(The Trafalgar Studios, 25 June 2016)
It is the engineering approach to art, and to life. Identify a problem. Seek a solution. Do not judge. This is also the Enlightenment approach. The Spoils adopts it.
An individual does not choose many of his traits: how tall he is, how handsome (at his ideal weight) he is, and most of his tastes. Different individuals face different costs of trying to suppress in themselves the traits they find undesirable, such as pugnaciousness, impatience, or a blatant disregard for others' wellbeing. As a result, the question often is not how to reform an individual, but how to integrate him into the society, how to learn to live with him or to avoid him. This is the engineering problem in the play.
The proposed solution operationalises the principle voiced by Sarah (played by Katie Brayben): "And even though I don't know if you deserve to hear this, I think the world will be a better place if you do." This principle's compelling operationalisation is to reward desirable traits, behaviours and attitudes, instead of punishing undesirable individuals. An individual is a complex vehicle for traits. He ought not to be extinguished if one---or, indeed, most---of his traits offend. To reward a trait is to give the individual another chance.
Jesse Eisenberg's writing is intelligent. So are his characters. This intelligence is deployed to set up a problem that is nontrivial.
Scott Elliott's direction is impeccable. Each character is alive and is dying to live.
One of the reasons theatre remains commercially viable is that self-censorship in cinema (to secure ratings) remains profitable.
27 June 2016
BP Portrait Award 2016
(The National Portrait Gallery, 25 June 2016)
People prefer to see the world in terms of the units they have evolved to understand best: other people. Thus, the primitive people identified the forces of nature with the wills of anthropomorphic gods. Later, somewhat less primitive people conferred human characteristics on ethnicities and nation states and then dedicated their lives to serving the super-human narrative. Today, methodological individualism---the belief that the best way to understand how individuals act as a group is to understand how individuals act individually---is the methodology of choice in the (better) social sciences. (The rather compelling selfish-gene alternative is acknowledged.)
The captivation with the individual is the theme of the Exhibition. The most interesting subject is the one caught in the mid-narrative of his own life or about to disrupt the viewer's life (typical for a portrait), preferably a future life (e.g., Joshua LaRock's Laura In Black or Fiona Graham-Mackay's Sir Andrew Motion) but possibly a past one (Martin Yeoman's Laurie Weedon's D-Day Glider Pilot or Laura Guoke's Petras), or in the mid of a social narrative (typical for candid photography). Intelligence (conveyed by the tentative, sceptical look) and beauty (in the gene of the beholder and conveyed by the countenance of one's beautiful wife, ugly wife, a child, or oneself) evoke the presumption of a narrative.
The London art scene is a single conversation whose goal is to understand the world a little better and nudge it a little forward.
People prefer to see the world in terms of the units they have evolved to understand best: other people. Thus, the primitive people identified the forces of nature with the wills of anthropomorphic gods. Later, somewhat less primitive people conferred human characteristics on ethnicities and nation states and then dedicated their lives to serving the super-human narrative. Today, methodological individualism---the belief that the best way to understand how individuals act as a group is to understand how individuals act individually---is the methodology of choice in the (better) social sciences. (The rather compelling selfish-gene alternative is acknowledged.)
The captivation with the individual is the theme of the Exhibition. The most interesting subject is the one caught in the mid-narrative of his own life or about to disrupt the viewer's life (typical for a portrait), preferably a future life (e.g., Joshua LaRock's Laura In Black or Fiona Graham-Mackay's Sir Andrew Motion) but possibly a past one (Martin Yeoman's Laurie Weedon's D-Day Glider Pilot or Laura Guoke's Petras), or in the mid of a social narrative (typical for candid photography). Intelligence (conveyed by the tentative, sceptical look) and beauty (in the gene of the beholder and conveyed by the countenance of one's beautiful wife, ugly wife, a child, or oneself) evoke the presumption of a narrative.
The London art scene is a single conversation whose goal is to understand the world a little better and nudge it a little forward.
The Threepenny Opera
(The National Theatre, 25 June 2016)
“It is good of you to come back. You did not have to, you know? You could has been outside instead, enjoying this wonderful new country we now have,” said Mack the Knife when opening the second act. The words came an act too late and were met with lukewarm applause. Pandering to the parochial, the play is set at an indeterminate time in London, during coronation. Would not have the audience been able to imagine the 1920s Berlin, the opera's original setting? Should have Shakespeare set Hamlet in Cornwall?
The programme and poster graphic designs project disdain for expertise (or is that the language of condescension towards the plebeian tastes of the working man?), the very disdain that has been feeding the demagogues of late and is partly responsible for the topicality of the second act’s opening lines. The programme is written by the commentators whose myopic ethics of envy give socialism and Marxism bad names. This ethics maintains that there is something moral in dividing humanity into “them” and “us.”
The disdain for expertise does not infect acting. Nick Holder’s performance (as Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum) lives up to his high heels, make-up, and the wig. Rory Kinnear (as Mack the Knife) is duly solemn, precise, and tragic. His is an everyman Mack the Knife, with no outside option in modelling business.
