to the park, which was more of a construction site encased in highlighter orange barriers and a mesh fence. Among other things, it appeared they were refurbishing the statue of Jose Gervasio Artigas, as I could see through the fence that the Uruguayan hero was resting on the ground. Co-Pop gave a quick look around to make sure he wasn't being watched, then grabbed an area high up on the fence, kicked his feet into it, and hoisted himself up and over. Falling to the ground on the opposite side, Co-Pop went into a body roll. It wasn't pretty but it was successful. DJ and I scoured the area for onlookers. The coast was clear.

Through the mesh fence we watched Co-Pop scurry around the fallen symbol of Uruguayan independence and begin foraging around the grounds. Within a few seconds, we heard three Rafael Nadal-like grunts and following each one, was a an airborne sand bag just barely clearing the fence. Co-Pop was preparing to hop back over the fence when the lights appeared. They were blue and red and had flashed on suddenly from an unmarked Crown Victoria that happened to be parked right there on the corner of 6th Ave and Spring. The officers had had a front row seat for Co-Pop's entire performance. The doors opened and a big black bald headed cop in plain clothes emerged from the driver's side and a busty red-headed female cop from the other. Brown and I watched the scene unfold from the comfort of the couch.

Co-Pop's legs came over the top first, appearing out of nowhere like a plane falling out of the sky. Then the rest of him, a fur ball of glory sporting a bleach white grin, the same one he always displayed when he felt pride from his prowess. Though this one was short-lived.

As soon as he hit the pavement the officers took a position directly in front of him, simultaneously reaching down into their shirts and yanking out their bling that hung from a thin silver metal chain: NYPD badges. The black cop spoke first,
"Kid, what the fuck do you think you're doing?" Co-Pop got up slowly from his crash landing. The female cop reached into her back pocket with her right hand, while yanking Co-Pop out of her partner's hand with the other, and slamming him up against the back of the cruiser.
"I believe my partner asked you a question." This was the first, and only time I ever heard Co-Pop stutter.
"Well, look, I'm a carpenter, and, and DJ over here, see..." Co-Pop pointed between the officers to myself and DJ sitting on the couch behind them, "is an interior decorator, and him, well that's Nate, and his new couch."
"Save it kid," the cop woman barked, opening up her cuffs and grabbing Co-Pop's wrist, "You're under arrest for trespassing and..." Just then a sudden burst of static white noise flowed out of the cruiser's open rear window and then a voice, "We have a 305 in progress, all units respond, all units respond." The woman let out a heavy sigh, let go of Co-Pop, pushed him away from the vehicle, and pocketed her cuffs. The officers darted back into their vehicle, threw on their sirens, and screeched off. Brown and I looked at Co-Pop awaiting his reaction. He calmly collected the sand bags that lay on the sidewalk, placed them on the cushion by the armrest, bent down and adjusted the dolly, and then looked up at me.
"Nate, where to next?"

I was making it up as I went along. I am a born San Franciscan and raised Bostonian with little sense of direction. I might as well have been in Mexico City. Sure, a right on Broome Street, because, why the hell not. And let's cut through this parking lot and hit Wooster Street because my Dad grew up in a Worcester. So what's a few cobblestones anyway? And fuck the rain. We have trash bags. I ripped a hole in one of our spares, threw it over my head, and punched through the sides with my arms. Now a right on Grand. You're pushing well DJ, keep up the good work Co-Pop. Hey how about a little SoHo history from this guidebook. I'll read it aloud.

"Hard to believe but until the mid 18th century this wonderful shopping district was all farm land!!! But soon, the large farms were divvied up into smaller properties and by the 1800s, wouldn't you know it, the wealthy class had moved in and had brought with them hotels, casinos, and brothels. Horse drawn carriages, just like the ones you now see around Central Park, lined the cobble stone streets. But the industrial revolution changed the face of the neighborhood as factories and immigrant labor moved in while the rich fled uptown. On account of being a cheap metal that was easy to work with, architects began designing buildings with a brand new iron called cast iron. The cast iron permitted the builders to construct enormous windows and massive indoor spaces called lofts. However, in the early 1960s, a most controversial figure in New York's history, none other than urban planner Robert Moses, threatened to destroy it all in order to make way for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. But drawn by the lofts, which made for wonderful studio spaces, groups of visionary artists came together to block the construction of the highway, and the area was saved from its demise. Now SoHo has emerged as one of the most unique and cherished shopping districts in the nation!!!"

