OMGGGGG! I started it in 1999—and now it’s finally here! Or rather, there! Near you! In bookstores! And on Amazon! And Barnes & Noble! And iTunes! In paperback! And E-Book formats! I’ll admit it: I’m proud of it; it’s the best thing I’ve ever made. So if you’re moved, get it! Read it! Love it! Thank you *so much* to everyone who supported this dream, who believed, and who helped keep me sane (as much as that’s possible—hahaha). Here’s a kung fu present just for you….

The standing-room-only book tour’s reading & performance launch party at gorgeous Skylight Books in L.A. was a smash! I’ve gotta admit, it felt a little surreal (and terrifying) to hold the book in my hands and talk openly about something I’ve been working on like a hermit behind closed doors since 1999—but there’s no denying that the excitement, anticipation, and support in the room were real, and I couldn’t be more grateful—it’s my childhood dream coming true. Thank you *so much* to everyone who came out!

After catching a few hours of sleep, we drove up to the Sylvia White Gallery in Ventura, where I unveiled a new piece called Your Name Is Magic for the monthly live 5x5x5 show curated by my performance art mentor, the certifiable art genius John M. White.

The gallery was packed, and the crowd absolutely on fire. I can’t be 100% sure, but I *think* I received my first standing ovation (except that the crowd was already standing, so I don’t know if that really counts??—haha).

You can get all of the book tour information here—we’ve got a ton of stops from L.A. to NYC, with more cities coming soon! I can’t wait to read and perform for you!

I can’t believe the book’s official launch is only 30 days away! It’s been such a long, surreal, and gloriously delirious haul—did I really start this journey 14 years ago? Apparently I did. Apparently I’m insane. Hahaha. But holy shit, IT’S HERE!

Which brings me to two exciting announcements:

First, although the official launch date is April 10th, 2014, there’s no such thing as exactitude when it comes to dates in the world of publishing, since books will hit different distributors, wholesalers, and retailers at different times. And so it’s happened that the E-book version of the book is already available for the Kindle, iPad, and Kobo devices! I’m trying not to make a huge deal of this, because the publisher and I have spent so much time trying to run a coordinated April 10th launch, but if you’re reading this, and want an E-Book version instead of the paperback, by all means, hit it!

And second: I’m insanely thrilled to say we’ve just confirmed our first bookstore event! I’ll be reading and signing at the gorgeous Skylight Books bookstore in Los Angeles on April 3rd at 7:30PM. Expect a little reading, a little performance art history, and of course, a lot of crazy. And YES, we will have paperbacks for sale—the real deal! I would LOVE to see you there! (And if you’re not in L.A., don’t worry, there are plenty of other cities and dates, with more coming!)

Many people ask why my novel, Two Performance Artists Kidnap Their Boss And Do Things With Him, has such a long title.

Answers:

1. It’s ridiculous (and therefore, I hope, memorable).

2. It references Hank and Larry, the novel’s performance art protagonists, who believe that every performance art piece should be given a title that simply says what the piece is about. Example: “Slap My Face With A 2-Pound Trout.”

3. My first boss (who is now a billionaire) gave me this marketing advice: “The best name for a thing just tells people what it does.” Maybe he was on to something.

NEWSFLASH: I’ll be protesting SHIA LABEOUF’s plagiarizing ass tomorrow/Thursday Feb. 13th outside the art gallery where he’s doing his #IAMSORRY “performance.” Stop on by anytime from 11am until 5pm and join in the craziness! Wear your favorite #lunchbagfashion! Cohen Gallery, 7354 Beverly Blvd.

UPDATE (2/13/14): The experience was incredible. WOW. *Thank you* to all of the friends, Hippos, family, and *new* friends for holding me up during today’s protest and #LABEEF performance. The huge crowd — some 300 people who’d been there 8 hrs or more — was empathetic, encouraging, and full of original POVs on Shia, his spectacle, and celebrity. I learned so much, and was blown away by the support—thank you.

