48 WSJ. MAGAZINE
WSJ. asks six luminaries to weigh in on a single topic. This month: Convention.
RIAN
JOHNSON“I love having the con-
ventions of a genre to
work in, I guess because
I find the limitations
to be incredibly useful. It
gives you a chessboard
to play on with the audi-
ence. To use the famous
quote: ‘Freedom is the
enemy of art.’ I think it’s
absolutely necessary
for creativity to have a
box to plan in. I think
there are stories that are
essential to human ex-
perience, that just line
up with big things that
we all go through in our
lives. When those hit,
they resonate. We take
the chaos of the world
and each of us individu-
ally turns it into a story
in our heads. That’s
the one element of con-
trol we have over the
world around us: how we
tell it back to ourselves.
Having a sense of con-
vention is just finding
patterns. Being good
at finding patterns and
being a good storyteller
is something that we
do in our day-to-day lives.
It’s a big part of being a
good human being.”Johnson is a director. His
latest film, Knives Out, pre-
mieres this month.“My first job in journal-
ism was at an alt-weekly,
which was like working
for an internet startup.
I was absolutely anti-
convention. Later, I
worked for a magazine
called Washington
Monthly. We found it very
exciting that the econ-
omy was being deregu-
lated. We didn’t use the
word disruption, but
we definitely thought
existing institutional
structures were stifling.
A better world would
emerge if they were
taken away. The result
was a world that I don’t
find as appealing as
I thought it would be.
Most people live regular
day-to-day lives and
don’t find the idea of dis-
ruption all that compel-
ling. Often, that kind
of rhetoric has accompa-
nied breaking things
apart. When the smoke
clears, inequality has
increased, and elites
have benefited more than
ordinary people. The
reason conventions exist
is they stood the test
of time. To improve on
them, the odds against
you are really long.”
NICHOLAS
LEMANNLemann is a professor of
journalism at Columbia Uni-
versity and the author of a
new book, Transaction Man.
“Etiquette is made up
of two different things.
The first is manners:
the expectations that we
have of others, actions
that allow us to know
what to do and what to
expect of others in any
given situation. They are
limited to culture and
periods of time; they
come and they go. The
other part is what we
at the Emily Post Insti-
tute believe are the
principles of etiquette:
consideration, respect
and honesty. When you
guide your actions in a
way that acknowledges
the people around you,
that’s when you’re being
considerate of some-
one. When we honestly
choose to do something
in a way that benefits
the most people, that’s
the real hope. You’ve
got etiquette when it’s
based on these principles
and when it utilizes
manners—the little ac-
tions that we take and
make to operate together
as a society. That’s what
etiquette is as a whole.
It’s fluid and flexible
and sometimes helps us
preserve tradition.”LIZZIE
POSTPost is co-president of the Emily
Post Institute and the author
of the book Higher Etiquette.SOAPBOX
THE COLUMNISTS
Rainer is a dancer, choreogra-
pher and director. This month’s
Performa 19 Biennial in New
York will feature her piece Parts
of Some Sextets.YVONNE
RAINER“My work is the result
of coming to maturity
as an artist in the 1960s.
That era was all about
flouting convention. You
might call it a revolu-
tion. One of the major
changes was making
the dance vocabulary
much more free-ranging
and inclusive, including
pedestrian movement.
We were studying with
Merce Cunningham and
being influenced by John
Cage’s ideas, looking out
the window and watch-
ing people in the street.
It was happening in the
art world, too. People
did a lot of nutty things.
Instead of putting paint
on a canvas, you put it
on the body. We were in
the same boat, and that
gave us courage. It was
about challenging the
audience, but that was al-
most impossible because
the audience came
from the same artistic
milieu. It was the critics
who lagged behind.
There was one I’ll never
forget. He said: ‘Some-
day there will be a real
murder in one of Yvonne
Rainer’s dances.’”Tipton-Martin’s cookbook Ju-
bilee: Recipes From Two Cen-
turies of African-American
Cooking is out this month.TONI TIPTON-
MARTIN“I’m advocating on be-
half of generations
of black cooks. We’ve
carried along this myth-
ology that African-Amer-
icans were mindlessly
or innately coming up
with these magical
dishes, but they were
just like any other ap-
prentices. Recipes all
derive from somewhere
else. [Historian] Arturo
Schomburg theorized
in the 1930s that there
was an African-Amer-
ican canon of some 600
dishes. You can see an
evolution. We go from
hoecakes to corndodgers,
corn bread to spoon
bread. We had a mythol-
ogy of a mammy-type
figure that was a compos-
ite of various character-
istics: entrepreneurship,
professionalism, com-
petency, economy. I’m
now taking that apart
and helping to see them
as individual aspects
that we can all aspire to.
We no longer have to
live by the conventions
that have managed to,
as one scholar said,
keep African-Americans
enslaved in a box.”“Convention reminds
me of the Japanese word
kata. It means many
things, but the term is
most well-known in the
martial arts world.
Kata means a set or cho-
reographed pattern of
movement. You practice
kata to achieve mastery
of each movement. I
feel this applies to any
occasion in our daily
lives. You wake up, make
your bed, wash your
face, eat breakfast, say
itadakimasu, which is
like a little prayer before
food, and you go to work
and you go to bed. You
go through kata until the
very moment you sleep.
You repeat it every day
over and over, and that’s
how you cherish each
day. Kata is almost like
a prayer. That’s how my
parents taught it to me.
In this long history of
humanity, we’ve always
been reaching for a good
life and a good society.
And going through
natural selection, what
do we do in our lives,
generation after genera-
tion? What’s left is kata.
Convention.”NAOKI
KOBAYASHIKobayashi is an actor, per-
former and dancer. He stars in
the new movie Earthquake
Bird, to be released on Netflix
this month.