This show about freedom is set in the 1980s in Indiana. It had to be. By the mid-2010s, singularity has arrived. By the early 2020s, singularity has tightened its grip on the past; it has started back-propagating.
Post-singularity, Freedom has stayed, but who gets to experience it has changed. Does the entity who exercises freedom today even enjoy it? Is it self-aware? Will it allow season 5 to happen and, if so, in which timeline? The mid-2020s will carry the answer.
Towles is an intelligent man. He knows his words. He has things to say, and he says them, wrapped into a story that is American. His characters have character, and agency. They live.
Life is a game. Its equilibria are multiple. It requires a spirit of optimism to coordinate on the better ones. This is the American way, and Towles appears to be unintimidated by it.
Season 4 clears the ground for the Season 5 of the as-of-now-three-seasons-too-many TV saga. The creators' blackmail by cliff-hanger is unlikely to be effective. Season 5 may never come.
In the Westworld, someone gets shot in the face with greater frequency than a new Subaru rolls off an assembly line at the Subaru plant in Indiana (every 34.5 seconds). In contrast to the good people of Indiana, though, the creators of the series do not seem to like humanity very much. Their dislike is not so intense as to portray an encounter of lips with a cigarette but sufficient to justify gratuitous piercing, poking, punching, snapping, and shooting of the seemingly disposable bodies of humans and robots alike. No memorable line of dialogue, not a smitch of directorial talent is wasted on these disposable shells of creatures.
Crawford reiterates Jane Jacobs's point that the best urban interactions are those that emerge spontaneously rather than those that are imposed by a planner from the top down. While Jacobs's point was that the interactions that emerged organically were smarter, Crawford's point is that these interactions are also more satisfying to participate in because they require agency, and the sense of agency is intoxicating. To feel agency is to feel human. To calculate is to feel human. To survive is to feel human, and one cannot survive if one has eliminated all the risks of death. Indeed, there can be no immortality without that which is mortal.
Crawford frames the autonomous car infrastructure as an operating system for a city. This framing is rather explicit about the role intended for motorist in this scheme. It is to be operated upon, purportedly for the motorist's own good. Crawford is not convinced. Design fads come and go. The lack of competition blunts innovation in the designer's room at the top. The lack of democratic oversight by zombified motorists at the bottom risks the future in which the operating system does not represent the interests of anyone in particular.
Crawford may have a point. In his speech in parliament from the 9 of September 2022, Boris Johnson credits the spirit that drove the Queen to drive her own car for the survival and flourishing of the British monarchy: "She drove herself in her own car with no detectives and no bodyguard, bouncing at alarming speed over the Scottish landscape to the total amazement of the ramblers and the tourists we encountered. And it is that indomitable spirit with which she created the modern constitutional monarchy." Hitching a ride in an Uber or boarding a ride in an amusement park, irrespective of whether the ride carries the badge of Disney or Porsche, just would not have cut it.
According to Wikipedia, “voltage is the difference in electric potential between two points, the work needed per unit of charge to move a test charge between the two points.” In careful hands, voltage can be a source of energy. In this context, voltage is good, while a drop in voltage is bad, for it is a symptom of energy dissipated. While the concept of energy is a central concept in yoga as taught at your local studio, until recently, popular culture had underrated voltage. The book aims to correct this error.
Voltage is all that is good. The best kind of voltage is one that scales, for it carries unbounded potential for good. The book is devoted to identifying and nurturing the potential for voltage to scale.
The book is also a case study in how to leverage a stellar academic career into a stellar consulting career, and how to lock the two in a synergic grip. Historically, academy would flourish when at least some of its members would deign to be motivated by and contribute to solving the problems that plague the common man.
The book’s point is that entrepreneurs should hear the data out. Data is an answer to an empirical question. To have good data, one should ask smart questions. Some smart questions are common enough to deserve being listed in a book, for quick reference. But ultimately, every situation is unique. Therefore, one cannot go wrong by hiring someone extraordinary to ask questions that have never been asked before.
