Ainars Mielavs

(Mūzikas nams Daile, 29 December 2019)

Mielavs is a musician---a city musician, perhaps, for he treats music as a complex emergent phenomenon, a collaborative effort, akin to a city quarter, that cannot be planned and mastered by each participant in isolation. Mielavs's voice is just one of several instruments in the band, and is more for it.

He loathes repeating himself. It must be that he has not figured out life yet. He wants it to continue.

The first of the three new songs he sang will become a hit.

Baltā Pasaka

(Latvijas Nacionālais teātris, 21 December 2019)

Even before the curtain rises, one can recognise the pianist---the percussionist. Each note has a life of its own, slightly displaced in time and clearly articulated. It is this recognition of the individuality of each note note that makes their union an emergent experience. The notes collaborate because they want to, not because they have been straightjacketed into submission by rules or technology.

Raimonds Pauls is a jazz musician. Jazz is a pursuit of happiness through freedom and conversation.

“Trīs Draugi”

(Latvijas Nacionālā Opera un Balets, 18 December 2019)

The ballet lacks mathematics. It is literal. All the dramatic heavy lifting is supposed to have been accomplished by Erich Maria Remarque as remembered by audience members. To reference the appropriate pages in the eponymous novel, the choreographer resorts to pantomime, singing, grunting, laughing, and wailing---only not to trust the dancers to support a stand-alone narrative with their dancing, and rightly so. “Trīs Draugi” is appropriate for the People’s Theatre in an authoritarian republic much smaller and less artistically accomplished than the one that has put it on.

Sugar

(Teatro de los Insurgentes, 26 October 2019)

In her "Walking Together" paper, Margaret Gilbert examines collective intentionality. What does it mean for two individuals to take a walk together, rather than to happen to be walking side by side? Without getting lost in epistemology, the behavioural definition must be that, while focusing on the execution of his or her own part, each individual is also conscious of the collective's overall goal, and adjusts his or her behaviour to correct for others' failings to work towards that goal.

In "Collective Intentions and Actions," John Searle gives an example that illustrates collective intentionality well. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" argument maintains that (under appropriate conditions) Alice's selfish behaviour advances efficiency. So does Bob's. Yet Alice and Bob do not collectively pursue efficiency as they pursue self interest. Indeed, should Bob fail to maximise his profit, Alice need not rush to mitigate the inefficiency of his error. Alice's behaviour is more primitive than that, which need not be morally wrong but may be boring to watch, at least onstage. Certain complexity is gratifying to the eye and the mind, which is one of the reasons cities fascinate and soothe so.

In Sugar, the cast do not just perform, they play, driven by a collective intention that makes the whole greater than the sum of its components. The collective goal is, perhaps, the most noble one of them all: to entertain and, in the process, to be entertained. (While the musical is meticulously directed and choreographed, one cannot shake off the feeling that the cast jam.) By contrast to Broadway and West End productions, which seek to minimise risk by maximising the resemblance of theatre actors to the stars in the movie on which the production is based, Sugar projects confidence by simply casting the actors who are suited well for the part.

Each member of the cast is indispensable and insuperable in their ability to inhabit the character. Clearly enjoying herself and (rightly) secure in her skills, Cassandra Sanchez Navarro betrays a smile, twice, in a nod to the power of the production. Ariel Miramontes underscores that the way to live one's life is to make the most of---to inhabit to the fullest---the character(s) one has been dealt to play. (Why choose?) Arath de la Torre's first teaches and then learns this lesson, too. And then there is the rest of the cast, and the many members of the company (including in the orchestra pit) who make appearance in the programme but do not make it onstage.

The piece is refreshingly apolitical. (Once sufficiently remote in time, traces of politics morph into history, which bifurcates into a story and a tool for national indoctrination, of which only one is a poison.) It sets the priorities right by beaming humanism.

Rochester Lindy Hop Reunion

(Rochester, 18–20 October 2019)

A thriving, resilient society is a patchwork of overlapping communities. Thriving comes from specialisation. Resilience comes from decentralisation.

Some communities are hierarchical. Others are flat. Some are competitive. Others are cooperative. Each one has a language. To flourish as an individual is to find a mix of communities—and solitude—that suits one best.

Dance and music are universal. So is silence. While the medium is not the message, the medium does define aesthetics, to which one is drawn at a visceral level.