Rufus Norris’s direction is timid, however. Brutality is there, but the zest and abandon of cabaret are missing. The play takes itself a notch too seriously.
The play portrays a Hegelian—in many ways pre-Englightenment—Weltanschauung, wherein the world spirit shuffles around individuals: his pawns, the victims of circumstances.
“It is good of you to come back. You did not have to, you know? You could has been outside instead, enjoying this wonderful new country we now have,” said Mack the Knife when opening the second act. The words came an act too late and were met with lukewarm applause. Pandering to the parochial, the play is set at an indeterminate time in London, during coronation. Would not have the audience been able to imagine the 1920s Berlin, the opera's original setting? Should have Shakespeare set Hamlet in Cornwall?
The programme and poster graphic designs project disdain for expertise (or is that the language of condescension towards the plebeian tastes of the working man?), the very disdain that has been feeding the demagogues of late and is partly responsible for the topicality of the second act’s opening lines. The programme is written by the commentators whose myopic ethics of envy give socialism and Marxism bad names. This ethics maintains that there is something moral in dividing humanity into “them” and “us.”
The disdain for expertise does not infect acting. Nick Holder’s performance (as Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum) lives up to his high heels, make-up, and the wig. Rory Kinnear (as Mack the Knife) is duly solemn, precise, and tragic. His is an everyman Mack the Knife, with no outside option in modelling business.
Rufus Norris’s direction is timid, however. Brutality is there, but the zest and abandon of cabaret are missing. The play takes itself a notch too seriously.
The play portrays a Hegelian—in many ways pre-Englightenment—Weltanschauung, wherein the world spirit shuffles around individuals: his pawns, the victims of circumstances.
24 June 2016
The Play that Goes Wrong
(The Duchess Theatre, 23 June 2016)
The play makes up in physical farce what it lacks in verbal dexterity. The farce errs on the side of violence, which, on occasion, is gratuitous and does not serve to advance the characterisation.
When individuals are surprised, they either find it scary or funny. If the surprise is threatening or inexplicable, one is scary. If the surprise is pleasant or reveals a hitherto neglected regularity, one finds it funny. The individuals who have a taste for, and are good at, discovering patterns and regularities are those who appreciate, and are capable of, humour most. A society that is open to nonconformist ways of thinking is also a society that is most receptive to humour. A society that seeks to circumscribe the acceptable modes of thinking promotes the scary in art and customs, to project the dangers of thinking outside the received paradigm.
Art, just as science, is a language of hope.
The play makes up in physical farce what it lacks in verbal dexterity. The farce errs on the side of violence, which, on occasion, is gratuitous and does not serve to advance the characterisation.
When individuals are surprised, they either find it scary or funny. If the surprise is threatening or inexplicable, one is scary. If the surprise is pleasant or reveals a hitherto neglected regularity, one finds it funny. The individuals who have a taste for, and are good at, discovering patterns and regularities are those who appreciate, and are capable of, humour most. A society that is open to nonconformist ways of thinking is also a society that is most receptive to humour. A society that seeks to circumscribe the acceptable modes of thinking promotes the scary in art and customs, to project the dangers of thinking outside the received paradigm.
Art, just as science, is a language of hope.
17 June 2016
Rudens sonāte
(Jaunais Rīgas Teātris, 16 June 2016)
If one has a moral obligation at all, it is to do what one wishes to do, without gratuitously harming others.
To keep a child happy, parents must first and foremost be happy themselves.
Ģirts Krūmiņš's Viktor is a persuasive Swede for the part: simple. There is contentedness and peace in him. He is a quiet, predictable winter day.
If one has a moral obligation at all, it is to do what one wishes to do, without gratuitously harming others.
To keep a child happy, parents must first and foremost be happy themselves.
Ģirts Krūmiņš's Viktor is a persuasive Swede for the part: simple. There is contentedness and peace in him. He is a quiet, predictable winter day.
16 June 2016
Cerību ezers
(Jaunais Rīgas Teātris, 15 June 2016)
The play consists of a potpourri of snippets and soundbites, perhaps meaningful to the director and evocative for some in the audience, but not adding up to a coherent narrative or a portrait, and hence not adding to the audience's private experience (if any) with the subject matter of the play.
An artist should aspire to deal in the largest unit he can perfect. A theatre production is a complex, delicate enterprise. Rīdzinieki have mastered the art of cafes, which compete with and surpass in their design and ambiance those in Paris and Vienna. Good taste and some worldliness suffice to succeed in design. Scriptwriting and direction require intelligence of a top scientist or engineer---in addition to good taste---and so are scarce.
Exposure to an authoritarian regime conditions an individual to blame authority for his circumstance and attitude to this circumstance. Authoritarian regimes arbitrarily label individuals and pitch them against each other. It is peculiar that individuals would choose to brood on these arbitrary divisions even after the authoritarian regime collapses, instead of choosing to exploit their newly gained freedoms by pursuing art, science, and entrepreneurship.
