Spring in Central Park

Start of Dusk
Central Park, New York
Spring 2016
[Photo By: KPA]

Prayers for Our Parents

From Laura Wood's The Thinking Housewife:

PLEASE pray for my father, William Paul Quinn, who is expected to die in the next day or two. He is 91, and has struggled physically for a long time, but especially in the last six months since my mother’s death.

Pray also for your own parents, if they are still alive. Here is a beautiful prayer for that purpose:

O God, Who hast commanded us to love our father and mother, look down upon the souls of my beloved parents, whom Thy only-begotten Son has redeemed on the Cross. Remember, O Lord, the good which with Thy grace they accomplished; remit the punishments which their imperfections deserve. Pay Thou their debt, O Jesus, with Thy Precious Blood. Grant me that favor for the sake of the love which Thou hast for Thy Mother Mary and Thy Foster-Father Saint Joseph. Grant that I may meet my dear parents again in the realm of eternal bliss, that we may together enjoy the happiness of Thy saints forever and ever. Amen.

I appreciate your prayers for my father.

"Out of Zion, The Perfection of Beauty, God Hath Shined"

Cloisters Spring Blossoms
New York, April 2016
Photo By: KPA

Psalms 50:2

Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined.

Related post by Reclaiming Beauty: "Therefore my beloved, flee from idolatry" 1 Corinthians 10:14

Full text of Psalms 50 here

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At the end of the day, these artists and the gallery won't succeed -- not because of politics alone, but because they can't make beauty.

The above is a reassuring message from a friend after I sent her an email (below) about the Art Gallery of Mississauga Benefit Art Auction.

Dear ...

The nefarious Art Gallery of Mississauga has just finished its annual Art Auction. Many of its pieces are by non-White, non-Western artists, on non-white, non-Western themes. Fine. Why not if they pass the standards, and many do. But what was striking to me was that a couple (more, I'm sure but I have to go through them slowly one by one) are of foreign gods and idols. Nothing on christianity, not even some kind of reference as in a Christmas Dinner or an Easter Tulip, or Travel to Lourdes. And what are not "spiritual" themed are abstract and collage art. No realistic representation of, say, a Canadian Landscape (or even of a Gujarati one for that matter). And the administrators (curators, CEO and director) are almost all White women. And they are set to deliver the world from "White racism and oppression." They have said as much. I have all this saved.

No wonder these women said they would set "security," i.e. the Mississauga Police, on me if I don't come to the gallery in a spirit of sharing and goodwill. Remember I was going to sue them (for discrimination LOL) and you said it wasn't a good idea. I - that minority group traitor - had exposed the truth of their carefully camouflaged words!!! But now they are no longer so secretive about it, now that they are safely established as a regional gallery, getting hundreds of thousands of dollars through government money.

This pathetic auction, from my calculations, barely got them $20,000. The running bid for two of the most highly priced pieces was a combined $21,000, one of which sold for half of its $10,000 value.

But money is clearly not the issue. This was a big platform they had, bigger than last year's, and this year's was very publicly and heavily advertised all over Mississauga. So they accomplished their promotion goal.

You can see the pieces here or in the gallery's facebook page (you don't have to log into either to see them) both titled Art Gallery of Mississauga (or AGM) Benefit Art Auction.

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Addendum:

The bigger picture is that the AGM is getting ready to apply for its programming funds. The meagre earnings they obtained from the auction was just a show, to present to the funding agencies - the majority of which are governmental agencies, although a few (very few, and with very limited donations) are private donors.

With the now established multiculturalism in Canada, which in clear language means legislations that would set priorities for supporting non-White Canadians, and non-White immigrants, the Canadian government, under the Trudeau leadership, is set to spread its monies across to these groups which the AGM has carefully cultivated over the last few years and especially under its newest director, Mandy Salter.

Below is the promotional message on the AGM's Facebook page for the 2018 Art Benefit Auction:

The Art Gallery of Mississauga Benefit Art Auction showcases contemporary Canadian works of art from emerging and established artists, many of whom have exhibited at the AGM and other major public galleries, all in support of our FIRST NEW NEXT mandate for exhibitions, programming, collection and institutional growth. All proceeds of the Benefit Art Auction will make it possible for the AGM to expand and connect our FREE community-engaged programmes with children and youth in Mississauga.

