"El Camino del Libertario" (2022) by Javier Milei

One must be possessed just to go into politics, much less to succeed in it. The idea that possesses Javier Milei is Economics 101, which is not a bad place to start when overhauling the government. A liberal, or libertarian, believes that carefully designed markets beat government intervention every time. An anarcho-libertarian, or anarcho-capitalist, believes that carefully designed markets are capable of emerging spontaneously whenever in demand. A neoliberal believes that the government failure is always graver than the market failure; even if a perfect market fails to emerge spontaneously, government intervention can only make matters worse. Milei is somewhere between neoliberal and anarcho-libertarian---in the realm of Econ 101, in other words.

One can admire the modern government as a miracle of self-organised complexity akin to a world city such as London or New York or fear it as one would runaway artificial general intelligence of science fiction and now the near future. One certainly cannot deny the runaway aspect of modern governments, even the most successful of them. The anarcho-capitalist scalpel applied to the tortured body of Argentinian politics by a steady hand of an Econ 101 enthusiast may prove to be the very salubrious intervention that the country needs.

Milei has read multiple books, some of them with equations. This is a commendable quality for a politician to possess.

"The Shakespeare Requirement" (2018) and "The English Experience: A Novel" (2023), by Julie Schumacher

Julie Schumacher has grown as a narrator; she reads both books and excels in the second one, especially when inhabiting the voices of jaded female students. Her forte is not the plot but shifting spontaneously among perspectives from disparate points of self-absorption. Schumacher understands that time is the ultimate scarce resource, and that self-expression is the ultimate urge. Her protagonist, Jason Fitger, pays with the precision of his prose for the reader's scarce attention to Fitger's self. Fitger succeeds. So do some of his students in The English Experience; they make up with sincerity for what they lack in fluency. Janet fails.

Writing is trading in time and over time, with others and with one's future selves. The writer sinks time so that others do not have to. The writer thinks so that others can think better.

Deseo

(12 November 2023, Un Teatro)

A modern ballet tells ten different stories in parallel. One experiences them develop all at once, just as one hears chord progressions in a musical piece. Interpret a dance performance too soon, before the experience of watching it has coalesced, and you have destroyed nine stories out of ten by singling out just one. Do so publicly, and you have robbed other spectators of their stories. It is best not to interpret. If one could interpret, then the medium of dance would be redundant.

What may be more profitable is to describe how watching a ballet has changed one. And even if one is unchanged, one’s sensibilities may be selectively awoken, if only for a moment. That, too, may be worthy of description. Perhaps the latter phenomenon is exactly what the incantation “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in the motion picture Asteroid City meant. To be consumed by theatre or dance is to succumb to sleep. To wake up is to walk out of the theatre with one's sensibilities sharpened. 

In a typical novel or a film, the protagonist follows a positive character arc. First, he is desperate to satisfy his wants. Then, in the course of the story, he learns that his wants are at odds with his needs. He changes course. He grows. This perspective on storytelling suggests supremacy of needs over wants and a conflict between the two.

In Deseo, needs and wants are in harmony; the characters follow flat arcs. It is the audience whom the dancers invite to become heroes each complete with a conflict and a positive character arc. To this end, Act 1 prompts the audience not just to think of wants but to actually want. Act 2 parts the curtains slightly and invites the audience to walk through for a glimpse of the ultimate needs: connection and beauty.

Jessica Sandoval, Deseo's choreographer and director, along with Estefanía Villa and Tathanna, the dancer duo, define these needs with extraordinary precision. They do so in the language that few speak and fewer still speak fluently but everyone understands: the language of dance. What is even less common is that the artists know exactly what they want say. And they will not repeat the definitions; the production has a limited engagement. The audience members are uniquely responsible for learning the supplied definitions and for living out their assigned character arcs.

Drawing the audience in like this requires a powerful connection with the ballet's creators. Jessica Sandoval reveals the secret: “On stage, one must be free. Free means vulnerable. Vulnerable is open. Openness generates a connection.”

Deseo thus introduces connection at two levels. The dancers connect with the audience. The dancers also connect with each other. Beauty nourishes both connections.

To live is to want. To live intensely is to want passionately. To live is to live in the moment; there is nowhere else.

"Dear Committee Members" by Julie Schumacher (2015)

Life is a fight against the second law of thermodynamics. Life wins fight after fight, and yet, as it wins, it edges ever closer to losing the war. The second law is immutable.

