Archives for June 2006

“The point of life is–I think–its imperfection. The point of human beings to me is that they are full of faults and weaknesses and wickedness–it is because of all that that they are human, made up of a thousand things: defects, qualities, idiosyncrasies, tricks, habits, crotchets, hobbies, little roughnesses and queer pitfalls, unexpected quaintnesses: unexpected goodness, and unexpected badness; take all that away, and what is left? Nothing that I want to see again.”

Maurice Baring, C

I reviewed Monica Ali’s sophomore novel, Alentejo Blue, in the Baltimore Sun last weekend. While more sweeping and ambitious than her first book, Brick Lane, this novel proved less satisfying in the end. Ali is a deft and sometimes flat-out dazzling writer, and I was rooting for the book to succeed. But the form she chooses is a difficult one to make work: she strings together several short stories about different characters residing in the same small Portuguese town. Taken individually, the stories are compelling and wonderfully written. But she seems not to know how to finish the book as a whole.

The final story, encompassing all of the characters’ points of view and pushing uncertainly toward meaningful closure, just doesn’t make much of an impression. As a formal choice, this late move from limited to omniscient narration is an interesting failure–I appreciated the risk Ali took, but at the point it should have been peaking, my engagement with the book crashed and burned. As I said in the Sun:

Each of the first eight stories belongs utterly to a single character, steeped in that individual’s consciousness, sensibility and ethos. But Ali’s reversion to third-person omniscient narration in the last story is the real innovation and surprise – one that, alas, doesn’t have whatever effect was intended. Instead, it ends the reader’s journey on a flat tire, dispersing the separate intensities that had mounted in each boldly imagined, pristinely written story that came before.

Still, I found large swaths of the book pretty impressive and involving, and will continue reading the talented Ali.

I see in the Washington Post that Neil Simon, author of The Odd Couple, has won the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, an award of whose existence I was hitherto unaware. No doubt there are many such awards, since there seems to be nothing more popular than the handing out of prizes, a phenomenon first remarked by Lewis Carroll:

However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?”

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, “EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.”

So it seems, and most especially when it comes to the arts, be they high or low. Of the giving of prizes there is no end, and it’s hard to think of a single one, however ostensibly prestigious, that hasn’t been devalued by the promiscuity and/or lack of discrimination with which it is handed out.

I’m not here to beat up on Neil Simon–I’ve done that enough in my Wall Street Journal drama column in the past couple of years. Instead, I want to ask a question that seems to me obvious but turns out not to be: has there ever been a prize in the arts that was worth having? Is it possible for any institution to give an award for artistic achievement that has real significance?

Looking back over the long history of such prizes, it strikes me that even the best-laid and most idealistic institutional plans are inevitably subverted over time by non-artistic considerations. Sooner or later the temptation to inflate the currency in one way or another becomes irresistible, and before you know it you’re either out of business (the Leventritt Competition) or no longer taken seriously (the Kennedy Center Honors).

More to the point, I have a feeling that the reason why awards in the arts tend irresistibly toward irrelevance is that they contradict the essential nature of art. The fact is that there are only two “prizes” worth having, short-term success and long-term acclaim, neither of which can be conveyed by any means other than the uncoerced consensus of the relevant public.

Yet as self-evident as that might seem, there is some irresistible impulse built into the human psyche that makes us keep handing out awards anyway. Indeed, I myself am connected with the giving of three fairly well-known ones, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, the National Medal of Arts, and the NEA’s Jazz Masters Fellowships, and I like to think that all three are worth getting.

Am I kidding myself? Or is my continuing involvement in the prize-giving process simply an expression of my idealistic belief that it is somehow possible to second-guess the mysterious workings of posterity? Beats me. All I know is that most artists like to get awards, especially when they’re accompanied by a check. The trouble with the verdict of posterity, after all, is that you’re never around to hear it, any more than you get to read your own obituaries. (Go here to read my past reflections on this grim subject.)

Few of us, it seems, are sufficiently self-confident not to long for the reassurance of immediate appreciation, meretricious though it may be, and we long for it all the more as we grow older. As Orson Welles once observed to Peter Bogdanovich, “A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.” I need it, too, and I’ve never won any prizes worth mentioning.

So, I’m sure, does Neil Simon, who has lived long enough to see his style of comedy go out of fashion. That’s why I don’t begrudge his having received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which was previously awarded to Richard Pryor, Carl Reiner, Jonathan Winters, Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin, Lorne Michaels, and Steve Martin. A motley crew, to put it mildly, and I doubt that any of them has done or will ever do anything that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the writing of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn–but so be it. That’s what posterity is for. Today can take care of itself. That’s what prizes are for.

