Diary of a Young James Franco

From the diary of a young James Franco:

age 9, "I thought in those movies and tv shows when they talk about having a coffee break that they should have a masturbation break. But then again, maybe that would decrease productivity. Aha!"

age 11, "Maybe these are my glory days, and I'm not even realizing it because they don't involve a ball."

age 16, "a well-bearded man is only a well-bearded man as long as someone makes sure that he stays that way. Instead of the morning shave as status quo, a new order emerges. Instead of the never-ending regularly recurring necessity deserving comparison with the trials of Sisyphus there is...what exactly I don't know yet. A lot of people like saying things like, 'hey man, nice beard.'"

Christmas, 2014, "I think I'm the only person in my family who's ever been high. maybe also my brother. i'm not sure. definitely not my sister. then again, maybe my whole family has been high, and we just don't tell each other these things."

The James Franco Weed Challenge (YouTube)

The time of James Franco's novel
is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity
with humanity.

A humanity that no longer knows anything
no longer remembers anything
lives in cities without names
where the streets have no names
or with names different from those they had yesterday.

Because a name is continuity with the past
people without a past are people without a name.
 
***
To appreciate a mystery,
part of the mind must be left behind,
brooding,
while the other part
goes
marching
on.
 - James Franco, 12/25/14

***
James Franco is post-postmodern.

***
Franco estimates that a person would have to smoke
a hundred pounds of marijuana
per minute
for fifteen minutes
in order to induce a lethal response.

Sounds like a YouTube challenge!

Only One Of These Is True (1)

Either:

(1)
Fighting with his wife,
James Franco once threw his three-month-old daughter
against a wall.
It was a padded wall in his ironic "madhouse" room,
but still.

Or:

(2)
James Franco thinks St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine
were both anti-Semites.

Or:

(3)
James Franco says he has read
Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
at least three dozen times.

Someone Nodded Hello

Someone nodded hello to James Franco on the street yesterday. It must have created a domino effect, because once this someone started, everyone was nodding hello to James Franco on the street yesterday.

Franco's affair with Anna Akhmatova's great-great-granddaughter, Anna, in Amsterdam in 2044. True or false? Later in Franco's life, having never left Amsterdam, after a third of a century, James would be astonished to learn how famous he'd become, mostly thanks to Anna.

Either: James Franco's favorite personal artistic creation is a Haiku he wrote when he was 20. It's three lines long. He started it when he was 14.

Or: If forced to choose, James Franco once said, "I would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Picasso."

The Planet Camazotz

This one time, James Franco was on the planet Camazotz 

where all these little boys 

were in front of their ticky-tacky houses, 

bouncing their matching balls

of yellow, blue, and red.

All the balls hit the ground 

at exactly the same moment, 

every time.

James lit a cigarette 

and all the boys turned 

at the same exact instant

and they went back to their identical houses.

Except for one boy. 

Outside all alone,

his ball rolled forlorn into the street,

his mother all nervous and shit, 

she came out and wrangled her son,

invited James in for some coffee.

***

Harold and Maude

Dilettante has a son Harold & a daughter Maude.

The oldest movie he’s ever seen is Forrest Gump, from 1994.

He’s only seen 17 films, from beginning to end.

         America needs a 2nd party

Dilettante once dreamed he was inside a Klingon television show,

portraying a human being from the united federation of planets.

Dr. McCoy says, "wallets wrapped in amber" & it appears,

"apparently anything that can be created

which is also aesthetically pleasing, is created

Upon its signifier's utterance..."

This planet is run by fashionistas, etsy crafts folk.

WTF Klingons?

Which reminds Dilettante of the episode of Frasier

where Frasier ends up speaking at his son’s bar mitzvah

because his baby mama is named Lilith

jewish & but frasier

pisses off his friend who was supposed to translate his speech,

so his friend translates it, but into Klingon.

Which reminds Dilettante he wants to make a short story with this premise.

Dilettante says Sam Harris's motto is --

Tolerance (n):

The virtue of those who believe in nothing.

That the Great Person should be able to appear & dwell among

you again & again.

That is the sense of all your efforts here on earth.

That there should ever & again be men & women among you

able to elevate you to your heights:

That is the prize for which you strive.

& if you are not yourself a great exception well then be a small

one at least!

& so you will foster on earth that holy fire from which genius may

arise.

Friedrich Nietzsche.

