…So much, in fact, that he apparently lifted passages verbatim from my performance art manifesto for his recent “performance art plagiarism” on Twitter.

If this whole drama is news to you, it really started in late 2013 when the world learned LaBeouf had plagiarized word-for-word from Justin M. Damiano, a comic by Daniel Clowes, for LaBeouf’s short film Howard Cantour. Caught red-handed, but determined to laugh off his asininity, LaBeouf presented a mea culpa through plagiarized apologies on Twitter, then did a little skywriting, and then offered the excuse that this had all been “metamodernist performance art” — that, oh you know, his charmed life is really just a performance art piece — all of which climaxed with a final twittering of performance art aphorisms that read almost like a performance art manifesto. An astute tipster googled some of LaBeouf’s tweets, and lo, discovered they’d been lifted straight from the performance art manifesto on my web site, as well as from writings of performance artist Marina Abramovic and others.

You can check out his (un)original tweets, my manifesto (originally published in 2009 as evidenced by Archive.org), or compare them side-by-side. As payment for my writerly services, I won’t object if Shia wants to buy a few thousand copies of my novel when it comes out April 10th. I’ll even sign each one (unless, of course, he’d prefer to sign my signature himself? Ha).

I’ve received buckets of sympathy from supporters & cohorts, which I truly appreciate. Sincerely: thank you for having my back.

But I need to say for myself: I’m not without a sense of humor, nor do I lack appreciation for pastiche, sampling, intertextual play, remaking, invoking past influences, and the like; these are how humans push ideas forward.

I was reminded today (thanks, Mark Axelrod) that French-American writer Raymond Federman termed this kind of textual borrowing “playgiarism” to distinguish it from less artful, more insidious brands of thievery:

“To answer the question once and for all. I cannot explain how Playgiarism works. You do it or you don’t. You’re born a Playgiarizer or you’re not. It’s as simple as that. The laws of Playgiarism are unwritten. Like incest, it’s a taboo. It cannot be authenticated. The great Playgiarizers of all time — Homer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Diderot, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Proust, Beckett, Federman — have never pretended to do anything else. Inferior writers deny that they playgiarize because they confuse Plagiarism with Playgiarism. It’s not the same. The difference is enormous, but no one has yet been able to explain it. Playgiarism cannot be measured in weight or size. It is as elusive as what it playgiarizes.

Plagiarism is sad. It whines. It cries. It feels sorry for itself. It apologizes. It feels guilty. It hides behind itself.

Playgiarism on the contrary laughs all the time. It exposes itself. It is proud. It makes fun of what it does while doing it. It denounces itself.

That does not mean that Playgiarism is self-reflexive. How could it be? How can something reflect itself when that itself has, so to speak, no itself, but only a borrowed self. A displaced self.

If this is getting too complicated, too intellectual, too abstract, then let me put it in simpler terms — on the Walt Disney mental level: Playgiarism is above all a game whose only rule is the game itself. The French would call that plajeu.”

Lit critic Larry McCaffery writes about 3 kinds of plagiarist hoaxes: the kind intended to remain undiscovered (e.g., forged painting), the kind intended to be detected (via irony or exaggeration), and the third: an exact forgery, but whose “forged nature is built into the project” in the form of a constructed context (the context allows for the forgery to be inferred).

With his list of “playgiarizing” authors above, Federman seems to cover all 3 kinds of hoaxery — plain thievery, artful dodgery, and structuralized disclosure, respectively — but I find these forms of plagiarism to be vastly different from each other on the ethical scale (and on this, Federman is suspiciously quiet). Since le jeu (“the game”) can’t be self-reflexive — it can’t confess, having no self — and in the case where the audience has no idea a game is even being played — the playgiarizing “borrower” is really playing the game alone, and for his or her own gain, at the expense of the author who did all the work.

My guess is that Shia intended to succeed, through hubris or ignorance, in the first kind of hoax with his film’s brazen theft of Daniel Clowes’s comic. After that embarrassing & expensive failure, he stumbled upon the third kind of hoax through trial and error, creating a “constructed context” by accident, insofar as his listless celebrity aura, stuttering initial apologies, and reputation as a goof quickly made it unbelievable that he’d authored any of the tweets — his ham-handedness became the context in which we no longer believed his claims of authorship. And thus, his tweetfest devolved into dorky, eye-rolling postmodern pastiche — what Fredric Jameson called the “emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” — which was ironically (and accidentally) fitting for a celeb — and especially one trying to confidently bullshit his way forward in spite of total inexperience.

