Austin Kleon

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THE GOING-INTO-BUSINESS STORY: GHOSTBUSTERS AND BE KIND, REWIND

Warning! Mild Ghostbusters and Be Kind Rewind spoilers ahead!

This is a silly post for a silly subject.

Ghostbusters is a key movie for Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind: not only is it the first movie the Jack Black and Mos Def characters remake—”swede”— but the two movies actually share the same plotline: friends going-into-business.

Kurt Vonnegut:

Anyone can graph a simple story if he or she will crucify it, so to speak, on the intersecting axes I here depict:

“G” stands for good fortune. “I” stands for ill fortune. “B” stands for the beginning of a story. “E” stands for its end.

A much beloved story in our society is about a person who is leading a bearable life, who experiences misfortune, who overcomes misfortune, and who is happier afterward for having demonstrated resourcefulness and strength. As a graph, that story looks like this:

misfortune graph

This story shape describes most comedies, especially romantic ones:

In the case of the going into business story, it goes like this:

  1. friends go into business to wild success (good fortune)
  2. business gets shut down by government agency (misfortune)
  3. the community rallies behind the friends to save their world (good fortune)

Here’s Ghostbusters:

ghostbusters graph

  1. Friends get kicked out of Columbia, go into business for themselves, land on the cover of Time magazine, etc.
  2. Walter Peck from the EPA comes down and shuts down the power grid and all hell breaks loose
  3. the mayor gets the Ghostbusters out of jail, NYC rallies behind them, and they kick Gozer’s ass

Now Be Kind Rewind:

be kind rewind graph

  1. Jack Black erases the tapes, so he and Mos Def have to record their own movies, and everybody loves them
  2. the lawyers from the MPAA come to shut them down (and the developers want to tear down the building!)
  3. the ‘hood rallies, they make the Fats Waller documentary together, and they have the screening in the building so the developers can’t tear it down

It’s a great plot because it has great American themes: friendship, capitalism, and community.

Okay. So this post might not pass the “so what” test. I’ve had a couple margaritas…sue me.

Can anyone else think of other “going into business” plotlines?

THE “SO WHAT?” TEST

Sophomore year of college. Classics 202: Greek and Roman Epic. Teacher doesn’t say a word, just passes out our papers, walks up to the blackboard, picks up a piece of chalk, and writes:

so what

Then she says, “Ask yourself that next time you write something.”

Dang.

That’s one of those lessons I never forgot.  

ADAM GOPNIK ON MAGIC IN THE NEW YORKER

All grownup craft depends on sustaining a frozen moment from childhood: scientists, it’s said, are forever four years old, wide-eyed and self-centered; writers are forever eight, over-aware and indignant. The magician is a permanent pre-adolescent. At least, all lives of magicians begin with a 12-year-old…—Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has a great article in the March 17th New Yorker called “The Real Work: Modern magic and the meaning of life.” It examines the intellectual side of magic: what magic is and what it’s about. No doubt because Gopnik is a writer and former art critic, I found that things he writes about magic have great relevance to the other arts, especially writing.

Quoting Jamy Ian Swiss on distractions:

Magic only ‘happens’ in a spectator’s mind….Everything else is a distraction. Magic talk on the Internet is a distraction. Magic contests are a distraction. Magic organizations are a distraction. The latest advertisement, the latest trick—distractions. Methods for their own sake are a distraction. You cannot cross over into the world of magic until you put everything else aside and behind you—including your own desires and needs—and focus on bringing an experience to the audience. This is magic. Nothing else.

On technique & transparency:

…the magician is one of the few true artists left on earth, for whom the mastery of technique means more than anything that might be gained by it. He center-deals but makes no money—doesn’t even win prestige points—because nobody knows he’s doing it.

…a magician’s technique must be invisible; if it became visible, we would be insulted by its obviousness. Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life…

Quoting Teller on irony:

Magic is the most intrinsically ironic of all the arts…I don’t know what your definition of irony is, but mine is something where, when you are seeing it, you see it in two different and even contradictory ways at the same time. And with magic what you see collides with what you know. That’s why magic, even when merely executed, ends up having intellectual content. It’s intrinsic to the form.