With a commitment to supporting historically underrepresented artists, and offering inclusive, dynamic public programs free to all, your support will help inspire and foster the next generation of engaged and creative citizens through exposure to and appreciation of the arts. As Mississauga's only public gallery, the AGM, needs your support to make this happen!

The Auction will take place in The Grand Rotunda, near Entrance 3 at Square One on Thursday April 26, 2018.

Salter's goals are presented in a February 2016 online promotional article at PRWeb:

Since taking the reigns of the AGM last summer, Salter has reached out to actively involve many new cultural and social community groups in the AGM’s exhibitions and programming schedule. With her populist approach to bringing people together using art as a common denominator, she is also working closely with ethnic, youth, seniors', exceptional learners and business groups, corporations based in Mississauga and all levels of government to partner on and provide support for her inclusive and indigenous community programs and events

Auction Night in Mississauga

Square One Mississauga has been busy getting the main entrance area ready for the big auction tonight featuring art work donated to the Art Gallery of Mississauga to help with the museum's yearly activities.

I was in Square One briefly late morning, and here is what I saw:








Square One Grand Rotunda
11 am
April 26, 2018
[Photos By: KPA]

The Museum of Beauty

Blueprint for a Museum
[Design By: KPA]

Contemporary Western museums are no longer dedicating their collections to Western works. And they are carefully and determinedly placing dark curtains over the rich and long legacy that they have inherited. All that is left is for them to throw away these collections. But thank goodness for their weakness (or heresy) of being image idolaters. They would NEVER throw away these works.

Therefore it is up to us to pick up these pieces one by one.

Reclaiming Beauty has been doing that for about five years. Now, a new project is being initiated, although the idea has been developing for a couple of years.

The Reclaiming Beauty Museum, or simply titled The Museum of Beauty, will be the first online museum dedicated to beauty. Following the website Reclaiming Beauty's direction, this online project will not only be a depository (and re-depository) of works but also an education and information center, and a place to develop liaisons, links, and eventually a place to start and maintain a movement.

All of these ideas have their basic structures already in place. It is only a matter of filling them in, a challenging task but with great rewards.

Welcome to The Museum of Beauty!

Kidist Paulos Asrat

"Multiculturalism In Canada Is Here To Stay"

Below is a post from Our Changing Landscape written in 2010:

Multiculturalism In Canada Is Here To Stay
Salim Mansur has written in the Toronto Sun*:

Multiculturalism is a diminution of Canada’s founding history. It diminishes the vitality and largeness of the political culture that has accommodated a multitude of ethnicities within its borders, while it fails in bringing to immigrants — especially of non-European origin — a compensating increase in appreciation for those values that went into building Canada as a model of civility...

It is now for the rest of us to engage in a constructive discussion on how to roll back multiculturalism, this doctrine of divisiveness, for the love of Canada.

Mansur fails to explain something: why is it that multiculturalism flourished soon after non-Europeans started to enter and remain in Canada? Could it be that the differences between Canada’s founders and these current immigrants are just too great?

How much easier is it for a Ukranian immigrant to assimilate fully and unconditionally to Canadian culture than it is for an Indian or Chinese immigrant? Based on cultural, historical and civilizational backgrounds, non-Europeans undoubtedly find it much more difficult.

These are the kinds of difficult questions that writers like Mansur have to face in order to talk honestly about immigration and multiculturalism. Then, we can discuss whether in this current climate and historical juncture it is even feasible to change or dismantle the multicultural policies. But I am getting more and more pessimistic, and I think that in Canada, multiculturalism is here to stay.

* Original article found here

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Addendum:
Nothing is forever. We know that. I already sense the beginning of the end of multiculturalism, because even those it is meant to help and "move forward" are grumbling. I welcome that grumbling. In the meantime, we mustn't lose one minute getting caught up in negativities, fake news, and manufactured discontent. And we must form our allies. I won't put Mansur in that group.

We need to form our strategies to reclaim our civilization. I myself am working on Reclaiming Beauty. What are you doing?

Multiculturalism ain't here to stay.

Art and Empt ty Spaces: Part II

In my last post (Art and Empty Spaces: Part I) I discussed the art exhibition at the Fenster art gallery of two neon light "installations."

I am interested in technique and method, and tried, through the various links and websites, to find out if Shellie Zhang - the artist - had created these neon lights herself.

