"Three Comrades" by Erich Maria Remarque (1936)

Remarque merely sketches his protagonists. Pat is liked by all, but the reader shall not see why. He must do with the author’s assertion that she is. Bobby is shallow and nice—a valid character, but an imperfect narrator. The novel’s true characters are times, not individuals.

War steals and deceives. It breeds fatalism. Individuals refuse to attempt to change their circumstances, and the lack of change discourages them further. Despair settles in.

War untames humans by awakening the thrills of risk-taking. Without the rule of law, such behaviour is destructive. With the rule of law, such behaviour may promote entrepreneurship. In either case, the shortage of individuals willing to invest at a normal return leads to extreme inequality and myopic policies.

Narratives must be happy. Good opportunities present themselves rarely, and so it is important to illustrate how to take advantage of them. Catastrophes and failures do not instruct.

Gravity (2013)

Beauty: the belief that the world is a little better than it is.

Memories of the better moments linger longer.

Gravity: the power to cling to the world as it is—in expectation of the memories of beauty.

The sequence in which Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) strips, dozes off briefly, and then glides inside the space station are among the most beautiful visuals in cinema. Her smooth, efficient body contrasts with the prickly, inanimate interior of the station. These two paragons of human-made beauty summarise the accomplishments and the vulnerability of the civilisation.

There is an element of honesty in cinema that is absent from literature. Movies have only two hours to distract and instruct. To succeed, a movie must inspire living, not replace it.

ProArteDanza

(Harbourfront Centre, 5 October 2013)

Mami Hata's movement is her own. Her each step is natural, necessary, and occurs only if every muscle in her body concurs---which happens often and visibly brings her happiness. When she moves, it is for a reason.

Novelty is not an integral part of beauty. Beauty is a fulfilled expectation. Beauty is an evocation of the familiar. Novelty emerges as the artist searches for a more intense, more efficient presentation. Novelty emerges as the artist expresses the private, which is unique, hence novel.

ProArteDanza hold the balanced attitude according to which an individual neither spins in vacuum nor inanimately submits to an external design. What one discovers about oneself depends on who one is with. One travels to discover. What one discovers shapes what one becomes. One's perception of oneself is affected as much by how one has influenced others as by other's influence.

"Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan (2012)

Ian McEwan's novel is a permutation of stereotypes about times, places, and people. His tone is that of a tutor delivering a lesson: competent, respectful, detached, pleasant, engaging, and faintly condescending. There is nothing singular about the characters; these are the circumstances that make these characters interesting, not the other way around.

McEwan hides behind the back of a boyish writer, Tom, slouched at the typewriter that impresses the very pages that the reader ends up swooshing on his touchscreen. Lovestruck and hence stuck with his protagonist, Tom relives, fills in, and retouches his own and borrowed memories.

The novel concludes with three non sequiturs, supplied by Tom: (i) English majors are better than mathematicians, (ii) Sussex is better than Cambridge, and (iii) "marry me."

Discovering how to align individual self-interest with the social good and explaining this alignment to voters have been among the most valuable pursuits of the twentieth century.

"On China" by Henry Kissinger (2011)

She is alone, having just returned from a tango class. At 10:22pm, the front door is slammed open. A poorly shaven (by design or inadvertently) man enters. She neither screams nor calls the police. "What a nuisance," she thinks, putting aside the New Yorker. "This foul-smelling savage probably wants me to teach him some salsa. And another one is hovering in the corridor---too shy to enter and supplicate. Well, if I teach the basic steps to the intruder, he might leave promptly and share the knowledge with his friends. Surely he has not forced himself into my apartment to lecture me on his area of expertise. I am in no danger." This seems to have been the Chinese foreign policy until the mid-nineteenth century.

History has favoured military might and economic influence, not poignant poetry, romantic dance routines, and friendly demeanour. Yet it is hard to accuse history of having failed to favour merit; the definition of merit evolves to conform with history's choices. Today, poetry, dance, and friendly demeanour are all integral parts of economic influence.

History matters for the same reasons data matter in science. A successful society encapsulates all relevant history in social norms (e.g., common law), institutions, and a collection of principles (e.g., a constitution). The remaining history are possibility theorems, of interest to experts.

Revolutions change the rules of the game. Entrepreneurship changes the strategies. Economic and political development benefits from the stability of rules and the innovation in strategies. Mao understood the merits of change, but has failed to direct it appropriately. Capitalist economies and democracies deliver change without planning for it.

