Twee Magazine

"Teaser and the Firecat," Cat Stevens, 1971

"Teaser and the Firecat" was, as far as I can tell, Cat Stevens' best-selling album. It produced three songs that charted and, to this day, are seen as three of Stevens' best: The metaphysics-meets-children's-book "Moonshadow," the piano-driven hymn "Morning Has Broken," and the hippy dippy antiwar anthem "Peace Train."

There is a terrific pop sensibility to the album, and so I can understand its appeal. Stevens always had a talent for memorable melodies, and he tends to build entire songs around a few musical phrases and then repeat them until they've locked themselves into your head. Stevens rarely has choruses to his songs, but he manages to keep his songs from sounding repetitive through dynamic arrangements and often devastating climaxes to his musical stanzas. Take, as an example, "The Wind," the song that opens this album. These are the first four lines:

I listen to the wind to the wind of my soul
Where I'll end up well I think only God really knows
I've sat upon the setting sun but never, never never never
I never wanted water once, no, never, never, never

 The first two lines, sung over a joyous, plucked guitar part, are dreamy and liliting, and both lines are sung exactly the same way. The second two lines change the melody radically, starting as though climbing a hill with leaden footsteps and then interrupted by Stevens' repetition of "never. The final "never" lands back on the tonic note, as though with a satisfied nod. There are no verses, no chorus -- just two intriguing, satisfying musical phrases. It's no wonder that Wes Anderson used this song in "Rushmore" to represent the moment Max Fischer decides his path toward redemption -- as with Stevens' best songs, "The Wind" tells a story of a troubled, uncertain journey with a worthwhile conclusion, and does so with remarkable economy.

The album also represents a satisfying mix of musical styles, including one borrowing from Stevens' Greek heritage, "Rubylove." The song is not only written in the 7/8th time of Greece's kalamatianós dance, it also features dueling bazoukis and Greek lyrics. "Tuesday Dead" revisits Stevens' interest in Caribbean music, while the "Morning Has Broken" hymn originates as a Scots Gaelic song.

The arrangements alternate between dreamy ballads and acoustic-guitar-driven pop, but, despite having the same arranger as his previous albums, they strike me as unexpectedly straightforward. The songs on this album rely very heavily on a pair of rhythm guitars, one played by Stevens, one by folk rocker Alun Davies. Both are superb rhythm players, and the album has an almost Flamenco sensibility, relying on sometimes frantic strumming and sometimes startling syncopations. At the same time, the album pares back the use of other instruments to color songs -- even the bouzoukis seems unexpectedly subservient to the melody, supporting the song without driving it. Gone are the signature piano fills that pushed one section of a song into another. Gone are the perplexing string sections.

There is some eccentric percussion work hither and yon, especially handclaps (they drive the song "Peace Train"). But if there is anything that defines this album, it is the use of choral harmony. Often it is Stevens' own voice, providing little supportive phrases, but sometimes it is great blasts of vocals that sometimes are oversweet. And I think this represents a shift in Stevens' songwriting -- with this album, he has started to move away from the character he most often played in previous albums, as the wide-opened wanderer. Instead, he has taken on the role of the knowing elder. There were hints of a sort of pomposity in earlier songs. His treatment of women in his melodies often felt paternal, and one of his roles in "Father and Son" is quite literally that of a father. But these characters had a certain helplessness, their advice tempered by the idea that everyone has their own difficult journey to make, their own wisdom to gain.

Previous protest songs, such as "Where So the Children Play," revolved around questions. But on "Teaser and the Firecat," Stevens has answers. "Let's all start the living for the one that's going to last," he suggests on the song "Changes IV," but it doesn't sound like a request. The song is jubilant, propulsive -- it sounds as though it were intended to sweep you up and take you along with it. Likewise, the Calypso-flavored "Tuesday's Dead" finds Stevens' giving directions: "We must try to shake it down. Do our best to break the ground. Try to turn the world around one more time." And, most famously, "Peace Train" presents itself as a visionary moment for Stevens, with him moving between optimism and pessimism for the future, but encouraged by a metaphoric vision of a "peace train" that is approaching. At the song's most impassioned moment, Stevens and his choral backers cry out "Everyone jump upon the peace train!" He even tells us to pack our bags.

It may be a matter of personal taste, but I prefer the music in which Stevens is an ambiguous searcher to the songs in which he's an unambiguous seer. I just don't think he's that good at the latter, and he would prove this in 1989, many years after he recorded this album. Upon Ayatollah Khomeini calling for a death fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, Stevens made a series of comments that seemed to support this religious death sentence. Stevens has since backtracked, claiming he intended to be funny and it came out wrong, and that he was simply explaining the laws of Islam, but I have heard the original comments and they seemed in earnest. Rushdie has not forgiven Stevens, and I can't blame him -- there was real reason for Rushdie to believe his life was in danger, including a failed assassination attempt that leveled two floors of hotel in London. Rushdie spent many years in hiding, and, to the best of my ability to tell, Stevens has never apologized directly to the author.