In short, I guess I take issue less with going uncredited as part of an art project, and more with being part of a failed “artist’s” blind grasp at justification for his own initial ethical failure. It just feels kind of icky.

From Federman’s “Story of the Sparrow”:

“The moral of this story: Your enemy is not necessarily the one who shits on your head. Your friend, however, is not necessarily the one who pulls you out of the shit. And besides, one should never twitter when one is buried in shit.”

With his willingness to clumsily screw artists everywhere, it’s no wonder “Shia LaBeouf” is an anagram for “I Has Oaf Lube.”

See? I has a sense of humor.

Writing my novel looked like this.

The TWO PERFORMANCE ARTISTS book trailer is here! You can play it below, or watch it on YouTube.

To learn more about how it was made, check out the novel’s FAQ page. And to the tireless cast, crew, and volunteers who made it all happen: THANK YOU!

A new wacky video with me & pal Natalie Palamides from our Wet the Hippo show at this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival:

NSA got you feeling paranoid?  Not to worry: I made you a little tool that’ll let you encrypt (scramble) any message between you and a friend using a browser or smartphone.

But this scrambler has a surprise. After encrypting your message with industrial-grade AES encryption, the tool further scrambles the output into a mess of random NSA terror watchwords. If the NSA is so hellbent on illegal eavesdropping, why not give them something fun to read? And if enough of us use this, in theory it should make it harder for them to single out any one person for monitoring.

Scrambling the phrase NSA is watching with the password eavesdrop produces a ciphertext of:

exposure bomber spy worm cain black chemicals port marijuana hazmat botnets eavesdrop codes standoff trafficking cain black underground eavesdrop trafficking pipe scam narcotics undercover tnt riot black national biological trafficking listen port cops initiative force cartels looting underground nitrate national bombing nitrate outbreak mitigate

…and then you can use the eavesdrop password again to decrypt the whole mess back to normal.

Haha, OK, granted, maybe it’s not the most efficient means of communication, but it’s fun. And the AES makes it strong as hell. And it’s one more way to protest the erosion of our constitutional rights. Ssshh! They’re listening.

Get scrambled at Ønsa.net

Alex Madrigal, illustrator extraordinaire, has started work on the book’s cover art. Although my freehand sucks, I did him the “favor” of putting together a rough movie poster-style comp to give him some idea of the book’s zodiac of characters & action. The result was insane, and proof that I probably need my Photoshop examined. But if you look closely, you’ll see Bill, Stark, Mouse, Hank, and Larry (Hank and Larry are the women skating in the tighty whities—it was 1 a.m. and I was too tired to bother looking for appropriate heads, so for now, they’re women; no harm there). Lovely. Brace yourself, then click here to see the whole picture in all its glory.

Here’s a taste of the insanity I’ve been cooking up for the 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival in June with John Gilkey, Natalie Palamides, Alec Jones-Trujillo, Tyler Watson, Gabriel McKinney, Tim Reid, Claire Titelman, and Don Colliver. The show’s called Wet The Hippo, and our preview shows all sold out, so don’t delay! Get ticket info here!

 
*** UPDATE: Bitter Lemons, L.A.’s most trusted source for theater news & reviews, just posted a great review of WET THE HIPPO, and called the duo piece that I performed with Natalie Palamides “…absolutely hilarious…hallucinatory….” Not bad!

Sat. April 6th I’ll be in WET THE HIPPO, a seriously demented show produced by JOHN GILKEY, a longtime Cirque du Soliel clown and insane man. It’s improvised, but it’s not “improv.” It’s just…well, insane, hilarious, and terrifying, and maybe the new face of avant garde performance. Doors at 7. Only $5 at the door. Flight Theater at The Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. GUARANTEED to sell out, so arrive early!

(While you’re at it, if you want to know more about John, Cirque, and the danger of clowns, have a listen to this radio interview I did with John late last year).

*** UPDATE: There’ll be another performance this Friday, May 3, 2013, at 10PM as we get ready for the Hollywood Fringe Festival. I’ll be performing on stage, plus playing a cajon drum to accompany one of the spazziest performances you’ll ever see! Tickets only $5! Doors at 9:30. Flight Theater at The Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Free booze. Come watch the insanity!

*** UPDATE: The show sold out and killed! Don’t miss us at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in June, 2013!  Check out a few photos from the show, or learn about tickets.