Identity is the continuity of memories. Soundtracks glue memories together and, later, evoke them. Dance reveals the illusion of time. Past does not vanish. It all is one long conversation.

Some individuals are like music. They realise that, sometimes, in order to keep running, one must stay in place. They grow but do not age. They tie past, present, and future together. They tie people together. They facilitate the Conversation without ever attempting to dominate it.

"A Spy Among Friends" by Ben Macintyre (2015)

The characters are portrayed shallow, glib, flippant, and drunk, perhaps, because they were shallow, glib, flippant, and drunk. While (purportedly) clubby and class-conscious circles of British spies are of little amusement to the outsider, the dynamics of their antagonists are not explored at all. The book reads as a history of a friendship, not its story.

Joker (2019)

Respect, listening, and the unwisdom of crowds. Freedom and its price. And responsibility.

"The Spy and the Traitor" by Ben Macintyre (2018)

Up or out is good for morale, both for those who remain and thereby know that they belong, and for those who are dismissed and are thereby forced to look for a peer group in which they will not be reminded of their incorrigible inferiority and will not be tempted to sabotage their colleagues’ work out of bitterness.

A case could be made for a world with weak governments, whose weakness would protect their own citizens from accidental oppression by the rulers, and would protect the citizens of neighbouring countries from being occupied by force rather than on the occupying regime’s merits as measured by the welfare of its citizens. In practice, unilateral commitment to a weak government will only make an economically superior regime vulnerable to an inefficient takeover. As a result, powerful governments are bound to emerge and serve as periodically deployed peacock’s tails, indicators of a vital and viable economy.

Right and wrong, while not god-given, are not entirely relative either but solve a maximisation problem of a reasonably broad appeal.

"Something Deeply Hidden" by Sean Carroll (2019)

The book urges---science teaches--to go through life shedding prejudice, seeking a more convenient basis for one's representations, and deconstructing emergent phenomena into their constituent parts. Science (at least on fast forward and with Sean Carroll's voice at 1.25x) reads as a suspense story, which happens to be true, where "true" stands for "critically appraised."

Truth is not a necessary ingredient for entertainment; a certain amount of internal consistency is. One could imagine public support a theory (or a political candidate) on the false equivalence stemming from the sentiment evoked by good entertainment, a sense of poetry, a sense of mystery, the immensity of the starring phenomena, and a granting of trust.

The cast of the book's characters includes free will, volition attributed to a system that one can predict only imperfectly; Everett's many worlds, which ferry animate and inanimate observers along deterministic timelines; particles that do not really exist, in a space that is an emergent (pixelated?) at best; the initially modest entropy; and time, which can only be recovered from the readings of a clock hidden on each page of an indubitably real manuscript scattered all over the floor.

The surprise chapter 8, in the dialogue form, is a fantastic interlude, bound to be imitated, even by the classics.

"Talking to Strangers" by Malcolm Gladwell (2019)

The audiobook version is, on balance, a success. The narrator's---the author's---voice is pleasant and lively enough (at least at 1.25x). The voice actors do not act out episodes from a 2000s TV show. The occasional musical accompaniment (are these ambulance sirens on repeat?), ever so slightly audible but audible enough to niggle, fade into background when drowned in traffic noise of right proportions.

While not denying individual agency, the book invites the reader to critically assess the game before blindly blaming the player. Misfits is the norm. Conformism is the fiction marketed to bind audiences to mediocre TV. Virtue signalling through conformism is not worthy and is not worth the damage it inflicts on the society by muffling the critical discourse and dehumanising fellow travellers.

The suspension of disbelief---trust---is responsible for the success of modern societies. Allowing oneself to be occasionally deceived is a fair price for the majority of individuals to pay for this success. The residual minority are paid to be skeptical.

Once Upon a Time In… Hollywood (2019)

The movie is infused with its marker's obsessions and perspective and, so, is alive and personal. Tarantino's suspense is Lynchian and Hitchcockian. His drama is the mystery that life becomes once its characters approach it as detectives, as they should.

It is easy to be generous when one is rich. To be generous when one is poor and ambitious is the true nobility.

Chernobyl (2019)

The redeeming feature of the series is that it motivates one to consult Wikipedia, with which the series competes in dramatic depth and to which it loses in factual accuracy. There is nothing particularly Russian or Soviet about the characters, who are presented as generic Europeans, as if recreated by a creative committee from images on ancient vases and poems scribbled in a tongue long foreign to the modern ear. The visuals are compelling.