Dilettante decided to experiment with Evolution, to at least read a

book about it, against the better notions of his parents, his pastor,

& his teachers.

He read Darwin's On The Origin of Species

under the covers at night so that no one would find out.

He became a Darwinist & things were good, & more importantly,

made sense.

For a while. 

Excited For Some Reason

Unfurling before our eyes

expands an endless array of Dilettantes,

a buzz at the front door sharpens things

as the Dilettantes coalesce into

one hirsute instance of the nigh cryptozoological

Dilettante

a buzz from the neighbor who lost her keys

Dilettante hesitates,

not to be rude, but cuz he’s awkward

dont know her name, sorry

only been living here for 3, 4, 5 years

i said sorry

i should know her name for crying out loud

(bend it like Dilettante)

i’m going to my room

to your room?

open the door, dude, it’s your “turn”

i opened it last time

i don’t remember that

yeah cuz it was 3 weeks ago

wait

i just got a text

he’s going to be here any minute

who

lots of baseball signs,

he’s like a third base coach

what the fuck is he trying to say

dissolve, choronzon, into nothingness

sound & fury

nothing

godot

multiple Dilettante heads pop out of each doorway,

in a long series of doorways,

leading down a seemingly infinite hallway,

there must be mirrors,

it can’t actually be infinite

can it

Godot?

did somebody say godot?

it’s pronounced Gold STEEEEEEEEEEEN.

& the Dilettantes arrange themselves in a congo line,

excited for some reason.

***

Calling to you who wanders aimlessly, or wonders,

Calling to those lost on the flotsam of eternity:

    You are a donkey that shall die in a terrifying bray.

How to Rearrange the Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Dilettante is currently working on a series of photographs,

no biggie,

of wild animals praying to various dieties,

sundry iconographies,

& doing other things generally agreed upon

by most

to be outrageously ridiculous.

The caption, under the photos:

“It looks ridiculous when you do it, too.”

Dilettante has a tremor,

but its mildly endearing.

  

He once "accidentally" shook a pot of coffee so violently

that it spilled onto the hands of the Catholic priest

who's coffee Dilettante was pouring.

How does Dilettante live with himself?

  He has to, that's how.

Fidget's Fifth

Dilettante writes semifictional children’s books about the inner lives of zoo animals.

Giraffes, he writes, almost exclusively dream as unicorns.

Dilettante was up late all we long, putting together the final touches on a special edition DVD box set of his brother’s third marriage, complete with bloopers, outtakes, behind-the-scenes glimpses of the consummation, et cetera.

Instead, he was kidnapped,

Taken to a place,

Taken under (drugged),

woke up in a room full of actors

First thing he says is,

"Is this place real? Is this

Virtual reality?"

Not knowing why he thought to ask at all.

"You can leave,"

Said a booming voice

Dilettante determined to be a mannish woman,

From an adjacent room.

"but you only enter another room

each room is diffferent

And has, therefore,

Rules unique unto me itself.

No two rooms are remotely alike,

Due to Fidget's Fifth."

"Fidget's What?"

Far Out, Frasier

Dilettante once asked, “Did you know people still use actual, physical greeting cards?”

“Really, people still use em.”

“What are they?”

Dilettante of course remembered the original campaign to ban physical greeting cards because they were obviously less important than trees, not to mention books. 

The campaign was a series of all these different people talking about what they did with the ridiculously large amount of money they had lying around once they stopped buying greeting cards for every single occasion, & instead, when the spirit moved them, sent an e-card or somesuch.

“I once thought of making a supercut version of the Sci-Fi television series Fringe, edited by me, chopped up to tell a different story.”

“Right. You could do that. That’s a great idea.”
“I wanted to call it Lunatic Fringe.”

“You gotta be kitten me. I had the same title idea, but it was for a story about this mad genius who kidnapped people and performed experiments on them in his supernaturally large, possibly infinite mansion, normal-sized from the outside.”

“That’s far out, Frazier.”
“You’re kitten me. No, no, no, you godda be kitten me. That’s another idea I had. A supercut, but about the show Frasier and how far out he is, in the Alan Watts sense of the word, like totally committed to his character, his ego, despite the fact that he’s clearly just god differentiated into individuated matter in order to know itself.”

“Right.”

The Frammis Goskit Distims the Blue Doshes on Round Thursdays

The Frammis Goskit Distims the Blue Doshes on Round Thursdays

Dilettante has abandoned pretensions to Philosophy,

Much like the pretensions of his child ego.