The belief in the supremacy of ideas is less harmful than the belief in the supremacy of nations. The latter vilifies and sacrifices people. The former challenges ideas and, in the best case, may lead to conversations, not wars.

Peepshow Follies of 1938

(Fais Do-Do, 16 August 2013)

What Marx used to call exploitation, what feminists used to call objectification, what the layman calls a repugnant transaction, and what the philosopher intuits as injustice consists in having little choice but to make a living of a small and common subset of individual characteristics. This subset's commonality leads to vigorous competition, which makes so earned living meagre. This subset's smallness makes so earned living dull.

The way to improve an individual's condition is to expand the choices available to him, instead of circumscribing modes of employment. The involuntary, idle poverty brought about by such circumscription would hurt more than exploitation does.

The mundane serial exposure of common bodies lacks a narrative and aesthetic gratification. It is not art. (There is more art at an afternoon SkyBar, in the fabric flirting with the breeze and the bodies undulating with each step.) This exposure may lead to intellectual gratification, however. There is liberation in acknowledging the mundane as such. There is a promise in bodily small talk, however common.

Paper or Plastik at Pico Blvd

A sole supple soul seeks thought; treads, trusts, twists, propelled by the purpose to probe the plurality of potentialities, to contact, connect, commune, contemplate, condense, cancel, fall free, flex, fudge the future.

Motion rouses reality; reality flees, exposing the traces of liberty.

Helmut Newton: White Women • Sleepless Nights • Big Nudes

(Annenberg Space for Photography, 10 August 2013)

Helmut Newton's fashion photography is predicated on the principle that the individual has no inherent personality. Instead, any personality trait derives from a garment. Newton's models wear the clothes that they do not choose in settings that they would not seek. The clothes accentuate no trait that the model cannot be stripped of or twisted out of. The stares are blank, right into the camera.

The exhibition notes apologise pre-emptively, claiming that the photographs do not "objectify," but empower, the women. Objectification (a concept so nebulous that it subtracts from any debate) is subjective. If one detects it and is offended by it, one is better off not perusing Newton's catalogue; no disclaimer would appease.

"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" by Susan Cain (2013)

The book is a cultural critique. It asserts that individuals differ in temperaments, on which one can build (personality), but which cannot be altered and must not be cured. The plurality of tastes has been championed by markets. The plurality of both tastes and values has been championed by democracies. The plurality of temperaments may have been underappreciated by the education system and the labour market; extroverts carry a premium, possibly undeserved.

It is not obvious that motion pictures are to blame. Roger Thornhill, of "North by Northwest," may have been an extrovert or an introvert (indeed, his wives left him because he led too dull a life). These are only his superior social skills that are apparent. Movies do tend to promote characters with such skills (because a mumbling hermit would typically be an inept ambassador for the director's ideas), but by doing so, movies educate at least as much as they promote a particular temperament. Instead, it is the higher-density living (which raises the rewards to socialising) and possibly the pharmaceutical industry (which cashes in on the desire to conform) that are complicit in the rise of the extrovert ideal.

Ron Mueck

(Fondation Cartier, 28 July 2013)

The past exists only in what one is today. Today is when one leaves a mark on tomorrow. In the interim, to exist is to remain alert and hopeful, and to reason. To die is to wish to be never seen.

A work of art that is remembered is an innovation in method as well as in representation. The gratification from accomplishing both is necessary to motivate a breakthrough.

"Sally Meets Stu" by Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY

(Fais Do-Do, 13 July 2013)

Aristotle believed that heavier bodies fell faster.

Science progresses because it tests, not canonises, its hypotheses. Art progresses as it discovers new ways to design experiments (which help the viewer discover his preferences and offer to him new perspectives on others) and to gratify. Classical ballet only seeks to gratify. Preserving the traditional means of gratification is an end in itself, for classical ballet.

Contemporary ballet, as contemporary science, does not appeal to authority. Its priority is to enrich the vocabulary. Ate9 is the experimental quantum mechanics of dance. Ate9 ventures into the world where the classical intuition fails. Once-in-a-lifetime events are as exotic to an individual as quantum phenomena were to the classical physicist. With evidence scarce and premeditated reasoning incomplete, individuals act in ways that do not conform with others' expectations.

One can get by with classical physics alone; one can neglect surrealism, censor irony, and dismiss the quantum phenomena at the heart of contemporary dance---but not if one yearns to understand completely and communicate parsimoniously.

Danielle Agami's ballet is intense, direct (not literal), and immediate. It is of precarious peace and of the urgency of the moment. To act and irrevocably err is better than to waste oneself on chores and indecision.