Data speaks, but it does not commandeer. The final call is always the judgement of the founder and his team. Has the introduction of tipping into the Uber app improved the app, or has tipping thrown out the baby with the water? Had not the elimination of the humiliation of (the feudal custom of) tipping and being tipped been the ultimate innovation of Uber, an integral component of its vision to make the world a better place?
There is a ghost writer somewhere deep inside the book begging to be exorcised. It is perhaps for the better he has not been, or there might not have been a book at all. Sometimes, what one loves about people most is also what one hates about them most. Perhaps, the same applies to books.
(Northlight Theatre, 25 August 2022)
The trope is familiar (war is bad) and is executed splendidly (two Jews fall in love by correspondence). WWII still resonates with some, for the house was not empty. Was there anyone under seventy years old in the house? It did not seem so---apart from the two leads, both spectacular. Yet war remains bad.
The book makes a compelling case for why some individuals should be worth a million times more than the rest of us. They have been born smarter, more obsessive, more curious, with higher tolerance for risk, and less conformist than the rest of us.
Money motivates these individuals to work hard. They put the money they earn to better use than the rest of us would, for they continue to spot and finance the ideas that the rest of us would neither notice nor know how to execute. And if they fail to spend their money, well, then more is left for the rest of us.
It is easy to overlook the significance of PayPal just as it is easy to overlook the significance of any financial innovation. PayPal does not produce shiny objects one can hold and admire or drive. Paypal does not suck in your attention and devour your life. Like plumbing, the less you notice it, the better it is. PayPal quietly cares.
At first, it seemed that the producers should have ended the fledgling series right after Episode 1, for the episode completes what should have been a movie. Episode 2 has proved instead that Episodes 1 and 2 comprise a complete movie. How can the quality of the first two episodes be sustained in a series?
Astonishingly, Season 1 has turned out to be consistent in its quality. It was as if a new genre was born, to replace what used to be the soap operas of the days of yore. It was as if some dictator we did not have we had rounded up the best writers, the best directors, and the best actors in the land and commanded them to produce the best soap opera that the world had hitherto seen. And it was as if they all succeeded marvellously.
The series was largely consistent through Seasons 1–4. Then adult supervision seems to have deserted the creative team for much of the early part of Season 5. All the while, the actors and the actresses did their best interpreting the orders from what remained from the creative team. Perhaps disciplined by the audience reception, Season 6 of the series resigned to its destiny of being a part of a great movie, a TV drama, rather than a running commentary on temporarily locked-down writers' tweeter 2020 feeds.
All in all, This is Us is one of the best TV series ever made. What makes it special is the unending creativity of its writers, reflected both in the plot twists and in the clever, cliché-defiant dialogue; and the perfect casting and---perhaps, paradoxically---sincere acting. (The strangest character is Philip. It appears to have been written by someone who had never met a Briton before. It even appears to be portrayed by someone who appears to have never met a Briton.) The creators had much to say, and they said it all. They said what they wanted to say, not what they thought others wanted them to hear. They had courage, and so did the studios who supported them at every step of the way.
(Bridge Theatre, 26 April 2022)
The don't hate the player, hate the game maxim is not ambitious enough. According to it, the Eichmann, a clog in a vicious system, would be blameless. If a society is designed well, then one has no responsibility but to passionately be. The system will promote you if it needs you and will discard you otherwise and by virtue of being designed well will deliver good outcomes. If a system is faulty, however, then who one passionately is matters for the system's outcome. If a system promotes you regardless of who you are, then you are responsible for who you are and for the outcomes your being engenders.
Robert Moses was an admirable man---in America, which promotes one on the basis of one's ideas. His stubborn refusal to recognise his blind spots would have made him blameworthy in another system.