The band 10,000 Maniacs also took Stevens at his word: They had included a version of "Peace Train" on their breakthrough album "In My Tribe"; they subsequently struck the song from the US CD releases of the album. It wasn't the only song from "Teaser" album to be controversial after-the-fact, by the way: The lovely, baroque piano on "Morning Has Broken" was by Yes keyboardist Rick Wakemen. He went uncredited and unpaid, and, while Stevens eventually made up for this fact, he blamed the studio for the confusion, which, true or not, seems a bit blame-shifty.

So Stevens is a fallible man, and ordinarily that wouldn't mean much. Pop musicians are often prickly, difficult people, and sometimes they are absolute monsters, but we can enjoy their music nonetheless, because we know that it is possible to recognize human limitations and yet enjoy human creativity nonetheless. It's harder to do this, though, when the artist casts themselves in the role of teacher or spiritual guide, and surrounds his songs with ecstatic voices agreeing with him and encouraging listeners to do likewise. For me, it's unsurprising that the arrangements on this album are less interesting than on previous albums. The songs themselves are shallower.

That being said, this album produced a pair of incidental products that are thoroughly delightful, both based around the song "Moonshadow." With its fingerpicked guitar and childlike lyrics, "Moonshadow" is one of the strongest songs on the album, and Stevens used it as inspiration for both a children's book and an animated film.

Both tell the same story, written and illustrated by Stevens. The title characters of the album, who appear on the cover, witness the moon falling from the sky and set out to return it to its proper place, chasing it across English hillsides and increasingly surreal settings.

This was animated by Charlie Jenkins, who had worked on "Yellow Submarine," and narrated by the great Irish comic performer Spike Milligan with a combination of very British fustiness and a growing twinkle, and it debuted at 1977's Fantastic Animation Festival. It's currently available on YouTube, so I shall include it at the end here.

"The Pillow Book" by Sei Shōnagon.

I realize that by including Sei Shōnagon's "The Pillow Book," I am expanding the definition of twee and pushing it back by about a thousand years (the book was published in 1002). But I have said before that I think the sensibility we now call twee has existed for a long time, in a variety of forms, and the contemporary idea of tweeness is just the newest iteration. "The Pillow Book," which mostly consists of a series of lists of the author's aesthetic reactions to her world, nowadays reads as twee.

Sei Shōnagon had her own word, and she uses it throughout the book, relentlessly, so much so that modern translators choose to use a variety of synonyms so as not to sound repetitive. That word is okashi, which translates as "amusing" or "delightful." Translator Meredith McKinney describes the words as follows;

Okasi is much more than a matter of merely  private and transient responsiveness. It is in essence a kind of aesthetic response, one that can be cultivated and honed, which delights itself by its awareness of the frisson of pleasure that an object or moment produces, and whose pleasure is compounded by the knowledge that it would be shared by others of cultured sensibility.

It should be noted that contemporary American twee sensibilities already borrows from Japanese sensibilities, particularly kawaii, which represents a sort of squealing delight in cuteness that finds its purest expression in America in Zooey Deschanel's character on "The New Girl."

But okashi is an older sensibility, and deliberately refined. Sei Shōnagon liked poetry -- a lot. "The Pillow Book" repeatedly offers stories of spontaneously composed poems, often by the author, and how delighted people were to hear them. Sometimes these poems are challenges, intended to be answered by another poem, which Sei Shōnagon has a particular talent for.

She also likes clothes, and talks about them frequently, and sometimes likes and sometimes doesn't like fine art (she tells a story of hiding from an especially graphic collection of images of hell). Sei Shōnagon was part of the court culture in 11th century Japan, acting as a court lady to the empress, and much of her writing is about the activities in the palace.

But okashi encompasses much more than a cloistered world of fine arts, fashion, and court politics. Just about anything can produce a reaction of delight from the author: the way a group of women lean out of a carriage, the voice of a priest reading out a prayer, birds rising from a pond. Sei Shōnagon seems to go through her life looking for experiences that give her a little ripple of pleasure, and then documents them in lists, which then expand to stories. Her tastes can be strange and contradictory, and, when her pleasure is interrupted, she can be hilariously irritable. She is as bothered by a sleepy exorcist as she is by someone who disturbs a sleepy exorcist, and she cannot abide the sounds of barking dogs or crying children.

