Casablanca Poem by gershon hepner

Preferring freshly perked to Sanka,
my favorite movie “Casablanca, ”
I collate cold-cut collages
which, unscreened, turn into mirages,
to find out if I really can
play tunes again like Sam the man.

To what friends fancy as familiar
I add words that may sound far sillier
than the original, while rounding
the usual suspects up for sounding
banal, and make sure they’re transformed,
old words by me brought out and warmed,
to come out freshly from the cold
and o be refashioned and retold,
delivered with soupcons of crudeness,
and hints of darkness mixed with dudeness,
that to my catatonic cult
I shoot out like a catapult.

Intertextually I therefore frolic,
as free––though far less alcoholic––
as Humphrey Bogart tried to be,
which we rescreening love to see,
rewatching “Casablanca” while
we play it once again, and smile.

Inspired by an article on Joel and Ethan Coen’s movie “The Big Lebowski, ” by Dwight Garner (“Dissertation on His Dudeness, ” NYT, December 30,2009) :
Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 movie, “The Big Lebowski, ” which stars Jeff Bridges as a beatific, pot-smoking, bowling-obsessed slacker known as the Dude, snuck up on the English-speaking world during the ’00s: it became, stealthily, the decade’s most venerated cult film. It’s got that elusive and addictive quality that a great midnight movie has to have: it blissfully widens and expands in your mind upon repeat viewings. “The Big Lebowski” has spawned its own shaggy, fervid world: drinking games, Halloween costumes, bumper stickers (“This aggression will not stand, man”) and a drunken annual festival that took root in Louisville, Ky., and has spread to other cities. The movie is also the subject of an expanding shelf of books, including “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers” and the forthcoming “The Tao of the Dude.” Where cult films go, academics will follow. New in bookstores, and already in its second printing, is “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, ” an essay collection edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe (Indiana University Press, $24.95) . The book is, like the Dude himself, a little rough around the edges. But it’s worth an end-of-the-year holiday pop-in. Ideally you’d read it with a White Russian — the Dude’s cocktail of choice — in hand….
Reading “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, ” it’s hard not to recall some of the profound and not-so-goofy things the novelist Umberto Eco had to say about cult movies in his 1984 essay “ ‘Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” “What are the requirements for transforming a book or movie into a cult object? ” Mr. Eco asked. “The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world, a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the sect recognize through each other a shared expertise.”

12/30/09