The second law is immutable. As life creates order, elsewhere chaos intensifies. Life is a negative-sum game, in entropy terms. A certain degree of parochialism is required to root for life. 

Human flourishing is the pursuit of beauty and interestingness---a fight against ugliness and monotony. What is considered beautiful and interesting is inherently subjective, parochial, too.

Morality calls for just the right amount of parochialism.

Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members is a paean to beauty---the beauty of saying things. The tragedy of the piece---should one be inclined to read it as a tragedy rather than a triumph of the word over matter---is in the English professor's lopsided emphasis on beauty over interestingness.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)

It is surely a sign of superior civilisation when night after night stadiums are filled with crowds eager to cheer mellow musicians with whom the crowd has no chance of copulating and whom the crowd has no prospect of feeding to a lion or sacrificing to competing blood-thirsty musicians. Capitalism is a cult of creators, not thieves and destructors. Taylor Swift is the ultimate creator. She reads the room so well that one is ready to forgive her reading the room so well. She has talent, she has grit, and she is free.

To Kill a Mockingbird

(CIBC Theatre, 8 August 2023)

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others," is the principle attributed to Groucho Marx. But is it a good principle? And if it is not, what about the others?

The world in which every soul assesses every situation on a case-by-case basis and in accordance with his or her private ethics may be unpredictably slow and bureaucratic or unpredictably fast and chaotic but definitely unpredictable and---by failing to treat equals equally except in the arbitrariness of the manner in which justice is administered---unjust. At the same time, work-to-rule is a time-honoured tool for industrial action. At best, it sabotages production. At worst, it begets evil, a product of the failure to think, as illustrated by the story of Eichmann in Jerusalem. One cannot outsource all thinking to the past, to the founding fathers, and fear no adverse consequences.

Even though it may be wise not to commit to principles, it may be profitable to commit to a stance that would adjudicate among competing principles. Liberal Democracy is such a stance. The democratic component of the liberal democracy infuses the political process with a degree of inertia that invites deliberation and mitigates the coercion of the masses by the elites. The liberal component of the liberal democracy holds the promise of injecting political process with just the right amount of elitism to give the demmocracy a promising direction.

Liberal democracy does not obviate the juggling-in-principles act at the individual level, though. Nor does it absolve the individual of the responsibility for violating (or failing to violate) one’s own principles, the prevailing laws, or social norms.

It is better to be loyal than disloyal, mostly to principles rather than to people, although the two loyalties will mostly align under the right principles. And one ought to never stop examining one’s principles.

Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch and Aaron Sorkin, the playwright, carry the production into the territory of the excellent. Thomas has just the right amount of drawl, and his sprightly kinematics lets him (age 72) pass for a fifty-year old father. His speech is clear, and his bearing is confident. He makes Atticus's part seem easy to inhabit. 

Sorkin has stepped aside and then forward a hundred years in order to write for the ages, which is what one needs to do in order to have a chance to succeed in the moment.

The choice to cast adults as children is artistically questionable. Perhaps, American children lack the free-range childhoods that would enable them to absorb enough life in order to be able to project theatre parts with any degree of authenticity. The adults in the children’s parts did not do much better than this counterfactual, though. They tried hard to act as children, while what children usually do is try hard to act as adults. After the first couple of scenes, though, the suspension of disbelief takes hold (possibly because Steven Lee Johnson joins the company onstage, and he is good), and the Thomas–Sorkin miracle manifests itself.

Le Saint-André in Rue Danton

America deals in extremes. In America, one is either Amish or glued to a cell phone to devour the latest in goods, services, and political fashions.

Paris projects the third way. Its denizens are neither too fat nor too fit. They neither give up nor breathe just to compete. Other people aren't a nuisance for them but the reason to exist. They don't punish the past and won't hasten the future. They get a glimpse into both by sitting down at a cafe with a tea and a pain au chocolat and watching the world being carried away into the future against the scenery that has stayed put for generations.

Is that world that one observes from a corner cafe more real, more compelling, or more engaging than a social-media feed? There's that thrill of a chance that the world in the street will scroll back at you. It is this thrill that makes it worthwhile to engage with that world, which is not trying to hide from you behind the gorilla glass and that trusts you to look, to judge, to interject, and to neglect.

Barbie (2023)

While, unexpectedly, the movie took some risks (the dance numbers and the dreamy sequences), it desperately avoided others by pandering to the target audience's prejudices. These prejudices likely run deeper and truer in the non-Western world, thereby reflecting the movie's ambition to become an international blockbuster.

Margot Robbie is a good actress. Ryan Gosling had too much makeup to tell. 