“C. opened the volume of Shelley and came across The Cloud, which is at the beginning of the third volume, on p. 19. He read and experienced for the first time in his life what the printed words upon a page are capable of. He seemed to be caught up in a chariot of fire. Time and place were annihilated; one gorgeous vision after another swept him with dewy, rainbow wings; celestial bells seemed to be ringing in the air, and when it was all over something ineffable had been left behind. He was dazed. He thought he must be mistaken. He read the poem through slowly and silently again from the beginning until the end. Yes, it was all there. He had opened the gates of an undiscovered magical kingdom. He was bursting with the wonder of his discovery.”

Maurice Baring, C

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday digging in the Garden of Satchmo, and came home bearing riches galore.

On Tuesday I drove to the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, New Jersey, a city in which there appears to be no parking at all. In order to stow my Zipcar, I had to drive all the way up to the roof of a dinky little garage reachable only by ascending a corkscrew ramp located inside a silo. Once I finally got where I was going, though, Dan Morgenstern, a distinguished critic who knew Louis Armstrong when young and now runs the most important jazz library in the world in between writing thoughtful essays about the music he loves, filled my lap with goodies. Among them were the unedited typescript of Armstrong’s autobiography and a thick stack of his letters–real letters, mind you, not photocopies.

Of course I’d seen original Armstrong manuscripts before, but I’d never handled one, much less a king-sized batch of Satch. I got so excited that I worked for six hours straight without bothering to eat lunch or check my messages. That was a medium-sized mistake, as I discovered when I returned home and learned that three editors from The Wall Street Journal had been trying to call me all day. By early evening they were on the verge of jumping to the not-unreasonable conclusion (given my recent medical history) that I’d dropped dead. One of them actually went so far as to call Our Girl in Chicago to find out what hospital I was in, which didn’t do anything for her peace of mind.

On Wednesday I went back to the Louis Armstrong Archives to finish going through Armstrong’s Thirties scrapbooks, after which I listened to a half-dozen of the private tape recordings he made after hours. As the Armstrong Archives Web site explains, “Louis Armstrong’s personal tape collection comprises 650 reels of audiotape. When he was hanging out with fans backstage or with friends in a hotel room or with Lucille at home, he loved to set his tape deck to

Friday again, and today’s Wall Street Journal drama column reflects my sharply mixed feelings about Spring Awakening, the very explicit new musical version of Frank Wedekind’s famous 1891 play about teenage sexuality:

Steven Sater has compressed Wedekind’s three-act play into a tight two-act book that is surprisingly faithful to the original, though Mr. Sater’s adaptation is far more sentimental and (fortunately) rather less didactic. The action is set in provincial Germany circa 1890, but the songs are contemporary in style–often unprintably so–and the performers whip wireless mikes out of their pockets and are bathed in neon light whenever they start to sing. The point, I gather, is that nothing much has changed since 1890, and when it comes to puberty, that’s doubtless true enough. “Spring Awakening” is full of self-centered, solipsistic kids who think they’re both unique and misunderstood. I know I felt that way when I was 14.

Is “Spring Awakening” for you? Only if you warm to the idea of spending a whole evening wallowing in teen angst. It also depends on your tolerance for the kind of singer-songwriter pop that runs to languishing tunes and sensitive piano arpeggios. I find it cloying, but I’ll be the first to admit that Mr. Sater (who also wrote the lyrics) has used Duncan Sheik’s music to savvy dramatic effect, greatly aided by the fast-paced direction of Michael Mayer and the sharp performances of the ensemble cast….

My feelings about Neil LaBute’s Some Girl(s) were considerably more clear-cut:

I wanting to admire Neil LaBute, but he keeps writing plays like “Some Girl(s).” Mr. LaBute’s favorite subject is the way men mistreat women, and while he handles it with virtuosity–I can’t think of a more technically adroit playwright–his slickness almost always does him in….

No link, so get thee to a newsstand and pony up a dollar for today’s Journal, or be big and brave and go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you on-the-spot access to the full text of my review, plus many other worthy stories about art and its ancillary activites. (You can also read about money if so inclined.)

“I have not carried out experiments to prove it, but may I suggest that people in the theater and the cinema do not sit in the same way? The theater requires attentiveness, and people must sit up alertly to see what is often a small area of concentration. Whereas in the cinema, the screen looms above us, and many people sink into reclining positions to watch. Some luxurious movie houses have seats that slide back to allow this posture. In the cinema we sometimes put our feet on the back of the row in front, loll across two seats, and damage the upholstery. Would this happen with a lively and commanding presence on the stage, or is it the result of a sort of loneliness in cinemas?”

David Thomson, America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture

Look in the right-hand column immediately below the Top Fives and you’ll see that “About Last Night” has just rolled out a fresh feature. In “Out of the Past” we apply the Top Five idea to art that isn’t new. Starting today, you’ll find capsule commentaries on books, movies, records, and other old favorites that we think you might like.

Like the Top Fives, our “Out of the Past” picks will change frequently and without warning, so keep an eye peeled for the latest postings.

UPDATE: The Top Fives are all new, too!