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.

Police are investigating one of the largest* art heists in Vermont history: the $1 million theft of 30 bronze statues from the home of artist Joel Fisher, some weighting as much as 1,000 pounds.

The sculptor's life work is likely to be smelted for the material—unless, of course, he's lying, which is what the police rep more or less accuses him of doing at the end of the article:

The burglary was reported last week, said Senior Trooper Callie Field of the Vermont State Police in Derby. Law enforcement has "no idea what the heck is going on," she said. She has received no evidence to establish clearly what was stolen, or even whether the works were on the property, Field said.

"A lot of stuff's not adding up," she said. "Who knows what was taken?"

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* not a pun

Via the first page of The World Without Us, the sad story of the Zápara. More at NativeWeb and UNESCO's list of oral tradition.

The smallest Indigenous group in the Ecuadorian Amazon is the Zápara. Often they are called "Zaparos," which refers to a type of basket, while "Zápara" in their own language means "person of the forest." Their history demonstrates the devastating impact of Western civilization as their numbers collapsed from about 200,000 people in 39 different groups at the arrival of the Europeans to approximately 200 people today living in five Zápara communities in Ecuador in addition to two other related groups in Peru.