Mediated

After Prague, I took the train north, making a short afternoon stop in Dresden.  One sight there was a massive mural of the leaders of the region over the last thousand or so years!  Below is the August, who ruled at a time of great wealth and power there.

A couple days later I paid a visit to Augustburg, his summer castle built atop a hill some 70 miles or so south west of Dresden.  Quite a place!

That’s looking from one of the four corner towers down toward the courtyard.  All basically built in 4 years, they say.

The start of my travels last week was in Prague, and I had some lovely weather there.  On Sunday I climbed the wooded hill on the right side of the picture above, and then climbed up the mini ‘eiffel tower’ on top of the hill for the shot below of the castle:

Here’s a shot along the river…

For now I’ll just put up one building picture - take note of the line of windows toward the top - Praha!

Orange is the color of the day! That’s because Holland has gotten off to a great start in the Euro 2008 soccer tournament, with victories over Italy (3-0) and France (4-1). I’m not much of a fan really, but it’s great fun to see how the country has come alive and the national color is out all over. Read all the latest news on the Euro 2008 site.

Update: Well, it’s all over now.  Last night Germany lost to Spain, 1-0.  A kind of surprising result after all the higher-scoring matches.  I watched the Dutch lose to Russia in the Old Town Square in Prague, then saw the Russians lose to Spain a few nights later.

Here’s Don DeLillo from The Names (1982):

The price of oil was an index to the Western world’s anxiety.  It provided a figure, $24 a barrel, say, to measure against the figure of the month before or the year before.  It was a handy way to refer to our complex involvements.  It told us how bad we felt at a given time. (p. 66)

So, how do we feel at $130+ a barrel?

First off, I think it’s appropriate to acknowledge the extraordinary accomplishment of Barack Obama in winning the Democratic nomination.  The campaign was a long slog, and prior to Iowa seemed like an extreme long shot, but his team appears to have had a solid strategy and great discipline in working toward the end goal.  They were of course helped by the fact that so many people felt that Clinton was a shoo-in, to such an extent that even the Clinton team simply did not pursue the contest in all the states.  Essentially if Obama was running against a less confident front-runner, he might not have had a chance.

I find it a refreshing change to watch a young man (well, he’s a year older than me, but still young in the political world) who is very smart and very articulate go through this process with most of his dignity intact.  Some may find his message on hope and change to be empty, but let’s consider whether it’s really so much different from Reagan’s ‘morning in America’ message…  I think we may well be talking about ‘Obama Republicans’ in the years to come.

The general election campaign will be a much different affair; substantive policy differences, and major ’style’ differences, and a generational gap all make it next to impossible to feel that the candidates are basically the same (even though I recognize that in many ways things in America will play out in a similar way regardless of the next President).  There are major challenges to be faced in the years ahead: energy, water, global competitiveness, national security, immigration.  I would like to see the two candidates will focus on these real issues, despite the almost inevitable media hysterics driven by a need to gab 24/7.

Yep, that’s me going airborne a couple weeks back!

Made a quick trip to Paris this past weekend, and I made of point of heading over to the Grand Paleis for Richard Serra’s Monumenta 2008 installation entitled ‘Promenade’. I had never been in the building before, and this was a neat way to see it; nearly empty, with Serra’s five tall steel columns set up through the length of the hall.

One of the best features of the installation was that they had a audio guide largely consisting of Serra talking about the piece, explaining some of his thought process as he designed it for this particular building.

The title acknowledges that the piece is all about walking through the space, using the columns as a way of guiding you through it, perspectives changing as you stroll up to and around the columns and then back away.

It also had me thinking about the steel of the columns versus the steel of the glass roof, straight lines and curved metal. Serra also talked about spending some time in Kyoto, getting a sense of the zen gardens there where the individual object in the setting is less important than the whole of the garden.

I read this novel on the flight from San Francisco to London, and the view above is of the book at Heathrow before I left it on a bench for someone else to pick up.  I’ve read most of Ishiguro’s novels, and with this one I was a bit surprised that so many reviewers seemed to think this was some sort of ’sci-fi’ novel….  Yes, there is a bio-tech angle to the story, but my sense was that the three main characters here, like in most of his other work, are self-deluding and unable to communicate important thoughts and feelings to each other, and are thus like all too many of us in the ‘real’ world.  Other characters wonder about whether their efforts to help others really did any good.  This one did cohere as a story quite a lot better than his last one, so I’d rate it about as high as anything else he’s written.

After reading a biography of Isaac Newton, along with Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, I wanted to pay a visit on the English university in Cambridge.  I got lucky and got there on a beautiful Spring day!  Cambridge is really a combination of twelve or more individual colleges; above is St Johns.  Below is the ‘bridge of Sighs’ that goes over the River Cam.

Above, the garden at Jesus College; below, a view of King’s College from The Backs.

Just saw this post from Jamais Cascio, titled “The Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You”, which I think sums things up pretty well:

Critics of environmentalism often claim that eco-activists hate humans, that we value the Earth more than we value ourselves. With very few exceptions, nothing could be further from the truth. Environmentalism is fundamentally about making sure that human beings, and human civilization, can continue to thrive on our home planet for centuries, millennia to come. Environmentalism, in its demands for respect for nature, ultimately demands that we respect ourselves.

A couple shots from yesterday’s bike ride, looping through the flower fields just north of Leiden. Beautiful day, lovely sights, intense colors and smells!

Here’s a selection of shots from my wanderings around the Belgian town of Gent.