“How big of a f*** would I have to be to reference my own novella?” –DJ Fancy Mike

After months of dedicated badgering, The Protagonist finally tracked down the elusive Mike Kleine, also known as DJ Fancy Mike, to discuss his 2012 novella Mastodon Farm.

We began our conversation over Facebook chat, which is possibly the only appropriate vehicle for a talk about a literary endeavor which has been called by Goodreads critics equal parts Samuel Beckett, Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin.

To provide a flavor of the novella, which is narrated in the second person, Kleine offers the following: “The VHS market is still alive…Uma Thurman wears Spanx…A man named Bruce Willis is really not Bruce Willis.” The protagonist (you) is also enamored with James Franco, despite avoiding him throughout the book, but Ryan Gosling is your arch-nemesis. I struggle to know whether this “plot line” demands psychoanalyzing or not. After all, whose mind would I be probing for explanation?

Kleine, who graduated from college in 2011, says writing a novella was the furthest thing from his mind at that time nearly two years ago. “I was more interested in drinking and eating in the dining hall,” he says.

I ask Kleine to talk about what happened next—had he gone to Berlin to become a DJ, I inquire, half-jokingly?

“DJ in Berlin, f*** you,” is his reply.

In reality, Kleine spent the year after college teaching high school English in the south of France. It was during this time Mastodon Farm was conceived then rewritten piecemeal approximately 87 times, according to Kleine.

“I only got one hour of internet a day and needed to pass the time at night after I was done preparing lessons,” he says.

So what exactly is Mastodon Farm? For one, Kleine is quick to tell you it’s a novella, not a book.

“I think it is a reference to how people try and sometimes make meaning out of nothing/everything,” says Kleine. “It’s a book that is heavy on pop culture, references and tautology: the idea of repetition. Saying the same thing, again and again, but in a different way. And this is how we speak, normally, most of the time…If you go outside and record some people having a conversation—you will hear that a lot of the time, they will repeat what the other person just said. I try and emulate this kind of interaction in Mastodon Farm.”

“And nobody will ever know this unless I say it but Mastodon Farm is a musical,” he adds.

Hold on though–it might not be the kind of rollicking, carefree picture of fun “musical” conjures—as Kleine explains: “The main character (you) never smiles.”

He says the story is grounded in reality, replete with pop culture references some of which themselves may not be so “real,” though nothing truly “strange” happens in the novella, according to Kleine. It’s like the uncanny valley with all parts equally interchangeable. He says the book unfolds like a spool of yarn unraveling, which frankly seems too cohesive an image for what sounds like one frenetic, feverish dream sequence after another (the benefit of which being you can step away at any moment rather than succumb to illness).

Even though Mastodon Farm was just released last year, it’s clear Kleine has spent a good deal of time thinking about what all this means, even if we haven’t yet fully unraveled the yarn.

“There is a lot of stuff that just sort of poured out of me, unintentionally, from the subconscious-like,” he says. “Which is very interesting because yes, the book, in a way, is a sort of extension of myself, the sort of person I am, and a reflection of the things I think, but, if I have something like a murder take place in the book, does that mean I am a murderer, or someone who has murderous thoughts?”

Mastodon Farm was promoted on Facebook and YouTube by Kleine himself, and on Goodreads by his publisher at Atlatl Press. Before the novella’s release, Kleine sent digital copies to reviewers to garner some hype.

So who should read Mastodon Farm? Who can reap something from its unorthodox process and presence? And in the age of pseudo-celebrities like Tao Lin—or last week’s Mark Baumer—is Kleine’s process really so unorthodox at all?

Kleine says he has enough copies of Mastodon Farm sitting around to regularly give them away as gifts, but he makes sure those gifts are never opened in front of him. He notes his parents have never read the novella all the way through.

He explains: “Mastodon Farm is a book for people who don’t want/like to read books. It’s for people who prefer to watch films and television. For people who enjoy something that is a little out-of-the-ordinary and not completely sincere. Something they will remember in the long run. Something that is sad in a not-sad way.”

While writing in France, Kleine also found time to unleash his alternate identity and occasionally perform as Fancy Mike. (His album MARY B JAMES ALBUM, which came out in October, was named #6 bass album of 2012 by KMAG, “whatever all that means,” says Kleine.)

It seems Kleine’s eccentric, potentially quixotic lifestyle may itself be great fodder for a Kleine-ian novella. These days, Kleine, who recently left his position as an electronic sales associate at Walmart, is soon to become a practicing optician.

“In Iowa, you don’t need an optician license to be, well, an optician,” explains Kleine.

Ebook sales will continue to spike now that Digital Book World has officially changed the spelling from “e-book” to “ebook.”

Read our predictions on literature, Broadway, politics and fashion.

Lucy Walker

Out of 15,000 submissions received, Vimeo, the web-based video platform favored by filmmakers from up-and-comers to well-knowns, handed out 13 online films awards at the company’s 2012 award ceremony last Thursday at NYU’s Skirball Center in Greenwich Village. While the vote was public, the selection process included an esteemed and varied panel of judges, which included actor James Franco, documentarian Lucy Walker, professional surfer Alana Blanchard and local filmmaker Casey Neistat. (Text by Adel Manoukian and photos by Ryan McCune/PatrickMcMullan.com)

Lauran Bush Lauren and David Lauren

The categories ranged from the standards like narrative and experimental, but also included some off-the-beaten path choices like action sports, advertising and remix video. Each winner received a $5,000 grant, but the grand prize winner, the film directing collective Everynone, walked away with $25,000 for their film Symmetry, which was made in partnership with WNYC’s Radiolab.