A sharp right onto Mulberry St. took us under the green, red and white awnings of little Italy where we went wheeling down the sidewalks flanked on both sides of the street by the famed Italian ristorantes. As we came to Canal Street and the entrance to Chinatown we hit a human wall.

The rain had passed and people were out in numbers getting their last daylight of the weekend in the waning summer. Sidewalks, streets, bike lanes, it didn't matter they were all jammed. It was strange that nobody acknowledged us. Not because I expected courtesy, I had lived next to Fenway Park for two years. But just for the oddity, or the spectacle of two dudes pushing a third dude on a wet couch through Chinatown. But they didn't. In fact not only were we not of any interest to anybody, we were a nuisance, just plain in the way, taking up more space than three pedestrians ought to be allotted. In any other city, we would have stuck out, but New Yorkers are not fazed by the outlandish, they expect it. Diversity and difference have been woven into the fabric of the city. And while initially I found fault in the way that nobody here pays any attention to their fellow eight million neighbors, I have come to think of it as a show of respect. Instead of staring at the un-ordinary, New Yorkers are much more fixated on their schedules than they are fazed by diversity, and really just couldn’t give a shit, so they keep on walking.

Wired to think in musical terms, DJ Brown solved this dilemma by purchasing an aerosol air horn for five dollars off of an ambitious Chinese fruit seller trying to call attention to his stand. We took turns tooting, dispersing the crowds and found our way from Mulberry to Center Street, our path illuminated in the waning light by florescent Chinese characters mounted to the storefronts.

Finally, after navigating the narrow, claustrophobic one-ways of lower Manhattan, where the sky felt like a low roof that hovered just above the buildings, we reached the open spaces of the Supreme Court and City Hall Plazas and took a gulp of fresher air. Then we proceeded towards the signs that pointed towards the Brooklyn Bridge.

We wheeled onwards up to its base and halted. None of us had ever been on the bridge before and were unpleasantly surprised both by the number of people clogging its foot and bike paths, and by the pitch of its incline. It was steeper than any of us had anticipated. Up until this point our journey had been flat. The illuminated suspension cables looked like a runway up to the sky. We dumped all the extra weight, the sand bags, a few jugs of water we purchased, and me; it was time to get up and work. I popped a few tylenol, took a swig of DJ's booze, tossed the empty bottle into a nearby bin, and wiped my lips clean with my hand. Co-Pop and I took DJ's position as the pushers and DJ became the puller. We started up the hill.

After a hundred feet or so the pavement gave way to wooden planks and our progress was noted by the thumping of the dollies' wheels as they traversed from one plank to the next. We were promptly educated by the bridge’s crowd dictated rules: Unless on a bike or skate board do not under any circumstances venture into the bike lane, if a whistle is blown immediately hug the side railing and flatten up against it (there is a biker with spandex and toe clips coming through), and walking or running speed is to be held constant.

The first few hundred feet of the bridge trail didn't feel quite that spectacular, it is just an elevated path over what was once Printing House Square, the life of the city until the early 20th century when the New York Times relocated to what became Times Square. However, as we approached the plane of the East River the city walled up around us.

To our left was a sea of public housing, one unit after the next, stretching north almost all the way to the Manhattan bridge dotting the sky in sporadic yellow lights. To our right loomed the towering office buildings of the financial district as dense Manhattan disappeared behind us and Brooklyn glistened on the horizon. But as the pitch of the hill increased, the dolly wheels began to lock up on us and the couch and the couch started to drag until it came to a full stop. Exhausted, we all gave in and took a seat, contemplating a termination of our mission. After all, Carroll Gardens was still almost two miles away. As we sat taking in the cityscape, we realized that not only had our environment transformed, but so had the people that surrounded us. They were bubbly and enthusiastic in a way that no New Yorker ever was, and they carried fanny packs rather than backpacks or brief cases. These were of course tourists, hundreds of them. And while they are normally quite a nuisance to be around, buzzing around mid-town and Times Square like locusts, here I didn’t mind them because they took notice of us. Cameras that were aimed off the sides of the bridge capturing images of the Statue of Liberty, Governor's Island, and the distant Verrazano bridge to the South and the Manhattan and Williamsburgh bridges to the North, all of a sudden began turning from the panoramic views to us; to myself, to Co-Pop, and to DJ Brown. And suddenly the couch began to move.

