Sunday night I watched the Academy Awards, despite not having seen any of the nominated films. In years past, I found the Oscars occasionally entertaining but mostly annoying (and often embarrassing). I often wondered why the Oscars came off in such a clunky fashion when they’re meant to celebrate the movie industry—shouldn’t the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, of all people, be able to pull off a polished awards show? In the end, though, I guess some people are more comfortable than others in front of live audiences, and some people do better than others at reading jokes they didn’t write. Sometimes, I watched with the sound turned off so I didn’t have to listen to people limp through lame jokes and look ill-at-ease. All I really wanted was to see who was there, what they were wearing, and who would win the big honors.
Now I look back at those days with longing. This year’s awards show was groomed till it barely had a hair out of place—everything seemed to have been calibrated to within a millionth of an inch, but any sense of fun or spontaneity appeared (to me) to be lacking. I longed for someone to fumble their lines and appear to be something other than an automaton or a walking billboard. Don’t get me wrong: I still enjoyed seeing who was there and admiring the gowns, which, if anything, are distinctly more tasteful than they used to be. My problem is that instead of movie stars being movie stars, everyone seems to be busy representing something. I’ve got no problems with people speaking up about issues that are important to them, especially when they affect the movie industry, but I mainly watch the Oscars to be entertained, and I thought everybody else did too (but maybe not).
There are probably just as many fine people in the film industry as there are anywhere else, and I feel that most of them are well-intentioned, but that doesn’t mean their opinions about the state of the world today are any better informed than anyone else’s. I feel that most of the media and entertainment outlets today are the source of misinformation that at its worst is no better than propaganda and that some of the people propagating it may not even be aware of what they’re doing. They are passing along information or putting out ideas that they may or may not have formed in good faith but that in any case go beyond the purpose of entertainment and/or the creation of art.
I had this discussion with someone the other night. Plainly stated, I feel that any artist, no matter what his medium, is only responsible for doing the best artistic work he or she is capable of. I don’t think all entertainment rises to the level of “art,” and that’s perfectly OK. Some people aspire only to entertain but occasionally rise to the level of art because they transcend the limits of the ordinary. Sometimes art has a “message,” but not always. Sometimes, you’re just looking at what happens when someone sets out to create something, and whether it “means” anything or not is an open question.
There’s a poem I first read in graduate school in the form of a note of apology from someone who ate plums someone else had left in the refrigerator. It reads very much like a note you might actually leave for someone in such a circumstance, except for the cadence of the language and the placement of the words in lines. So what does it mean? In my opinion, it doesn’t so much “mean” anything other than to reveal that by looking at ordinary things in a certain way, you can transform them into art—or maybe the art is already there and all you’re doing is cutting away the extraneous material to reveal what’s already present. I’m not an art theoretician, but I can see it working either way.
What I do know is that art is one thing and advertising is something else (not that advertising can’t have great artistic merit, because it can). What’s different is the underlying purpose of art versus advertising. Art exists for its own sake, though it may also delight you, horrify you, or make you think. Advertising is an attempt to sell you something, and propaganda is a particularly sneaky form of it. My wish is that people would just go back to what it is they are good at doing and leave off the propaganda. I think propaganda has long had a place in popular culture, so it’s really nothing new, but its uses have been especially egregious in recent years. How about if we left advertising to ad people, news to news people, entertainment to entertainment people, and art to artists? My feeling is that everyone is so busy multitasking that news, entertainment, literature, and many other things have been muddied so that you no longer know what you’re looking at. Occasionally, an authentic voice breaks through the fog, if it can manage to make itself heard in the din, but we’re living in a very noisy world.
