Rushmore... in space!: “I’d like to do a movie in space,” Wes told AccessHollywood.com on Friday at the Hollywood premiere of his latest film, the animated Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox. “If possible I would like to try to actually shoot some of it on location in space. That’s my preference.”

The salience of this particular moment fades a bit as we get further and further from Friday's spoiler-line, but I feel compelled to comment briefly on the conversation between Marathe and Steeply that begins on page 638. How can I, or anyone who has chosen a life in academia, read this week's material without feeling interpolated by it? How could any academic, would-be or otherwise, avoid asking him- or herself more than once just what it is that separates us from Steeply's M*A*S*H-obsessed father beyond the razor-thin veneer of professional legitimacy? It's my job, allegedly, to develop intricate and sometimes bizarre readings of pop-culture artifacts, which means it's perfectly okay for me to (still) spend all my time reading science-fiction novels and watching science-fiction movies just like I did when I was twelve. Heck, I wouldn't be doing my work if I didn't! And if I can just trick somebody into paying me to do it I'll never have to stop.

Herman Blume:What's the secret, Max?
Max Fischer: The secret?
Herman Blume: Yeah, you seem to have it pretty figured out.
Max Fischer: The secret, I don't know... I guess you've just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it's going to Rushmore.

Intellectually, of course, I've always been able to recognize the tragic irony of this exchange—Rushmore, you'll remember, doesn't offer a post-graduate year—but I wonder sometimes whether deep down I've ever really come to terms with it.

Is this addiction? Does pursuing a academic career studying literature and pop culture—a preoccupation which over the years has diverted me from any number of more financially lucrative pursuits—mark me as the writerly equivalent of a functional alcoholic? Do I even qualify as functional? And it occurs to me now, reading this section against not only my own life and those of my grad student associates but against the life of anyone who has ever been a "fan" of anything—anyone, that is, who can recognize themselves in the way Steeply's father looked at M*A*S*H—that the danger DFW is highlighting is central to the construction of modern subjectivity. If everything is at least potentially bad for us—even/especially the things that give us pleasure, the things that make life appear to be worth living—just what is it we're supposed to be doing? Where is the authentic, healthy, free life, if there was ever such a thing to begin with? When even the things we love conspire to destroy us, what is left?

Friday afternoon linkblogging!

* 28% of Republicans claim to believe Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and another 30% "aren't sure." Results for the South are even worse. So it's official: our national discourse is completely broken.

* Entertainment Weekly asks: Was 1984 the greatest year in movies ever? I've always been partial to 1999: Rushmore, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Magnolia...

* Vanity Fair has your sketchbook history of the drug war.

* Steampunk monkey nation.

* Jericho may be returning once again as a TV movie to wrap up loose plot points. My recollection of the finale was that there weren't very many loose plot points left, but your memory may vary.

* Chris Hedges: "The Rise of Gonzo Porn Is the Latest Sign of America's Cultural Apocalypse."

* And Scientific American explores the quiet end of the Neanderthals.

Happy Monday. The summer is dying. We have to face it.

* With the Institute for Gifted Youngsters shut down I returned to Infinite Summer blogging over the weekend with a post on maps and territories.

* The issue of Polygraph I contributed to on study, students, and the university is available from Amazon, or will be soon.

* Time-lapse video of the construction of Disneyland at (where else?) Boing Boing.

* Colin Marshall sings the praises of my favorite film, Rushmore.

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 has 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.

*Revisiting the Rosenhan experiment. Via MeFi.

* And fair warning: Toy Story 3 will break your heart.

Rather short Infinite Summer post from me this time around as I put together all the things that need to be put together for my late-summer stint as an instructor at the Duke University Institute for Gifted Youngsters. Like last year, posting will be somewhat slow the next three weeks; I'll mostly be posting only in the very early morning, at night, and on weekends, with occasional daytime posts here and there whenever I'm able to commit a little time theft.