Part of my performance (photos here) involved wearing a paper bag with the words #WE WERE NEVER FAMOUS printed on it, and using black duct tape to affix a beef patty to the top of each of my shoes (thanks for the discount, Burger King!). The beef was a reference to interviews LaBeouf has given in which he’s stated that his last name originates from barely-literate French ancestors who couldn’t properly spell the French word for “beef” (boeuf). I’d originally planned to use only one beef patty, but then decided to use two, with the second foot “plagiarizing” the first. And the pieces of black tape served as funerary stripes, like black arm bands, to mourn the slow death of LaBeouf’s originality.

I also ripped out pages from copies of LaBeouf’s zine Cyclical, signed them SCOTCH, and gave them away as souvenirs — my favorite gesture of all, and the crowd seemed to love it.

I was especially moved when, after hearing my story, several people throughout the day offered to let me take their places in line so I could confront LaBeouf directly, even though they’d been waiting for over 5 hours. I was grateful, but couldn’t do it. In order for the #apology to be sincere, I felt LaBeouf needed to come to me. I’d notified the gallery that I would be outside, and that LaBeouf was welcome to come out and apologize to me directly—his army of bodyguards were welcome too!—but he didn’t make an appearance.

Thanks to Jake Perlman at Entertainment Weekly for his fine interview, to KPFK’s talented Jasmine Broderick for talking with me, and to Pop Culture Beast‘s Kari Tervo for her great coverage.

POSTSCRIPT:

Two friends of mine warned me not to let Shia steal my magic, nor my “magic wand.” Haha.

Worry not: LaBeoufs everywhere want nothing to do with magic. From my forthcoming biography, Shia: An Unauthorized Life:

Shia’s French forefathers were, by all accounts, country clodhoppers and barely literate. Cattle breeders by trade, they worked barefoot in the dung over 20 hectares of pasture just south of Montagnol.

The French word for steer was la boeuf, which, unsurprisingly, was also slang for the male organ. When a breeder went into town, he’d try to entice women with crass jokes about his beouf — accidentally misspelled, of course, and therefore mispronounced — to which the women would respond with glee: “n’existe pas, votre beouf!”

Confused, the breeder would report back to the other pasturemen that women had found his beef to be imaginary. Over time, the men became convinced that they’d been cursed with genitalia that only they could see (or smell). Frustrated, they stopped courting women. Known collectively as Les Beoufs, these beef bachelors passed the time by inventing elaborate pasture dances that consisted of leaping long distances in order to hump the air.

If, by pure luck, a breeder did manage to marry, his refusal to wear shoes or bathe made sex unthinkable. If his wife wanted a baby, she would write allemagne — the French word for Germany — on a paper and give it to her husband. Sounding out the letters, the husband would incorrectly render it as “aller magne” — literally, “to go to magne.”

Magne was, of course, a homophone for the English word ‘man’, but more importantly, it contained the prefix mag, from the old Greek magos, which signified a special male member of the priestly class — that is, not just a class ‘member’ (sexually and organizationally speaking), but a special one: namely, a magician or male witch. The husband understood that magic must be necessary in order to conceive a child — how else could it occur?

Reluctant to get too close to occult practices, the husband would take his wife to the train station at Montagnol, where she would show the allemagne paper to the conductor. The conductor would laugh, but faithfully charge the couple for a ticket to Frankfurt — a party town packed with German sailors on leave — and off the wife would go, away to ‘the magician’, the husband believed, only to return weeks later, happy as a clam, and of course, very pregnant.

And so it came to pass that Shia would hail from a long line of bastards who knew nothing of magic — but plenty about fruitless humping.

…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.

First things first: the 100 Performances for the Hole at SOMArts January 4th in San Francisco killed, with 100 consecutive performers each doing a 4-minute piece in a 4-foot concrete hole in the gallery’s floor. The crowds were amazing—half drunk and game for anything, their numbers ranged from 200 to 400 at any given moment. My inner art critic felt there wasn’t enough site-specific attention paid to the hole by the performers generally, but there were some amazing spectacles nonetheless, with one of my favorite pieces being “Bare Suit” by 100-Hole veteran, Pete Ippel.