The Japanese court seems especially prankish in Sei Shōnagon's telling, sometimes alarmingly (the book starts by describing a puckish tendency of courtiers to just smack each other, which was treated as hilarious by everyone except whoever got smacked), sometimes filled with whimsey. There is a long sequence dedicated to the members of court betting how long a mountain of snow will last, and Sei Shōnagon offers a suggestion that seems absurdly long, but then the mountain just lasts and lasts and lasts, and everyone grows slightly hysterical about the subject.

Okashi seems to have been considered to be as shallow and inconsequential in Sei Shōnagon's era as twee is today: "Tales of the Geni" author Murasaki Shikibu called Sei Shōnagon "ridiculous and superficial," and the books was parodied in the Edo Period in a book titled "The Dog Pillow," which borrowed Sei Shōnagon's tendency to list things, but with a sharp comic sensibility, such as:

Things One Would Like to Send Away

An old wife.
Someone who appears in the middle of a conversation.
A beggar standing at the gate.
The officious parent of one's boy favorite.
A woman who falls asleep after making love.

Even though the "Dog Pillow" is making fun of Sei Shōnagon's sensibilities, the parody somehow manages to be equally twee. The parody, after all, fulfills on of Sei Shōnagon's main requirements: It is delightful.

Even foxes like corduroy.

It was probably inevitable that corduroy would be adopted by the twee. There's something simultaneously dressy and dressed down about it. It's a fabric associated with both college professors and English gentleman farmers. It's nostalgic, but in a cozy, thrift-store way.

Of course, the corduroy suit is most associated with Wes Anderson. He wears them, and his characters often do as well, especially Mr. Fox, who dresses exactly like Wes Anderson. But he wasn't the first to bring it to the screen: Tom Baker wore a wide-gauged corduroy suit in 1973's "Vault of Horror;" he later wore a red corduroy shooting jacket when he played the tweest incarnation of Dr. Who, a look that the designer described as that of an "eternal student."

But, as mentioned, the look is also professorial: Donald Sutherland wore a three-piece variant when he played the lewd Professor Dave Jennings 1978's "Animal House." Unexpectedly, the tweed jacket also makes an appearance on Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which gives the ordinarily restrained coat a bit of wild west dash. (John Wayne also liked corduroy jackets for his cinematic cowboys). And so it's visually associated with the 60s and 70s, which may be why the Coen Brothers dressed their Greenwich Village folkie, Llewyn Davis, in a corduroy jacket, giving him a look that is at once serious and casual.

Hark! A Vagrant: You see me rollin up pops you step aside.

Had Kate Beaton not started to write and illustrate comics, she might have wound up twee anyway. She's Canadian, studied art history and anthropology, and worked in Victoria's Maritime Museum. She developed a fascination for obscure historical figures -- she told interview magazine that she found herself amazed that nobody outside the museum knew who the first Justice of the Peace of British Columbia was.

And so her next decision is one that cemented her into the twee firmament: She started drawing little, adorable, frequently daffy cartoons about history. She began to publish on the web, naming her site after a very early comic in which a contemporary panhandler speaks like a Dickensian pauper. ("O crack," he says, "I am a fool for the love I bear unrequited.") Unexpectedly, her comics caught on, and she eventually moved to New York to pursue cartooning professionally.

I say "unexpectedly," but, really, the world is full of adults with underutilized history and literature degrees, and Beaton's comics hit the sweet spot between being clever enough to surprise but not so clever as to be incomprehensible. An example: She did a series of comics inspired by "The Great Gatsby," and a recurring joke was about Tom and Daisy's baby. In order to appreciate the joke, you must be versed enough in Fitzgerald to recall that the baby briefly appears in "Gatsby," but Daisy is almost entirely disinterested in it. And so we have a cartoon in which Daisy is shown actually sitting on the baby while seeming confused when asked about it, and another in which Gatsby and Daisy make love on a sofa while the baby plummets from beneath them.

This is the sort of joke that's only going to be appreciated by someone who spent hours in a lit class discussing the symbolism of the book's forgotten infant, but Beaton is canny enough to know this. Her sense of humor is anarchic and wide-ranging, mixing highbrow with lowbrow, and so the Gatsby series also includes a cartoon in which Tom brags about how old his money is, and, when pressed for specifics, simple answers "Old as balls."

One of my favorite recurring cartoons is a series in which Beaton reprints covers of Nancy Drew books and then imagines the contents based on the cover alone. Without context, the famous teen detective simple seems to constantly be creeping around, and so Beaton's version of Drew is positively psychopathic. In her version of "The Mystery at the Moss Covered Mansion," an image of Drew and her friends digging up treasure becomes one of Drew burying treasure. "I don't trust the banks," she says, "I don't trust anyone." And then she starts shooting her friends.

Beaton has done something similar with Victorian Halloween cards. She has a particular taste for paralleling the odd manners of previous eras with the odder manners of our own, and so she starts with Halloween card that shows a Victorian staring in a mirror, hoping to see a reflection of her beloved. Halloween isn't really a time for divination games anymore, and so the moment a gentleman's reflection appears in the mirror, it pulls out a cell phone and sends her dick picks.