Startled, the three of us jolted and turned around to find four large Aryan men pushing the couch from behind and screaming to one another in German. We didn't budge much on account of the jammed wheels, but one of them, the resourceful bastard, reached into his pocket and yanked out a swiss army knife. He knelt down and began tinkering with the wheel and before we knew it we were moving, and not only by the power of the Germans. The commotion got the attention of two Israeli girls, a French couple, and a Japanese dude. And together they delivered us from Manhattan and we found ourselves floating over the water at a decent speed, hooting and hollering at the crowds in front to make way.

The hill leveled off and we began picking up even more helpers from Australians, to Norwegians, to Russians. The thumping sound of the wheels against the wood increased in volume and frequency. All of sudden, Brooklyn was right there in front of us. The Watchtower building, the piers, the downtown, Dumbo, and the cars whipping around interstate 278, together formed a collage of twinkling light that was getting closer and closer.

As we reached the second half of the suspension the slope began to dip down. Pop, DJ, and I emerged from our seated positions so we could guide the sofa safely down the increasingly steeper decline. Our crew piled onto the couch, taking whatever space they could find, and we pushed them down the hill, picking up speeds that rivaled the slow-moving vehicle traffic on the roadway below us. The three of us looked at each other and smiled, signaling for a full throttle, a green light to go for it all. We threw all our weight into the push with more people joining behind us and then we let go and sprinted beside the wheeling sofa and jumped into the international stew. We screamed, laughed, and blew the air horn, clearing the way for the out of control vehicle which was now thumping louder and louder, more people jumping on top of us as we whisked by. There was no stopping us now, we were bombing down the last section of the bridge over the cobbled streets of Dumbo, Brooklyn. We were like the first ever international bobsled team, only on wheels instead of ice, until…BAM. At the bottom of the hill we struck the railing, a definite whiplash for all and numerous splinters for most, but everyone got up, hugged, and compared scrapes, and blacks and blues. A quick goodbye, a pose for a picture, and onward.

Once in Brooklyn, we emerged at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge trail, banged a right onto Tillary Street, met up with Henry, and then it was smooth downhill couch surfing from there. We rode the bike lane, passing one extravagant brownstone after the next in Brooklyn Heights, crossed over Atlantic Avenue to the neighborhood of Cobble Hill, where the bigger the wheels of your kid’s stroller the higher up in the social system you are, and finally to the old pizza shop-ridden gentrifying Italian neighborhood of Carroll Gardens.

The couch came to a standstill in front of one of the more decrepit brownstones, home sweet home. I opened the front door with my key, then the door to my apartment and watched Co-Pop and DJ carry the sofa up the two flights of steps. The two of them set it down it its new home against the baby blue wall I had just painted. And then they left. Co-Pop for Seattle or Portland, he hadn’t decided which yet, and DJ for Austin.

I lay down on the sofa, inhaled a deep one and let it out slowly, tuning my mind into my lower back. Immediately, I became aware of an impression of healing. The pain was still very much present, but I detected a transformation in its character, and after a few more breaths and moments of reflection, I understood. This endeavor was an uncharted one that was fraught with a host of potentially dreadful outcomes, some of which were barely averted, and yet I had persevered. And I had done so, not by myself, but by that which was outside of myself. It was not only my generous friends, Co-Pop and D.J. A. Brown, who had wheeled me and my new couch to safety, but it was also the support of the city itself, of New York City, which had provided us with the wood we needed to lift the dolly, a guide book I had found on the ground, bike lanes to navigate the streets, crime that diverted the cops from arresting Pop, neon lights that illuminated the way through Chinatown, and the helping hands of the Brooklyn Bridge tourists. In order to nourish myself and remove the pain for good I would have to learn to be mindful of this support, to trust that as long as I was willing to thrust myself into the clutches of the city, to make myself vulnerable to its grip, this city would hold me, it would have my back.