Carol (2015)

It is one of those rare movies whose protagonists one cannot imagine portrayed by anyone but the movie’s actual stars. One sees immediately why Carol (Cate Blanchett) falls in love with Therese (Rooney Mara), from the first sight. One sees immediately what Therese finds so irresistible about Carol. What follows is a sequence of yeses, to oneself and to each other, that—that, and cash—infuse the film with a much greater sense of freedom than would have been warranted by the stifling attitudes of the times and the timeless prejudice against personal happiness alone. One can be decisive in one’s choices because they reflect examined preferences or because they reflect a firm commitment to such examination. It was this decisiveness that both lovers found so attractive in each other—that, and the class transcending the circumstance. Each one had a version of the other live inside her mind long before their meeting in flesh.

Kumu Art Museum

(23 July 2019)

Perestroika art is a revolt against political establishment, not art establishment. Revolts against art establishment strive to seduce the audience away from the canon. Revolts against the system strive to offend the elites and are often ugly; the audience is the collateral damage.

Rick Owens’s dresses, without imitating Alexander McQueen, borrow his ideal: freedom as the ultimate value. The freedom to entertain and express an idea is also the freedom from being identified with this idea. A dress is a vehicle for an idea.

To a greater extent without than within the museum, Tallinn is strangely subservient to its Soviet past. Are the displays of souvenir busts of former leaders of a purportedly oppressive regime the best way the town can appeal to tourists? Has not the town built a new identity? (The country has, so why not the town?) Perhaps, Tallinn attracts the Northerners who seek the thrill of the past that they themselves have narrowly escaped, instead of attracting those who would value the town for its defiance towards that past. The new identity is also probably slow to percolate into the Old Town due to its peripheral location.

"Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" by Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016)

The book asks what it feels like to be the Internet, what it feels like to be a tentacle of an octopus, what it feels like to be Canada, what it feels like to be David Lynch. It all feels about the same.

What distinguishes the nervous system is that it is “fast.” Other cells communicate with other cells—inside or outside the organism—but slowly. Reaction speed is a defining characteristic of intelligence. Complexity, to be preserved in the face of competition, requires speed, which calls for centralisation: a nervous system, a brain. (The observation may also very well apply to social organisms: companies and states.)

One can partition human mind into two selves: the sleeping, dreaming, self and the awake self. This partition may serve as a metaphor for the multiple brains and, so, “selves” of an octopus. Each self thinks it is the principal one; while it may act in concert with other selves, in a kind of a dance, ultimately, the narrative is its own. Or so it thinks. When awake, an individual sticks to the awake narrative. Who knows what life the sleeping self imagines for itself? It would be unwise for either self to ignore the other, just as it would be unwise for a tentacle of an octopus to seek autonomy.

One can also partition human mind differently: the left-hemisphere self and the right-hemisphere self. To some extent, experiences within each such self are compartmentalised (more so in pigeons than in humans). Yet the subjective human experience is emphatically devoid of split personalities, at least most of the time. In a similar vein, even though the brain remembers events and feelings one associates with, say, one’s co-worker in distinct ways, one rarely recognises the tenuousness of the connection between the two kinds of memories. Human consciousness—and that of the Internet, an octopus, Canada, and David Lynch—is alarmingly unexceptional.

3 Osokins

(Dzintari Concert Hall, 25 July 2019)

Sergejs Osokins’s every keystroke has a life of its own, executed nearly staccato, perfectly timed, and with just the right strength. In that, his classical piano resembles jazz piano (of Raimonds Pauls’s variety); it is decidedly twenty-first century.

There is a reason to keep performing traditional classical music, a reason that does not confuse art with a mere sport competition in the exercise of a narrow vocabulary. A musical piece is a dance whose moves the musical score can codify only roughly. Successive performers build on earlier discoveries and, by doing so, create a slightly different, ever more perfect piece.

The Lehman Trilogy

(Piccadilly Theatre, 30 July 2019)

The play is about three Jews’ journey to America. And yet the play is not about immigration, America, or Jewry. The play is about commitment to adventure (perhaps, with a concomitant commitment to avoid certain misadventure); immigration is but a commitment tool. The play is about trust and rivalry between business partners; both are often found among family members. The play is also about the ever evolving trust among market participants. Finally, the play is about daring and luck.

