Sunday, May 30, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Vote for the Worst
An anti-prize prize voting site: http://www.votefortheworst.com/page/1/about-us
This counter-American Idol website joins the Razzies, the K Foundation and the Not-the-Booker Awards as subversive comment on the original Award. Is this a symbiotic or parasitic relationship?
This counter-American Idol website joins the Razzies, the K Foundation and the Not-the-Booker Awards as subversive comment on the original Award. Is this a symbiotic or parasitic relationship?
Monday, May 17, 2010
Building a course around the Man Booker
Here is proof that winning the Man Booker is guaranteed canonization. But, what a great idea for a course: critiquing ten years of Booker winners. See http://www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/articles/1300
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes Film Festival was announced on the back page of the Life section of The Straits Times (Friday 14 May 2010) in an overwhelmingly visual display. This celebration of the visionary (literally) and creative directors of celluloid seems to be reduced, like so many prizes, to a display of beautiful dresses. This article is one quarter text, and three quarters photos.
The very first paragraph informs us that the films up for scrutiny are "leaner and less star-studded than usual", but that the opening ceremony was glamorous. What does "Agence France-Presse" mean by this quote?
We then get a list of beautiful actresses who were seen on the red carpet, the title of the premiere (Robin Hood), a paragraph describing two glamorous gowns and one dress designer, and then some elaboration on that "leaner and less star-studded" bit in the beginning: fewer movies and fewer Hollywood stars. Finally, there is at least some mention of the festival jury, and a political comment on the absence of Iranian director, Jafar Panahi, in jail for subversive movie-making. I suppose the assumption is that we know all about the Cannes Film Festival and don't need much elaboration. But, there is a laughable contradiction in the claim of a festival pared down to something more minimalist, and all this frivolous detail on stars, dresses and designers.
A quick glance at the website http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/about.html reveals a cornucopia of information. You can really lose yourself in video footage, synopses, links to other relevant sites, all in a carnivalesque celebration of the potential of cinema. There is an hourly update of events that gives the site an edginess that is balanced with a comfortable sense of history (that stark black background announces solidity and character). Cinema is alive and vibrant, but the list of advertisements prominently displayed along the top right of the site is a not-so-subtle hint at the money that is needed to keep this industry going. The fairytale dresses and the nonchalant pseudo-hoodlum look of the men reinforce the sense of a virtual world. It takes lots of money to sustain our dreams and fantasies. For those outside of Cannes who cannot access the cinemas, we will have to make do with the fantasy lives of those who inhabit the films: actors, actresses and directors with their aura of a life of privilege. The dominant visuals in the Life article are a sad substitute for the magical world of film that Cannes celebrates. But, it is the closest most of us will get to seeing most of the films advertised, or the exquisite setting for this prestigious Award.
The very first paragraph informs us that the films up for scrutiny are "leaner and less star-studded than usual", but that the opening ceremony was glamorous. What does "Agence France-Presse" mean by this quote?
We then get a list of beautiful actresses who were seen on the red carpet, the title of the premiere (Robin Hood), a paragraph describing two glamorous gowns and one dress designer, and then some elaboration on that "leaner and less star-studded" bit in the beginning: fewer movies and fewer Hollywood stars. Finally, there is at least some mention of the festival jury, and a political comment on the absence of Iranian director, Jafar Panahi, in jail for subversive movie-making. I suppose the assumption is that we know all about the Cannes Film Festival and don't need much elaboration. But, there is a laughable contradiction in the claim of a festival pared down to something more minimalist, and all this frivolous detail on stars, dresses and designers.