The play consists of a potpourri of snippets and soundbites, perhaps meaningful to the director and evocative for some in the audience, but not adding up to a coherent narrative or a portrait, and hence not adding to the audience's private experience (if any) with the subject matter of the play.
An artist should aspire to deal in the largest unit he can perfect. A theatre production is a complex, delicate enterprise. Rīdzinieki have mastered the art of cafes, which compete with and surpass in their design and ambiance those in Paris and Vienna. Good taste and some worldliness suffice to succeed in design. Scriptwriting and direction require intelligence of a top scientist or engineer---in addition to good taste---and so are scarce.
Exposure to an authoritarian regime conditions an individual to blame authority for his circumstance and attitude to this circumstance. Authoritarian regimes arbitrarily label individuals and pitch them against each other. It is peculiar that individuals would choose to brood on these arbitrary divisions even after the authoritarian regime collapses, instead of choosing to exploit their newly gained freedoms by pursuing art, science, and entrepreneurship.
15 May 2016
"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker (2011)
Steven Pinker is a careful, non-doctrinaire thinker---a position that does not come easily to a scholar not steeped in the aesthetics of mathematics, the aesthetics that illustrates the intense pleasure of discovering truths instead of imposing one's tastes on others. (It suffices that there exist a group of others who share the relevant tastes.)
Pinker's point that the realised violence in the Westernised world has historically declined is persuasive. For making predictions, however, it is the past potential (i.e., expected), not realised, violence that matters. Potential violence may have gone up in the last century, if only due to the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. Pinker's goal is not to make predictions, however, but to alert the reader to the fact that one lives in the best of the worlds that have ever existed, which presents one with the extraordinary opportunity to make the world even better and make it last a little longer.
Pinker's unified theory of technological and cultural progress is compelling. These are the restless young who create (and also destroy and degrade). Just as the Internet is believed to help the citizens who hold dissenting beliefs recognise each other and coordinate on an uprising, so did television, radio, and the interstate highways in the 1960s help the young recognise the condition of youth in the millions of others all over the world, declare this condition normal, and resist the excessive civilisation by the old.
Before the authority of the older generation was fruitfully challenged, the authority of the dead and the fictional had been---with the invention of the printing press and the rise of the Republic of Letters. Once the conditions of being alive and sometimes young had been framed as acceptable, the young and the alive found themselves contributing to mainstream culture and technology, instead of armed conflicts, thereby accelerating the progress of the civilisation.
One economist's model of the world derailed and has been cast as one of the evil ideologies of the twentieth century. The perception of the malice in the theory can be traced back to the elevation by the practitioners of the idea of the class struggle to a necessary condition for progress. In the long term, however, those social visions are most fruitful which seek mutually beneficial transactions, not those that artificially pit one social group against the other and dissipate resources in the course of the struggle. Mutually beneficial transactions require ingenuity and empathy (to experience the warm glow from making a gift or recognising others' rights, or to imagine others' needs and innovate); these are not too hard to come by.
Technological and moral progress are intertwined. The free circulation---and an occasional case of theft---of ideas promote both.
Pinker's point that the realised violence in the Westernised world has historically declined is persuasive. For making predictions, however, it is the past potential (i.e., expected), not realised, violence that matters. Potential violence may have gone up in the last century, if only due to the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. Pinker's goal is not to make predictions, however, but to alert the reader to the fact that one lives in the best of the worlds that have ever existed, which presents one with the extraordinary opportunity to make the world even better and make it last a little longer.
Pinker's unified theory of technological and cultural progress is compelling. These are the restless young who create (and also destroy and degrade). Just as the Internet is believed to help the citizens who hold dissenting beliefs recognise each other and coordinate on an uprising, so did television, radio, and the interstate highways in the 1960s help the young recognise the condition of youth in the millions of others all over the world, declare this condition normal, and resist the excessive civilisation by the old.
Before the authority of the older generation was fruitfully challenged, the authority of the dead and the fictional had been---with the invention of the printing press and the rise of the Republic of Letters. Once the conditions of being alive and sometimes young had been framed as acceptable, the young and the alive found themselves contributing to mainstream culture and technology, instead of armed conflicts, thereby accelerating the progress of the civilisation.
One economist's model of the world derailed and has been cast as one of the evil ideologies of the twentieth century. The perception of the malice in the theory can be traced back to the elevation by the practitioners of the idea of the class struggle to a necessary condition for progress. In the long term, however, those social visions are most fruitful which seek mutually beneficial transactions, not those that artificially pit one social group against the other and dissipate resources in the course of the struggle. Mutually beneficial transactions require ingenuity and empathy (to experience the warm glow from making a gift or recognising others' rights, or to imagine others' needs and innovate); these are not too hard to come by.
Technological and moral progress are intertwined. The free circulation---and an occasional case of theft---of ideas promote both.
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