The play is an ode to capitalism, which forges connections. Capitalism also purportedly brainwashes the public to buy (and, so, to create and to sell). Even so, the mantra that buying is necessary for survival is better than the alternative mantra that killing, pillaging, and raping are necessary to justify and enhance one’s existence. Buying and thinking one is winning is better than thinking one is being taken advantage of. To trade rather than to war is the hallmark of civilisation.

In the play, an exchange occurring during a stock market crash suggests how the expectation of government intervention, however well intentioned, may exacerbate a bank run. The government waits for the first banks, the scape goats, to fail. The remaining banks are to be bailed out. The recognition of this strategy prompts banks to refrain from lending to each other, thereby justifying bank runs and precipitating the collapse of the financial system.

Adam Godley shines, in each of the many parts he plays, spanning both genders and all ages, from an infant to a 140-year old. His dance number (with expert support from his two co-stars) is a standalone masterpiece. All three actors shine in their multi-character play, which only occasionally distracts away from the characters themselves.

Le Modèle Noir de Géricault à Matisse

(Musee d’Orsay, 12 July 2019)

Focus on the future. Do not waste the time rewriting the past (and, perhaps, the future generations will be less ruthless in overwriting you).

The blacks used to be exotic to the Western eye. Soon it will be Europeans' turn to look quaint and exotic in the eyes of the newly rising civilisations. Perhaps, they already do, at Lapin Agile; not yet in London.

Catastrophes, such as wars, take people outside their comfort zone, shake up social hierarchies, spur creativity, bolster solidarity, which helps cooperate. A kinder, more humane catastrophe is capitalism with a healthy measure of democratic folly every now and then.

The Tree of Codes by Wayne McGregor

(Opéra Bastille, 13 July 2019)

One never sees the full picture. Any literal interpretation is a misrepresentation. One sees the symptoms, while the phenomenon is hiding in between the broad brushstrokes. And yet one must have a model.

To maximise freedom, one may choose to curtail property rights and cultivate public spaces. The critical feature of property rights is not their absolute nature but their clarity and enforcement. (Historically, clarity and enforcement have been the easiest to achieve when property rights are absolute.) Noncritical features of property rights can be redesigned to suit the circumstances (as is routinely done—not necessarily well—in the case of intellectual property rights). Public space is property rights management on behalf of the unborn, underinsured, and those suffering from the collective action problem.

A conflict, international or domestic, can be akin to an autoimmune disease. There is no moral imperative to the democratic process, less so to the autocratic one.

To feel like an octopus is to experience agency in a group project. To feel like an octopus is to choreograph. To feel like an octopus is to play, converse, dance.

Art is never about capturing a moment. It is about capturing an idea, which is never at rest. Dance is a sculpture in motion, a Rodin sculpture.

Le Crazy Horse

(12 Avenue George-V, 14 July 2019)

When done right, dance is architecture. One gets only one go at it. One cannot erase, paint over, or reshape. One must engineer to perfection and then build, just once, night after night, a living thing.

Each number is an impressionist painting. The light guides the thought, is animated by the thought, is emitted by the flesh, contracts the flesh, echoes the music, writes the score. Each number is as long as its guiding idea requires it to be. The pace is honed down to its primal, universal essence.

Less is more to the extent that the shadow keeps the multitude of possibilities alive while just enough light articulates the general idea. Once reality is exposed, the alternatives die. Perhaps, one's favourite alternative dies. There is less life overall.

Cronofobia (2018)

(Ischia Film Festival, 29 June 2019)

One gleans only partial insight into the lives of others and yet must guess quickly and enough (but not too much) in order to help others and to help oneself. The narrative flows better if one dares to trust and is conscious of the progress of time.

The movie begins and progresses in a quiet, Mr. Klein kind of way, courtesy of Vinicio Marchioni and Sabine Timoteo in equal measure, the occasional shouting by the barrier notwithstanding.

Admissions

(Cambridge Arts Theatre, 8 June 2019)

Attempting to correct one injustice with the converse injustice does not automatically add up to justice.

The diversity in individual choices of how to compartmentalise the society (if at all) the way one finds most interesting (e.g., intelligence, looks, the country of origin) helps the society not to overlook each other's valuable characteristics. The pursuit of such diversity in attitudes is also consistent with the belief that the democratic process is liable to uncover socially valuable truths.