A quick glance at the website http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/about.html reveals a cornucopia of information. You can really lose yourself in video footage, synopses, links to other relevant sites, all in a carnivalesque celebration of the potential of cinema. There is an hourly update of events that gives the site an edginess that is balanced with a comfortable sense of history (that stark black background announces solidity and character). Cinema is alive and vibrant, but the list of advertisements prominently displayed along the top right of the site is a not-so-subtle hint at the money that is needed to keep this industry going. The fairytale dresses and the nonchalant pseudo-hoodlum look of the men reinforce the sense of a virtual world. It takes lots of money to sustain our dreams and fantasies. For those outside of Cannes who cannot access the cinemas, we will have to make do with the fantasy lives of those who inhabit the films: actors, actresses and directors with their aura of a life of privilege. The dominant visuals in the Life article are a sad substitute for the magical world of film that Cannes celebrates. But, it is the closest most of us will get to seeing most of the films advertised, or the exquisite setting for this prestigious Award.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Finding a good book: scandal, talk shows and judging
I was digging around in some old articles on awards and found this delightful intro to Salon's Book Awards for 2007 (http://www.salon.com/books/awards/2007/12/12/best_books/index2.html.) It is written by one of my favourite book reviewers, Laura Miller.
Look out for the acknowledgment of the stock role of scandal in the book trade, the anxiety at the bleak statistics for the reading habits of Americans, and the sparsity of book reviews. Miller concludes her little summary of the factors that are at play in the book culture with a clearly formulated set of criteria that shaped the decisions when choosing the 10 best books of 2007. The subjectivity of the process is acknowledged, but with a sincere attempt to pin it down to a process that most can relate to.
It's been a tranquil year in the book industry: no big fabrication or plagiarism scandals, à la James Frey or Kaavya Viswanathan, and consequently no dramatic denunciations on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." O.J. Simpson's bizarre "hypothetical" confession, "If I Did It," was finally published after the copyright had been transferred to the family of Ronald Goldman; in the end, it achieved little more than the destruction of the career of one of publishing's premier carnival barkers, editor Judith Regan. (She's now suing her former employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.)
But if the book world provided relatively little tabloid fodder in 2007, that doesn't mean that graver problems aren't afoot. The National Endowment for the Arts just released another of its depressing surveys of American reading habits, revealing that one in four of our fellow citizens had not read a single book in the preceding year. Meanwhile, the National Book Critics Circle's Campaign to Save Book Reviews has been tirelessly documenting -- and protesting -- the withering away of book coverage in our magazines and newspapers.
What fragments can we shore up against this ruin? Well, there's the single, powerful fact that in 2007, books remained the most consistently refreshing, illuminating, diverting, original and enriching sources of entertainment in our lives. This is Salon's 11th best-books list, and it was as hard to whittle our short list of hundreds of titles down to just 10 as it has been every year for the past decade. And that's after conflicts of interest obliged us to eliminate two terrific new books from former Salon editors -- "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years" by Salon founder David Talbot and Scott Rosenberg's "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software."
Our criteria for this list have always been a little idiosyncratic. We leave it to other critics to try to suss out which titles will wind up on college syllabuses or cited in footnotes by future generations. To make our list, a book has to keep us up late and be the first thing we reach for when we open our eyes in the morning. These are the books we thought about on the way to work and rushed through our dinner dates to get back to at night, the books we blocked out whole weekends to read and propped up next to our bowls of breakfast cereal. However beautiful an author's prose or important his or her subject matter, it doesn't go on our list unless we sigh every time we close the cover and just can't wait to open it again. We hope you'll agree that these titles fit the bill.
Look out for the acknowledgment of the stock role of scandal in the book trade, the anxiety at the bleak statistics for the reading habits of Americans, and the sparsity of book reviews. Miller concludes her little summary of the factors that are at play in the book culture with a clearly formulated set of criteria that shaped the decisions when choosing the 10 best books of 2007. The subjectivity of the process is acknowledged, but with a sincere attempt to pin it down to a process that most can relate to.
It's been a tranquil year in the book industry: no big fabrication or plagiarism scandals, à la James Frey or Kaavya Viswanathan, and consequently no dramatic denunciations on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." O.J. Simpson's bizarre "hypothetical" confession, "If I Did It," was finally published after the copyright had been transferred to the family of Ronald Goldman; in the end, it achieved little more than the destruction of the career of one of publishing's premier carnival barkers, editor Judith Regan. (She's now suing her former employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.)
But if the book world provided relatively little tabloid fodder in 2007, that doesn't mean that graver problems aren't afoot. The National Endowment for the Arts just released another of its depressing surveys of American reading habits, revealing that one in four of our fellow citizens had not read a single book in the preceding year. Meanwhile, the National Book Critics Circle's Campaign to Save Book Reviews has been tirelessly documenting -- and protesting -- the withering away of book coverage in our magazines and newspapers.
