The art museum and the circus

I arrived in Melbourne in 2017 and I avoided the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) for the most part of my stay. The NGV is an art museum and one of the iconic places at the heart of the city, right behind the famous Flinders Street Railway Station. I mostly avoided it because it strikes me as pretentious and lavish, generally not my type of place to experience art, even though historically art, just as science, has been almost exclusive for privileged people, it makes me uneasy whenever I perceive it to be treated that way (same with mathematics or science).

To be fair, and to start with the positive note, I did avoid the Gallery to my own detriment, as it does have some amazing pieces in its permanent collection. I did happen to visit, however, during a contemporary art exhibition called Triennial. I generally say I don't like contemporary art because the line between art and entertainment, between the deep and the banal, the everlasting and the immediate becomes too blurry for me. Now, the thing with the arts is that there is no true definition of what constitutes art and what does not; even if one can point to elements that must be present in a piece, like aesthetics, intelligence and technique, most of these are still subjective.

I do think, however, that the institutional display of most contemporary art (such as the one displayed at the Triennial) comes with a price for society at large. It seems like most people qualify any creative piece with an elevated sense of depth as art. These tend to be the same people that think that the act of reading should be fun, or that mathematics has value only if it can be applied; this is not to say that reading can't be fun or that applied mathematics are not valuable, but the act of reading is generally an intellectual exercise that should start a dialogue with the author that might face us with uncomfortable questions and make us think (which is largely a difficult and uncomfortable thing to do), and mathematics has a value in itself as the purest form of thought we know and perhaps the only way we have of defining and uncovering truth. It seems to me then that the price of such displays in art museums is a society that can't distinguish these from amusement parks, from circuses (circi?), from glossy instagrammable installations with flashy lights and/or colors. Now, similarly I don't intend to say that all contemporary is consumable fast food with no nutritional value, but rather that a large part of it is sold and perceived as something much more that what it actually is, bringing masses to institutional places selling mainly entertainment as artistic expression.

In the end, contemporary art does deserve a place and people with respective credentials should get to decide what gets displayed where; as things stand today, however, in many places it seems like the line between an art museum and an amusement park is quite hard to draw.

Porky Hefer at the NGV Triennial

On avoiding death

While these days back home I haven't been able to see friends and family for obvious reasons, at least I was able to see my grandma. She won't come out of her apartment almost for nothing, my mom takes care of most of the household chores, buying groceries and so on. And when she steps inside my grandma's apartment, she does so wearing a mask and a face shield; mind you, I proceeded in the same way.

In a sense, I guess in this situation we're all intentionally escaping death, either our own, someone else's, or both. And I guess we all go to different lengths to avoid it, we all give up something, some of us more and some of us less. What has surprised me the most during this pandemic is the selfishness of so many people in this regard, not understanding that them not giving up their normality can cost someone else's well-being or ultimately their life.

Overall, anyway, we all just seem to naturally want to perpetuate [our]  life at all costs. Even those aforementioned selfish bastards are laughing until they're not. As some people say, life's purpose seems to be simply to perpetuate itself and nothing else. That's perhaps the thing I find the most odd about suicide: it completely goes against the purpose of life whilst being the only true thing we have a power to choose (as opposed to everything in life, including to live). In a similar vein, I find as somewhat curious the joy that most people find in newborns or small kids, and how in a sense these result more valuable than older lives: a suicide of a middle aged person is intrinsically less tragic than that of a teenager.

These are just spare and somewhat disjoint thoughts on life and death that came to mind this morning and I felt like writing. As Albert Camus, I believe the one truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, and overall I tend to agree for the most part with Emil Cioran's thought that it's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Death And Life, 1908 by Gustav Klimt

Road cycling

It's been almost a month since I haven't ridden a (real road) bike. About a year and a half into my PhD I bought a road bike, influenced by a good friend of mine, and it totally changed my life and my perception of Melbourne, not to mention helping me stay afloat in some very dark days.

Even though I loved my bike and I actually invested quite a considerable amount in accessories and parts, I decided it was not worth it to carry it to Mexico and then to Taiwan. My plan is to get a road bike in Taipei asap when I get there; how quick I'll do this will depend on several factors.

I enjoyed my time riding in Melbourne and it's one of the things I will miss dearly. At first I'd always start riding at Clayton and my favourite routes would include taking the Scotchman's Creek trail to the city, riding on Beach Road, where I reached Mount Martha several times and climbed Arthur's Seat at least once, riding some of the climbs on the Dandenong Ranges like the "1/20" or "The Wall", doing some laps at Albert Park Lake, or taking the Yarra Boulevard for its sake or en route to other places such as Mount Pleasant road up in Research (yes, there's a suburb called that).

Melbourne was such an amazing place to ride in; I wish I could've ridden in other places in Australia as well, but I was busy doing my PhD. Anyhow, I'm now looking forward to riding in Taiwan; hopefully I'll be able to find a place where commutes to work will be nice and for sure I'll be eager to explore the country by bike whenever possible. There's also the famous Taiwan KOM Challenge, which I'd be happy to try in case it gets on during my time there.

