Monday, March 3rd

Take ­a ­cold shower after your weekend of saucy French immersion and come back to your senses as the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts bestows Lifetime Achievement Awards on imwpresario Mel Brooks, writer Joe Pintauro and artist David Salle. We called up Mr. Pintauro, the playwright, poet and novelist, in Key West, where men of letters are shipped circa age 50. “It’s nice to be complimented by people who are achievers in your own field,” he said. “I’m generally hard on myself.” His favorite work of his own is his stage adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s book Men’s Lives, an elegy to commercial striped bass fishermen on Long Island. “For me there was kind of a Whitman-esque beauty and sadness to what was happening to these people,” he said. “Billy Joel had written a song for it [‘Downeaster Alexa’]. He actually went out and got arrested, caught a striped bass. Writing this play made comrades of all of us with these families.” (We’re not sure, but we think it’s bad that we still sympathize with the fish.) Later, a nonprofit “documentary arts collaborative,” UnionDocs, screens Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, a film that follows the L.A.-based band Dengue Fever (we don’t have time to get into it) as they traverse Cambodia and unearth its 60’s and 70’s music scene. Afterward, as with all things in Brooklyn, there will be live music and a discussion, and, one hopes, scruffy video artists to flirt with, and subsequently pay for at the pizza place when they “don’t have cash.” (At this rate we’ll never see the Maldives before global warming sinks them.)

[Guild Hall event, the Rainbow Room, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, 6:30 p.m., 631-324-0806, ext. 13; UnionDocs screening, 8 p.m., http://uniondocs.org]