And I don't want to overemphasize one type of cartoon she does, but I can't help myself, because she sometimes uses random old books for the same purpose, and I can't help but love one based on "True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality," a collection of stories from the New Yorker with a cover by Edward Gorey that shows a man in stripes and yellow kid gloves beckoning down an alley. Beaton animates this scene, with the hoodlum calling out "Come let me tell you a tale of crime and rascality," and then, when a listener draws near, running off with his wallet.

Ultimately, whatever your particular interest in history or literature, Beaton will sooner or later offer up a cartoon that seems tailor-made for your particular tastes: She has tackled Vikings, the founding fathers, the Medieval era in Europe, and a number of cartoons about great, forgotten women from history. She has a special affection for the suffrage movement, whose history she treats as complex, often heroic, and hilariously contradictory. She also has a taste for the early years of bicycle riding, which treated women bicyclists as though they were violent criminals. So Beaton treats them like members of a motorcycle gang, riding while smoking and snarling at men who dive out of their way, saying "You see me rollin up pops you step aside."

In fact, that cartoon reintroduces an old word for female bicyclist, velocipedestrienne, and, my God, what a marvelous word. If this were a perfect twee universe, we would see gangs of women out riding antique boneshakers, wearing Victorian bustles, smoking cigarettes, and terrorizing neighborhoods. It may never happen, but, thanks to Kate Beaton, at least we can imagine it.

"Tea for the Tillerman," Cat Stevens, 1970.

"Tea for the Tillerman" is likely Cat Stevens' signature album. It contains a number of songs that were used on the "Harold and Maude" soundtrack (as did his previous album), but also "But I Might Die Tonight," which played over the opening and closing credits of "The Deep End." The short title song appeared in the closing credits of Ricky Gervais' television show "Extras." The album also represents a shift in focus from his previous album, "Mona Bone Jakon," which was dominated by songs about post-breakup heartbreak.

There is a song about the end of a romantic relationship on this album, "Wild World," which, like his previous songs, were inspired by his several-year-long, on-and-off relationship with actress and model Patti D'Arbanville. But instead of the confusion and betrayal expressed in previous songs, "Wild World" is almost sanguine about the end of the relationship, a caring adieu to a former lover who is about to head out on her own.

And that's the theme of much of this album, and a lot of Stevens' later works: partings, and the voyage that follows. Three other songs on this album address that theme. Firstly, there is "Miles from Nowhere," which presents life itself as a lonely, searching voyage, sung in escalating pitch over increasingly frantic acoustic guitars. There is "One the Road to Find Out," a cheerier, friendlier version of the same song, done as an almost childlike singsong. And there is "Father and Son," a soft-rock duet between Stevens, playing a somewhat melancholy older man saying farewell to his son, also played by Stevens (singing an octave higher), who is sure that he cannot learn about life except by experiencing it on his own.

Stevens makes use of this octave dueting in another song, the previously mentioned "But I Might Die Tonight." This is a countercultural anthem with a typically earwormy melody that starts with Stevens singing the song's title in a bluesy howl and then turns to an unhappy little piano driven melody that constantly descends, usually by two or three notes at a time. By the third verse, Stevens has joined himself, one octave atop another, an effect frequently employed by David Bowie and decidedly unsettling. There's not much to the song's lyrics -- Stevens merely rankles at the idea of getting a job he doesn't like -- but the melody, despite its simplicity, has a menace to it that explains its use in "The Deep End," a film in which tweeness turns into psychopathology.

"Tea for the Tillerman" represents an expansion on Stevens' previous album. I am tempted to say the arrangements are more ambitious, but I don't think that's the right word, as there are only six musicians credited on the album, including Stevens, and the songs remain tastefully under-produced, with an ear toward giving each instrument clear, distinct parts. But there is an emotive ambition here that wasn't as present on the previous album, with songs sometimes exploding into gospel style choruses, sounding ecstatic and visionary, and Stevens voice sometimes processed with an almost rockabilly echo and distortion, making his growl sound sinister. He relies on a string section for several of his songs, especially prominent in a piano ballad called "Sad Lisa." Strings can act as an artificial sweetener in the world of pop music, but the arrangement by Del Newman borrow from classical and folk sources and are genuinely exquisite.

