by Colin Marshall

Because thousands of a certain generation's cinematic lives have been changed by this film, its territory is best approached with caution. Mine, however, happens to be among those thousands, 1998 marking as it did the opening of my prime window of cultural absporpton. Cinephilic teenagers of the 1960s had The 400 Blows, Breathless, Dr. Strangelove; cinephilic teenagers of the 1970s had Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Taxi Driver; cinephilic teenagers of the 1980s had Repo Man, Blue Velvet, Stranger than Paradise; cinephilic teenagers of the 1990s had Rushmore.

The impact of Wes Anderson's second film didn't propel me immediately from the screening room to a new, theretofore unseen world illuminated by pure light cast forth by the angels of cinema. Its effects were those of a gradually-dissolving ingested substance, working only in the fullness of time. I knew I'd seen something epiphanic, but damned if I could put my finger on what or why. While it has sparked and continues to spark in young viewers as much of a fanatic enthusiasm for film, both its appreciation and its craft, as the most radical, stylistically transgressive piece of deliberate provocation, it does so within a shell of relative normality. But though translucently thin, this shell appears to have confused almost as many filmgoers as it's blindsided with slow-acting inspiration.

“You can't tell if it's a comedy, or if it's a drama, or what it is!” complained some with whom I excitedly sought to discuss the movie. While my adolescent mind couldn't counter this grievance, I now realize that coming up with a genre to fit Rushmore into is an exercise not only doomed to futility but ignorant of the very seat of the film's strength: you can't tell if it's a comedy or a drama or what because it isn't. It is, strictly speaking, a film without genre, which is to say, a film without any of the bundles of clichés that constitute the genres' membership qualifications. This must have rendered marketing a futile ordeal, which would account for the movie's unimpressive domestic box office performance. (But since genre is a labor-saving marketer's device in the first place, perhaps this is a simple case of reaping what's been sown.)

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When it comes to “memetics,” which some say is the new science of studying “memes,” consider me a skeptic. Doesn't a science need to have a clearly defined subject and verifiable findings? At this point the “meme” concept seems more or less to be where the “artificial intelligence” idea was twenty years ago: That is, it's not so much a hypothesis as it is an analogy – a somewhat vague and fluid analogy – one that lets people think in some new and smart ways but leaves them subject to flights of excessive rhetoric.

Which means it's useful … but not exactly real.

The uninitiated among you may be wondering what, exactly, is meant by the word “meme.” You're not alone. Meme advocates are still arguing about that. The word was first used by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, as a contract of “mimeme” (meaning imitated behavior.) Dawkins was suggesting that cultural behaviors, reproduced as one person mimics the actions of another, could be considered analogous to genes.

What are some examples of memes? Opinions vary. But the word has caught on in the blogging and Internet world, where its definition seems to be indistinguishable from “fads” or “catchphrases.” Lolcats is described as a “meme” on the Web, for example, and so is “rickrolling.” Expressions like “Jump the shark” and “FAIL” are memes in the online universe, too. A more rigorous and universally agreed-upon definition appears to be lacking.

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by Steve Tignor

If you live in New York, there are, theoretically, an infinite number of reasons to vary your route home from work. Dozens of neighborhoods, hundreds of shops, thousands of bars can be explored with only the slightest detour from your particular beaten path. So why do I rarely, if ever, take the opportunity? Call it inertia, or lack of imagination, or, more realistically, the result of nine hours of staring at a computer and circling a mouse around. After that, whatever path gets me to my apartment and into a drink the fastest is the one I’m going to follow. More than once I’ve convinced myself to make a post-work side trip to, say, a book store in Union Square, only to emerge from a daydream and find myself walking up the steps at my normal stop in Brooklyn anyway. The best-laid plans are powerless in the face of the daily habits of the 9-to-5er. The upshot, sadly, is that the city where I work is seldom the city where I explore—it’s not the city where I see.

My office is in Murray Hill and I live in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, which makes my best commuting option the 6 train to 14^th St., and then the 4 to Borough Hall, a wobblingly reliable 20-minute express shot down the east side. Late in the evening, though, the 4 can be exasperatingly slow, so slow that on some nights I’m compelled to throw routine to the wind and take the 6 two more stops, to the Bleecker St. station, where I can catch the F to Brooklyn.

Bleecker is less a proper station than a decaying, half-finished interstice that serves as a connector between the subway’s formerly competing systems, the IRT (i.e., the numbered trains) and the BMT (the lettered trains). It’s the only stop in the city where you can transfer between lines on one side—downtown—and not the other, a flaw that’s currently costing the MTA $134 million to rectify. The space’s most notable landmarks are two large, blue mosaics that date from the system’s proud opening in 1904. “Bleecker Street” is carved out at their centers with a beaming, capitalized pride that mocks the dilapidated state of the station today.

Jarring as they may be, those mosaics weren’t what caught my eye one recent evening after work.

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“These are tears of joy. I can die a happy woman. Though I don't feel much like dying today… Think harder. Write faster. Please take your time and hurry if you possibly can.”
–from reader F.M. on a previously posted poem: A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman

Steep Sigh

Walt Whitman’s ready nearby
tucked humbly among authors
I keep close upon my night stand
for the waking of my
night eye

You'll see him in this drawing
I made years ago, still stacked
(a bedrock source) while others
cycled in & out of this small
proximate collection
like many million moments
that have blindly come and
slid by

Yesterday I found a poem
which said well some things
I've thought as days have
gone by;
…….;…of Whitman
and the subject he so expertly
unravels and so surely
pins and spins and
re-ties

And funny you should mention
tears since this morning
without reason I
………………….had a sudden sob-fest
returning from the dump
after dropping off our rubbish in
my weekly, sloughing,
drive-by

It might have been the singer
in the dashboard or
the adolescent female walking
sadly postured
plying the left shoulder as I
whizzed by
………………(a clone of my granddaughter?)
or— ……….who knows what existential lever
I'd leaned upon too deeply in a
steep sigh?

by Jim Culleny, 7/26/09

Night Table; drawing by Jim Culleny, 1997

Michael Blim

Heard enough about those “little green shoots” of economic recovery? Not finding them in your backyard garden? Not popping up in between the cement slabs on your stoop?