American Ballet Theatre

(The Music Center, 11 July 2013)

Balanchine's "Symphony in C" is a firework---a routine that is simple, aesthetically pleasing in its synchrony, musicality, and understatement, a routine that is about nothing in particular, but has been found to please, just as Bizet's accompaniment.

By contrast, Balanchine's "Apollo" is affectedly theatrical, dated in its narcissism. To prevent a work from evolving is to condemn it or confine it to a menagerie that is of interest only to historians and choreographers. Jazz standards and classical music are resilient because legally malleable. A performer of Bach's Cello Suites is under no obligation to imitate Rostropovich; a Berlin interpreter is under no obligation to imitate Astaire. A dance is not a precision instrument built to meticulous specifications, but a conduit of emotion, which originates with the choreographer and musicians and infects dancers and the audience. To starve the dancers of that emotion by replacing the artist with the technique is to abuse their bodies (for the dancers would be doing something they do not understand and hence would not live when life could have been at its fullest).

In Ratmansky's "Chamber Symphony," with Jason-Hartlinesque intensity and playful curiosity, the protagonist discovers that it is easier (and more gratifying) to inspire dozens than to control one. Creativity is spurred by bewilderment and the failure to fit in.

Hitchcocked

(Fais Do-Do, 6 July 2013)

Theatre shows how little one may need to change the world. Pretend that the world is the way you want it to be. The chances are, you are not alone in that vision. Others will join in the pretence and nudge the world in the desired direction.

Starbucks on the Third Street

A waiting room. A check-in counter into a world dignified, inclusive, relaxed. A wormhole.

Traversed, it opens onto the Third Street, dignified, inclusive, relaxed; foggy, fluid, forthcoming; carrying and caring for the world's Parisless Parisians, angelless Angelinos, sanctified by the ocean breeze Santa Monicans, wrapped into or flaunting ideals, eyeing the stars, from the gutter or laterally, by stroke of good fortune and taste, to the mingling of voices and guitar tunes, bouncing off the soaped pavement, the lit-up storefronts, spilling into the side-streets, lulling the alleys, taming the night.

Driven by a maxim and the promise of sun, a barista attends to the journey of the civilisation.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago + Alonzo King LINES Ballet

(The Music Center, 22 June 2013)

At the turn of the twentieth century, among the objections against skyscrapers was an aesthetic one.  No skyscraper of pleasing proportions had ever been designed. The view that has prevailed, in letter or in spirit, is that economic viability alone warrants the skyscraper's right to rise. What ought to be legislated is not beauty, on which few agree, but the liberty to seek one's own expression of beauty.

Height limits in Chicago had been imposed, but were routinely flouted. Today, zoning rules in the city remain among the most permissive ones. In the irregularity of its members, the troupe of the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago resembles the skyline of their home city---disparate in height, proportions, and plasticity (in wind or music). If a dancer can execute a part, he gets the part. Beauty is in the work done well, not the fortuitous bodily architecture. What makes dancers' bodies beautiful is that their form is subordinated to function, which is to communicate.

Morals are subjective in the same way that beauty is. In public policy, promoted ought to be the ideals that few question---such as efficiency---not a purported universal morality.

The craving for synchrony is irreducible. Yet classical ballets, and many modern ones, fail to indulge this craving by occasionally recognising that music is more than an accompaniment to a silent film, and that music has a beat, which can be acknowledged by an individual dancer and can be used to coordinate with others. As a result, a dancer warming up in the wings has a greater presence in the production than his on-stage colleagues.

The craving for synchrony of beliefs favours simplicity at the expense of accuracy. A simple belief is accessible to many. Hence, even if capable of critical thinking, one may prefer to suspend his disbelief---seduced by the prospect of mutual confirmation.

"Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt (1963)

Removed from historical context, the idea of Nazism seems absurd and implausible. Yet abstract ideas such as this---serving no one's interest---do take on lives of their own. Humans become these ideas' bewildered carriers and victims. Like a virus, the idea cares about its carrier only in so far as the carrier's well-being is conducive to the idea's propagation. Uncritical attachment to abstract ideals such as duty, honour, loyalty, and consistency turn humans into obliging carriers.

Resistance to viral ideas comes from critical reasoning and the assertion of self-interest. Such behaviour flourishes in markets and democracies. Under these regimes, an idea must benefit sufficiently many individuals in order to survive.