With IGY on my mind, I was really struck by footnote 76, which provides as good a summary as you'll find of the inner life of anyone stamped "gifted" when they are young, not just Hal Incandenza but also my IGY students and me and most of the people who have become my close friends over the years and maybe you as well:

Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder—partly because he read so fast and spent so little time on each level of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale kid even slightly to port or starboard of the bell curve's acme was thought at that time to have A.D.D.—and for a while there'd been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling, and many of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see Hal as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis's Child Development Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted spectrum, and for much of the glabrous part of his childhood Hal'd been classified as somewhere between "Borderline Gifted" and "Gifted"—though part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.'s diagnostic tests weren't quite so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw neural gifts and the young Hal's monomaniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even exceptionally pleasing—and when he'd committed to memory entire dictionaries and vocab-check software and syntax manuals and then had gotten some chance to recite some small part of what he'd pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these times of public performance and pleasure—the Weston M.A. school district in the early B.S. 1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competitions called "Battle of the Books," which these were for Hal pretty much of a public turkey-shoot and approval-fest—when he'd extracted what was desired from memory and faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he'd felt almost that same pale sweet aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second prize, ever.

The incredibly slippery slope from this sort of childhood precociousness to adult dysfunction is something we've talked about here once or twice before in connection with the films of Wes Anderson, whose thematically similar The Royal Tenenbaums pops up around the fringes of IJ discussion quite a bit. And we can see now what a hard-luck case I really am: thirty years old and I'm still a student, still chasing the same damn high.

Most of the rest of what I'd have to say about today's spoiler line was already covered in my post last week on DFW, addiction, and suicide, for which Joelle is something of an exemplary case. This weekend's pages were pretty much all Joelle, all the time, not that I'm complaining. She's an interesting character and somehow able to bring us closer to the mind of Himself than anyone else we've met thus far.

A second round of late night shouldn't-have-taken-that-nap links.

* Why GM failed; link roundup from Kottke.

* A.O. Scott vlogs the awesomeness of Rushmore. Via TRA. It's vlogtastic.

* Mrs. Santorum is a very lucky woman.

* The headline reads, "Secret US Nuke Site List Accidentally Published Online by US Gov." Whoops!

* Handicapping the 2012 Republican field at Open Left.

* The median number of tweets by a Twitter user is one. This and other Twitter bubble factoids via MetaFilter.

* J.D. Salinger sues to block the publication of the unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel. I feel torn here between my liberal attitude towards copyright and my sense that said sequel can only be an abomination.

* “It’s remarkable, what we’re unable to do as a country": Wire creator David Simon on BBC Radio 4, via Edge of the American West.

* Monkey astronauts.

Friday night links.

* Gingrich: "If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything," Sotomayor must be barred from the Supreme Court. Who does he think won the Civil War?

* Tom Tancredo: "I don't know" if the Obama administration hates white people.

* Sonia Sotomayor, notorious racist, ruled against people claiming illegal discrimination in 45 out of 50 cases. This goes along with Dave Sirin's piece on Sotomayor in The Nation to demonstrate that she is a moderate—likely too moderate—not some leftist firebrand. Anyone Obama picked to replace her would, from Newt's perspective anyway, likely be significantly worse.

* Earlier this month, a Twitter user in Guatemala was arrested, jailed, and fined the equivalent of a year's salary for having posted a 96-character thought to Twitter. @jeanfer faces ten years in prison.

* Nuclear power, too cheap to meter.

* Uhura, Dualla, and "Blacks in Space." I really think some nuance is being lost here; to take up just one point, Uhura isn't marginalized in the new Star Trek; if anything she replaces McCoy as the third lead.

* Jason Schwartzman's (fake) new sitcom on NBC, "Yo Teach," a viral ad for Judd Apatow's Funny People.

* Wikipedia has barred edits from known Scientologist IP addresses. Xenu weeps.

Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.

* Swine flu in NC! PANIC!

* Another article on Homeland Security's use of science fiction writers for brainstorming.

* Test your knowledge of literature with the Amazon Statistically Improbable Phrase Quiz. Via MeFi.

* New Yankee Stadium homerun theories.

* 'The Making of Rushmore.'

* Two from Steve Benen: on the improbable discovery of Democrats at Liberty University and a roundup of recent misogynistic attacks on Nancy Pelosi.

* And our friend Tim Morton has a new video on YouTube: The Mesh.

