Unanswered Prayers

“There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers," runs the famous line from Saint Teresa of Avila. There’s probably some degree of poetic justice in the fact that the novel, Answered Prayers, Truman Capote chose to name after the quote was unfinished--particularly since there is something intrinsically unresolvable as regards the effect of all prayers. At it’s most elemental, prayer is an admission of powerlessness. If you felt powerful there would be no need to pray. You’d simply take care of the problem yourself. But there's something in most prayer that mitigates against the notion that there's anyone who can attend to your plight or fulfill you wish. Many religions, for example, reject the notion of praying for things. Which goes back to the St Teresa quote. You may know what you want, but do you know what you need? If you get the job or snag the partner you think you desire, you may be settling for a dead end.  When one door closes another opens is a homily that used to rationalize unanswered prayers. Instead of praying for things, you pray for something over which you fundamentally have more control, i.e. acceptance or the willingness to abide by God’s will, if you believe in a God. There’s also something repetitive and boring about prayer. When you pick up a traditional prayer book you’ll find so many phrases glorifying and praising God that the act of praying actually seems like a form of people pleasing, though such cynical interpretations discountenance the incantatory nature of prayer. Once you get over the boredom, prayer can have the soothing quality of a dirge. You wish and you want and you’re mournful, but you find solace in congregating and finding a commonality in the recitation of shared emotions. So there's a curious topography to this ancient ritual that often produces a joy (and in the case of certain sects an ecstatic out of body experience) but little in the way of clear cut results. Perhaps the most profound thing about prayer and the thing that accounts for its mournful quality is that it anticipates and even exults in its own futility.

Thomas Demand's "Junior Suite"

photomontage: Gothamist

Carol Vogel’s Inside Art column from Friday’s Times reported on a Thomas Demand photo called “Junior Suite” that will be part of an upcoming show of the photographer's work at Matthew Marks ("A Remade Tabloid Image of Houston's Last Meal," NYT, 4/26/12) In the photograph Demand reprises a shot of Whitney Houston’s final meal first posted on a site called TMZ. According to the Times Demand checked into a similar room to the one Houston occupied at the Beverly Hilton on the evening of her death and ordered the same foods: a hamburger and fries, a beer, a flute of champagne. The flowers that decorated the original room service setting added a particular note of tristesse to both the original photo and Demand’s version of the event. What to call Demand’s work? A reproduction is literally what it is, but in photographic terms a reproduction is a duplication of the original and what Demand has created is clearly a separate work of art based upon a photo of the crime scene. “I don’t have anything to say about Whitney Houston,” Mr. Demand told Vogel who went on to explain. “Rather, it was the way the shot itself had the quality of a l7th-century Dutch still life that intrigued him.” What Demand has done is the equivalent of journalists using the techniques of fiction to enter their subject’s minds. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner’s Song provide the literary antecedent for Demand’s gothic “last supper.”

Paris Journal IX: A Moveable Feast

Hemingway called Paris “a moveable feast,” but it is hard to regard the Parisian salons presided over by the great cultural figures of the past—Breton, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway himself, and numerous other denizens of Parisian cultural life—as feasts in the same sense as the collations that occurred in American and even English cultural life. For all the brilliance of French cuisine, one associates the great gatherings of Parisian intellectuals that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century at cafés like Les Deux Magots (which are now over priced tourist meccas) with buffets of conversation and ideas. In contrast, Truman Capote threw his famed Black and White Ball for Katharine Graham in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza in l966. It would be hard to imagine a latter-day infant terrible and major French celebrity like Houellebecq throwing a comparable society bash for someone like Carla Bruni. Thus, though one reads about the social mores of the French upper classes in Remembrance of Things Past, it is really difficult to imagine the kind of literary cocktail parties and dinners one expects in New York occurring in Paris, where the spread of ideas has a more extemporaneous feel, fueled by the ongoing presence of a true café society on streets like the Rue Mortorgueil, which is to Paris today what the Boulevard St. Germain was a century ago.

Diasporic Dining: Episode IV

Back in the days when America was a prosperous country, eating conformed to Thorstein Veblen’s doctrine of conspicuous consumption.  Oenophiles and varying kind of agrophiles and phobeds flocked to restaurants that specialized in presentation. There was a particular fascination with all things French, duplicating a fixation that began in Russia with Peter the Great, and that ran right up until the revolution. (The elegant Manhattan gallery, A La Vieille Russie, specializes in Faberge eggs and the kinds of Russian Imperial treasures that canonize French culture.) The appearance of French food was once seen as a form of ostentation similar to the luxury goods—cars, summer homes, jewelry—so often used as expressions of class superiority. Escoffier and Emily Post are personifications of class consciousness, in that the manners, mores and appreciation they exude require a certain level of leisure time, while simple dishes like meat loaf and potatoes are associated with the working man or woman, for whom eating is a matter of refilling the empty tank, an act generally accomplished with a silent, often sullen counterpart in front of the TV.

Writers like Julia Childs and M.F.K. Fisher taught us about haute cuisine, but what about moyenne cuisine or basse cusine, like the Croque Monsieur sold in most French cafes? Today, with tempers short and pocketbooks thin, the age of haute cuisine has happily passed. Those Goldman Sachs executives who can afford to eat in the grand old French restaurants don’t dare to be photographed using their stimulus bonuses to purchase overpriced meals. La Grenouille is one of the last on a list that included La Côte Basque, which figures in the title of Truman Capote’s famed expose of café society that served to exile him from the very world into which he’d longed to gain entrée.

This is the age of comfort food, with 24-hour diners in their original Greek form (the Athens, the Dionysius, the Parthenon, the Ethos, the Lyric) or in ersatz incarnations such as the Brooklyn Diner or Big Daddy’s, which raise prices by treating a viable part of American cuisine as a period piece. “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain said. Similarly, murmurings about the demise of the local diner are premature. After all, what can be gotten at La Grenouille that can’t be gotten at the Lyric?  Here is a comparision: at La Grenouille, the service is formal, the food excellent (if you like quenelles), and the atmosphere elegant.  At the Lyric, the service is surly, the food is good (if you like Chicken à la King), and the atmosphere is comforting—if you are at the point where you have lost everything (or know someone who has), and have nowhere else to go.  The lighting can be harsh, but so is life.