The colour pink was good.

David Lynch Lithography

(Cut Art Gallery, 15 July 2023)

Pundits and essayists profess to be threatened by AI's superior intelligence. What is really threatening, though, is rationality: intelligence consistently applied in pursuit of a well-defined goal. Cities and polities are more complex than people, and yet many people are brave enough to belong to a polity and live in a city. This is because cities and polities are not rational. They are kludgy and inconsistent. They are slow to adapt and slow to exploit and, therefore, are less threatening. People are quick enough to run away from a rotting city or a corrupt political regime. Not so with the the imminent AI overlords. And hence, "I find it very difficult to understand what is going on these days" (a title of a lithograph from the exhibition).

Suicidal fantasies is the coping mechanisms of choice for some of those who are faced with the anxiety owing to the impending singularity. Perhaps, there is comfort in imagining the worst case and in doing the imagining in company. There is the illusion of control in planning to bring this worst case upon oneself instead of just sitting there and waiting for something to happen, even if that something would not be quite as bad. "Alice thinks about suicide." The masses dream of degrowth.

Those who don't, seek comfort in the deliberate sensation of staying alive, in spite of the odds. They insist on existing, on constantly pushing through the resistive medium, with one's body ("Man in the rain," "Woman rising"), with one's mind ("Woman obscured by cloud," "Woman w/ abstraction"). They create.

To be creative is to have an interesting conversation among multiple people inside one's head. One may be quite disturbed by the cacophony of the voices inside one's head and seek to silence all but at most one of them. "I fix my head." One should resist this temptation. One does not want to kill the conversation.

Creative work can be fully understood only in relation to the bodies of other people. "Two figures dance by a tree with a ladder."

Asteroid City (2023)

There are futures in the past. One knows this for a fact, for we are witnessing one of these possible futures right now: the present. And there could have been others, too. By contrast, the present is not even guaranteed a future. Any picture set in the past is therefore inherently optimistic.

Asteroid City is a perfect picture in the sense that it defies a summary in any other medium. It is expressed most efficiently in the medium of its choice.

The best way to paint the Grand Canyon is not to try to paint the Grand Canyon. The best way to paint the Grand Canyon is to paint the abstract idea of the Grand Canyon. So it is with all objects of great complexity, including the life itself. One gets closer to the real thing by staying back a little and cultivating an optimistic perspective.

To live is to compose, to write, to act, to doubt, and to rehearse; and to rewrite, to play, to be fired (mostly unbeknownst to one), and maybe to catch one's lucky break. Perhaps this is why movies about movies and plays about plays endure. Life is a play within a play within a dream. Or some permutation thereof.

2023 Prius

The car’s visibility is modelled on that of a tank. A substantial fraction of driving happens by instruments: radars and a rearview camera, with the latter easily disarmed by the sun. The instrument cluster lacks a visor. Nevertheless, at night or when the sun shines of a favourable angle, one can just about make out the car’s speed, outlined in a thin font that must have looked pretty in a fashion magazine ten years ago. Little else in the instrument cluster is discernible to the naked eye.

The windows are cut to declare on the owner’s behalf: “I hate where I live. All I want to see is the strip of the road directly in front of me.” The rear window is just large enough to alert the driver when his car is in the direct path of a chasing dinosaur. In a parking lot, the cars parked diagonally behind and similarly placed columns are invisible to the eye, though visible to the radar. As a result, one learns to drive the car the way one may play a computer game. The outlines of the car as seen in the rearview camera are calibrated to be too wide apart.

The steering wheel is pleasant enough to the touch and is pleasantly small. (The shifter is unpleasantly small.) The placement and the design of rear-door handles is a cost-saving measure with no ergonomic justification. The roofline is so low that entering and exiting the car come with health and safety hazards of their own.

The fenders are pliable, presumably for the benefit of the pedestrians who may choose to approach and come into contact with the vehicle from unexpected angles. Once inside the car, one has the strong desire to push the encroaching roof and the pillars out with one’s forehead and hands, and one probably could, both in the front and in the back seats.

The car handles well on the highway. It feels stable and accelerates fast enough to merge with the traffic.

The driver feedback is haphazard. There is a set of chimes that anticipates the illegibility of the instrument panel and alerts the driver to the developments inside the car. Another set of chimes alerts the deriver to various external hazards. Then there is a collection of sounds that are supposed to inform the  driver about how the car feels about moving in various directions. The internal combustion engine refuses to play with the band and has a parallel gig of its own.