Here are the email interactions I had with various bodies involved in the installation, including Zhang:

To Fentster:

To:info@fenster.org
Apr 9 at 9:26 AM

To whom it may concern:

I am an artist who is interested in cross-cultural communications.

Regarding Shellie Zhang's work now on display at the "Fenster: A Window into Jewish Life Through Art" exhibition, could you inform me if the pieces are found objects (neon lights from the historical buildings) or originals created by the artist through blown or sculpted glass.

Thank you,

Kidist Paulos Asrat

Reply from Fentster:

Fentster Gallery
To: camera-----@yahoo.com

Apr 9 at 2:29 PM

Thank you for your inquiry -- the neon signs on display in our current exhibition are original designs by artist Shellie Zhang.

You can read more about the project on our website: http://fentster.org/#/wholesome-amusement/

And here: https://canadianart.ca/features/shellie-zhang-recovers-spectral-traces-from-a-diasporic-past/

And, of course, if you visit the exhibition in-person -- this is also explained in the curatorial text displayed there

Email to Shellie Zhang: (actually I used her message form on her website):

From: Kidist Paulos Asrat
To: Shelle Zhang

Apr 10 at 2:34 AM

Dear Shellie,

I am an artist who is interested in cross-cultural communications.

Regarding your work now on display at the "Fentster: A Window into Jewish Life Through Art" exhibition, could you inform me if the pieces are found objects (e.g. neon lights from the historical buildings) or originals you created yourself through blown or sculpted glass.

Thank you,

Kidist Paulos Asrat

Email From Shellie Zhang:

Shellie Zhang
To:camera.....@yahoo.com

Apr 10 at 7:12 PM

Hi Kidist,

The works were created for the exhibition, not found.
Is this for your own personal research?

Best,
Shellie

It fascinating that Zhang used the passive "were created" to describe her "method." I went afAnd the Fentster curators also used similar language: "the neon signs on display in our current exhibition are original designs by artist Shellie Zhang." What does "original designs" mean? She drew them on paper? She took photographs of them and photo-manipulated them in photoshop?

Ater that, I went to the nearby Living Arts Center Glass Studio. As always, the place is busy and HOT (these are hand-blown glass). I knock gently on the window - we are encouraged to watch these processes, but not to interrupt. The glass-blower was on a short pause anyway. I ask him about the glass that Zhang used. He knows what I'm talking about.

"It industrial glass, from sodium silicate. There are a couple of places in Toronto that make it."

"Is that sy or si?"

"Si - Silicate."

"You must know the work that Zhang - she's exhibited at the Living Arts Centre previously - did at Fenster, Fentster, Gallery in Toronto? Did you assist her with the glass rods?"

"No. Those are industrial type glasses. There's places in Toronto who can do that."

"Thank you! Bye!"

"Have a good day now."

My Beloved Lion: Ambushed

Bruce Eves
Becoming Visible: The Spirit of Stonewall, 1994
Photo, 22.86 cm x 30.48 cm.
New York Public Library collection

The above image is from the group of selected works on the 2018 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts webpage.

I guess one strategy for getting a chance at selection for a Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts is a "message." Well I would think that my America (Americas) theme aided by my Reclaiming Beaut has it all.

No! You also need the pink triangle. Or any "other" label.

“Bruce Eves has a restless mind. His commitment to the rigor of historical research – whether art history, gay history, or his own personal history – has been at the core of his work across his 40-year career. Through performance, curatorial, installation, archival and photo-based projects, he has produced a remarkably prolific body of work that exhibits a logical growth and development without falling into the trap of easy repetition.

That Eves has been able to wrestle with the challenges and traumas he has encountered, and found within them the seeds of art, illustrates his vitality as an artist and his ability to fashion artistic assertions from his own lived experiences. This echoes what philosopher Mary Warnock would insist ‘operates under perpetual tension: the only way to cope with life is to learn what to forget; the only way to feel one has an identity is to remember.’”

- Lily Eng, performance artist (nominator)

My beloved lion at the New York Public Library, whom I have photographed so many times, gets ambushed by this year's GG Winner.

You pick.