To endorse markets and democracies is to endorse a particular moral standard. Markets kill by starving the poor. Such deaths are deemed to be more moral than deaths by a committee. This is presumably so because the impoverished have little to offer not just to the few and possibly prejudiced members of the committee, but to anyone in the inclusive, anonymous market. Democracies kill, for instance, by imposing trade restrictions, by popular will. Such restrictions are deemed to be moral because they benefit the special interests whose lives---as viewed by the group defining morality---are worth more than the lives of sufferers. The incidence of markets and democracies influence---and are influenced by---the prevailing moral norms.

Extinction through evolution is deemed to be more moral than extinction through revolution. This is so due to the society's reluctance to reward momentary superiority in violence. Evolution aggregates the decisions of many, in a variety of environments, and over time.

The desire to change the world is an instinct, related to the desire to seek a better place. Artists and mathematicians create realities that do not interfere with others' realities. Most others' sought realities do conflict.

This conflict admits at least three resolutions: (i) individuals can sort into homogeneous communities with a shared view of reality (e.g., artists' colonies); (ii) individuals can seek seclusion in suburban units, and (iii) individuals can live in high-density, urban environments, with multiple realities intertwined, and tolerate others' realities.

It may be a crime to support an inferior institution. One may be held responsible even if (ex-post) non-pivotal. The rationale is to avoid coordination on inferior outcomes.

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (1961)

The Industrial Revolution heralded what few thought possible to engineer: sustained economic growth. With hindsight, governments have come to believe that property rights, the rule of law, the private enterprise, and insurance promote growth. The governments undertook to guard these tenets. Growth has continued to oblige.

Reducing the success of cities to a handful of tenets has proved elusive. Suburbs have been more popular and more enduring than Jane Jacobs had imagined. They are popular among the generations who grew up without having experienced the ideal cities envisaged by Jacobs. They are enduring because they are simple enough systems to be understood and managed. Even suburban boredom has been less venomous than Jacobs had imagined, because of the diversions supplied by television and the Internet; few view watching the street as a comparable entertainment.

The mind needs a delicate balance between external structure and stimulation on the one hand, and the peace and quiet, necessary for independent reasoning, on the other hand. Sensory deprivation and solitary confinement relax at first, then cripple. In the absence of external stimuli, the mind hallucinates.

So suburbs can debilitate. Yet survivors abound, for at least two reasons: (i) what constitutes sense deprivation varies across individuals depending on the baseline level of stimulation to which they were exposed when they grew up, and (ii) individual tastes differ; some may actually like suburbs, regardless of upbringing.

A major suburban limitation is that suburbs do not permit casual relationships. Only intense ones or none are available. So one must settle for an extreme. Furthermore, intensity will typically not translate into depth. Those few with whom deep relationships are possible are unlikely to be one's neighbours.

The restlessness in "the" American character may stem from the dull city scenery. There may be high-density (but architecturally and occupationally monotonous) agglomerations of people without a city atmosphere. Most streets in American cities are barren after dark. One must travel in order to experience the variety of scenery and people. Without a local sample of this variety, however, one may be unaware that variety exists and gratifies.

"Surely You're Yoking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard Feynman (1985)

Specialisation requires detachment, which can be arrived at by deep reasoning or by prejudice, and is well sustained by prejudice.

Individuals are bad at solving in parallel multiple optimisation problems with disparate horizons. Peace---the luxury of focusing on the long horizon---is conducive to intellectual pursuits.

A rich choice set has ennobling influence on one's idiosyncrasies. In its presence, one is not forced towards the lowest common denominator. A choice set is expanded by inviting and following up on life's leads.

That is real the idea of which is useful.

Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future 1940-1990

(The Getty Center, 27 April 2013)

Advances in art come with advances in technology. Only the most successful adopters of novel technologies are remembered. Only the most confident in their own success venture to experiment and can afford to.

L.A. has had neither a Haussmann nor centuries of compression to mould a city. Its identity is not that of a city, but of individual ideas, which did not have to clash and form a consensus alien to each contributor. Instead, each dreamer got his way (e.g., got Anaheim, Venice, Disneyland, and the LAX Theme Building), neither hampered nor supported by a non-market arbiter of good taste and civic sense.

A museum in a city brings a respite from the mandate and gathers disparate individuals with shared tastes, whom one later learns to recognise unaided. The former role is largely obviated by L.A.'s natural beauty and eccentricity.

Clare Means

(The Third Street Promenade, 20 April 2013)

An artist cannot help being, and translating who he is into a narrative. If one finds aspects of beauty in oneself and translates these, one succeeds as an artist.