The result is that Stevens doesn't merely seem like an adventurer, but a spiritual seeker, a pop version of the burgeoning new age movement, which is, I think, why he is sometimes shrugged off, his songs treated as lightweight and his pre-Muslim spirituality as shallow. This seems a little unfair to me -- despite Stevens' leanings toward folk, blues, tin pan alley, and world music (which appears on this album in a song called "Longer Boats," which borrows from West Indies' melodies), he is, first and foremost, a pop musician. Pop music is typically evocative rather than investigative, and must be, as the pop format is unavoidably limiting. There is only so much that can be expressed in a few minutes, and the best pop musicians gesture at larger themes, and return to them again and again, building a worldview over dozens of songs, rather than one. It is no more fair to say that Stevens' spirituality is shallow based on one song that it is to say that The Beatles' understanding of love is shallow based on "Eight Days a Week."

It is true that Stevens' spirituality here doesn't seem to be an expression of a specific religion, but instead something more general, with occasional Eastern influences, as well as influences from English folk culture, which I will detail in a moment. And that's fine -- Stevens' is not creating devotional music here, but instead creating a narrative of exploration, of young people setting out into a complicated and often difficult world. His characters, as in "Wild World" and "Father and Son," are young and inexperienced, and the older voices in the song seem sadly resigned to the idea that their journey will be a hard one. This is a more clear-eyed view of a metaphysical journey that Stevens is given credit for, especially knowing that he was in his early 20s when he wrote these songs, and so was closer to the callow naifs in the song than the wizened elders.

There are two songs on the album that I especially like, and are quite different than the others: "Into White" and the title song, "Tea for the Tillerman." Both are, it must be said, nonsensical, and I think deliberately so. The lyrics to the songs sound like a hodgepodge drawn from nursery rhymes. Into white, as an example, starts as follows:

I built my house from barley rice
Green pepper walls and water ice

 The song has a gentle, rolling quality, like a lullaby, and the whole of it sounds like the sorts of hypnagogic dreams that a hobbit might experience just before slipping into unconsciousness. "Tea for the Tillerman," in the meanwhile, is showboaty -- in a single sentence, Stevens runs his voice through its entire range, soaring to the cracking top end of his voice, with a hallelujah choir joining in for the final verse. It's an astonishing display, considering the complete lyrics to the song are as follows:

Bring tea for the tillerman, steak for the sun
Wine for the women who made the rain come
Seagulls sing your hearts away
'Cause while the sinners sin, the children play
Oh Lord, how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day

A tillerman is someone who works a rudder post, on a boat or anything else that needs a tiller (early cars had them, firetrucks did as well), but it feels like the actual job of tillerman is irrelevant in this song. Stevens is singing about invented folk characters, and brings to mind the sort of seaside folk festivals that still happen in England, where costumed adults engage in strange ritual behavior for the entertainment of neighbors and children.

Stevens' journey are filled with mysteries, and they often take the form of these fictional folk and fairytale scenes. In fact, Stevens represented the tillerman on the cover of his album, an illustration he did himself: A burly man in a battered felt hat and fire-red beard, sipping tea in nature as children climb a nearby tree. It's a bucolic scene, but doesn't feel very far removed from the world of, say, "The Wicker Man," in which paganism had reclaimed part of the British Isles and expressed itself as a traditional May Day parade.

Stevens' world is wilder than his flaky, new age reputation gives him credit for. His youngsters are often found weeping, and it's unsurprising: I've seen a lot of what the world can do, he warns, and, further, a lot of nice things turn bad out there. The seekers in Stevens world are his heroes, undeniably, but they're heroes in part because there is a lot to find that will hurt them.

I shouldn't end this review without mentioning "Where Do the Children Play," the first song on the album and the closest thing to a protest song on it, which may be why it is written in a voice that sounds a little bit like a zonked out hippie. "Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes," Stevens sings, "or taking a ride on a cosmic train." The song creates an image of ever-spreading technological and economic progress that is crowding out any space for nature, much less humanity, and for a song that includes humming it is positively apocalyptic. It's also the first Stevens' song from this period of his life to explicitly address itself to the world of children, and is worth noting because this is a theme he would return to, with ongoing ambivalence.

He actually answers the song's question at the end of the album, in "Tea for the Tillerman," and in it children play in a strange, dreamlike, surreal folk fantasy. I don't know if the decision to bookend the album with these two songs, but it suggests that Stevens' solution to humanity's drive for a sort of progress that blots out nature and culture is a fraught, painful, sometimes lonely spiritual journey whose answers are ambiguous and sometimes nonsensical. That's an answer that has more in common with the romantic poets, Alice in Wonderland, and the psychedelic revolution of the 60s than the new age movement of the 70s.

Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow in "The Royal Tenenbaums"

We may never see a film version of the Glass Family, the collection of washed-up former child geniuses essayed by J. D. Salinger in a series of stories starting with 1948's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." But we don't really need to, as Wes Anderson provided his own version of the Glass family with his collection of washed-up former child geniuses in "The Royal Tenenbaums."