It is beneficial for one's long-term wellbeing to adhere to logically coherent beliefs, whether such beliefs are fashionable or not. One learns faster if one thinks and acts consistently; the social feedback is then clearer.

Diversity has immediate value that does not merely amount to the warm glow that the historically dominant group experiences by acknowledging underrepresented groups. It promotes social cohesion to recognise such benefits and to speak about them openly.

The entire cast shines.

Motley Hue

(NYC, 29–31 March 2019)

Humans speak a multitude of languages but are rarely fluent in any one of them. As a result, one may have to invoke multiple languages to get the intended message across. By contrast, committing to but one language helps live a story with just enough ambiguity to engage its narrators, as long as for each narrator the story remains interesting. One should then refrain from rewriting the story by volunteering a translation ex-post.

The affirming sadness of New York.

Burn This

(Hudson Theatre, 30 March 2019)

The production is first and foremost a showcase for its leads, Kerri Russell and Adam Driver, both appropriately ageless. The plot is driven by events and personalities more than by each character's character (at least while in previews), perhaps, because two hours is insufficient to thoroughly set up each character, or doing so would be too risky in 2010s, or would require to sacrifice too many Wildesque repartees. While movies have not destroyed destroyed theatre, TV shows, unleashed, just might.

The events are set in the safely distant era that is either pre-woke (1980s) or post-woke (2020s), lest the positive be mistaken for the normative. The narrative gets deeper as the play progresses. The seemingly accidental churning of words, people, and events emerges as the play's philosophy: talk, reevaluate, or else you run the risk of being left behind your better self.

"Nations and Nationalism" by Ernest Gellner (1983)

Gellner's thesis flatters the educator: A nation state is not a monopolist on violence. A nation state is a monopolist in setting general-education standards.

A nation is a labour market. A nation state is the entity that supports this market by supplying the public good that enables it: general education. With this interpretation, one can construct nonesensical sentences (typically referring to pre-industrial or post-industrial societies), for instance, to imply that mathematicians are a nation. Whenever such a sentence reads nonsensical, replace "nation" with "identity." The mathematician is an identity.

Another, equivalent, interpretation of Gellner is that a nation is a language, which circumscribes the labour market in a modern economy.

Cambridgeshire is not a nation state because the success of Cambridge University relies on the pool of applicants and the set of employment opportunities that transcend the boundaries of Cambridgeshire.

Gellner asserts that unique to a nation state is the culture that is shared across all social classes, instead of a collection of cultures, one for the ruler and many for the ruled. A test of a common culture is incidence of jokes, whether humour travels across class and ethnic boundaries, and whether there is humour at all.

Ainars Mielavs

(Mūzikas nams Daile, 30 December 2018)

The band is excellent. They actually know how to play (rock, rockabilly, country) and, true to the spirit of their art, appear to harbour no suicidal tendencies (at least not on stage, not by boredom). The vocalist, continental, is just the right mixture of parochial and worldly to please the small-town unprovincial urbanites in attendance.

The urbanites in question are the southerners of the north, not the northerners of the south.

Kurt Vonnegut’s observation (recalled by Mielavs) that, if left to themselves, individuals live out their lives as stories is by now experimentally confirmed and has both a positive and a normative appeal. While one should enjoy many a moment the way one enjoys a good meal, for its instantaneous gratification, when a meal is unwelcome or inaccessible, a good story (or its anticipation or its memory) is a valuable diversion, if not a lesson.

It is unclear whether individuals devote excessive or insufficient effort to writing their life stories. On the one hand, a good story nourishes many and serves as a prologue for future stories. On the other hand, one can overindulge in Instagramable storytelling at the expense of living, the same way that one can overindulge in eating.

Vonnegut also opines that countries, in contrast to individuals, most certainly should not pursue story telling. Vonnegut is right. Good institutions would encourage both the government and private citizens to undertake long-term investments that would coalesce in a non-trivial narrative, a good story. But this story would be a byproduct of good institutions, not an extrinsic goal imposed by the country’s rulers. If a country needs a narrative on which to bring up its citizens, it will do better by inventing this narrative rather than by putting generations of its citizens through living it.

When at loss, one can crowdsource one’s storyline by drastically changing one’s environment. Repeat.