Few are artists. While some are tall buildings and fluid fabrics, others are merely a smooth gait, a wit, a reassuring profile. Nevertheless, most can find gratification in distilling a part of themselves into the beauty that can be passed on, onto the audience of strangers. One creates when the external narrative is either lacking or inspires a dialogue.

There is wisdom in being but a reporter---not a schemer, nor a moralist, nor a nostalgist---especially when one is of the age when one is supposed to be alive. One gets only one chance at being oneself, followed by numerous an opportunity for revising the account of what one used to be.

Top Hat

(Aldwych Theatre, 2 April 2013)

A live performance assures that the memories evoked by music are real. This reality is shared, at least by few, in whom one sees those who one aspires to be or may become, or was or could have been. A live performance assures that also music is real, ready to reveal the humanity that transcends individuals once a critical mass of them assemble, on or off stage.

In an act of the division of emotional labour, the audience empathise with characters, thus inhabiting multiple lives at once. This practice is no escapism. Escapism denies one's condition. Empathy enriches one's condition.

Axiom

(Fais Do-Do, 29 March 2013)

Civilisation---aided by art---structures immediate temptations to further long-term gratification, and---aided by science and luck---structures immediate incentives to further long-term goals. Civilisation replaces the degrading compromise by the quest for an ideal.

"Balanchine GOLD" by Los Angeles Ballet

(Royce Hall, 23 March 2013)

Balanchine's is a peculiar language, that of social isolation, decreed aspiration to excellence, and the fear of slowing down for fear of disappointing the machine. His language constructs aesthetics, but neglects meaning. Balanchine is the Manhattan people commute to.

Bach is the Manhattan people reverse commute from. Engineered to dance to, Bach's music tricks thought into wakefulness. In "Concerto Barocco," Bach's music attributes the ballet's kinetic detachment to the congruence of individual goals, not to the sacrifice of self-denial.

End of the Rainbow

(Ahmanson Theatre, 16 March 2013)

It is unclear what Judy Garland is, and hence how to portray her. One could sing a little better than she did, dance a little better than she did, and pass for a star.

Judy Garland is anything but Judy Garland. Yet the play focuses on Judy Garland---not on the studio system that had shaped her, not on the husbands who clung to her, not on the public who adored her---not on who Judy Garland was.

In the play, Judy Garland is too subordinated to addictions to be free, her prospective husband Micky is too dull to be free, so it is left to her accompanist, Anthony, to deliver one-liners that the audience can take home for guidance and reassurance.

The world collapses once one asserts one's singularity, instead of waiting for the world to impose it upon one.

"The Little Mermaid" by the Hamburg Ballet

(Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 9 February 2013)

Whereas the absence of a live orchestra eliminates the no-man's land between the dancers and the audience, the choreographer's divorce between the dance and the music precludes the dancers from engaging with the audience. This divorce is endemic in classical ballet and is particularly pronounced in the first third of this performance. Passion is lost as musicality is suppressed in an effort not to be literal.  The musicality is regained later on, as the dancers begin to dance with (not just next to) each other.

Towards the end of the ballet, one gets inured to the redundantly grotesque. Classical ballet seems to have been devised to guide ships in the fog, not to communicate subtle emotions. In theatre, verbal subtlety can be communicated from a faraway stage, whereas ballet choreographers must fear that physical subtlety will fail to reach the house's distant corners. If indeed so, then large concert halls are inappropriate for dance performances, which should be downscaled and transferred to smaller venues, akin to jazz clubs. This transfer may also cleanse classical ballet of its competitive element; more would aspire to the dramatic prowess of Lloyd Riggins, this ballet's star.

As male ballet dancers age, they mature and grow more masculine. As female ballet dancers age, they seem to lose femininity and revert to girlhood. Females may try to arrest ageing, succeed at it, and overdo it. Males, by contrast, seem to accept ageing and, in order to compensate for it, develop dramatic skills.

One cannot be an artist full time, for one needs time to simply be, and to inhabit the messages that it is the artist's vocation to communicate.

Art is an escape into an ideal world that one would wish to be a part of. If the world one inhabits is ideal in that one does indeed wish to be a part of it, then any art that does not emerge spontaneously may be redundant.

The poor like the rich more than they like art, for the luxuries of the rich are real, and hence potentially attainable. Demanding exorbitantly progressive taxation would be akin to demanding to close down museums on the grounds that the riches exhibited there are unattainable to most.