Matt Zoller Seitz pits Wes Anderson vs. Hal Ashby in the third part of his Moving Image documentary, coming to a startling conclusion:

There's nothing inherently wrong with Anderson's selective adoration. But when you look at the totality of what Ashby accomplished—the social and political dimensions that all his films explored, the blunt honesty of their expression—Anderson's work can't help but come up short, just as the work of Anderson's imitators is overshadowed by the genuine article.

Tell Matt Seitz he just made my list of things to do today. In all seriousness, I guess I can see Seitz's point, but you can only conclude "Anderson's work can't help but come up short" when you demand of Anderson's work the things it is quite pointedly refusing to do.

Part 2 of Matt Zoller Seitz's five-part Wes Anderson documentary is now up. The focus this time is on Scorsese, Lester, and Nichols.

If you missed the video for the first one, it should be said that the video (and not the text) is the whole link. The link to the video is practically invisible; scroll down and keep your eye on the right side of the page.

The House Next Door and Moving Image are running a five-part series on Wes Anderson, "the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation." (Tarantino who?) Here's Part 1.

When I interviewed Anderson for a 1998 Star-Ledger article about A Charlie Brown Christmas, directed by the late animator Bill Melendez, Anderson cited Melendez as one of three major influences on his work, so we’ll start there. Anderson told me that he and his screenwriting collaborator, Owen Wilson, conceived Rushmore hero Max Fischer as Charlie Brown plus Snoopy. He said that Miss Cross, the teacher Max adores and will draw into a weirdly Freudian love triangle with the industrialist Mr. Blume, is a combination of Charlie Brown’s teacher and his unattainable love object, the little red-haired girl. Anderson and Wilson even made Max a working-class barber’s son, just like Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, and gave Seymour Cassel, the actor playing Bert Fischer, glasses similar to Schulz’s.

But Schulz’s impact manifests itself in deeper, more persistent ways—particularly in Anderson’s characters who, regardless of age, seem, like Schulz’s preternaturally eloquent kids, to be frozen in a dream space between childhood and maturity. Think of how Rushmore’s Blume pauses during a phone conversation to run across a basketball court and slap down a student’s would-be layup; the now-adult children in The Royal Tenenbaums navigating adult emotional minefields within the confines of a childhood home crammed with toys, grade-school art, and nostalgic knickknacks; Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic transforming a submarine into a gigantic clubhouse and rec center; and the brothers of The Darjeeling Limited turning a supposed spiritual voyage through India into a more affluent, adult cousin of a summer camp stint.

The arrested adolescence thing is right on the money—we've talked about this before—but the Peanuts thing is strange. What a weirdly intriguing misreading of one's own film...

Tuesday!

* Cold fusion is back. More here. We're saved!

* Radiology art. (Hat tip: Neil.)

* My pursuit of all Wes Anderson-flavored cultural ephemera has led me to this video from Company of Theives, as well as Tenenbaum Fail. Via Fimoculous.

* The first eleven episodes of Quantum Leap are up at NBC.com.

* Anarctica travel blog.

* Who was dead at your age?

I wasn't especially impressed with this video of Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman shopping for CDs at Borders, but that doesn't mean I'm not pretty excited about news of Schwartzman's HBO pilot.

Scripted by somebody named Jonathan Ames, the comedy project stars Jason Schwartzman (“Rushmore,” “Shopgirl,” “Marie Antoinette,” “The Darjeeling Limited”) as a writer who, reeling from a break-up, starts pretending to be a private detective.

I've had that idea. Not the show—the pretending to be/becoming a private detective.

Tim ups the ante with Wordles of Ulysses and Paradise Lost. I'll take up his challenge with five killer Wordles: the scripts of Wes Anderson.











We see again that Wordles are both fun and smart—here, for instance, the inescapable importance of want is highlighted, as well as the crucial distinction between thinking and knowing. Yeah.

BONUS: "Hotel Chevalier."

The Suicide of Genius: Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson in Life and Art. At 24LiesaSecond, via The House Next Door.