Salinger isn't the only source for the film, even if he's the most obvious. Anderson has an omnivore's tastes for influences, all increasingly unexpected. There is a cuckolded husband, played by Bill Murray, and he is based on neurologist Oliver Sacks (which is clear in the original script, which gave him Sacks' lisp and English accent). There is an accountant played Danny Glover as a soft-spoken klutz, but with a wardrobe and goatee lifted from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. There is a neighbor who has made a career for himself as an author of speculative Westerns, played by coauthor Owen Wilson, and he is, in Anderson's words, a "Cormac McCarthy knockoff."

There's an element of collage to the film, as though the whole of the film were pieced together from back issues of "The New Yorker"; unsurprising, as Anderson apparently owns every issue of the publication. And there's an element of the film that displays Anderson and Wilson's obsessive interest in film: The story itself, about a once-great family in decline, owes as much to Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" as it does Salinger. The role of the film's callow and accidentally cruel patriarch, the tough-talking bon vivant Royal Tenenbaum, was written for 70s film superstar Gene Hackman over the actor's own objections. The film borrows from Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Pierre Melville's film "Les Enfants Terrible." With "Tenenbaums," Anderson revealed himself to be as much a cinematic magpie as Quentin Tarantino, drawing from sources just as broad-ranging; there's even a line of dialogue in the film that borrows from "Witness."

Tarantino's and Anderson's films end up packaging these influences very differently: Tarantino is self-consciously cool, and he has wound up being a great legitimizer of genre films, while Anderson is self-consciously twee, even if he wouldn't use that word, and his sources come squarely from the American middlebrow. This is not meant as a criticism, by the way -- Anderson uses these shared touchstones of American good taste to tell stories of people behaving badly and falling apart in the process. Anderson's characters tend to be damaged, and the exquisiteness of their environment serves to highlight their pain. And while his films often seem set in a world of privilege, this was the first movie of his featuring lead characters who were undeniably privileged. Max Fischer, the main character in "Rushmore," was the striving child of a working-class single father, and Owen Wilson's character in this film has a similar story. He seems to have been raised by his grandmother, attended a Catholic boys school, and has taken aim at the rich kids, as Fischer was instructed to do.

But the Tenenbaums are the film's main characters. There is disgraced former lawyer Royal, alienated from his family, whose mixture of masculine dandiness and old-timey tough guy phrases make him a precursor to "Grand Budapest Hotel's" M. Gustave. There is his never-divorced wife Etheline who, like Anderson's own mother, became an architect after her marriage fell apart, and has raised her children to be geniuses; she is played with understated elegance by Anjelica Huston. There is eldest son Chas, played by Ben Stiller, who displayed an early knack for finance and a later inability to deal with family tragedy.  There is middle child Margot Tenenbaum, who was adopted and never allowed to forget the fact, and had a brief career as a playwright and an adult career as a secret adulterer; she is played with black rimmed eyes and fur coat by Gwyneth Paltrow. And there is youngest son Richie, played by Luke Wilson, who was his father's favorite and briefly a tennis pro, but who has a long unrequited love for Margot that caused him to melt down mid-tennis match.

As with "Rushmore," these characters are all slightly exaggerated and slightly caricatured. All wear signature costumes and grew up in rooms that seem more like stage sets than actual residences. But, as with "Rushmore," these facts allow Anderson and his artistic staff to load the film with telling details. There is, as an example, an unexpected triangle between Etheline, Margot, and Owen Wilson's western author, Eli Cash. And it's not just that Margot is having an affair with Eli, nor that Eli has sent Etheline grades and newspaper clipping for years like she was his surrogate mother. It's also that all three have a fascination with so-called primitive cultures. When we first meet Eli as a boy, he is wearing Apache warpaint, a motif that will recur throughout the film. Margot, in the meanwhile, has a childhood room painted with a faux-African masks and repeatedly writes plays set in jungles. And Etheline has an office filled with woodcuts of various tribesmen, which seems like it would interest an anthropologist rather than an archeologist.

Each has explored this interest in non-European cultures in different ways. Before the start of the film, Margot was something of a sexual tourist around the world, while, during the film, Eli is engaged in exploring the world's drugs, smoking opium from a Chinese pipe, eating South American mescaline, and buying cocaine from Egyptians. (In one of the film's subtlest nods, he also has a taste for porn that features nonwhite actors.) And all three, in their own way, are interlopers into the world of the Tenenbaums: Etheline married into it, Margot was adopted into it, and Eli seems to be trying to screw his way in.

The Tenenbaum brothers, in the meanwhile, couldn't be less similar. Royal describes himself as half-Jewish, half-Irish, and Chas seems to have gotten all the Jewish (he even names his sons Ari and Uzi) while Richie wound up with all the Irish. Chas has a lonely childhood of crunching numbers, represented, sadly, by the presence of a bunk bed in his childhood room -- it's never clear who the other bunk was meant for, perhaps to share with Richie, perhaps to share with a friend, but it is clear that one bunk went unused. In the meanwhile, Richie was a successful jock who wanted more -- he's always shown reading atlases, chatting on a HAM radio, and painting childish images of Margot, which he carefully hangs around the house.