Kidist Paulos Asrat
Fortitude: Lion by the New York Public Library, 2017
Photo

The Multicultural Politics of the Art Gallery of Mississauga's Art Auction

Diana Hillman
Passing Lane 2, Study, Road Works Series, 2016
Oil and pencil on paper
Approx 30 x 40 cm
Estimate: $300

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Message: 2018-04-23

Dear Diana,

I am writing to tell you how wonderful I think is your painting that is up for auction at the AGM fundraiser, "Passing Lane 2, Study, Roadworks Series, 2016." I think you have captured splattering rain, a kind of relentless rain that can make driving difficult at such a late time in the day (late evening). I can feel the cold of those icy showers from the truck's wheels! I've travelled many times from Barrie to Toronto/Mississauga along these two-lane roads during such a time. But there is the comforting glow from the cars' and truck's headlights, and that town up on the hill welcomes us with the lights from the homes.

Congratulations!

I am surprised that the starting bid is so low! Others have been priced so extraordinarily high.

All the best,

Kidist Paulos Asrat

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Hello Kidist,

Thank you so much for your extremely kind words about my painting! It's so nice to get an unsolicited compliment.

I told the AGM that they could start the bidding wherever they wanted ... so I guess they did. I wish them all the best in their fundraiser.

Thanks again,

Diana Hillman

"One Who Is Silent Before Error is Repulsive to God"

Here, about the source of this article, the website Tradition in Action.

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One Who Is Silent before Error Is Repulsive to God

Pope Leo XIII exhorted us in Sapientiae Christinae of January 10, 1890, to defend and proclaim the truth of the Catholic Faith at all times without fail. To safeguard the integrity of the Faith, he insists, is a duty that belongs to each one of the faithful and not just those with power of rule. Further, one who keeps silence in face of error is repulsive to God and unworthy of eternal salvation. These are important lessons for the progressivist clergy and laymen in our days.

Pope Leo XIII

But in the same matter, touching Christian Faith, there are other duties whose exact and religious observance necessary at all times in the interest of eternal salvation, become more especially so in these our days.

Amid such reckless and widespread folly of opinion it is, as we have said, the office of the Church to undertake the defense of truth and uproot errors from the mind, and this charge has to be at all times sacredly observed by her, seeing that the honor of God and the salvation of men are confided to her keeping.

But when necessity compels, not only those who are invested with power of rule are bound to safeguard the integrity of the Faith, but, as St. Thomas maintains, each one is under obligation to show forth his faith either to instruct and encourage others of the faithful or to repel the attacks of unbelievers.

To recoil before an enemy or to keep silence when from all sides such clamor is raised against truth, belongs to a man either devoid of character or one who entertains doubt as to the truth of what he professes to believe. In both cases such mode of behaving is shameful and is insulting to God, and both are incompatible with salvation of mankind. This kind of conduct is profitable only to the enemies of Faith, for nothing emboldens the wicked so greatly as the lack of courage on the part of the good.

Moreover, lack of vigor on the part of Christians is so much the more blameworthy, as not seldom little would be needed on their part to bring to naught false charges and refute erroneous opinions. And, by always exerting themselves more strenuously, they might count upon being successful.

Leo XIII, Encyclical Sapientiae Christianae
of January 10, 1890, n. 14

Passing Lane in Splattering Rain

Diana Hillman
Passing Lane 2, Study, Road Works Series, 2016
Oil and pencil on paper
Approx 30 x 40 cm
Estimate: $300

Painting on view at artist's webpage under "Roadworks".

[Above image from the artist's Facebook page]

"Therefore, My Beloved, Flee from Idolatry." 1 Corinthians 10:14

Youngo Varma (1938-2015)
Tantra 21,
New Dehi, India
Graphite on Paper
1981
36 x 48 inches
Royal Ontario Museum Collection

The Art Gallery of Mississauga is holding its annual auction of donated artworks from the Mississauga community. Youngo Varma's Tantra #59 will be up for bids with a starting bid of $9,000-$11,000.

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John 4:23
But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.

1 Chronicles 16:26
For all the gods of the peoples are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.

Isaiah 42:8
I am the Lord; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.

1 Corinthians 10:20-21
No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

Leviticus 19:4
Do not turn to idols or make for yourselves any gods of cast metal: I am the Lord your God.

Psalm 96:5
For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens.

Leviticus 26:30
And I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars and cast your dead bodies upon the dead bodies of your idols, and my soul will abhor you.