He passes rapidly from Hemingway to Proust

to Hitler to Marx to Foucault to Mary Douglas

to the present situation in The Middle East

to Tolstoy to Steve Jobs's biography.

He is a name-dropper,

who uses names such to refer to ways of seeing.

  

His specialty is in seeing similarities & differences

between great big pictures,

between attempts

to see how things hang together.

Dilettante is the person who tells you

how all the ways of making things hang together

hang together. 

Windigokan no-flight contraries.

Lost in space & time.

An airport bathroom.

A woman & a man, the Dilettante --

with five-day stubble &

A surprisingly expensive looking suit.

Each confused,

each washing their face in front of a mirror.

Each walking from their respective bathroom

bumping into each other.

On his flight,

the Dilettante is alone but for a single sannyasin,

whose eyes remain closed for the entire flight.

Dilettante converses with the sannyasin,

Nonetheless, & among other things they discuss

The film dark city of all things

(I haven't seen it) but when they're done

Talking about dark city & the director &

His other movies Yada Yada the sannyasin says

"I am an alien."

"What? You're a human being," laughed Dilettante, not knowing why he said this of all things. If he squinted, the sannyasin looked like tiger woods for a second & then like

"This is merely a disguise. The perfect trap with which to ensnare

you. Notice I look a lot like your childhood friend."

"No you don't."

"Yes I do."

"Look --"

"Yes I do."

"If you can morph or whatever - if that's what you're saying -

morph into something else."

"No."

"Um."

The main thing about them is not that they wish to go “back,”

but that they wish to get--

away.

A little more strength, flight, courage, &&

they would want to rise, not return!

  Exclaimed Nietzsche.

& now to pass to the matters canvassed in the following essay.

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture

culture being a pursuit of

total perfection by means of getting to know

on all matters which concern us,

the best which has been thought &

said in the world;

&

This, & this alone, is the scope of the following essay.

& the culture Dilettante recommends is,

above all, an inward operation. 

Surfeit of Knowledge, Sensation, Culture

Aporia (n):

To be at a metaphysical impasse,

but also the rhetorical act of

feigning such an impasse.

  I love NY.

"There are no secret rulers of the world."

"But even if there were, why not trust them? If one world government is all we have to fear, we'll be alright. Don't you want one world government?"

"I guess. How else are we gonna fight off the hordes of invading alien armies?"

I'm afraid of you,

Dilettante,

very much afraid, because the future of mankind depends on you.

I'm afraid of you

because your main aim in life is to escape--from yourself.

   

You're sick, little Noob, very sick.

    It's not your fault;

but it's your responsibility to get well.

    You'd have shaken off your oppressors long ago

if you hadn't countenanced oppression

& often given it your direct support.

No police force in the world

would have had the power to crush you

if you had an ounce of self-respect in your daily life,

if you were aware, really aware,

that without you life could not go on for one hour.

    You've got to realize

that you have raised up your little men to be oppressors,

& made martyrs of your truly great men;

that you have crucified & stoned them,

or let them starve,

that you have never given a moment's thought to them

or to what they have done for you;

that you haven't the faintest idea

who brought you the true benefits of your life.

As a child, Dilettante would always be holding helium-filled balloons,

whenever possible.

He likes to release a couple-three

into the New Year’s eve sky.

The Inevitability of Meaning Working Its Way Back Into Our Lives

Somewhere,

Demographically-Minded Social Scientist Dude

is reading a report

with your name on it.

  Next to your name, two boxes:

  Marked 'viable' & 'non-viable.'

        Behind all logic & its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life.

        For example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, & mere appearance worth less than “truth”--such estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless mere foreground estimates, a certain kind of niaiserie which may be necessary for the preservation of just such beings as we are.

           Said Nietzsche.

The Inevitability of Meaning Working Its Way Back Into Our Lives

For the Dilettante, certain signifiers fit you, & not others.

For the Dilettante, all signifiers fit himself.

  One as well as another.

He is trickster, rapscallion, anti hero,

craven, brave, treacherous, loyal,

at once the secret hero & asshole of the cosmos.

We are like the spider.

We weave our life & then move along in it.

We are like the dreamer who dreams & then lives in the dream.

This is true for the entire universe.

  From The Upanishads.