Air quality

During my time in Melbourne, perhaps during the late 3/4 of it, I fell in love with road cycling. I was already relatively fit cause I enjoyed working out at the gym lifting weights and so on, but road cycling was a new challenge in this sense cause it requires a different kind of fitness. In any case, I achieved a relatively good level and I would go out for rides as often as possible, sometimes long ones of over 100km, and road cycling during the lockdowns in Melbourne was one of the things that helped me pull through.

While the air quality in Melbourne, particularly in the city, wasn't absolutely clear, it was definitely good for outdoor physical activity; perhaps the only extraordinary exception was during the fires at the beginning of 2020. It's interesting because I never really noticed how bad the air quality in Mexico City was. I first noticed how much this mattered in one's well-being when I travelled in 2018 to Los Angeles; as we stepped down the plane we could see the sky covered in a greyish blanket of light smoke and it was as if a switch had been turned on in my body putting me in some kind of mild overdrive.

Now during my time in Mexico City, I don't have a road bike so I'm just using a stationary bike to try and retain some fitness. I feel like I can notice, anyhow, the difference and that it's harder to keep up with the local air conditions; added to that, it is well-known that Mexico City is more than 2km above sea level and where I'm staying there's some extra meters added to that. At least the latter might be beneficial for when I get to ride again at sea level and/or do some climbing on the bike. On the bright side, in my opinion the weather in Mexico City tends to be much better than that in Melbourne.

The VVitch

I've been wanting to watch The VVitch (2015) by Robert Eggers for a while; turns out that while it's not available for streaming in Australia (at least in the major streaming services), it is so in Mexico (and actually I find the Mexican Netflix catalogue to be in general way better than the one in Australia). I actually watched The Lighthouse (2019) first, his second big film, at a cinema in Melbourne right after it was released. I was extremely impressed with it and thought about it for a while; I've seen people label it (and The VVitch as well) as horror and, although for sure it has some elements that take it on that side, I feel like it falls on a category of its own.

Anyhow, I first heard about The VVitch from Robert Pattinson & Willem Dafoe in this interview. If you hadn't heard about it, you're surely wondering about the "VV" thing, as obviously "VVitch" is read as "Witch": the film is set on seventeenth-century New England, and supposedly this simply comes from a pamphlet from back in that day and the fact that then printing houses would use two V characters instead of a W, as that would save the need for the W typeface. In a nutshell, I'd say the film is a psychologycal-terror-thriller that interweaves the historical setting of the 1600's in New England with the popular tales carrying supernatural (involving witches, obviously) elements related to the religious fanaticism that was widespread back then. Robert Eggers has now a fame of doing his research and giving films a unique touch, historically accurate in quite many aspects while evidently creating a world of its own; when I saw The Lighthouse I was impressed with the dialogues, specially those by Willem Dafoe, and this similarly happens with The VVitch, where historically accurate rather means accurate according to the tales from that time (I'd recommend looking up the little references some of the scenes or the whole film make - the ones involving the baby, the goat, the Caleb kid, the raven, etc).

This one's definitely one to watch and one I'll be keeping as my favourite films.

Changes

I submitted my PhD thesis back in September 2020 (which you can now find here or on the arXiv) in some of the most unusual circumstances amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In Melbourne, that meant arguably one of the hardest lockdowns in the world, but most importantly for me, it implied writing in isolation with hardly any movement (perhaps only with cycling within a 5km radius and my girlfriend to keep me sane), and furthermore, it implied that I wouldn't have a teaching job, as the university cut most of the teaching assistants (whom on the first half of the year were working online), so no steady income to keep me going while I waited for the outcome of the thesis.

Long story short, I'm moving to Taipei, Taiwan, most probably in March if all goes well, to work at the Foxconn Quantum Computing Centre, led by Prof. Min-Hsiu Hsieh, who incidentally was at UTS, in Sydney, until the end of last year. Meanwhile, however, I'm spending this time back in Mexico City. It's strange, but even when I've lived here almost my entire life, I'm still not comfortable with a lot of things. Looking back and thinking of the future, it's a bit sad, but I don't think I would like spending the rest of my life or to finally settle (which at some point I think I'd need) right here. And it ends up being a bit of a dilemma because I never felt entirely comfortable or at home neither in Edinburgh nor in Melbourne, where I had the fortune to live for more than a year. Hopefully I'll (or rather I should say "we'll") figure this out during my time in Taiwan, as I certainly would like to get some stability after this postdoc.

Among other things it was pretty stressful flying back home, specially cause I had to transit through Los Angeles. Similarly, I'm not very excited about my time in Mexico and although I would love to see family and friends, I'm essentially gonna try and keep it as a oneish-month layover before I head to Taiwan. On the positive side it's a good chance to try and learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese and enjoy the food that I've been missing for a while.