Perhaps this is because the only place the green is sprouting is on Wall Street and on the balance sheets of several mega-banks. The Dow Jones has hit 9,000 again. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan reported hefty profits. Seems like old times.

But these are new and perhaps even better times for the masters of the money universe. They now operate with a full and explicit federal guarantee against failure, and many have made back their government loans at little or no expense. Even though the banks and big financial firms working through them laid us low, the Obama Administration seems to have passed out “get out of jail cards” to their operators. Unless Andrew Cuomo decides to play spoiler, the miscreants who triggered the world financial crisis will be back living large in no time. This is also because the proposed Obama financial regulation regime is so weak that it is even described as toothless by that paragon of 18^th Century classical liberalism, the Economist.

Walk off Wall Street and you hit upon another world. Never mine no green shoots. There is instead massive die-off, as if the economic eco-zone had been ripped up by a financial Katrina and been left to molder.

The rot and decay of a near-dead economy lie all around us. There is universal acknowledgement that we will reach 10% unemployment in the fall. Every occupational category has been hit thus far, with rates of unemployment doubling since 2008 in computing, architecture, engineering, community and social services, health care technical services, construction, maintenance, repair, manufacturing, mining and transport. Already in double digits are food services, buildings and grounds maintenance, construction, farming, fishing, forestry, construction, mining, manufacturing and transport. In addition, state and local governments are laying off workers at unprecedented rates.

The unemployed are running out of benefits – an estimated 600,000 have run out of benefits since the recession began, and the rate at which workers will lose their benefits is growing exponentially as the stimulus package extension of benefits runs out.

I also counted 9 states and Puerto Rico as having forced furloughs of varying lengths on their workers thus far.

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By Alan Koenig

George “Cousin Georgie” Mayer, the last living member of my family to fight in WWII, died earlier this summer. In February of 1942, at the age of eighteen, he was drafted and spent the entire war fighting in the Pacific theater under General Douglas MacArthur.

Georgie saw continuous action — except for two periods of convalescence after contracting malaria — and his eventual return to Chicago after an absence of three years is a hallowed chapter of family legend. He died after a thirty year battle with leukemia. What’s unusual about his story is we know how it got him.

In late August or early September of 1945, on only his second day in occupied Japan, a “deuce and half” truck from his unit pulled up and some soldiers asked Georgie if he wanted to visit Hiroshima. In one of those historically haunting moments in which future consequences are unknown, he accepted. While recalcitrant about many of his battle experiences, Georgie was more forthcoming about visiting Hiroshima, mostly because there wasn’t all that much to tell.

“There was simply nothing there. All day long we walked around in dust, nothing but dust.”

Highly radioactive dust. The first atomic bomb had been dropped only about four weeks before his unit’s macabre visit. By the time Georgie was diagnosed in the late seventies, the VA administration was tracking the soldiers from that fateful truck as well as many other luckless American military tourists. A strange corollary to the epochal tragedy of Hiroshima: The VA deserves credit for the intensive care they gave him over three decades, care widely believed by my extended family to have extended his heroic life.

*

Alan Koenig is a Ph.D. student, teaching fellow, writer, and political analyst living in Queens, NY.

*

The Owls is a literary experiment that cross-posts here by the generosity of 3Quarksdaily. “A Deuce and a Half” forms part of an ongoing project called “Stamps” featuring writing and images about places. Other recent posts in the Stamps project have included a photograph by Frederick Schroeder, a poem by Kirsten Andersen, and an essay by Sean Hill. If you would like to get updates from The Owls, send an email with the word “Subscribe” to owlsmag[at]gmail[dot]com.

Self-portrait with Masks (detail), 1899, Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Japan

Elatia Harris

James Ensor, the Belgian painter, died in 1949, having done his last searing work half a century earlier. The man in the sea of masks, above, was wrapping it up in the studio even as he painted this self-portrait at age 40. In two decades of furious industry, he had cast himself as Christ, as John the Baptist, as an insect, a skeleton and a herring. Crucified, beheaded, rattling but undead, made a meal of by critics or simply subhuman, he spared a thought for how he might appear a century after his birth. My Portrait in 1960, below, is an etching on woven paper. It's no self-portrait — the actual sight of his remains would necessarily be recorded by some other guy. This is just a nudge.

Ensor kick-started Surrealism and Expressionism, driving Flemish painting forward from its roots in the Renaissance to its foundational place in Modernism. In him, Bosch, Bruegel and even Rubens found an heir who would poke holes through the possibilities of paint, and figure forth a vision powerful enough to impel artists a century later to engage with it en route to terra incognita of their own. And that's not all. While it is common to feel repelled by art considered in exquisite taste in the late 19th century, uncommon it is for an artist of that era to step neatly outside taste once and forever, offending a certain high idea of painting with lasting sureness of touch. As the song, Meet James Ensor, written by They Might Be Giants, urges us — “Appreciate the man.”

With the first major Ensor show in the United States in more than 30 years, the Museum of Modern Art in New York makes that very easy to do, through September 21. I have had a lifetime with James Ensor, one of my mother's art gods. Mother was a Southern lady, the kind that naturally thrills to the transgressive in art. And I am brought to my knees, again and again, by this painter so utterly uningratiating.

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