Nowadays it is fashionable to worry about the alignment problem: what happens if robots take the goals that humans have programmed them to pursue a little too literally (under the circumstances that human programmers have failed to foresee) and inflict misery onto the human race. The Prius proves that the alignment concerns are not utterly misplaced. Prius appears to have been designed to pursue one goal only: mileage maximisation. In the blind pursuit of this goal, Prius has chosen to drop the human from the equation.

The Mountaintop

(The Geffen Playhouse, 24 June 2023)

She is too tall. He is too short. The script is too thin. The direction is dry. The actors try hard. The public has style.

"The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On 'Liberal' as an Adjective" by Michael Walzer (2023)

For Michael Walzer, to be liberal (adj.) is to be capable of recognising and navigating trade-offs; to be nondogmatic; and---not explicitly stated but implied---to be committed to looking for, and exploiting, the opportunities to make everyone better off. In other words, to be liberal is to be a good economist.

Walzer is not shy of wearing his politics on his sleeve. He should not be. After all, his politics is his and has not been thrust upon him by the accident of birth. One is free to broadcast any aspect of one's persona one pleases---the bandwidth of the public square permitting---and to broadcast the aspect that one is wholly responsible for (with a little helps from one's friends and, in Walzer's case, comrades) is the American way.

The Empire Strips Back

 (Logan Square Auditorium, 11 June 2023)

It is not difficult to improve on the films; the show accomplishes that much. The opening two acts are good. The show fails to pick up momentum, however. MC's rants before every number deserve some of the blame. (MC's one saving grace was the invocation of the Star Wars maxim "Win not by fighting what you hate but by saving what you love.") In addition, the weaker numbers should have been axed and the stronger ones expanded.

It is hard to think of a problem in life that cannot be solved by throwing mathematics at it, or money, or classical ballet training. The show is a testament of how much can be achieved with classical ballet training.

"Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality" by David Edmonds (2023)

One does not envy an ideal circle. Nor an ideal square. One does admire the ideal, though, for everything else can be obtained as a convex combination of ideals.

Parfit was an ideal. His intensity seemed unnatural and inaccessible to most and threatening to some. It may be tempting---it seems to have been tempting to the book's author---to deflect the perceived threat by saying: "While Parfit has brilliant, he was incapable of happiness, for he did not gorge---perhaps, because incapable of gorging---on what the masses habitually gorge on. He was different, and, therefore, defective." This temptation deserves resistance. One does not take solace in the perceived unhappiness of a theorem. The appropriate response to an individual who---be it thanks to his intellect, wealth, physical prowess, or beauty---strikes one as almost alien is the same as to a theorem: "thank you."

The ideal circle cannot be accused of eccentricity.

At times, the entire philosophical community may seem like a sorority, an elitist club whose members are cool not because of what they say (for most of the time what they say is either trivial or false) but because of how they say it. At other times, philosophy seems like an incubator of apolitical political thought, an arena where future leaders seek to define and engage with fundamental questions. It is probably both.

It is not clear that the cultural enterprise requires a philosophical leadership (or any leadership at all). Science appears to be capable of guiding itself rather well, without supervision by the elites. It does not appear that philosophers or philosophies have much influence on arms control negotiations, nuclear energy policies, or pandemic management. Agitators for special interests do, and they need slogans. These slogans may as well come from philosophy. But to equate philosophy with a slogan factory is to equate the All Souls College with the Media Arts Lab (except that the All Souls places its output into the public domain). The choices of agitators are explained by political economy rather than philosophy, though.

Much of what Parfit says is either self-evident or incomprehensible. Of course, one ought to interrogate the widespread intuitive appeal of equality as a primitive desideratum. Of course, a life spent trying to reconcile conflicting moral intuitions---just like a life spent trying to aggregate disparate consumption tastes---is a life well lived. And surely it is a salubrious habit to challenge the logic of being upset about geopolitical developments today so much more than about the tragic events of the past. Perhaps, it is thanks to Parfit's work in the 1980s that these truisms are perceived as such today. 

Mamma Mia!

 (Teatro de los Insurgentes, 13 May 2023)

This is not a West End production, where you are only as good as you are in your current part. Here, the actors and actresses are familiar faces from telenovelas. Except for the lead: Sofia Carrera. This is her breakout role. It is suggestive of certain meritocracy in the world of theatre that an eighteen-year-old newcomer, rather than an established forty-year-old actress, would be chosen to play the part of a twenty-year old protagonist.

