153. What’s about } totally wrong?

David Shields invited me to watch I Think You’re Totally Wrong (2017*), directed by James Franco. It’s an adaptation of an argument between David Shields and Caleb Powell. Its subject, ostensibly, is a life dedicated to art (Shields’) vs. a life dedicated to living (Powell’s). That’s a dumb argument, and it’s quickly apparent Shields and Powell aren’t really arguing art vs. life, but success vs. failure and who is a better man. James Franco’s appearance in the film radically distorts those arguments—Shields and Powell and their discussions are utterly dwarfed by Franco’s larger-than-life presence.

After I watched the film, I sent Shields my comments; I asked if it was okay to post said comments. He said he’d be “honored.” What follows is a selection from my comments.

Why “white guys bullshit”? Are there no books and films in which two black guys bullshit? Two Pakistani women? Is it difficult to recognize when people from a culture not your own are bullshitting? Why “bullshit?" and not dialogue? Dialogue can't be too rarefied if what follows “white guys bullshit” is “Apollonian and Dionysian.”

David explains why Caleb. Caleb does not explain himself. David wants to be questioned; Caleb want to have a good time (according to David).

[Un-focus my eyes and see thru Caleb.]

Conversation about homosexuality—Caleb's—“you trying to Mark me?” Caleb’s wife's privacy.

Broken leg. Coma. How do you avoid the tendency to always have a reply anecdote? To one-up? 

David: "Here's are chance to reanimate both your art and my life." [Is this line scripted? Rehearsed? Previously articulated?]

Caleb has four-wheel drive, snow chains, he helped build the deck, he did some roofing. Blue collar work. David lights a fire in the fireplace. “I'm Bertrand Russell who couldn't even start—who couldn't even boil water.” Caleb doubts this anecdote. Good on Caleb--how could you not? Russell's teapot. Caleb suggests maybe Russell didn't boil water. More plausible, but still not likely. The kind of anecdote artists perpetuate about other artists and themselves. What does that anecdote admire?

Knight to Death: “You play chess, don't you?” (The Seventh Seal, 1957.)

Caleb: “You can't just play to play.” According to David, Caleb's work lacks an “x-factor.” “It's not making any meaning.” “Your work stands next to the world.” Chess = a game, a competition, intellectualism. Caleb drinks beer, David, water.

David and Caleb do not look alike, tho it would be easy to reduce them to two bald, white middle-aged men. Collapse the split screen.

How does a non-artist relate to this film? Is this film for the “10,000 people who have MFAs”? “I want everyone...,” Caleb says. 10,000 people? That would be a fucking amazing crowd. How many audiences of two have I traveled three hundred miles for? About 10,000.

Why is it making the world better vs. art? Is the only way to make the world better to directly engage with some kind of politics? Another false dichotomy: the “real world” vs. the academic world. Is David strictly an academic, or is he an academic and a practicing artist? The real world = changing tires.

David: “...you gotta start with the chaos of life whereas in a way I always want to start with the cathedral of art.” [Scripted? Rehearsed? Previously articulated?]

Genius. Get to the bottom of talent. A work of amazing power vs. a work that helps everyone. A real dilemma. A work of amazing power might help people. How does art help? (Let's ignore art therapy, etc.) Let's put dresser drawers in a bust of Venus.

SALARY.

Caleb has never earned more than $20,000 in a year. David earns approximately $170,000 a year. What does James Franco earn per year? How much is changing a tire worth?

Caleb twice has had sexual encounters with men he thought were women. Is this humiliating? Might it make his wife nervous? Does it ultimately seem as trivial as having never changed a tire? Is a bad stutter or is feeling like a “walking dead man” or “you have a high-pitched voice” less of a cross to bear than a blowjob from a transexual? Is this about manhood? James challenges David: “...if you don't have any material to man-up....”

What James is interested in is being an artist. And being an artist, for James, is taking risk. He uses the word “stake"—as in, what's at stake. A very writers' workshop term. [In the voice of my least favorite professor: But, Adam, what exactly is at stake here?]

I like James' presence is this film a lot. It's so bizarre. He walks among us.

Expression in this film. When Caleb describes Waltz with Bashir, he becomes visibly upset. David, in response to this, sits up—he knows it's no longer appropriate to lay sprawled on the couch. David is a performer—he's a professor! Caleb appears not to perform. Caleb becomes emotional when describing a work of art, not when discussing his family, or being overseas—i.e., his life.

That art causes Caleb to choke up is the big twist David suggests a film needs.

It goes without saying that James is an actor too. James also writes fiction—David sees fiction as a “veil.” “The moment it was fiction, it was dead. The Moment it was nonfiction, our nerves jangled.” Maybe fiction creates a space between author and material so author can breathe, but the author is always held accountable. 