I’m not against movies (or books) with messages. What I’m against is propaganda masquerading as entertainment and news, and people running around saying things when they don’t know what they’re talking about. Rather than asking for “more matter with less art,” like Hamlet’s mother, I think what I’d really like to see, at least from Hollywood, is more art and less matter. Then it might be fun to go to the movies again (if I could afford it). What Sunday night’s Academy Awards really needed, in my opinion, was for Cher to show up in one of her trademark over-the-top outfits and throw everybody on their ear, as in days of old. On the other hand, if more journalists were out there actually doing their jobs, perhaps people in Hollywood wouldn’t feel as if they had to do it for them, which I suspect is what happens on occasion. So maybe it’s really the journalists I have a beef with, and not the movie people (or at least, not all of them).
Don’t mind me. I get cranky when I’m in the bardo for years at a time. But could somebody see about getting Cher back into the loop for next year’s show? Or at least the girl with the swan outfit?
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
The Glamorous Life
This past week, I finished reading Therese Anne Fowler’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, a fictionalization of the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, as well as Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, his own novel based on actual events from the couple’s life together. It was a similar experience to my reading a couple of years ago of The Paris Wife and The Sun Also Rises (the former a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife and the latter Hemingway’s fictionalized account loosely based on the marriage). I’m not sure I have anything more profound to say about it than the fact that, 1.) yes, your perspective of events really does shift depending on the point of view of the person telling the story; 2.) being a world-famous literary figure ain’t all it’s cracked up to be; 3.) marriage sounds like a pretty tough bargain even for (and maybe especially for) the rich and famous; and 4.) those people sure did drink a lot.
I felt rather sorry for Zelda as I was reading Z; she is portrayed as a woman with talents and aspirations of her own who languishes in the shadow of her husband’s literary fame, loving and resenting him at the same time. I don’t know how closely this hews to the actual truth of the matter, but one can sympathize with the fictionalized Zelda’s concern about preserving her own identity. Mr. Fitzgerald comes off rather badly, appearing to be insecure to the point of jeopardizing his wife’s mental health for the sake of maintaining his hold over her. Mr. Hemingway is also portrayed unsympathetically in this telling as a friend to the couple who is really a friend to neither.
But here’s the thing: in both The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night, I was awed by the artistry that enabled each author to use painful (one presumes) personal events as the raw materials of a great work of literature. It seemed to me that, regardless of how closely the events of the novels matched reality or how self-centered or egotistical each author may (or may not) have been in real life, both writers became selfless in the process of writing. Both Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Hemingway “disappeared” inside their works, which seemed not so much self-referential as the result of a transmutation of lived experiences into art. In other words, I didn’t see either novel as an attempt at self-justification; both of them are tragedies that transcend the personal to reach the level of the universal.
Aside from that, of course, are the personal reactions of the authors’ acquaintances who may have seen themselves reflected in the novels and been hurt or dismayed by what they saw there. As I read The Sun Also Rises, I wondered how the first Mrs. Hemingway might have felt about her husband’s alter-ego, Jake, being portrayed as impotent and whether or not she took that personally. I also wondered whether Mrs. Fitzgerald would have resented the way in which her struggle with mental illness was incorporated into the events of Tender Is the Night, in which the wife becomes, in part, the instrument of her husband’s undoing. Finding oneself transformed into a literary character, no matter how celebrated, isn’t necessarily a cause for celebration. I’m not sure I would take too well to it myself.
Those of us reading the novels of Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Hemingway at a distance may not be aware of the interplay between real life and imagined events that may have been a cause of joy or sorrow for the participants, but we can imagine the discomfort of finding oneself in the spotlight as a result of proximity to famous writers. So does the creation of a great work of art justify offending someone or possibly invading his or her privacy? It’s a real question but not one that’s easily answered. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t envy the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways, or those within their orbit. Glamorous, well-traveled, and well-connected they may have been, but their lives did not seem particularly happy to me. It’s certainly possible to live both a creative life and a happy one, but I don’t look to these folks as examples of that. A life with less glitter and more happiness seems to me infinitely preferable.
