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.