Beauty & Madness

Power/Knowledge. A Think/Tank? I was advised to read Foucault. I was aware it would take some effort. The book I chose as a beginning point is a series of essays from later in his life that reflect on his own work - the master on the master, so to speak - and so provided some hope of being fundamental. The introduction did me a further favor, as the editor explained that the chapters were in chronological order but if you really  wanted to start at the beginning, you needed to turn to Chapters 5 and 6, which include two lectures trying to explain his overarching research purposes, and a short essay on power. I was lucky to read these materials in the most romantic way possible: with my wife in the passenger seat dj'ing the text-to-speech as we drove to a national park. We worked through each essay together, pausing frequently to parse out the delphic pronouncements and self-referential rambling into something resembling an understanding of his points. This was very much ...

During a recent trip I had the pleasure of touring the KunstHausVien (Art House Vienna), home of the Museum Hundertwasser and host at the time of a remarkable exhibition titled  Visions of Nature . The KunstHausVien is itself an artwork . Designed by Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser (translation: Peacerealm Rainyday Dark-colorful Hundredwater), ne Friedrich Stowasser, it has trees growing out of it. There is a permanent memorial exhibition of Hundertwasser's work, introduced by a picture of him in his late middle age, and a "picture of him" today. That latter is a photo of a tree; under which he was buried. Let's get our nature worship on.

My degree program puts me in classrooms at many of U.C. Berkeley's colleges. This semester I happen to be enrolled in a Transportation Policy and Planning course that led me into a book that led me directly back to my prior musings on awe. Karen Frick , author of a new book on the subject , spoke on the history of the construction of the new Bay Bridge, and particularly on the arguments over the new bridge's aesthetics and meaning as a key part of the formal decisionmaking process. During the course of the lecture, she mentioned David Nye's American Technological Sublime   (1994), which just sounded cool to me. So I picked it up and read it.

I thought my family history had been lost to time. My great-grandfather on my father's side was from South Africa, and the name Orford is particular enough that it was pretty clear we started in England, but that is all that anybody remembered. I was reminded of this recently and created an account on one of the online genealogy sites to see what I could see. It turns out that the answer was quite a lot. I have verified that all of the below is true, from scans of the original documents starting in 1740. This is probably of interest to about five people in the world, but I found the process of discovering it to be thoroughly absorbing, and am very glad to leave this record here.

Source I called this blog Beauty and Madness because I intended to write not just about politics and academics, but also about art, as the mood struck. The mood has struck. I went for a four-hour walk and took a lot of pictures with my phone. I posted them via social media by way of Instagram. As is my habit, I made liberal use of Instagram's photo-editing features before posting - not the preset filters, but the custom tools, the sliders and so forth. I liked the results but, as usual, I felt a little guilty about the manipulation. This got me thinking. Not only do the shots look a lot better with the touch-up, but I feel that  they capture what I am seeing better than the untouched photo . They make visible in reproduction the details and impacts that caused me to take the picture in the first place. What's going on here?