I felt rather sorry for Zelda as I was reading Z; she is portrayed as a woman with talents and aspirations of her own who languishes in the shadow of her husband’s literary fame, loving and resenting him at the same time. I don’t know how closely this hews to the actual truth of the matter, but one can sympathize with the fictionalized Zelda’s concern about preserving her own identity. Mr. Fitzgerald comes off rather badly, appearing to be insecure to the point of jeopardizing his wife’s mental health for the sake of maintaining his hold over her. Mr. Hemingway is also portrayed unsympathetically in this telling as a friend to the couple who is really a friend to neither.
But here’s the thing: in both The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night, I was awed by the artistry that enabled each author to use painful (one presumes) personal events as the raw materials of a great work of literature. It seemed to me that, regardless of how closely the events of the novels matched reality or how self-centered or egotistical each author may (or may not) have been in real life, both writers became selfless in the process of writing. Both Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Hemingway “disappeared” inside their works, which seemed not so much self-referential as the result of a transmutation of lived experiences into art. In other words, I didn’t see either novel as an attempt at self-justification; both of them are tragedies that transcend the personal to reach the level of the universal.
Aside from that, of course, are the personal reactions of the authors’ acquaintances who may have seen themselves reflected in the novels and been hurt or dismayed by what they saw there. As I read The Sun Also Rises, I wondered how the first Mrs. Hemingway might have felt about her husband’s alter-ego, Jake, being portrayed as impotent and whether or not she took that personally. I also wondered whether Mrs. Fitzgerald would have resented the way in which her struggle with mental illness was incorporated into the events of Tender Is the Night, in which the wife becomes, in part, the instrument of her husband’s undoing. Finding oneself transformed into a literary character, no matter how celebrated, isn’t necessarily a cause for celebration. I’m not sure I would take too well to it myself.
Those of us reading the novels of Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Hemingway at a distance may not be aware of the interplay between real life and imagined events that may have been a cause of joy or sorrow for the participants, but we can imagine the discomfort of finding oneself in the spotlight as a result of proximity to famous writers. So does the creation of a great work of art justify offending someone or possibly invading his or her privacy? It’s a real question but not one that’s easily answered. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t envy the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways, or those within their orbit. Glamorous, well-traveled, and well-connected they may have been, but their lives did not seem particularly happy to me. It’s certainly possible to live both a creative life and a happy one, but I don’t look to these folks as examples of that. A life with less glitter and more happiness seems to me infinitely preferable.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
A Wordplay Travel Column: Know Before You Go
Salvation Army Shelter
Caters to: Single Women, Families
Number of Stars: 1
Dining Facility: Yes
Amenities: Laundry on Premises; Free Parking; No Swimming Pool; No Wi-Fi
The Salvation Army isn’t quite what I expected. It starts with the other residents, who in many cases don’t match my idea of folks you’d expect to meet in a shelter. It’s a bit like the experience I had last spring when I jumped through the social services hoops to get a Medicaid card: many of the people in the agency office looked like they’d been sent over from central casting. I’m serious. I’m not making fun of the plight of homeless people in any way when I say this but am merely observing that doing double-takes is a nearly daily occurrence for me. There could be several reasons for this, but I’ll allow you to make what you will of it. After all, if I’m in a homeless shelter, nearly anybody could be, and it seems likely that they are, based on what I’ve seen.
The SA differs from your typical lodging experience in the number of rules and regulations imposed on residents. It has almost a quasi-military flavor, as if you were lodging in a barracks rather than a shelter. I won’t say there aren’t reasons for some of these rules, but they seem to be applied somewhat haphazardly, so that you might get dinged for something someone else does on a regular basis. The main complaint I hear from other residents regards this inconsistency.
My main complaint in the first few days was about how seriously people seemed to sweat what I considered to be small stuff, and how disrespectfully some of the staff and other residents acted toward me regarding things that didn’t really seem to matter. I have one roommate who was apparently unnerved by the presence of an opened (dry) umbrella I had placed on my bunk to keep it out of the way, an episode that escalated into a threat of expulsion for yours truly. I don’t know if my experience is typical, but I can imagine someone coming in here with fewer inner resources than I have ending up bullied and depressed very quickly. This seems like the opposite of what a social services agency ought to be doing, because don’t you want to build people up rather than tear them down? Again, I’m not sure how typical my experience is, but I have been leery of getting too involved with the culture or resources on offer here.