What fragments can we shore up against this ruin? Well, there's the single, powerful fact that in 2007, books remained the most consistently refreshing, illuminating, diverting, original and enriching sources of entertainment in our lives. This is Salon's 11th best-books list, and it was as hard to whittle our short list of hundreds of titles down to just 10 as it has been every year for the past decade. And that's after conflicts of interest obliged us to eliminate two terrific new books from former Salon editors -- "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years" by Salon founder David Talbot and Scott Rosenberg's "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software."
Our criteria for this list have always been a little idiosyncratic. We leave it to other critics to try to suss out which titles will wind up on college syllabuses or cited in footnotes by future generations. To make our list, a book has to keep us up late and be the first thing we reach for when we open our eyes in the morning. These are the books we thought about on the way to work and rushed through our dinner dates to get back to at night, the books we blocked out whole weekends to read and propped up next to our bowls of breakfast cereal. However beautiful an author's prose or important his or her subject matter, it doesn't go on our list unless we sigh every time we close the cover and just can't wait to open it again. We hope you'll agree that these titles fit the bill.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Reality show with big reward: running the UK
The UK elections are all but over, and there will be lots of assessments, evaluations and in-depth analyses of the events. A week ago Jonathan Eyal was describing Nick Clegg's meteoric rise to become a real player in what had appeared to be a two-man show-down. Eyal's showbiz discourse draws explicit links between politics and the prize culture. He describes Clegg as having "sprang out of nowhere", as being assumed to be little more than "a studio prop" who has become "the star of the show". And, most significantly, he refers to this support for Clegg ("Cleggmania") as being "no different from that of Ms Susan Boyle, a British middle-aged singer who rose from obscurity to instant stardom after being 'discovered' on a TV show". However, he notes that not all are convinced by this similarity: "Politics, the argument went, is more than just a fleeting Britain's Got Talent performance" (The Straits Times, Wednesday, April 28 2010, pg A2) What follows is an analysis of voting trends, set against a long history of democracy in the UK.
There are many influences on the way the vote goes, and that politics and entertainment have a lot in common is reinforced by the whole prize culture. Who is learning from whom, I wonder?
There are many influences on the way the vote goes, and that politics and entertainment have a lot in common is reinforced by the whole prize culture. Who is learning from whom, I wonder?
the prize and "high" vs "popular" culture
Two prizes are covered in short informative articles on the back page of the Life section of The Straits Times of 6 May. The one is a shortlist - with accompanying description - of the Turner prize candidates. The other is a brief summary of some of the better known actors who are in line for Tony awards. In the “high vs popular culture” debate, these two awards represent what would today be regarded as high culture: visual arts and the theatre. The visual arts, viewed in a museum or gallery, with their aura of muted splendour, and more recently, obscurism and inaccessibility, are per definition elitist. The theatre is arguably elitist because it demands harder work from the audience than do telly and movies in general. Of course, this is a debatable claim, because there are some very sophisticated films out there; films that challenge the viewer and draw him/her out of a comfort zone. However, the camera takes over some of the choices that a person in a theatre needs to make about interpreting events, and there is a visual sumptuousness about film that is very difficult to fully replicate on a stage. The Turner has managed for a long time now to be both elitist and populist. This year’s “conventional by comparison” [to other years’] finalists include paintings depicting notorious murder and suicide sites; folk tunes recorded by the artist, and played at bus stations, cemeteries, museums and churches; and a painter who “mangles her canvasses”. Two consequences of such controversial choices are a continued debate about what exactly constitutes art, and people actually going to view that, and hopefully, other examples of "art". The Tony awards are mentioned in terms of the A-list Hollywood actors who are up for awards in respected plays and musicals. Is the implication that the movies help to keep theatre alive? One could ask whether the visual arts and the theatre have been severely compromised? Does it matter? The theatre and the gallery will be fuller, and that is surely important. But, does this reduce art to yet another consumer product that needs to be sold?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