Caleb “confesses” he took photos of David asleep. Did he? James' shadow follows Caleb and David to the car.

[ *IMDb states that the films release date is 2014. I asked David about this; David asked Oliver Ike, president & founder of First Pond Entertainment, if that date could be changed. Ike wrote, “The year listing cannot be changed. They go by production year.” Why would IMDb do that? Obviously the date we want is the release date. ]

152. Love is old } love is new.

There’s a note on the Wiki entry “Because (Beatles song)” that claims, “In 2016, the Beatles’ Anthology 3 version [of “Because”] was featured in the trailer for Luc Besson’s film Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets. That trailer (published on YouTube Nov. 16, 2016) does feature “Because,” with the Beatles’ vocal track high in the mix, but it’s not clear to me it’s the Anthology 3 “version,”—which is, simply, “the exquisite vocal harmonies recorded by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison for John’s song Because…” with the instrumentation “stripped away to reveal the… voices.” CinemaBlend (“one of the web’s most popular entertainment sites” according to themselves, but really a platform for ads decorated with light entertainment journalism) reports that, “…the preview's use of ‘Because’ by The Beatles is the first time that a master recording from the band has been featured in a film advertisement.” Valerian also strips the song of its original instrumentation, but adds a new instrumental performance.

Whatever. Who cares? I once was anxious about how Beatles songs were used—“Good Day Sun Chips,” the Nike ad with “Revolution” (another with Lennon’s “Instant Karma”), etc. It’s a kind of protectiveness I’ve let go of—Beatles is not who I am, Beatles is not sacred. What’s more, the Beatles I love can’t be destroyed by commodification. What’s more, I like Luc Besson's giddy science fiction films and I like how he uses “Because” in the Valerian trailers. 

“Because” is lyrically simple—and very like Lennon in that period. “Because the wind is high / it blows my mind”—word play quite like “Got to be good looking / ‘cause he's so hard to see” (“Come Together”); and plays with opposites the way Beatles lyrics often do “Love is old, love is new”—“I want a short haired girl / who sometimes wears it twice as long” (“Old Brown Shoe”); and with simple causality “There's nothing you can do that can't be done / nothing you can sing that can't be sung” (“All You Need Is Love”). “Because” is, too, musically simple—simple in the complex way “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is simple—it repeats with variations, rather than repeating the way most songs do: verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus….

For Abbey Road, “Because” is gateway from the “song side”—which extends to side B with “Here Comes the Sun”—and the medley that dominates side B. Or: “Because” is like an incomplete sentence, lyrically and musically, completed by what follows.

The second “official trailer” for Valerian (published on YouTube Mar. 29, 2017) uses “Because” differently than the Nov. trailer. After a 32-second action sequence on a sun-bright desert planet, we arrive in space, at the “City of a Thousand Planets” and then we hear the “ah-a” of the Beatles’ “Because.” A gate from one world to another and an expression of awe.

Pre-Anthology, a recording of “Because” stripped of its instrumentation was a prized bootleg. Aside from the beauty of the three-part harmony, the empty spaces between the vocals were what made it such an extraordinary alternate version. The emptiness reverberates—can I hear Abbey Road studio 3?

But “Because” is not an example of a perfectly good song that’s been over-produced. George Martin’s performance on the spinet electric harpsichord and George Harrison’s Moog synthesizer performance perfectly marry old and new.

151. Shirley Jackson’s } Tragic Kingdom.

If we can overlook publication dates—Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962; No Doubt’s song “Sunday Morning,” 1995—it becomes clear that Jackson’s last novel was influenced—nay, transposed—from Gwen Stefani’s lyrics.

This, from chapter four of We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

It was really too late, although I did not know it then; he was already on his way to the house. … All Jonas and I knew then was that we were hungry, and we ran together back to the house, and came with the breeze into the kitchen.

And this, the chorus of “Sunday Morning”:

You sure have changed since yesterday
without any warning
I thought I knew you
I thought I knew you
I thought I knew you well, oh well

Essentially, all Jackson did was take Stefani’s lyrics and reverse their order. Compare: Jackson, “Although I did not know it then”; with Stefani, “I thought I knew you well, oh well.” Most damning, Jackson took Stefani’s “You came in with the breeze” and retouched it: “…and came with the breeze….”

Jackson’s detail “the kitchen” is also lifted from No Doubt, and this is her most insidious act of plagiarism. The video for “Sunday Morning” very clearly shows the band in a kitchen.

Surely this revelation will invigorate scholarly investigation into No Doubt's influence on the American literature that preceded the band's formation.  Specifically, it points to the grotesque robbery of ideas perpetrated by Shirley Jackson. I am currently using the most advanced comparative techniques available to determine once and for all if No Doubt’s “Hella Good” produced Jackson's Haunting of Hill House.