The subtext of The Royal Tenenbaums is one of collisions. The sanctified world of genius, creativity and art collide with the world of contemporary psychology. Diagnosis, psychosis, breakdown, and divorce emerge like a hydra in the wings of Anderson’s work. And the point of collision is Eli Cash, played by Owen Wilson. Through Cash, Anderson’s tragic-comedic vision reaches its apex and foreshadows its decline into sentimentality and self-apologetic quirk.

Of course, as an unrepentant Wes Anderson fanboy, I don't agree that his later works are failures in this or any other way—but the thesis is interesting. And I think there's something to Lasky's idea that Anderson shifts in Tenenbaums from a model of autonomous, tragedy-laced genius towards a comparatively more hopeless one of psychological and psychochemical dysfunction:

Genius, in their early work, is ineffable, resplendent with the trappings of depressive, rumple-haired Nietzschean eccentricity and Faustian striving and discontent. Anderson as writer/director and Wilson as writer/actor depict the creative spirit that defies diagnosis as it is ratified by its own insatiable drive, as it rebels against social pressures and cultural environments. Conversely, the therapeutic imperative of our contemporary society is to contextualize and diagnose, to encourage radical self-assessment in hopes of propagating permanent stability and happiness. As of late, Anderson’s original vision has been compromised by this imperative: his idea of the troubled genius has lost its romantic cache. Its integrity as a thing of heroism and beauty has been ostensibly diagnosed.

This may go a long way towards explaining why Rushmore is so much better-loved than Zissou.

Fresh from the critical and commercial disaster that was John from Cincinnati, David Milch and HBO are looking to try again with a series set during the 1970s Knapp investigations, which gave rise to the story of Serpico (immortalized by Max Fischer during Rushmore). The article also sadly tosses a little more dirt on Deadwood's grave.

Via AICN, which also links to the promo for the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica. The third season was very much not what I wanted, but I have to stick around to see how it ends.

Shoot the Projectionist has declared September Wes Anderson month, as all months should be. I was all prepared to take issue with his first post when I saw the link from The House Next Door ("Wes Anderson, Nostalgia, and the 11-Year-Old Point of View"), but I wound up mostly agreeing with it, though I would have phrased the central point rather differently. It's not that Wes Anderson chooses to shoot things from the perspective of an eleven-year-old because he's hung up on childhood, but rather that (at least for the characters he's focused on thus far, Bottle Rocket definitely included) there simply is no other perspective from which to film. For Anderson, the same tragicomic feelings of surreality, anxiety, and time-is-running-out impermanence that characterize childhood characterize the entirety of all our lives; the differences between the two states are differences in content, not form.

This is to say that, for Anderson, childhood is the form adult life takes. We never grow up. We can't. There's nothing to grow up into.

Anderson's entire project is predicated on this centrality of entropy, loss, and nostalgia in human life, and the ways in which we learn to live with them. If you don't buy that that's what life is like, you're not going to be a Wes Anderson fan. I buy it, and so I am.

UPDATE: I really like what Ed has to say in his follow-up to my comment:

Those of us that love--and recognize ourselves in--Anderson's movies, are not necessarily obsessed with our childhoods so much as we see no difference between childhood and adulthood. I've been told I was a crotchety old curmudgeon since I was a child, and now, as an adult, I'm often referred to as child-like. This is an element of the Salinger association that I considered bringing up but left out for fluidity's sake. In Salinger, all of the kids act like grown-ups and all of the adults act like children. Think of "Rushmore"'s Dirk Calloway and Mr. Blume.

But, for me, when things start to get really profound is in "Tenenbaums" when these twin impulses are merged into single bodies: each of the Tenenbaum children is a prodigy, the very definition of a precocious child. As an adult, though, each of them is in stasis, and therefore child-like. By the fact of exhibiting the same behavior that once read as "adult," they are now childish.

I'd always been perplexed by Wes Anderson's original plan to score Rushmore entirely from Kinks songs, but after becoming obsessed with their cataloge over the last few weeks I'm convinced it actually could have worked.

This won't be Kinks Week — probably — but my newfound Kinks evangelicism insists that I give you the track listing and some YouTube links for the extremely excellent Not Necessarily the Best of the Kinks compilation I've generated. For the benefit of those people uninterested in awesomeness, I'll hide it behind a [+/-].