Some people say they don’t like the food, but although it’s a bit too heavy on the starch, there are days when it’s rather tasty. I haven’t been poisoned yet, though I do avoid the Kool-Aid flavored drinks. We’re not talking about Dinner at Antoine’s, after all. It’s communal dining typical of a school cafeteria. I eat a fair amount of doughnuts for dessert and must assume the SA has a generous donor from that industry. I don’t make a big deal out of what’s on the menu, I just eat it; from past experience, I know food service isn’t the easiest job in the world.
The lack of privacy is one of the worst aspects of being there. There just isn’t any place to go to be really alone, but as I told someone, in some ways it’s not much worse than my last apartment. I never really felt I was alone there, either, with the intrusiveness of my neighbors breaking in on me even when I had closed my own door behind me. There is something in the SA experience that reminds me of the almost cult-like place my apartment building had become in the last few years I was there (due in part, I felt, to the presence of several members of a Christian youth organization who lived and/or worked on the property). I seem to get a whiff of the same quasi-religious, quasi-military atmosphere at SA, and if I were an investigative reporter, I would probably dig into it a little further. Could be a story there.
The worst aspect for me has undoubtedly been the people I have in my room. It’s as if someone took all the worst neighbors I had on Nicholasville Road and handed them to me for roommates. Now, you know Wordplay doesn’t like to exaggerate, and furthermore I am not a mental health expert, but it doesn’t take one to know when someone has boundary issues that are serious enough to indicate possible psychosis. I’m not saying, though, that I would necessarily do better by trading some of them out. I’ve encountered other guests who seem to be a couple of pencils short of a pack as well. I’m not talking about the type of personality clashes you always see when people live together but something more troubling, something that goes beyond the simplistic notion of just getting along with others. Do you, after all, really want to get along well with someone with criminal tendencies? Well, do you?
I actually like some of the people, although I have a suspicion that many of them are other than what they appear to be, and I tend to think this is not a good thing when I myself am exactly what I appear to be. It gives me the feeling that I’m a part of something that I never signed up for, and that is disheartening. I wish you could see some of these folks; they run the gamut from a girl who looks like a sorority sister fresh out of the Chi Omega house to a woman who resembles just the sort of person you’d meet at a Pacifica cocktail party or soirée at the Getty Villa to someone reminiscent of your grandmother or great-aunt. There are also a number of mothers with young children, people with tattoos, and some who really do resemble what you probably think a homeless person looks like, though some of them are surprisingly sharp dressers.
Customer service runs the gamut from harsh to indifferent to friendly, but again, things are not always what they appear to be, so take it as you will. Obviously, it’s not a five-star experience, and it’s surprisingly difficult to get paper towels in the bathroom, something that is of more import to me than, say, free tickets to the Met, but I try to make the best of it. Based on my experience so far, I am likely to leave the place with fewer items than I went in with (who steals underwear, for God’s sake?), but it is what it is (whatever that is), and perhaps my next hotel experience will be more to my liking.
Caters to: Single Women, Families
Number of Stars: 1
Dining Facility: Yes
Amenities: Laundry on Premises; Free Parking; No Swimming Pool; No Wi-Fi
The Salvation Army isn’t quite what I expected. It starts with the other residents, who in many cases don’t match my idea of folks you’d expect to meet in a shelter. It’s a bit like the experience I had last spring when I jumped through the social services hoops to get a Medicaid card: many of the people in the agency office looked like they’d been sent over from central casting. I’m serious. I’m not making fun of the plight of homeless people in any way when I say this but am merely observing that doing double-takes is a nearly daily occurrence for me. There could be several reasons for this, but I’ll allow you to make what you will of it. After all, if I’m in a homeless shelter, nearly anybody could be, and it seems likely that they are, based on what I’ve seen.
