Charlie Kaufman Inspires Meta Journalistic Experiment at Wired

How do you outdo Hollywood's master of mind-bending meta plots? If you're Wired and you're profiling Synecdoche, New York writer-director Charlie Kaufman, you create a blog that reveals the process of how the story was conceived, pitched, written, and edited. The profile and the blog are written by Jason Tanz. (This comes via Kottke.org.)

Mr. Kaufman, who previously wrote Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, seems to inspire journalists to look inside—or inside-out—to match his inventiveness. Then again, some just come at him straight on or use him as an example of how the culture keeps on getting meta.

Wired has long dabbled in the meta arts ("metallurgy"?). In its inaugural issue, the magazine let Camille Paglia annotate the interview she did with Stewart Brand. (Ms. Paglia's chicken-scratch notes can be seen here.) More recently, the magazine created its own imaginary (or is it?) Internet "It girl" (shades of S1m0ne?) in an over-the-top parody of the phenomenon of Web-born microcelebrity. That story was also written by Mr. Tanz—if there is a Mr. Tanz.

Whoa, did that blow your mind?