Dilettante the Daredevil

Dilettante the Noob, Ian

When Dilettante was a wee spazz of 12 or 13 years age,

When he was really more of a Noob than anything else,

Having not worked up the muster to rise to the

Torporous heights of dissipated ennui, he asked himself:

  What's the point in doing anything

  if God's in charge of

  everything I do?

If God's preordained it all?

Even then Noob né Dilettante at least had a sense of something being out of kilter.

He did not yet know that the Earth wobbled or that not trusting was even an option.

Still, he had more questions than answers, a deficit which would prove to have no ceiling.

The natural world behaves exactly the same way as the environment of Grand Theft Auto IV.

In the game, you can explore Liberty City seamlessly in phenomenal detail.

I made a calculation of how big that city is, & it turns out it’s a million times larger than my PlayStation 3.

You see exactly what you need to see of Liberty City when you need to see it, abbreviating the entire game universe into the console.

The universe behaves in the exact same way.

In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a definite state unless they’re being observed.

Many theorists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you explain this.

One explanation is that we’re living within a simulation, seeing what we need to see when we need to see it.

Writes Rich Terrile.

Dilettante Gets A Blunderbuss

Organize a fake holdup.

  You won't be able to do it.

The network of artificial signs will become

inextricably mixed with the real elements.

  A policeman will really fire on sight.

  Someone will faint & die of a heart attack.

You will immediately find yourself again,

without wishing it,

in the realm of the real,

one of whose functions is precisely to devour

any attempt at simulation,

to reduce everything to the real --

that is, to the established order itself,

well before institutions & justice come into play.

  

      Wrote Baudrillard.

How To Survive In The Wild

This morning I snuck into Dilettante’s room

while he was in the shower &

I got How to Survive in the Wild of Civilization Volume 3

out of his bureau.

Then I got back into bed &

hid it under the covers.

When Dilettante came in I pretended to be sick.

He put his hand on my forehead &

said What do you feel?

so I said I think I have swollen glands,

so he said You must be coming down with something,

so I said But I have to go to school,

so he said Nothing will happen if you miss a day,

so I said OK.

He brought me some chamomile tea with honey &

I drank it with my eye closed to show how sick I was.

When I heard his chair creak

I took How To Survive out &

started to read it to see if there were any clues

about who Dilettante was searching for.

Most of the pages were filled with information

like how to make a hot-rock bed, or a lean-to,

or how to make water potable.

About which Dilettante left scribbled in the margin:

"I’ve never seen any water that can’t be poured into a pot.

(Except maybe ice)"

I was starting to wonder if I would find anything

when I got to a page that said

HOW TO SURVIVE

IF YOUR GOLDEN PARACHUTE

FAILS TO OPEN.

There were ten steps but none of them made sense,

& what if your parachute isn’t golden?

For example if you are falling thru the air &

your (golden) parachute fails to open,

it said search for a stone

but why would there be stones

unless someone was throwing them at you

or you had one in your pocket

which most normal people don’t.

Mama & Papa Dilettante

Dilettante was baptized

& brought up Catholic.

He was instructed in religion as a child

& throughout boyhood & youth.

But at eighteen, he left,

Dilettante.

He left college in the middle of his sophomore year,

no longer believing any of the things he had been taught.

Judging from various memories,

he had never believed very seriously.

Just trusted in those who taught him,

& what they taught.

The trust was unstable.

When Dilettante was eleven,

J. P. Snook, now long since dead,

came to call on Dilettante,

only to announce that there was no God,

& that everything we were being taught

was, in his words,

a crock of shiznit.

This was in 1991.

Dilettante took great interest in the news.

A great discussion ensued.

Mama Dilettante & Papa Dilettante

& the entire Dilettante family became very excited,

& took the news as something very enthralling

& entirely possible.

Forest Ranger Dilettante

There was a time Dilettante lived in the forest.

He ate worms.

Bugs. 

Anything he could put in his mouth. 

Sometimes, Dilettante would get sick. 

His stomach was a mess, 

but he was orally fixated,

needed something to chew. 

Forest Ranger Dilettante drank from puddles.

Snow slushees.

He developed a fondness for sneaking into potato cellars

that the local farmers had around their villages.

They were a good hiding place

because the were a little warmer 

in the winter.

But there were rodent. 

To say that Dilettante ate rats--

yes he did, 

obv.

Dilettante wanted to live very badly.

This upset him to no end.

& there was only ever one reason: her.

Truth is she told Dilettante she couldn’t love him.

He made himself forget. 

He forgets why.

He keeps asking himself about it. 

___