1 Corinthians 10:14
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.

Spring Scarves II

Eye Contact

Eye Contact
[Photo By: KPA]

On Guard

On Guard
Photo By: KPA

The Art Gallery of Mississauga is holding its annual auction in the Square One Mall on April 27, 2018 [1]. For a few days, potential bidders can view the works in an enclosed space in the mall. Understandably, they are cautious of visitors (all?), and have a guard in place.

More information is available on the AGM's website as well as in the preview catalogue also linked on the AGM Facebook page and with a (pdf) link here.
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MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR | CURATOR Mandy Salter


Director | Curator
MA, ISA

Welcome to our signature fundraiser of the year! All proceeds raised at the AGM’s Benefit Art Auction support free access to our award-winning exhibitions and critically recognized programming, allowing us to deepen our connections to the community. I extend my most sincere thanks to our Platinum Sponsor Square One Oxford Properties for their aligned commitment to community, as well as to all of our public and private funders and sponsors. Thank you also to the generosity of the AGM’s community, contributing artists, curators, and the incredible staff who produce this event, as well as to the AGM Board and volunteers for their passionate commitment.

The AGM proudly supports a changing calendar of community-engaged outreach programmes and contemporary art exhibitions featuring regional, national and international artists. Our philosophy supports the transcending of traditional disciplinary boundaries by fostering community and providing platforms where alternative modes of thought are supported and activated in tangible ways.

We continue to embrace our FIRST NEW NEXT mandate as a strategy for programme and growth. The AGM embraces diversity, inclusivity and collaboration, with a focus on supporting artists and cultural producers from Indigenous, newcomer and youth communities. Given the issues of limited space and resources we are presently facing, I invite you all to join us in the achievement of future goals, which include expanding upon our engagement initiatives and growing the AGM’s facility. Our intention is to become more deeply integrated, involved in and relevant to our constituent communities, with an increased focus on socially-engaged arts projects that involve skill sharing and co-creation with community! I extend a hand of thanks and invitation to you all in joining us on this important path. Let’s walk together to ensure that the AGM’s continued growth appropriately supports and further reflects the diversity and size of our community! Our intention is to become more deeply integrated, involved in and relevant to our constituent communities, with an increased focus on socially-engaged arts projects that involve skill sharing and co-creation with community!

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MESSAGE FROM THE CURATOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART


Kendra Ainsworth

The Art Gallery of Mississauga’s Benefit Art Auction has always been a major cultural (and social!) event on the Mississauga calendar, and this year we’re thrilled to take things up a notch with our new location and partnership with Square One! The AGM has been incredibly fortunate to find such a generous and supportive partner, and we look forward to sharing this bigger, bolder event with our visitors, members, supporters, sponsors, donors and volunteers.

All proceeds of the Benefit Art Auction go directly back into the innovative, inspiring and engaging exhibitions and public programs for which the AGM has become known; growing the success of this event will allow us to expand our offerings of free workshops and events, to keep gallery admission free, and to build an even more stellar regional and national reputation for Mississauga’s only public art gallery. With our commitment to accessibility, inclusivity, and to supporting the work of historically underrepresented artists, the AGM plays a crucial role in helping to inspire and foster the next generation of informed, critical, compassionate and creative citizens.

My sincere and heartfelt thanks to the incredibly generous artists who have contributed work to the auction this year. We are so lucky to have the support of so many amazingly talented people. Representing a wonderful cross-section of emerging and established practices of regional, national and international renown, I am certain that the works available this year offer something for everyone. Bid enthusiastically in support of this wonderful institution I am so proud to represent, and go home with something beautiful!


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MESSAGE FROM GUEST CURATOR | Ali Adil Khan

Syed Iqbal
Portrait of Ali Adil Khan
Acrylic on canvas

ART FOR ART’S SAKECanada is home to 2 million people of South Asian origin, broadly defined as those originating from the Indian sub-continent, comprising of countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. They form the second largest pan-ethnic group in Canada after European-Canadians. Mississauga in particular has a large South Asian diaspora.

People immigrating from non-Western cultures often face difficulty integrating to life in Canada, and artists are no exception, with their art considered not “Canadian” enough. They often struggle with isolation, lack of support and acceptance, and yet still pursue their artistic passions. I have struggled with the notion of labelling art as “Canadian art” or “South Asian art” even though I have been a strong proponent, supporter, and collector of art created by artists of South Asian backgrounds. Art is art regardless of country of origin! If their art does not belong to Canadian mainstream art, the question arises–what is mainstream Canadian art? And does it not have room to accept diverse creative perspectives? Surely the work of any artist practicing in Canada reflects in some way the environment they inhabit.