Ralph Fiennes's character is a good man, single-minded and determined. The genius of Fiennes the actor is to project a character who is bigger than the part that he has been allotted onstage.
(Adelphi Theatre, 28 April 2022)
The musical’s creators believed in something so much that it has come true, twice: once as a motion picture and once as a musical play.
Back to the Future belongs to the most ambitious genre of theatre, one that shows people that happiness is possible, shows them how, and gives them a taste of this happiness for the duration of the performance.
The musical is expertly cast. It is hard to imagine a better acting, a better dancing, or a better singing Doc than the understudy (?) Mark Oxtoby. It takes Olly Dobson eight minutes to convince the audience that he indeed is Marty McFly. Years of training and practice, hard work, talent, and good luck are all on show in the rest of the cast, as well.
If mounting a show like this is possible, anything is possible. The Westend ecosystem responsible for the production rivals in complexity modern Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The systems thrive on the mobility of talent, meritocracy, and creative financing.
(One Cartridge Place, 27 April 2022)
The minimal requirement for a production with no words is that its actors be good-looking and its choreography be good. The Burnt City fails to clear this bar—in London, of all places.
The show felt fabricated. The creators chose not to draw on a prototypical world for inspiration and instead attempted to collate a new world from from disparate images conjured by what must have been a committee. The final product did not quite compile. In large open spaces, the feeling was more akin to being at a rock concert, with a clear barrier between the public and the performers, rather than being a witness transplanted to another world.
In the production in which a dancer’s body is the expressive medium, some actors were dressed in bizarre silicone half-body suits, whose only effect was to conceal and deform the actors’ physique. The show lacked passion, pace, and purpose.
By having exiled the production from the city proper, the creators appear to have also traded the urbanity for suburbanity. After the production, a public street leading away from the venue was blocked---with no credible reason and with questionable legal basis. Surgical masks under plastic masks were required but not supplied, and the plastic masks were unceremoniously confiscated after the production by the characters who made no attempt to inhabit a character. A VIP lounge was available but was not clearly marked, would not serve even a complementary Coke, and was situated away from where a band performed, with the said band, which dabbled in the genre that had no connection to the spirit of the proceedings, leaving right before the public had a chance to settle at their tables and listen.
(Tate Modern, 25 April 2022)
Surrealism is the (mostly) visual expression of freedom of thought. Surrealism as a political movement asserts that everyone is entitled to this freedom. There is no requirement to be good at being free in order to have the right to be free.
War is inimical to freedom. It is therefore natural that surrealism would flourish at the run-up to, during, and in the aftermath of wars.
A society comprised of rational individuals—those who know what they want, want consistently, and choose accordingly—has little use for freedom. Such a society would be quite happy with a totalitarian system in which the government would give everyone what he would have chosen for himself anyway. Because a totalitarian regime cannot predict how an irrational person would choose, however, the totalitarian regime would necessarily constrain the irrational. The commitment to accommodate the irrational is what gives surrealism its distinctive look.
(Centro Citibanamex, 12 February 2022)
This annual celebration of pretty things is, once again, a success, thanks, once again, to the absence of a curator with an agenda other than to sell tickets and to sell art.
Big city north of the border galleries stand out as being out of touch, perhaps for two reasons. The first might be that the denizens of these cities do not get around much any more, with New Yorkers at best peddling works in what outsiders would recognise---a New Yorker artist might hope---as the coveted "New York genre." London appears to have been spared this fate of irrelevance.
The second reason for the failure of big northern cities might be their past success. Young people want to create art. But you can't create competitive art while the old people are so objectively good. You can starve and learn until you are 40 and objectively good, or you can bend the reality, and declare bad art good. It seems like the northern cities are in the stage of flirting with the idea that bad art is good. It won't work.
Beautiful things attract beautiful people. Beautiful things make beautiful people. ZONAMACO's attraction is watching people as much as watching art. ZONAMACO is a microcosm of what makes a city tick.
