Tripartite entry

This entry is a three-part entry. I could have chopped it into three individual entries about one thing apiece, but I decided to do it this way instead. First I'll talk about positive things; then I'll talk about negative things; & last I'll talk about neutral things. But the image that accompanies this tripartite entry has nothing to do with any of its subjects — it’s just a library receipt which was at the end of its roll so it has purple ink at its sides to warn the clerk to change the tape; also it has the name of the movie that I borrowed: The Stunt Man (1980), but I removed the terminal “t” from the midmost word.

POSITIVE THINGS

Everyone's worried about natural disasters: climate catastrophe, global warming. But just think of how much better it will be than whatever you happen to be doing right this minute.

Let's say that a monsoon hits our city. This means that tornadoes as loud as freight trains and stronger than Zeus will knock over all the telephone poles in your district. And hailstones the size of baseballs will rain down on us. A tree will become uprooted and land on your car. And the roof of your place of employment will cave in, and one of the beams that was holding it up will fall and bisect your co-worker. Let's say your co-worker's name is Steve. Now Steve is crushed. Isn't that better than having to talk to Steve about when the project that you two have been working on for the last three months will get done? I say it is. Plus, even tho your car is ruined by the tree that fell upon it, you can just use Steve's car now. His was better anyway: You drove a Prism but he owns a Manza. And his car is in slightly better condition than yours, altho now it has hail damage.

Or say you're a farmer. The rays of the sun normally help your crops to grow, but now they're so intense because of the accumulation of greenhouse gasses (or whatever it is that makes the days too hot) that they cook your field until it's thoroughly burnt. Your farm's acreage is all cracked up now; the ground looks like a... I don't know what it looks like; I've never seen anything this bone-dry before. And you yourself are parched; which is to say: you're thirsty, cuz there's no water to drink. Only the cacti are thriving, becuz they were smart and saved up the rain in their veins. Plus the camel has some water in its hump.

I say: even this dust-bowl scenario isn't bad — on the contrary, it's good. For now you no longer need to make the payments on your farm implements. You can push your green tractor right off the cliff, and watch it fall into the Grand Canyon; and the bank representative who visits you on the cracked ground outside your burning house will melt to death while he's serving you some paperwork.

And if you live near quicksand, stop avoiding it: jump in, and thrash and flail your arms — that'll help you to sink.

Alternately, teachers who live near a swamp might fear that the children in their class will all drown when the sea level rises so high that it floods the vicinity; since the homes of the students who attend the school were built at the bottom of a mountain in Hyperborea, whose ice caps are streaming like snow in a microwave oven. I can assure you, you have nothing to worry about. For death-by-drowning requires its customer to endure only a few moments of agony; & then, they're in heaven, forever after. —What's not to love?

NEGATIVE THINGS

I'm still fascinated with the idea of authorship. What interests me about it is that it's so hard to determine. Tho it seems easy to say “Bryan Ray wrote A Terrible Misunderstanding, therefore he is its author”, the truth is that I reworked a text from Shakespeare; nevertheless, Shakespeare isn't the author either — it doesn't even seem right to call him the co-author; for I'd be labeled a fraud if I were to market the above book as “written jointly by Bryan Ray and William Shakespeare”. And poor Mark, when he finished his biography of Jesus, tried to call it “The Gospel, according to Mark” but then the church stepped in and said “NO! This book is written by God himself.” And then I did the same thing to Mark as I did to Will: I reworked his text into Rumors of Sarah, which, of course, I did not say was authored “by Bryan Ray, Saint Mark, and Lord Jehovah” — no, I took all the credit for myself alone; and those guys don't even receive royalties on my sales! That's cuz they were stupid and let their copyright lapse.

But so far I've only mentioned tall tales, fables, & myths. I haven't even gotten into the problems of authorship associated with sculpture and motion pictures:

The former requires one woman to pose while a second woman makes a clay-mold of the first, after which a team of twelve males plus one savior (accompanied by a genius skeptic bystander) pours liquid marble into the molding, adds two horns; then the statue is done.

Likewise, film is a communal art form, so some scholars say that there is no single author of a feature film: they're all joint efforts by a community — you have a cinematographer, usually multiple actors, a set designer, the screenplay writers, the editor, the director, etc… And then someone must pay all these people's salaries, but nobody wants to be known as just a lowly financier; that sounds too drab; thus the moneymen usually credit themselves as “producers”. Now I've been told that the French critics who wrote during the time known as La Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave) were influenced by an idea called the “auteur theory” — that first French word means literally author, whereas the term theory means something like “henceforth I'm winging it” or “this idea is flying by the seat of its pants” — the word is basically untranslatable.