NYC: By Foot and By Couch (Part 1)

I had just moved to Brooklyn into the third floor of a brownstone. And now, I had back pain. This was not just a sore back that a little bed-rest or Tylenol would mute. This was unrelenting, pulsating spurts of pain; the type of pain that made me consider purposefully bumping my head or stabbing myself in the hand in order or to distract from the pain at hand. Books I read on the subject had told me, that like a starving baby, this pain wanted something, was crying out for something, and absolutely would not shut up until it got it. I did drugs - Tylenol 3s, Percocets, Diloditts, - but that only muted it, put a big fat piece of duct tape over the baby's mouth, but it would not nourish the baby.

I found the pain to be a handy tool, which when employed properly, served as an excuse to keep me holed up in my apartment, insulated from a city, which from what I knew of it, had felt cold. But on this searing August Sunday I ventured forth from my new apartment, which was far from actually new—the "parquet hardwood floors" were quite soft and came apart like Legos, only one kitchen appliance could run at a time -else the fuse would blow, and the kitchen could have worked as a set piece for That 70s Show. I was en route to reunite with two friends I had not seen in some time, D.J. A. Brown, who was called DJ Brown on account of the ease with which it slips off the tongue, and Co-Pop.

DJ Brown had a white man Basket Ball player's look, tall, with a white man’s afro held taut by a sweat band across the upper part of the forehead. Before coming to The City, he had been on a brief mission somewhere in the south to build houses for the less fortunate as part of a City-Year equivalent program and was now a substitute teacher at a new charter school in Queens. In his spare time he built things, wooden things—a rocking chair that was more like an amusement park ride as it could rock as low as 45 degrees to either side, a cane with a knife on the bottom inspired by the creeper protagonist murderer of the1960 slasher film Peeping Tom, and a version of The Price Is Right’s game “Plinko Chip.” Some considered him an alcoholic, though I took issue with that. He just loved beer, and so he frequently carried one around with him, the same way a child brings around a lollipop. On top of all this, he was also a master of the music play list, which had earned him his name. And Co-Pop was medium height, medium build, with curly brown hair, and often shirtless. As a Peace Corps. volunteer he had been stationed in the Philippines the last few years freaking out the hairless natives with the doormat that covered his chest and back. When I visited him in the Pacific he coached me on how to treat the shy Filipinos. "In the world of the polite and the bashful, the wise ass is king," Co-Pop taught. DJ Brown mixed music, Co-Pop mixed wit. And me, I was just a tall skinny Jewish kid that thought this overwhelming city might offer me a chance to climb a few rungs higher in the film industry than I had in Boston.

Co-pop had come to the city with the insatiable yearning to play ping pong so the three of us converged on the West Village to a place called Fat Cat, a dive billiard room. Before this I had been to downtown New York maybe a handful of times and was always following someone else around. I never truly saw it for what it was until this moment. When I emerged from the F train at the West Fourth Street stop and began walking up 6th avenue I was surprised by how laid back this area felt.

Before I had moved here, Manhattan was engraved in me as being comprised of skyscrapers, world class museums, Central Park, and Donald Trumps. But thanks to deep bedrock that made laying the foundations required for skyscrapers unfeasible, there is a sizable gap in the city skyline in the southern region between the downtown financial district and mid-town. This major section of lower Manhattan is dominated by low-rise buildings and small town houses, which comprise Greenwich, the East, and the West Villages. Though the Jack Keuroac and Allen Ginsberg age is over, it is still coffee-shop New York, poetry reading New York, and off-off-Broadway New York. It’s not quite the center of bohemia any more but there is still a different vibe to this part of the city. The concrete jungle does not swallow up the sun, with each building competing for its light. Here, the sun warmed my shoulders, and the heels, hard leather shoes, and neck-choking ties had given way to jeans, white socks, the occasional mohawk, and stylish clothing like shirts with unnecessarily large buttons.

