Report From Yale: James Franco Still Likes Doing Things
According to a new report, the roundly chilly response to James Franco's Oscar hosting gig has hardly lessened his profile at Yale. In fact, the post-grad polymath -- who is in the early stages of obtaining a Ph.D. in English from the Ivy League institution -- was back on the East Coast mere hours after the Oscarcast ended, journalists in tow and mythology expanding by the hour.
"At 9 the next morning," notes today's NYT, "[Franco] was in a Starbucks in New Haven, hunched over a book and barely recognizable in a gray sweatshirt, but still wearing his tuxedo pants." I mean, of course he was still in tuxedo pants. Just add it to the legend promulgated by Franco's peers and faculty alike:
He has found time to undertake a multimedia musical production with about four dozen undergraduates that will open on campus in April. He is listed as a producer, but has worked with students on all aspects of the show, The Stargazer, including casting, making script revisions and acting in the film elements.
"We're all really fascinated and awed," said Cokey Cohen, the columnist at The Yale Daily News who drew Mr. Franco's ire. "To see someone who has what we all consider to have an ideal life -- with a fun, successful career -- to be voluntarily doing so much schoolwork all the time is both really admirable and something I can't even comprehend."
Dr. [Michael] Warner said the actor's academic ambitions were impressive. "We have had experience before with students pursuing parallel degrees," he said, "although the scale of his obligations is something that we've never seen before -- but who has?"
Good question! Related: On a name basis alone, I want Cokey Cohen to host next year's Oscars. The position's open, inquire within...
· James Franco Straddles Two Roles at Yale [NYT]
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Do you want Franco to make love to you? Do you want Franco to smile? Franco got plenty of sleep in class because Fanco's continued demonstration of the meaninglessness of higher education in the post-literate age tires Fanco very little.
Fanco makes a joke of your little lives. Fanco always gets a happy ending. Franco is totes a movie star. No professor can resist rewarding Franco.
George W. Bush is also a Yale graduate.
"journalists in tow and mythology expanding by the hour" is really good.
He, like Portman, speaks to our love of frenzied activity, of not sitting still, and routine daily acclaim; who will speak up for the benefits of leisure and contemplation, of great lasting deeds but perhaps-never-even-in-your-lifetime loud acclaim? (I hated seeing Crystal on stage -- an insult to Franco and Hathaway -- but it likely made me recall now that, unlike Franco, who wants you to know how much better he is than you [but not in any way you could ever pin him down on, of course] for being so unblanchedly able to reset to full-attention commit to and lead today's requisite agenda even after yesterday's titanic undertaking, he was ready to admit spending good portions of time revisiting most of his jokes and their reactions the nights after his hosting the Oscars -- at genuine risk, we all noted, of making him seem needy and insecure -- affectable, injurable -- even though what he was surely just admitting to was as much just the kind of absolutely necessary processing of experiences we all need to do to actually grow from them).
Franzen tried, for years locking himself away from feedback while he tried to write true -- but despite all his isolation he never convinced with his finished products that he'd ever let himself out of the zeitgeist: a hutzpah that cows him and lowers him before his TRUE master and fellow isolationist, DeLillo. Gandalf's back again in a couple years -- maybe he'll do it. If not, perhaps just recall of the Shire, and therefore some also of the Inklings and their lifetime works.
Doesn't surprise me that Franco is not about to lose his charm amongst youth: THEY NEED to believe he can automatically reset after anything -- daring everyone reflecting on and obsessing over what he had already finished to risk in quick retrospect seeming laggard, obsessive, and exposed -- so to believe their own resets are just as complete, provisioning, and other-balking. They identify with him too much to allow that he may have may have been substantively affected by this, which he likely was, and hence the prompt show of today's sufficient Starbucks study to ensure timely completion of tomorrow's ivy-league goals.
I don't think I have ever seen someone use so many words to say so little.
A self-aware narcissist is ambivalently received by a society of self-aware narcissists.
Yup.
And of course, the awareness of the narcissistic facade BEING a facade is the cause of the initial self-hatred that generates the narcissistic facade to begin with.
The actual despised self underneath the ridiculous fluctuating facade remains the same-- an asshole looking into a mirror, thinking upon what an asshole he is for sitting there looking into a mirror.
Write fifty theses on it if you want, James. You could just stare at your shit in the toilet to more engaging effect.