The film is packed with details, and it could take forever to unravel them, and, as with "Rushmore," it causes the film to deepen with each viewing. I don't know what to say about the fact that Richie attempts suicide, and this is sandwiched between songs by Elliot Smith, who would later kill himself, and Nick Drake, who already had, but it provides the scene with an undeniable melancholy. I likewise don't know what to say about the fact that at the moment of Royal's greatest rejection by his family, over his shoulder is one of Richie's childhood paintings, but it is not of Margot. It is of Richie, as a child, surrounded by tennis awards, with Royal seated behind him. 

In general, these small details contribute to a larger story, and it is one in which the very things that made the Tenenbaum children remarkable are the things that now represent betrayal, and each has retreated into something else, something they also did as children that wasn't tainted by grief. Richie stopped playing tennis -- literally during a tennis match, sitting down and weeping while staring at Margot and her new husband, the neurologist played by Bill Murray. And so he travels, setting out on a tour boat. Margot continued to write plays for a while, many detailing her sexual obsessiveness, but eventually that faded and was replaced by her history of running away, which eventually simply became a practice of sexual infidelity and extreme secrecy. (There is an extremely subtle example of this, in a long flashback sequence, when we discover in a flash that she had slept with a television newsman; we see him interviewing Eli Cash at another point in the film.) And while Chas never stopped being an obsessive businessman, he used it to destroy his father, repeatedly suing him, getting him disbarred, and eventually sending him to prison for a stretch. Chas had a second hobby, exercising, and it is hinted that he is now engaging in this obsessively, and forcing his sons to as well.

The physical details of the film, as splendid and theatrical as they seem, constantly reinforce this story, and it is a remarkably melancholy one, even though it is one in which an old man seeks redemption and his suicidal son helps him find it. It's not just that Margot and Chas both have closets filled with identical clothes (blazers and ties for Chas, striped country club dresses by Lacoste for Margot), it's that Margot's closet also contains costumes from a play she did as a child that was shrugged off by her father in an especially ungenerous move. It's not just that Margot's room has a library full of bookshelves; it's that she has multiple locks on her door, but leaves her windows unlocked for lovers. (And that Richie knows about the window, and is unexpectedly practiced at climbing in.) It's not that Richie gives up his bedroom for his father, who is feigning a fatal illness, but that Richie moves into a tent in the ballroom, and sleeps on the same sleeping bag he had used to run away with Margot when they were children

For fans of Anderson, "Tenenbaums" represents the end of one era of  Anderson's filmmaking and a segue into a new era. This would be the last film he would make with Luke Wilson and the last film he would write with Owen Wilson. This is the first film to feature Anjelica Huston, who would be featured in Anderson's next two films, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited," which are sort of grouped together as being Anderson's second period films. For a lot of filmgoers, this second period was one of increased whimsy, but lacked the emotional depth of Anderson's early films, especially "Rushmore" and "Tenenbaums."

And there's no doubt that Anderson's films changed after this, and a lot of it was due to the absence of Owen Wilson as a writer. It's hard to know precisely what Wilson was responsible for in any of these scripts, but Anderson's movies would lose the really off-the-wall spaciness of his early pieces, such as Eli Cash's improbable cowboy lifestyle. There's also some marvelously ambiguous lines of dialogue that may or may not have been authored by Wilson, but, with his absence, seem to disappear, such as Dignan declaring that he can't get caught because he's innocent, or Richie, in this film, declaring "I'm going to kill myself tomorrow" and then immediately slashing his wrists. It's not always clear what was lost when Wilson stopped contributing to the scripts, but something is lost, and it's hard not to watch the next two films without feeling that loss.

But for those who think that Anderson's movies somehow became less melancholy or less heartfelt -- well, the next two films have plenty of both.

Portlandia: Everything is better with a bird on it.

Four seasons in, "Portlandia" isn't as twee as it once was, and that might be for the better. Show creators and stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein have found a collection of characters they enjoy portraying and return to again and again, and these characters tend to be aging, irritable, and somewhat left behind. They play these characters well.

As a result, the show is now less a skewering of Portland, or of the sorts of Bohemian trends that Portland tends to adopt, than it is a gentle ribbing at the experiences of aging hipsters. But there was a lot more skewering in the early episodes, when Portland stood in as the twee everycity, where adults played league games of hide and seek in the libraries and dumpster divers obsessively collected anything they thought cute.