Quoting Teller on illusion:

There’s a moment in your life when you realize the difference between illusion and reality and that you’re being lied to….Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. After my mother told me that there was no Santa Claus, I made up an entirely fictitious girl in my classroom and told my mother stories about her….If you’re sufficiently preoccupied with the power of a lie, a falsehood, an illusion, you remain interested in magic tricks.

It’s a long piece, and there are lots of other great bits. The article isn’t online, but you can listen to a good 15-minute podcast where he discusses it on the New Yorker site.

Related links:

AL JAFFEE’S FOLD-INS FOR MAD MAGAZINE

[Al Jaffee] started at Mad not as an artist but as a writer….Eventually, he said, the sketches he used to illustrate his ideas caught the eye of Nick Meglin, an editor, who realized they were funnier than what the artists were producing….So Mr. Jaffee became a writer-artist. And in 1964 he had an idea. Playboy, Life and other magazines had their lavish color fold-outs, so Mad, he thought, should parody them with a cheap black-and-white fold-in.

I’m not sure that Al Jaffee’s amazing “fold-ins” for Mad Magazine really have anything to do with my goofy poems, but the textual parts sure do spark my imagination:

Mad magazine fold in text

It’s a gimmick, but a beautifully executed one that includes content and illuminates something. Which brings up the question, “If something starts as a gimmick but produces the effect of art, is it still a gimmick?”

Links:

RE-IMAGINING FROM MEMORY

All memory has to be reimagined. For we have in our memories micro-films that can only be read if they are lighted by the bright light of the imagination.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of Space

Something weird happens when we try to recreate cultural artifacts from memory: the result has less to do with the artifact, and more to do with us.

A year or two ago I got a Bonnie Raitt song stuck in my head. “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” I had the day off and I was bored, so I decided to sit down with my guitar and try to record the song from memory. I didn’t want to bother learning the lyrics or listen to the original. I just wanted to roll tape and see what happened.

On playback, it was the same song, but it wasn’t. The chords were “off,” and I’m pretty sure I left out a bridge. It’s like the filter of my memory took out the musical complexity and stripped it down to its bones. Left only a “cartoon” of the song…

dirty projectors rise above

Here’s the story behind the amazing Dirty Projectors album, Rise Above:

[Dirty Projectors man man Dave] Longstreth went to help his parents move out of the house he grew up in. Among his youthful artifacts was the cassette case from the Black Flag album Damaged. This brought back all sorts of memories— Black Flag was one of Longstreth’s first loves— but the tape itself was missing. So, like the character in the Jorge Luis Borges story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ who sets out to recreate Don Quixote line by line from memory, Longstreth went to the nearest Guitar Center, purchased the cheapest cassette four-track he could find, and embarked on recasting Damaged from memory, without re-listening to a single note or reading any lyrics. The ten songs that make up Rise Above (titled after one of the tracks on Damaged) stem from these four-track demos, recorded at his parents’ house on an acoustic guitar.

“I had to completely inhabit my early adolescence, the time when I used to listen to Damaged,” Longstreth has said. “[I was] trying to access the memory crystals stored from when I loved it back in middle school.”

The beauty of Rise Above is that Longstreth used his memory of the original Black Flag songs as a starting point to create “new” songs. “I wanted to see if I could make this album…not as an album of covers or an homage per se, but as an original creative act.” It was his imagination that made them great.

It frees us to have constraints. I’m starting to believe that the idea that the artist can should sit down and create something “new” is a paralyzing delusion. We can only create a collage of our influences, our memories—filtered through our imagination.

By re-interpreting these artifacts, we come up with something that is uniquely our own.

Ivan Brunetti has a drawing exercise (link long dead — try his excellent book, Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice) where he has his students doodle cartoon characters quickly, from memory:

When drawing characters quickly, from memory, one can be quite inaccurate, almost as if one is inventing new characters, and these “mistakes” can serve as the basis for new character designs. This lets the students see their own styles more clearly. A page full of these doodles can help the student discern certain qualities that are consistent within their set of drawings. These qualities are a clue as to what makes one’s particular “visual handwriting” different or unique, and these should be embraced by the student.

The idea that by drawing from memory “copies” of other work, we can somehow sharpen our own sense of what makes us unique! I love it.

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