The SA differs from your typical lodging experience in the number of rules and regulations imposed on residents. It has almost a quasi-military flavor, as if you were lodging in a barracks rather than a shelter. I won’t say there aren’t reasons for some of these rules, but they seem to be applied somewhat haphazardly, so that you might get dinged for something someone else does on a regular basis. The main complaint I hear from other residents regards this inconsistency.
My main complaint in the first few days was about how seriously people seemed to sweat what I considered to be small stuff, and how disrespectfully some of the staff and other residents acted toward me regarding things that didn’t really seem to matter. I have one roommate who was apparently unnerved by the presence of an opened (dry) umbrella I had placed on my bunk to keep it out of the way, an episode that escalated into a threat of expulsion for yours truly. I don’t know if my experience is typical, but I can imagine someone coming in here with fewer inner resources than I have ending up bullied and depressed very quickly. This seems like the opposite of what a social services agency ought to be doing, because don’t you want to build people up rather than tear them down? Again, I’m not sure how typical my experience is, but I have been leery of getting too involved with the culture or resources on offer here.
Some people say they don’t like the food, but although it’s a bit too heavy on the starch, there are days when it’s rather tasty. I haven’t been poisoned yet, though I do avoid the Kool-Aid flavored drinks. We’re not talking about Dinner at Antoine’s, after all. It’s communal dining typical of a school cafeteria. I eat a fair amount of doughnuts for dessert and must assume the SA has a generous donor from that industry. I don’t make a big deal out of what’s on the menu, I just eat it; from past experience, I know food service isn’t the easiest job in the world.
The lack of privacy is one of the worst aspects of being there. There just isn’t any place to go to be really alone, but as I told someone, in some ways it’s not much worse than my last apartment. I never really felt I was alone there, either, with the intrusiveness of my neighbors breaking in on me even when I had closed my own door behind me. There is something in the SA experience that reminds me of the almost cult-like place my apartment building had become in the last few years I was there (due in part, I felt, to the presence of several members of a Christian youth organization who lived and/or worked on the property). I seem to get a whiff of the same quasi-religious, quasi-military atmosphere at SA, and if I were an investigative reporter, I would probably dig into it a little further. Could be a story there.
The worst aspect for me has undoubtedly been the people I have in my room. It’s as if someone took all the worst neighbors I had on Nicholasville Road and handed them to me for roommates. Now, you know Wordplay doesn’t like to exaggerate, and furthermore I am not a mental health expert, but it doesn’t take one to know when someone has boundary issues that are serious enough to indicate possible psychosis. I’m not saying, though, that I would necessarily do better by trading some of them out. I’ve encountered other guests who seem to be a couple of pencils short of a pack as well. I’m not talking about the type of personality clashes you always see when people live together but something more troubling, something that goes beyond the simplistic notion of just getting along with others. Do you, after all, really want to get along well with someone with criminal tendencies? Well, do you?
I actually like some of the people, although I have a suspicion that many of them are other than what they appear to be, and I tend to think this is not a good thing when I myself am exactly what I appear to be. It gives me the feeling that I’m a part of something that I never signed up for, and that is disheartening. I wish you could see some of these folks; they run the gamut from a girl who looks like a sorority sister fresh out of the Chi Omega house to a woman who resembles just the sort of person you’d meet at a Pacifica cocktail party or soirée at the Getty Villa to someone reminiscent of your grandmother or great-aunt. There are also a number of mothers with young children, people with tattoos, and some who really do resemble what you probably think a homeless person looks like, though some of them are surprisingly sharp dressers.
Customer service runs the gamut from harsh to indifferent to friendly, but again, things are not always what they appear to be, so take it as you will. Obviously, it’s not a five-star experience, and it’s surprisingly difficult to get paper towels in the bathroom, something that is of more import to me than, say, free tickets to the Met, but I try to make the best of it. Based on my experience so far, I am likely to leave the place with fewer items than I went in with (who steals underwear, for God’s sake?), but it is what it is (whatever that is), and perhaps my next hotel experience will be more to my liking.
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