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.