The AGM’s Benefit Art Auction, now in its 15th year, raises funds for exhibitions and programming, research and learning that showcase just how diverse Canadian art is and can be, and support artists whose practices have often been neglected. I am pleased to have been invited to curate a selection of work for this auction that is not only rich in its diversity but connected to the local, important works by internationally renowned artists from Mississauga, Toronto, Burlington, Port Hope and Oakville. As you preview these works, I hope you will feel that their work is no less Canadian than that of their Western-European counterparts. Masterpieces by artists are looking for homes– make sure you take one home today.
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1 The Art Gallery of Mississauga Benefit Art Auction Catalogue

"Multiculturalism and the Demotion of Man"

Image from the book cover for A Country of Strangers:
Black and White in America (book quoted in Auster's article)
Design by Virginia Tan

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Multiculturalism and the Demotion of Man
Lawrence Auster
1998
Culture Wars (via a link from the author's webpage)

The perverse tendency among white Western elites to welcome and embrace non-Western peoples and cultures while refusing to defend their own people and culture is no mere fashion, as superficial conservatives would have it, but a natural and inevitable expression of a new culture-a culture of nihilism-that has become the dominant culture of the West. The organizing idea of this nihilist culture is that abnormal and transgressive conduct is normalized and celebrated, while traditional moral norms and constraints are either ignored or subjected to crippling social and civil penalties. Hardly a day goes by when this dominant nihilism does not announce its presence in unmistakable terms, as seen in the following items, selected almost at random from contemporary events (the reader is invited to think of his own examples):

High school pupils who physically attack their teachers go unpunished, while a police officer who slapped a boy he discovered having sex with his daughter is suspended from his job.
Male and female students at elite colleges are housed together in the same dorms, using the same bathrooms, while religious students who don't want to be forced to live in this libertine environment are told they should have gone to school elsewhere.

People who want the Unabomber executed are described by The New York Times as "angry," while people who consider the Unabomber a hero are described by the Times in neutral, nonjudgmental terms.

Hospitals are informed by federal courts that carrying on hospital business in the English language is "discrimination," while illegal aliens using those hospitals are told they have a "right" under the U.S. Constitution to be addressed in their native languages.

Laws against disability discrimination punish employers for failing to hire or make "reasonable accommodations" for hostile or violent or chronically late employees.

This systematic inversion of normal and abnormal, of law and lawlessness, of good and evil, goes beyond mere democratic leveling. It is a rebellion against what philosophers call the order of existence. Ultimately, it is a rebellion against God and the belief that man is made in the image of God. When man gets rid of the belief (which comes through revelation and rational intuition) that he is made in the image and likeness of God, man is not-as secularists imagine-enhanced. He is degraded. If man is not made in God's image, then he is made in his own image. If God is not the measure of all things, then man is the measure. But without a higher truth to raise him above himself and his disordered impulses, man inexorably sinks, finally becoming so contemptible that he can no longer believe in God or in man. So he begins to worship non-human, sub-human, anti-human behaviors and forms.

The organizing idea of this nihilist culture is that abnormal and transgressive conduct is normalized and celebrated, while traditional moral norms and constraints are either ignored or subjected to crippling social and civil penalties.

The manifestations of this depravity can be seen not only in our popular entertainments (e.g., the Jerry Springer Show and most prime-time television) and "lifestyles" (e.g., face-piercing and vampirism), but in the so-called high culture of post-1960s America. Sculptures and monuments once embodied an heroic-divine ideal going back to the ancient Greeks. But today our typical public sculptures portray grotesque shapes of victimhood, human figures bedraggled and twisted in pain, as though the universe were one vast Auschwitz. It is an aesthetic in which any sense of human dignity in suffering is erased.

Alongside the depiction of human beings as hopeless victims, we have now statues of monsters. In recent years New York City has displayed in parks and squares such "art works" as a 25-foot-long statue of an insect, and a statue of a gigantic, hideous dog as high as a man, with huge teeth projecting downward like knives. These sculptures are our postmodern equivalents of the terror-gods of the pre-Columbian cultures. When man loses belief in God, he also loses respect for man, and turns to non-human or anti-human figures as symbols of the malign spiritual universe he now inhabits.

