thoughts in and out of season
The book is Who Says That’s Art?: A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts, by Michelle Marder Kamhi. It was recommended by a friend who’s also a friend of the author.
The author herself is an independent scholar and co-editor of the (now online) journal Aristos. She seems to be somewhat of a … More ...
An essay or book review I wrote on architectural theorist Christopher Alexander’s theory of order has appeared in the International Journal of Architectural Research. Here’s the special issue in which the piece appears.
I have a short piece up at Solidarity Hall, a site that seems fairly new. It’s a comment on a much longer piece by Mark Signorelli, his review of the book Beauty Will Save the World by Gregory Wolfe.
My friend Nikos Salingaros, together with Mark Signorelli, develops and adds to some thoughts he and I kicked around in an interview and a short essay we did together last year: The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism. The basic argument is that artistic modernism is antihuman, tyrannical, and nihilistic in its essence, and must be … More ...
A blogger’s complaints about foodies put me in mind of a couple of award-winning and actually quite good movies I saw recently about food and drink as religion, Sideways and Babette’s Feast.
Sideways is set in present-day California. It’s about confused people with sordid lives for whom wine gives access to transcendent reality, or … More ...
I interview the mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros at the Philadelphia Society website. He goes into a variety of topics relating to his recent writings, including the evolution of living form, the cluelessness of modern man, the perfidies of the evil oligarchs. and what it all means for politics and religion.
I mentioned marriage as an example of the antiliberal implications of the new science of complex order developed by writers on architecture such as Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros.
There are of course many other examples, because the new science goes to basics. It helps make sense of living systems, explains how their specific qualities … More ...
I’ve been reading Nikos Salingaros’ Twelve Lectures on Architecture: Algorithmic Sustainable Design. It’s a somewhat expanded set of notes for a series of lectures he gave a couple of years ago on architecture and urbanism. As such, it gives a clear if rather spare presentation of ideas he’s presented in his other books. … More ...
I’ve done paintings and movies recently, so why not music? Here—if you’re in the mood—is a Buxtehude setting of Psalm 41:2-3, Quemadmodum desiderat cervus, ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea, ad te, Deum. Sitivit anima mea ad te, Deum, fontem vivum. Quando veniam et apparebo ante faciem tuam? (“As the deer longs for the … More ...
I’ve got another piece out on Christopher Alexander, this one at Takimag. It ended up following the general approach of the University Bookman review, which was mostly taken from old blog entries, but with a few different angles, examples, and turns of phrase. Also, the editor included some nice pictures.