My piece, Echolocation for the Unconscious, involved a quick rundown on the history of the mischievous Greek nymph Echo, tips for measuring echo distances in time and space (the distance from yourself to yourself), and then my following my echoes down into the concrete rabbit’s hole with the aid of a rappelling harness and rope. Fortunately, the far end of the rope was held tight by my pals Ryan and Patrick, two super-strong dudes. But unfortunately, the ground was slippery from a prior band of performers who’d sprayed the floor with tissue paper confetti. When the time came to rappel, my helpers slipped on the paper, causing me to fall 4 feet (almost) flat on my face…but it looked great. I only suffered a busted-up thumb and a pulled shoulder. And in its drunken exuberance, audience members began echoing everything I said almost from the beginning—sometimes a few people, other times hundreds—the sound was gorgeous. No doubt, somewhere Echo was laughing her ass off off off.

BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY: I just learned that the bound galleys for Two Performance Artists have arrived! They’re large & sexy, a full 8.5 x 11″ for easy reading, and available in E-formats also for Kindles, iPads, and all the rest. If you’re a book reviewer, hit me up for your copy! The novel comes out April 10th—just three months away!

SQUEALLLL! I just found out I’ve been selected to perform at the 4th annual 100 PERFORMANCES FOR THE HOLE show Saturday, January 4th at SOMArts in San Francisco! If you haven’t heard of this, it’s crazy: 100 performers each perform a 4-minute piece in a 6′ x 4′ hole in the gallery floor. That’s right: A HUNDRED PERFORMANCES BACK-TO-BACK! The show’ll run from about 6PM until at least 12:30AM. If you live for experimental performance, DO NOT MISS THIS! My 4-minute slot starts at 11:34PM. It’s gonna be wild! Tickets are $12 in advance, or $25 for VIP (includes free beer!). If you live in SF, I’d LOVE to see you there! General info is here, and tickets are on sale here.

I opened the email and there it was: “Kirkus has just published its review of your novel.” Oh god. My first review! I instantly felt nauseous.

I’ve long tried to mentally brace myself against the people who don’t like performance art, who aren’t interested in caper novels, or the ones who simply revel in burning novels to the ground…but I really, really was praying that my first review wouldn’t be a pan. I wanted a kind omen—just one—for the start.

I read it as fast as I could. And, to my joy, the review was generous & kind. OMG, relief.

The reviewer’s main beef was with the plotting, which Kirkus found to be indelicately paced, given my tendency to pile on more and “more craziness until the proceedings implode.”

I had to disagree—not because I think I’m innocent of crazy-piling, but because doing so was entirely appropriate for the story. Because it’s a madcap novel. Really, what caper comedy doesn’t pile on the craziness? It’s entirely appropriate. And what performance art piece worth its salt isn’t at least a little wacko? I applauded the spirit of the critique, but felt it was a bit of a straw man; given my subject matter and genre, I’d say the reviewer missed his mark by an inch on this point. I’ll take crazy. Absolutely.

That aside, the rest of the review was swoon-worthy: “raucous debut satire…whip-smart prose…a fertile, scabrous comic imagination that feels like a mashup of Rain Man and Fight Club.” Rain Man and Fight Club? YESSS!

Of course, he left out 9 to 5, Pulp Fiction, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Clockwork Orange, Sneakers, and The Burbs, but Kirkus, I so forgive you. Hahaha

The full review is here.

This Friday I’m unveiling ECHO, a brand new performance art piece about trusting your own voice. The lineup also includes John White (my art mentor and performance art god), PLUS the first public showing of my novel’s video trailer, PLUS get a free, limited edition Two Performance Artists bookmark! At the Sylvia White Gallery 5x5x5 Show in Ventura, CA, 1783 East Main Street. 8PM (but it gets packed, so arrive early). Free admission!

Update: I traced my feet, diagrammed echo math, and ate glass. Photos are up!