Attendees were treated to a performance by Reggie Watts, the Brooklyn-based comedian and musician, and U.K. beatboxer Beardeyman, who not only played off each other musically but incorporated a technologically innovative set into their performance. To read the full list of winners and learn more about Vimeo, check out vimeo.com/awards.

Reggie Watts and Beardyman in Performance

Reggie Watts

Flash Rosenberg and Kasumi

Photos courtesy of Patrick McMullan/patrickmcmullan.com

After making Slumdog Millionaire, arguably the worst movie ever to win the Best Picture Oscar, Danny Boyle surprisingly comes up with a not-bad film. 127 Hours, the true-life story of Aron Ralston’s 2003 rock-climbing mishap, makes acceptable use of Boyle’s usually egregious flamboyance. The potentially off-putting facts and limitations of how 28-year-old Ralston spent almost four days pinned by a boulder in Colorado’s Blue John Canyon and had to sever his own right arm to escape demands Boyle’s focus on the dilemma’s surface sentiment.

What would James Franco do if stuck between a rock and a hard place? You can guess.

All of Boyle’s imagination goes into keeping the story’s narrative monotony from being boring. The film’s primary impact comes from cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s hyperbolic videography. He shoots the works: highlighting atmosphere, water from a faucet traveling the core of a straw, telescopic scenes of street crowds, microscopic close-ups of Ralston’s contact lenses, split-screen multiplication of Ralston’s mountain-bike excursion, a few clever, triptych representations of the same activity to convey time’s passing and sometimes shots of Ralston from the rocky terrain’s POV.

These montages seem descriptive of life experience, though only superficially. They’re like TV-commercial details but with the extravagance of big-screen technological innovation: the blatant use of pixels and the nearly artificial hard, bright color that digital resolution gives to nature and flesh which, in themselves, becomes a form of entertainment. Boyle doesn’t concentrate on the spiritual crisis of Ralston’s imprisonment as Bresson’s great A Man Escaped pondered the depth of an isolated man’s sense of time and mortality. Boyle lacks depth and so plays to his mettle: turning Ralston’s predicament into a spectacular stunt. That’s why 127 Hours never descends into a vat of manure as Slumdog did aesthetically and literally.

Much of 127 Hours is a test of photographic realism—the latest step in Boyle’s constant play with techno trickery (such as his zombie flicks 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later) that makes him a frivolous Fincher. Aestheticizing Ralston’s calamity animates Boyle’s facile themes of modernity vs. nature, body vs. mind. When Ralston meets two female hikers and they dive into a grotto, the ostentatious splash makes a point of visual pixels, not analytically, as in Godard’s newest video provocation Film Socialisme, yet Boyle’s obvious style announces our contemporary physical and emotional distance from nature. This time, Boyle’s flamboyance is almost rigorous. Even the cheap distraction of a desert thunderstorm that nearly drowns Ralston is at least a distraction (until it briefly becomes a cheap fantasy tease about rescue).

Because Boyle’s subject is Ralston’s middle-class American arrogance regarding his own charm, ability and pleasure, 127 Hours doesn’t raise those embarrassing Slumdog issues of poverty, deprivation and social corruption. His stylistic excess that was so ruinous in the overwrought Slumdog and the equally far-fetched Scottish-junkies movie Trainspotting is relatively contained. It’s not so much that the story’s simplicity mandates narrative discipline (Boyle lacks discipline) but that his flashy fatuousness is uncannily right to convey an adult-kid’s folly—a truth Sean Penn neglected in Into the World. An aspect of Ralston’s situation suggests cosmic comedy; acknowledging dumb fate makes the later, grave family moments seem well measured and never insultingly mawkish like Slumdog.

The movie’s MVP is the ubiquitous James Franco, whose real-life propensity for art-stunts is reflected in Ralston’s recklessness. Franco channels some of the same expressive reserve he displayed in Altman’s The Company, embodying a quiet, always-thinking solitude. He doesn’t turn 127 Hours into a hipster version of Bresson (nor Van Sant’s insufferable desert trek Gerry); rather, he creates a fairly authentic portrait of a sweetly dumb American male loner who fears being stuck existentially
and romantically.

This is blessedly different from how Ryan Reynolds is used to condemn American foreign policy in Buried, the dour, one-man-movie political diatribe. Boyle’s flashbacks work off of Franco’s gift of gentle innocence. Questioning his own solitude—“You didn’t tell anyone?”—he then repeats, “Anyone?” in a good instance of self-critical shame. Boyle’s fancy staging (including a pocket cam’s double-image of Ralston) makes this po-mo moment genuinely thoughtful. Ralston’s memories (including a childhood hide-and-seek game recalled and regretted) aren’t merely mushy: memory and guilt reflect on each other because Franco’s characterization has substance. Despite this era of godless movies, listen to the way Franco says, “Please,” as a modest prayer. And when he does it again, saying, “Thank you,” at the adventure’s end, he could as well be addressing Boyle.
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127 Hours
Directed by Danny Boyle
Runtime: 93 min.