I too am untranslatable . . .

—Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself” (sec. 52)

Now here's a quote from the encyclopedia:

Auteurism originated in late 1940s France as a value system that derives from the film criticism approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc; it was dubbed auteur theory by the American critic Andrew Sarris.

Who cares about all that — I just wanted to get all my ducks in a row.

Now, whatever the auteur theory actually posits has no bearing on this present entry; the only thing that matters is what I myself derive from the idea. And the notion I get from it is that the DIRECTOR of a film should be considered that movie's author. This seems reasonable to me, since the director, as long as her contract guarantees her power over the film's final cut, can veto everyone else in the process. But if a director signs a lousy contract, then the moneymen, the studio or producer, can come in and take away her baby. This is what happened to a lot of the films of Orson Welles. Another instance would be Dune (1984), which is often attributed to its would-be maker David Lynch but is more the product of ‎Dino De Laurentiis' production company‎. Lynch disavowed the result of the latter's meddling; he even had his name removed from the credits and changed it to “Alan Smithee” (an official pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project). Both Welles and Lynch are such strong artists that their personal genius blazes thru & remains evident even in their most studio-botched projects. Another interesting thing is that both men were known to play roles in the films of others; it seems to me that Welles did this more than Lynch, but they both have appeared on screen as actors, as well as performed the role of director; both have also directed themselves.

But here's one thing that kinda bugs me: when people refer to a movie as a “Welles picture” or a “Lynch film” just because Welles or Lynch act in the thing; I mean, when neither of these guys served as director for the project that they played in, but people speak of the film as if it was authored by either — that kinda bugs me.

*

My god this just got boring. I had wonderful thots about authorship when I began writing, but then I smothered them all with dull pedantic finicky hairsplitting. Let me just end with a short note about automatic writing, since I see that practice as an interesting monkeywrench to authorship:

Automatic writing, as I understand it, is when you force yourself to write extremely fast, and, as much as it's possible, without thinking; so that your phrases go in whatever direction they choose; and yet you maintain proper syntax — you don't just toss random words out onto the page, haphazardly. Go ahead and place a dot at the end of each sentence.

True, I didn't explain that very well either, but my point is made: Automatic writing has no known author.

The author of an automatic text could be either the brain itself (the meat trapped in the skull), or the fire that pulses thru the brain (the electricity that shocks the skull-meat), or some earlier cosmic event of which the human being is an echo. Or the author could be God, or one of God's demons, or the author herself.

But even if the author IS the author, she doesn't know this with a surety; and there's something strange about that. It's like when your friend snaps a picture of you unexpectedly, and you remark “Is that really what I look like when I'm not consciously posing?” Or like the first time you record your voice speaking, and when you play back the audio, you say “Is that really how my voice sounds?” The part of you that thinks that you should appear different probably has access to better information about your actual self than is available to us in this shared realm of space and time.

NEUTRAL THINGS

On TV shows, they have this idea called “talent”. I wish I possessed talent, so that I could be the TV talent. But it's not really talent that is required of talent: you really just have to be handsome, and have a somewhat bland personality. That's what people want to see (or so they claim). Now, I'm not ugly, but I'm definitely not handsome; and my personality is the opposite of bland. My personality is like a pizza that has a topping that you do not like. Or perhaps many such toppings. Weird things that do not belong on an edible construct.

But gol darnit, can't they just let one wrong type of person appear on television? I'd really like to have my own show, or to be a regular guest on someone else's show. I'd even settle for being a sidekick — even if my whole job was just to laugh at everything the dull host said, I could do that really well. I can laugh on cue; no prob. Other folks can belch on cue, but that's gross: those types of people should be damned — I myself can laugh convincingly, whether or not an act is funny. So I could also be a radiant movie star, as long as the role demanded sincere laughter.

I've also always wanted to play a “bad guy” in a story. I've heard thru the grapevine (that is: by way of the prayer-chain known as gossip) about old Hollywood actors who were offered roles, which they turned down because they were strictly against playing anything but “good guys”. What a boring disposition. But it's understandable, cuz a lot of those actors had just come back from fighting in war; so they had already got their fix of being sadistic in reality. But my own actions are compassionate to a tee, so it thrills me to pretend that I am wicked. For instance: in reality, I could never lose my temper & berate a corporate executive in the presence of his lawyer; however, on film, I could let loose & give both men a verbal whipping. For, when playacting, one can be rude to one's fellow creatures without genuinely harming them, because they know that it's all make-believe. I'm really interested in these have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too types of scenarios.