After getting turned around a handful of times I ran into Christopher Street and found my friends at Fat Cat. The three of us caught up over unforced errors, weak back-hands, and missed slams. Though Fat Cat offers a plethora of great table and arcade games to choose from, it commits the all too frequent blunder of many ping-pong rooms in bars: Not providing enough light. We emerged from the basement dungeon an hour later and replenished the lost calories at a New York pizza joint called Two Boots, a halfway decent chain pizza house. When I say halfway decent, I mean halfway decent for New York, which means anywhere else in the world it was a phenomenal pie. But after being here over a year, I have to say that their ratio of sauce to cheese is askew. We ordered the shrooms and some soda, flirted with a table of girls, and ventured back out into the afternoon heat of Greenwich Village. When I snapped out of my reverie in which Native Americans were hammering away at my lower back with spears, Co-Pop and DJ Brown were walking into a petite thrift shop on West 10th Street.

This was very much a West Village thrift shop, the sort that is of a different vein than say, a Salvation Army, where the middle classes donate their clothes, cheap furniture, and outdated digital goods like VCRs, and lower class mommies and daddies come to outfit themselves and their children in Paco Jeans and elementary school team sports t-shirts. Then of course there are the starving artists and the rich wanna-pretend-to-be-poor hipsters, digging for vintage grandpa vests. In the West Village though it is the wealthy that sell their functional and once stylish couches, coffee tables, vases, and pots in order to make room for the newest and in-est. Instead of broad florescent lights illuminating the store, here, warm track lighting bathed the trinkets, furniture, and books in a yellowy glow. Flying in for the bargain or trendsetting kill were true shoppers, vintage hunters, and the casual frugalite, who were all seemingly well off.

I was doing my usual boutique walk-through, pulling a book off the shelf here, examining an old ice cream maker there, when something caught my eye. It was a couch. Not just any couch, but an enormous cream-colored couch with images of peacocks drawn all over it, their feathers twisting and folding into one another, forming beautiful red, white and indigo flowers. It reminded me of the peacocks my parents would take me to see at the San Francisco zoo when I was just a boy, where they roamed freely throughout the park. I took a seat and slowly melted in as my buttocks drifted down into the fabric. The cushion bent and receded beneath my bottom but then held and supported. Flawless. The price tag read $125. I grabbed DJ Brown whose nose was deep into an old record player.
"Yo Brown, man, what are your thoughts on this couch?"
"Handsome, elegant, and true," Brown said without looking up. He took a sip from a paper bag he had suddenly produced, but then added,
"Yo Nate, you forget you live in Brooklyn, man?" Shit. I was so wrapped up in the perfection of what lay before me; a place I could rest, think, eat, read, write, play backgammon, perhaps masturbate; though probably it was too precious to defile like that. I was watching myself in a montage striking various comfortable poses on the couch as it sat in the living room of my apartment. First I was lying on my back gazing at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, then I was lying on my side with popcorn watching Die Hard, then I was face down getting a massage from my girl friend, and then I was sitting Indian style in a deep meditation.
"Excuse me….EXCUSE ME," I said to the woman working the register. Finally she acknowledged me. "Do you offer delivery with the purchase of your couches?"
"We do, yes."
"Great. Will you deliver this couch to Brooklyn?"
"We certainly will. What part of Brooklyn?"
"Carroll Gardens." The thrift shop employee bent behind the register and lifted up a laminated card that contained a condensed map of the five Burroughs. She consulted it for a moment, running her finger along the card, and then raised her head and stung me in the heart.
"Okay, to Carroll Gardens, That’s a $120 delivery fee." Co-pop emerged from a corner sporting a pink and yellow flamboyant bandana on his head and an open jean jacket over his bear chest, his body hair protruding down his stomach like black spikes.
"Nate, we don't need the van, man, we can carry the thing." I thanked the lady behind the desk and tapped Brown on the shoulder signaling that it was time to leave. He began to follow me out but Co-Pop didn't budge.
"Yo, Nathan, it's no big deal, what is it, like half a mile?" Aside from a small piece of real estate on Good Harbor beach in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where his family resided, and a plot of land in Legazpi, Philippines, Co-Pop had not been out much, especially not in New York.
"It's more like four, maybe five," I said, and proceeded to the door.
"Fine, five, whatever. We could do it. "Hey Ms," Noah said, eagerly glaring at the register gal behind the counter. "HEY MS! Do you have two dollies we could borrow?"
"Sure. We could spare two dollies, but we would have to hold onto your license as a deposit." Once Co-Pop pops an idea into that head of his, it doesn't pop out. He thrives on outrageous dares, sometimes self-imposed, and always with a level of hazard, like jumping into Boston's polluted Charles River at midnight in winter, or snow tubing a black diamond trail at Okemo Mountain in Vermont. His blue eyes became a wild jungle green; this was Co-Pop in focus. "Awesome. Yo, guys, let's do this. Nate, give the lady your license." I wasn't going to let him push me into this. I figured it wouldn’t be long before we were stopped by a cop and forced to turn around or throw it away, or perhaps the peacocks would get torn to bits by an oncoming Mack truck. In such cases it would be my $125 down the drain. Plus my back pain would make it physically impossible for me to take part in this adventure. I voiced these concerns.
"DJ and I will push the couch the whole way, you can lay down on it. If something happens to it, I'll throw you 25 bucks." As I pondered the decision I linked eyes with the thrift store mannequin. She was a beautiful brunette with fair skin and deep almond colored eyes. She was looking right at me, smiling, whispering to me,
"Nathan, don't be such a pussy."

