Beautiful Things

Beauty is good.

Now, that may seem like a stupid thing to say, like water is wet, but there is a lot of meaning contained in that sentence. Whenever I find myself sideways with someone, it is usually about differences of opinion regarding aesthetics—I like things that are beautiful, others like things that are ugly. People like things that are ugly? Yes, it is true. Hamas.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. I like beautiful women. I have a type—short, brunette, smart—but I find myself in thrall of beautiful women of all sorts. Quick example: I watch a lot of Charlotte Hornets games, and the courtside reporter for Bally Sports Network used to be Ashley ShahAhmadi (who is about six feet tall), and I’d just sit there and stare at the TV, rapt, when she was talking about someone’s three-point shooting percentage or something like that. Just a megawatt smile. You couldn’t help but smile along with her. And it wasn’t forced, or an act—she seemed genuinely joyful, all the time. Ashley has since gone on to bigger and better things, and her replacement is as serious as a heart attack—no smiles—though she is equally capable. I’d watch Hornets games and text my other Hornets fan friend whenever Ashley came on. Saw her in person a few times, too, when I went to games. Like I said, she’s tall.

The funny thing about beauty (which applies to men as well as women) is that, like a lot of things in life, it is 80% effort and 20% genetics. Without the makeup, the Instagram models that you drool over are really nothing special. Makeup, gym, clothes, hair—it is a lot of work to be beautiful. Pamela Anderson stopped putting on makeup and got a Greta Thunberg haircut and she is no longer beautiful. She’s just an ordinary person. So the question is: do you want to be an ordinary person or an extraordinary person? Guys—the cargo shorts you got from Wal-Mart are not doing it for the ladies. Remember about fifteen years ago when True Religion jeans and Affliction T-shirts were all the rage? Douchebag attire for sure, but the point is that guys were trying. Those jeans weren’t cheap. Not my aesthetic preference—I prefer clothes that are a little more understated—but it worked. I like women (and men) that are beautiful. I like clothes that are beautiful. I like bodies that are beautiful. Bring on the unrealistic standards of traditional female beauty. If I worked on my abs like I work on my bank account, I could be an Instagram model, too. Everyone makes fun of that particular line of work, but let me tell you, it is a real job, and a hell of a lot of work to look that good all the time.

Since we are talking about aesthetics here, we should bring up music. As you know, I am a DJ, and if you asked me about my musical preferences, I’d tell you that I listen to downtempo melodic organic or progressive house, but the one thing this music has in common is that it is beautiful. I don’t play ugly music. I don’t play techno (except for the slower, melodic techno that was going around circa 2014), because it is not beautiful. Uplifting trance can be beautiful, which is why I’ve always been a big fan of the Anjunabeats label—they put out beautiful music, and they have a loyal following of fans who are into beautiful music. Dubstep is ugly. Went to Space Miami recently, and the warmup DJ, Kinahau, was playing house music that was eminently danceable—but not especially beautiful. And sometimes you’re in the mood to listen to some gnarly shit. And even some gnarly shit can be beautiful. There was beauty in Nine Inch Nails, for starters. KMFDM, on the other hand, was mostly ugly. You see the criteria that I am laying out here. A lot of Wall Street guys are into jam bands. That music is not beautiful. Nobody really listens to Phish in their car on long drives—they go to concerts and get messed up. It is all about the experience. By the way, arguments about taste are some of the most important arguments we will ever have—that is why the book and art worlds are so vicious.

The enemies of beauty are the enemies of civilization. I remember back during the Canadian housing boom that people were complaining about all the glass and steel high-rise apartment buildings that were going up in Toronto. Personally, I thought they were beautiful. Did you want people to live in a mud hut? A 1600-square foot tract house? Skyscrapers, broadly speaking, are beautiful, and the bigger they are, the bigger the achievement they are—which is why they are beautiful. We are talking about ethics here, the ethics of beauty. A skyscraper is beautiful because it is the embodiment of man’s achievements. An Instagram model is beautiful because she shows us how women should be, how they are imagined to be, in an ideal state. My favorite artist is a fashion illustrator who draws pictures of women, mostly—I have his work throughout my house. He paints pictures of perfect people. I am not perfect, but I try to be. The difference between me and most people is that most people don’t try. Trying means work and effort, which gets back to the core philosophy of this newsletter, which is that work and effort are virtues, and laziness is not.

There is beauty in work, as well. I write for a living, so I want my writing to be beautiful. Given time constraints, it is as beautiful as it is going to get. But there is artistry in it, in both this newsletter and The Daily Dirtnap. I couldn’t work in a profession where I didn’t think I was adding beauty to the world. I also trade for a living, and there is beauty in trading, too. I remember my days of working on the PCX or visiting the CME, and watching the S&P pit or the Eurodollar pit, that was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. There is beauty in chaos, for sure. That’s one of the reasons I wrote my novel All the Evil of This World, because I thought open-outcry trading was so beautiful. The subject matter of that book is ugly, but the writing is beautiful. I have said before that finance is depraved—it is, but it is also beautiful. Capitalism writ large is beautiful. There is a photo going around of some road somewhere with gas stations and McDonalds and Arby’s and more gas stations and the implication is, isn’t capitalism ugly? I disagree. If I were an artist, I would paint pictures of landscapes like that, with gas stations and McDonalds. What was there before? Nothing. Someone else can paint pictures of the trees. Everyone else wants to paint pictures of the trees. If you want to see ugliness, go to places like Sumter, South Carolina or Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which have been destroyed by politicians.

And speaking of which, there is nothing uglier than politics. Politics is aggression, and aggression is ugly. Politicians sit around and spend all their time thinking about how they’re going to screw somebody. I expose myself to politics on Twitter, because I have to be informed in the course of my work, but I don’t like it. Especially these days. Things used to be a bit more genteel. War is ugly. Peace is beautiful. Etc. I just thought of something—it’s not an accident that in Hollywood movies, the protagonists are beautiful and the villains are ugly. What they are essentially telling you is that beauty is good, right? In Lord of the Rings, the bad guys were the orcs—ugly. The elves were beautiful. If you spent any time playing Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, you know this to be true. But the interesting thing about this is while the real world is a bit more complicated, I can generalize broadly and say that bad people are less attractive than good people. Your outsides match your insides. I am sitting here in front of the TV and a Grey Goose commercial just came on with Zoe Saldana. I could watch Zoe Saldana all day, maybe doing her laundry. Companies use beautiful people to sell stuff. Now, there was a period of time about five years ago where that wasn’t true, and we are now experiencing the backlash to that. Beautiful people are in commercials again, and this is a positive development. Fat, gross people in athleticwear commercials were a moral inversion.

There was no doubt about who the villains were in Ayn Rand novels, especially as she went on in her writing career. The heroes were Hank Rearden and Francisco D’Anconia, and the villains were Balph Eubank and Claude Slagenhop. That’s about as unsubtle as you can get. The heroes were good-looking and the villains were ugly. You see this over and over again in popular culture. Back during the pandemic, when the communists rioted for over two years in downtown Portland, someone smartly put together a college of all their mugshots. You want to see a Rogue’s Gallery of some of the ugliest people on planet Earth? There was no doubt as to who the villains were. Is it as simple as that? Beauty is a virtue? I believe it is.

I am a beauty enthusiast. A freak, you might say. Music, art, clothes, jewelry—I can’t get enough of it. Of course, you can’t take it with you—what is important is the beauty of your soul. But like I said, the outsides usually match the insides. Merry Christmas.

P.S. If you want to listen to some of my music, I recorded probably what is the most beautiful set I have ever recorded, just a couple of days ago. You can listen to it here.