Brenda Marie and the Tiger

(12 May 2023, Milo's)

The successful are obsessed. They bring joy. Indeed, in society that functions well, an important dimension of success is the ability to bring joy; one cannot be successful in abstract, without giving others what they want. (In society that functions poorly, one can find success by destroying competitors and by destroying value, without ever giving anything in return.)

Brenda Marie and the Tiger are perfectly matched. The Tiger is a consummate pianist with an acute sense of timing. Brenda Marie lives every song.

People become artists and entrepreneurs in order to retain creative control over their lives, in spite of the  risk of penury. Brenda and Tiger are in full control. At least for the duration of the performance, they are free, and the audience gets a taste of freedom, too.

Folía

(12 May 2023, Un Teatro)

Dancers’ trim bodies maximise the expressiveness of the messages they transmit. There is little fat to disrupt the message.  Every muscle speaks. Emotion and thought are transmitted reliably and fast.

Humans are large language models. Garbage in, garbage out. One ought to live a life that does not regurgitate others’ regurgitations. One should live. If one does not and trains instead on the same stories that others train on, then—unless one is better at training than everyone else—one is dispensable; it is as if one had not lived. When everyone trains on the same stories that others train on, the society is hierarchical, with everyone ranked according to his ability to train. A highly hierarchical society like this is akin to the world in which everyone is required to make a living by being a professional opera singer while no one wants to hear opera from anyone but the one singer who is the very best; this is an impoverished world.

"El Traidor" by Anabel Hernández (2020)

Monopoly restricts output. The government outputs violence. Competing governments output even more violence. Cartel competition (with each other or with other forms of government) produces excessive violence.

EXPO Chicago

 (15 April 2023, The Navy Pier)

Like so very much does in this urban agglomeration, this exhibition, too, had the air of a money-laundering operation. One usually comes to an art fair to see, be seen, and to transcend the quotidian through communion with beauty. EXPO Chicago had the ambience of a car show, but without the cars. Some pretty pictures showed. But who was listening?

The Paper Machete

(26 March 2023, The Green Mill)

The night, headlined by Jonas Friddle's band, was over before the sun set. The band was earnest, and the comedy line-up was middlebrow, which is the fault of the genre as much the perpetrators, and perhaps is not a fault at all, for many in the audience seemed pleased. The genre was topical monologues intended to elicit laughter. To tool employed exceedingly often was the act of breaking certain perceived norms and taboos. The practice relies on the shared (with the audience) understanding of norms and taboos and the questionable premise that breaking a perceived norm or a taboo is inherently funny in a way that breaking a vase is not, and does not interfere with the story (if any).

The show is a great concept (Christopher Piatt's), and the city gets the comedians it deserves.

Ozark, Seasons 1–4 (2017–2022)

The series finale is premised on a certain notion of "realism" whose possibility and normative appeal are quite unclear. Successful criminals do not get caught and do not present themselves to the writer's room to brag about this. Then, how do the writers know what is realistic? And even if the writers (and their consultants) have been steeped in the criminal underworld long enough, most viewers probably have not been and, so, will not necessarily regard the writers' realism as realistic.

The normative appeal of realism is questionable. If society is stuck at a bad equilibrium, it is hardly noble to seek to reinforce this equilibrium by remaining true to it, by remaining "real." Realism in this normative sense is conservatism, which has limitations.

While realism carries little normative significance beyond reinforcing the status quo, internal consistency of the narrative is aesthetically and intellectually pleasing and, therefore, does belong in a work of art.

It would seem that internal consistency itself would call for realism by insisting on the realism of certain behavioural rules of logic, such as "If Alice is the kind of person who habitually does X, then she will never do Y." This may be so, but these rules of logic are less arbitrary than the rules that call upon the fate to punish the purported transgressor or to summon the prevailing notions of morality in order to energise the mob to meter out justice as it is currently understood. Furthermore, internal consistency does not require the rules of logic to be realistic. Surrealism, abstract maths, and quantum physics are among the examples. 

Even though the last season is botched to please a committee, the work executed within these constraints is superb throughout the series. (The last season is botched in that internal consistency is violated: Marty acts out of character and fails to reveal the depth that the rest of the series was busy cultivating. In the final episode, Ruth is killed off in the name of "realism.")

Julia Garner consistently shines in every single frame she appears. Jason Bateman bets on rejecting histrionics for his role and wins. Someone should shoot an alternative ending or at least fork the ending on a fan fiction website.

And there is also potential for a musical, although the show's creators may not see it today.