Co-Pop took off the jean jacket he had tried on and handed it to the lady to put back on the shelf, but kept the pink and yellow bandana, which he fixed to his head. I talked the couch down to a flat $100, and slapped my bankcard down on the table feeling a mixture of regret and nervous excitement. Within a minute we were outside on the sidewalk of West 10th st., with a few ominous rain clouds bearing down on us, and in possession of two raggedy wooden dollies and a four-seater peacock decorated, cream colored, sofa, half covered by black trash bags.

We got the dollies in position underneath the couch. Immediately there was a problem. The dollies were not tall enough to keep the bottom of the couch from scraping the sidewalk.
"We need some lumber," said Co-Pop, who was instantly on the case rummaging through a garbage can across the street by the M8 bus stop. I found a few pieces of wood just up the block in front of a dumpster, and Brown found himself a couple of pieces in front of the antique watch store across the way, and then re-entered the thrift store. He emerged with a hammer and nails, and Co-Pop and Brown went to work while I looked nervously up at the sky. Half-hour later we were ready to go.

Sitting up against one armrest and resting my extended legs and crossed ankles on the cushions, I whipped out the guidebook I had found on the street earlier and flipped through the maps section. I was to be the navigator. Co-Pop positioned himself in the front, as the puller, and Brown, the biggest of us, became the pusher. Like a new crew team, our vessel made awkward turns and nearly capsized. The dollies skidded out from under the couch repeatedly, sending me to the pavement and scraping the peacocks. It was clear, our sync was askew. Brown pushed too hard, Co-Pop had no finesse on the pull, and I didn't know where the fuck we were.

I had been told when I moved to the city that getting around here was a cinch on account of the grid system. “Oh, you can’t get lost in The City,” people would all say. Bullshit. Yes, north of 14th street Manhattan is a breeze to navigate but the villages are a maze, especially the west side. Because this area of the city was conceived and built before the commissioner's plan of 1811 where the New York State Legislature called for a grid for areas north of 14th Street, it missed out on this visionary organizational structure. The area may have escaped the monotony of uniform square blocks, which has no doubt added to its rich character, but it is one hell of a place to navigate. The streets are a series of narrow placed diagonal lines with awkward twists that lead to confusing intersections, like where West 4th St. intersects West 12th Street, two streets, which according to the grid system and laws of geometry, should never intersect even if they stretched all the way around the world.

It took us ten minutes just to move the couch one block and Brown and Co-Pop looked beat. On top of that there were more rain clouds than before and after all the preparations we were now deep into the afternoon. No words were exchanged, but our faces said it all. This was a mistake. We stopped in front of a flower shop lined with mini-carnations, tulips, and cheap orchids. We stood hugging a piece of sidewalk, stagnant, staring down at the dazzling peacocks, their feathers outstretched to the sky, while the city moved around us—taxis, bikers, workers, strollers, beggars, none of them batting an eye at our dilemma, just stepping aside to avoid the occlusion.

Until this moment we had all silently harbored a fantasy, that some kind of angel with a truck would notice what we were trying to accomplish and would come to our aid, or that a generous worker impressed by our endeavor would offer us a legitimate dolly suitable for the task. New York was teaching, the same lesson every citizen of the city had grown up with, it was preaching, and we were listening—here, if you want something to move, unless you have money, you’re going to have to make it move by yourself.