1. "The Village Green Preservation Society" (The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, 1968). Characteristically fantastic lyrics here:

We are the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium / God save the George Cross and all those who were awarded them / We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular / Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula

In live and original varieties at YouTube.

2. "Come Dancing" (State of Confusion, 1983). Vaguely Springsteenesque in terms of its wonderful sense of nostalgic melancholy. Here's the classic MTV video.

3. "Lola" (Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, 1968). What else needs to be said? Here it is live.

4. "Sweet Lady Genevieve" (Preservation, Act 1, 1978). No YouTube love at all, sadly.

5. "Susannah's Still Alive." (Something Else by the Kinks, 1967). Doesn't matter what she does, she knows that she can't win... Oh, Susannah's still alive. Here's Dave Davies on TV in 1968.

6. "You Really Got Me" (The Kinks, 1964). The original hit and probably still their most famous song. YouTube's really got us.

7. "Plastic" Man (Arthur, Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1969). Another fun, great song, with a nicely prescient satiric eye on suburbia. YouTube. No relation.

8. "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" (single, 1966). The first of two transplants from my glorious mix of Sopranos awesomeness, YouTube still offers just a taste.

9. "Destoyer" (Give the People What They Want, 1981). A nicely self-referential song with lyrical references to "Lola" and the main guitar progression constantly teasing "All Day and All of the Night." YouTube.

10. "Victoria" (Arthur, Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1969). I wish I'd had this .mp3 to play for my Victorian ghost story class. The main theme for the Kinks' little-known rock opera. God save YouTube.

11. "Waterloo Sunset." (Something Else by the Kinks, 1967). Live.

12. "All Day and All of the Night." (The Kinks, 1964). If their most famous song isn't "Lola" or "You Really Got Me," it's surely this. Girl, I want to be with YouTube.

13. "Supersonic Rocket Ship" (Everybody's in Show-Biz, 1972). Enjoy this well-made and oddly appropriate Firefly fan video using the song.

14. "A Well Respected Man" (single, 1965). Makers of fan videos apparently really love the Kinks. (Everyone should.) Here's a Homer Simpson tribute video.

15. "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" (single, 1966). Jaimee loves this one. Take a listen, live from 1973.

16. "David Watts" (Something Else, 1967). The best YouTube could do was a cover recorded in a dive bar, seemingly by a cell phone. Despite this evidence, it's another really good song.

17. "Do You Remember Walter?" (The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, 1968). Something about this one really gets stuck in my head. In the best possible way. YouTube demurs.

18. "Living on a Thin Line." (Word of Mouth, 1984). Another song lifted from my Sopranos mix. Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?

19. "Apeman" (Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, 1968). More lyrics I'm compelled to quote:

But with the overpopulation and inflation and starvation and the crazy politicians / I don't feel safe in this world no more / I don't want to die in a nuclear war / I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an apeman.

Here's a sort of lame fan video with the right audio track, at least. Just close your ape eyes and listen.

20. "Nothing in This World Can Stop Me Worrying 'bout That Girl" (Kinda Kinks, 1965). The only Kinks song to actually make it onto the Rushmore soundtrack, it plays during the classic underwater shot with Bill Murray in the pool in his Budweiser shorts. Amazingly, neither this scene nor the song itself is on YouTube.

21. "This Time Tomorrow." (Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, 1968). Another one poached by Wes Anderson, this time for the trailer for The Darjeeling Limited. This may be my favorite.

22. "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy" (Kinda Kinks, 1965). I got this off the High Fidelity soundtrack. This may be my favorite, too. But this video gives me cancer.

23. "Better Things" (Give the People What They Want, 1981). The end of the album and the end of this post. Your reward for reading this far is one last superkitschy fan video, this one for Xena: Warrior Princess, which from the looks of things is far more ridiculous than I'd ever allowed myself to dream.

Band of this arbitrary amount of time: The Kinks.

Playlist available to people I know in Durham upon request.

Tell Eli Lake he just made my list of things to do today.

I bet at least half of the netleft are failed professors, over-educated literary theory PHDs, who make themselves appear more numerous than they are through their anonymity and deliberate manipulation of google.

(Not anonymous.)