Here are a few middle paragraphs from the presentation, which addresses beauty and love in the work of the lecturer, me, Steve Wetzel. The piece is personal, theoretical and performative. 

“Let’s back up. (SLIDE 3, Leonardo DiCaprio] I have a deeply established relationship, an intellectual relationship born out in both my most intimate thoughts and my practice, to beauty, love and emotion. I’ve followed the same political position or, rather, a political position has guided my thinking on these ideas pretty thoroughly, and the position is kind of incoherent, or it’s at least contradictory and not exactly useful to me any more (END SLIDE), not just because I’ve fallen in love, but because it has severely limited the range of projects to which I might commit myself, positive projects. My partner isn’t here, and if my partner were here there’d be a lot of hurt. We’ve been together for a long time. I can remember having a bucket of June bugs stolen from me by a gang of neighborhood kids, my friends. I was popular on the block, athletic, smart-­mouthed, but for some reason they were whipped up into some kind of a frenzy against me and my June bugs. And as I watched them ride by on a pack of bikes, right past me on my front lawn, I wanted so badly to chase them, to confront them. But instead I sat holding my knees to my chin. And eventually they returned, guilty.

Perhaps this is the first step in my honestly coming to terms with the transformation inside me, irreversible, scary, and super exciting, as all revelations are (SLIDE 4, German bakery, IMPROVISE), or most anyway.”