“Look at the man! He is insane! Why bring him to me? Am I so short of madmen that you have to bring this fellow here to carry on like this in front of me?” —1 Samuel 21:14

L.A.’s NIHILIST FILM FESTIVAL is this Friday 12/7 at 8PM. If you’re a fan of surreal, absurdist, nihilist, short, wacky, crazed, Spanish, underground, cut-and-paste, low-brow, monobrow, waxed brow, conceptual, or WTF film, don’t miss it! Last year featured silverware f*cking. Hello!?? Admission is only 99 CENTS (in honor of the cliff). Echo Park Film Center, 1200 North Alvarado. Curated by le grand nihilistmeister hims-elf, Elisha Shapiro.

I had my most intense ghost experience in 1990 during my freshman year in college. My roommate and I were studying one night when our dorm room suddenly became freezing cold, even though the city was a sweltering 80 degrees and we had no air conditioning. The nerves in my skin started buzzing—like TV snow—as if I’d suddenly been draped by an invisible blanket of static electricity. I looked up from my book just in time to see a man standing in our room. Our room’s door was locked, yet somehow he’d gotten in without a sound, and now there he was, obscuring the entire door with his wide 6’5 frame. He was opaque and dark—a shadow man—with no discernible features except for two glowing yellow eyes. I glanced at my roommate, who was staring at the door with his mouth and eyes wide open, unable to speak. I looked back at the door again and the figure was gone. I asked, “Did you see that?” And my roommate replied, “The eyes!” Doubting myself, I glanced down at my book, and to my shock, saw an afterglow of the man on the white of the page—an after-image burned onto my retinas like a camera flash. I looked to the left, then the right, and the image moved with my gaze. How was that possible, if what we’d seen hadn’t emitted some kind of energy?

The man continued visiting us over the next two weeks with increasing frequency. Every time he appeared, my roommate and I would feel our room go abuzz with cold static and our hair would stand up. The static energy was so powerful that we could tell where the man was in our building—even if he was at the far end of the hall, we could feel where his energy was coming from in the same way you can feel the Sun’s heat with your eyes shut. The man visited at all hours, including the dead of night, until we started losing sleep. The cold static was rubbing my nerves raw to the point that I felt hypersensitive to the thoughts and emotions of others. When the static was around, I gained a measurable amount of psychic awareness, and my roommate was having the same experience. For fun, one of us would draw a picture, then focus on it intently, to see if the other could pick up on the thoughts and draw the same picture. The results were uncanny; again and again, with increasing accuracy, we were able to reach each other’s thoughts. The other students in the dorm thought we were possibly insane, but they couldn’t argue with the fact that our arm hair was standing up, and that we seemed able to know what the other was thinking in test after test.

I had my first out of body experience during this time of raw nervousness. One evening while walking up a path to our dorm building from class, I felt a surge of “jangly nerves”—an energy that seemed to come up from the ground and wash over me—and suddenly I was flying, like a Chinese dragon with a long tail that was still attached to my physical body. My dragon-spirit “body” flew up the path to the dorm, down the hall, and up the stairs to a small living room where I saw my friends sitting around talking. Then, in a flash, my spirit retracted, slamming back into my body. All of this had occurred in the blink of an eye. Not sure if what I’d experienced had been real, I ran to the dorm, down the hall, and up the stairs to the living room, where I found everyone—all the students I’d seen in my vision were there—except one woman, Laura, was standing, while in my vision I’d seen her sitting. I asked her, “Were you just sitting on that couch a second ago?” To which she answered, “Yes. Why?” So it was true: I’d visited the living room before I’d arrived.

After 2 weeks, my roommate and I couldn’t take it anymore. Our nerves were fried, and we were averaging 2-3 hours of sleep per night. Desperate, I researched everything I could find on exorcism, cleansing, repelling ghosts, you name it. I finally settled on a series of shamanic rituals that involved communicating with the ghost, and relocating him. I chose the ground outside of the dorm as his new intended home. Naked and alone in the dark of the dorm room, I carried out the exhausting ritual over several hours, during which the ghost communicated that he was lost. I reassured him that his new home in the earth would be comforting, and less disruptive to everyone around him. He agreed to be bound to his new home, which I sealed by burying a jar in the dirt right outside of our dorm building (which, appropriately, was called “the Shire” in the Middle Earth housing complex on the campus of U.C. Irvine). I walked back inside the dorm building, and felt a quiet sense of peace—the static energy was gone, and never returned while we lived there.

Several years later (around 1996, I think), a friend who knew the above story handed me a copy of the university’s newspaper, which included a news article about the incident. The reporter had written that the Shire was apparently experiencing a haunting, and that the ghost bore a resemblance to a ghost encountered several years earlier during which a “shaman had been brought in” to exorcise the building. The story detailed the exorcism—including the burying of the spirit in the dirt—and then said that recent building construction around the Shire had no doubt released the ghost back into the wild….