There are still hints of that early tweeness. When Armisen and Brownstein play themselves on the show, they don't merely share a bedroom like Ernie and Bert from "Sesame Street," their double beds are marked with their initials, like the Muppet characters, and they have a portrait of themselves between the two beds that looks suspiciously Ernie and Bertish. Portland's eccentric mayor, delightfully played by Kyle McLaughlin, remains a boyish, occasionally tantruming trend watcher. And the show is still set designed and costumed with an eye for whimsy.

What follows are some of the sketches where Armisen and Brownstein were the most indulgently twee, and portrayed Portland as a city were young people go to retire, as they claimed in an early sketch.

1. PUT A BIRD ON IT


Armisen and Brownstein play craft hobbyists who have badly moved into the professional sphere, but have only one crafting skill to offer: Whatever you own, they can put a bird on it. The sketch has come to represent Etsy-style handmade items at their most trifling, and yet ... everything in the sketch's store actually does look a little better with a bird on it.

2. HOUSE SITTER


A suitcase with a bird on it makes an appearance in this sketch, as does Aubrey Plaza -- the show remains ever-skilled at casting twee superstars in cameo roles. Plaza plays a housesitter tasked with looking after the tidy, prim, affected domicile of a tidy, prim, affected couple who are so precise about how their house must be tended to that they even expect Plaza to duplicate their household accidents.

3. BLUNDERBUSS


The entire last episode of Portlandia's first season was their most indulgently twee, springboarding off Portland's Bumbershoot festival. It opens with a growing war on a telephone pole, where one person keeps affixing posters for upcoming bands while another keeps covering them with lost kitten flyers ("Jennifer, but responds to Jenny"), affixing them in increasingly gentle ways, including yarn and a kiss. The episode also features a parody of the legendarily hip Ace Hotel, here called the Deuce Hotel, where the furnishings are all upcycled, the guests get complimentary typewriters, and the staff will trash the hotel in order to impress their indie rock guests.

The most sustained gag in the episode is a performer called Sparklepony, a retiring, guitar carrying want-to-be musician played by Jenny Conlee of the Decembrists. She is turned away from every venue she tries, and retreats into a private fantasy of happy ponies. Eventually she is put on a bus to Alaska, where she is immediately roped into performing by the hotel employees, who are former Portlanders desperate to still seem hip.

4. WE CAN PICKLE THAT


Armisen and Brownstein again offer an ad for an unlikely microbusiness, this one dedicated to the idea that anything can be pickled. For a while, the show presented Portland as a city with an endless number of these sorts of entrepreneurs, and the daffiest of these was to be found in the next sketch:

5. THE KNOT STORE



"Portlandia" nabbed Wes Anderson fave Jeff Goldblum as the proprietor of a store that only sells artisan knots in frames -- most look like sailor knots, which make them unexpectedly appropriate for a port city. In a pink jacket and big spectacles, Goldblum is the oddball quintessence of customer service, determined to match each customer with the best knot possible, which somehow always ends up being iPhone earbuds in a bell jar. Goldblum has returned in similar roles twice more, once selling doilies to aspiring bed and breakfast owners, and once as the Pullout King, who specializes in sofa beds.

6. DREAM OF THE 1890s


In the first season, "Portlandia" introduced Portland as a city still living in the 1990s, but by season two the show realized that the city's countercultural influences stretched back further than that. In song, Fred Armisen informs Carrie Brownstein that there is still a place where lumberjack bearded men pickled vegetables and citizens wear glasses like contact lenses never existed."Remember when kids grew up to be artisan bakers?" Armisan asks, and "everyone used to carve their own ice cubes?"

7. SMALL HATCHBACK

There is a lot to like about this sketch, especially musician Joanna Newsom's irritable turn as a harpist whose harp won't fit into a small car. But it makes this list for one reason: The episode starts with a group of folkies in nature singing a song about Tom Bombadil, the tweest of JRR Tolkein's characters and therefore the most despised.

8. SQUIGGLEMAN


In another episode-spanning sketch, Armisen and Brownstein play Brendan and Michelle, parents who are overprotective of their kids' hipness. In this instance, they decide to form their own children's band, which they name Defiance of Anthropomorphic Sea Mammals. They are awful at first -- noise rock that the children hate -- but then they witness Squiggleman, played by the laconically malevolent British comic Matt Berry. His show is part clowning, part psychedelia, and a little too much cult of personality, and Brendan and Michelle immediately switch tracks. The resulting music is incomprehensible but utterly delightful, receiving rave reviews from Pitchfork Kids, a child version of the online publication run by children with hipster facial hair.

9. BATTLE OF THE GENTLE BANDS


A perfectly constructed comic sketch in which Portland bands increasingly demonstrate their gentleness, some refusing to use microphones, some deciding to play dozens of yards away from their audience, and the winner performing a song that consists exclusively of blowing on some feathers.