The postmodern degradation of man and culture begins with the modern idea of placing all human beings, and even all of nature, on an equal plane, free of the burden of transcendence. The essence of this agenda has been put forth in a remarkable essay by religion professor Steven C. Rockefeller. Blending deep ecology with multiculturalism, Rockefeller enunciates what is in effect a new religion. "All life is sacred," he writes, "[and] all life forms should be respected as a 'thou' and not just as an 'it.' ... If, as has been suggested, all cultures as well as all life forms are of intrinsic value and also sacred, then from a religious perspective all are in this sense equal in value."[1]

All of this is, of course, a total inversion of Christianity and Judaism, which tells us that God is holy, not the world, and that human beings can become holy by orienting themselves toward God: "Be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy." But according to Rockefeller's gospel, everything that exists-plants, animals, humans, and (most of all) Third-world cultures-is not only holy, but equally so:

If one employs this kind of religious argument in defense of the idea of equal value, one should recognize its full implications. It is opposed to anthropocentrism [the idea that man is higher or more important than animals or plants] as well as to all egoisms of class, race, or culture. It calls for an attitude of humility. It encourages a respect for, and pride in, one's own particular identity only insofar as such respect and pride grow out of recognition of the value of the uniqueness in the identity of all other peoples and life forms. Furthermore, if what is sacred in humanity is life, which is not something exclusively human, then humanity's primary identity is not just with the human species but with the entire biosphere that envelopes planet Earth.

It is no longer God above man, and God's spirit working within man, that is divine, but mere biological life, in respect of which man is equal with crustacea, worms, and viruses. Instead of being humble before God and the nobler manifestations of mankind, we are supposed to be humble before plants and animals and primitive cultures. Most importantly, our own culture has no right to self-respect unless we first have total respect for all other cultures and life-forms. Rockefeller continues:

The call for recognition of the equal value of different cultures is the expression of a basic and profound universal human need for unconditional acceptance. A feeling of such acceptance, including affirmation of one's ethnic particularity as well as one's universally shared potential, is an essential part of a strong sense of identity.... The politics of recognition may, therefore also be an expression of a complex human need for acceptance and belonging, which on the deepest level is a religious need.

Unconditional(!) acceptance as a sacred(!) right of every(!) person and culture. Try to imagine what this would mean in practical terms. Of course, there’s a catch, which Rockefeller makes explicit elsewhere in his essay. Only some cultures and life-forms (namely white Western males) are actually obligated to extend this unconditional acceptance to other cultures and life forms, while those other cultures and life-forms are only expected to receive such recognition as is their divine right.

In Steven Rockefeller's mad epiphany, we seem to hear the final, degenerate gasp of the Protestant spirit that made America. In the earlier stages of this devolution, the Protestant loses his Christian faith, which eventually leaves him with nothing but "niceness." Then this "niceness"-cut off from the religious faith that was its source and discipline, but still in need of a "divine" sanction-spreads out indiscriminately until it embraces the whole universe, ultimately taking the form of nature worship, the belief in the equality of all cultures and life-forms, and the totalitarian religion of "unconditional acceptance."

The essence of this agenda has been put forth in a remarkable essay by religion professor Steven C. Rockefeller. Blending deep ecology with multiculturalism, Rockefeller enunciates what is in effect a new religion.

But the religion of cosmic equality, as crazy as it is, is not the end of the process. The attempt to eliminate all hierarchy and transcendence leads inevitably to an inverted hierarchy, in which man, particularly Western man, is at the bottom. The Bible placed man near the top of a divinely ordered universe, only a little lower than the angels. But now the radical egalitarians tell us that man is no better than animals, who (it is argued), also communicate and reason, and are less destructive than humans. "And as with animals," remarks the late literary critic Peter Shaw, "so with primitive man and with societies less developed than our own: both are closer to the sources of natural wisdom, and both wreak less damage upon the ecosystem and biosphere than does Western man."[2] As an extreme example of this inversion, Shaw quotes the popular left-wing paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould:

Evolution is a copiously branching network, not a ladder, and I do not see how we, the titular spokesmen for a few thousand mammalian species, can claim superiority over three quarters of a million species of insects who will surely outlive us, not to mention the bacteria, who have shown remarkable staying power for more than three billion years.[3]

"Here we have very nearly the ultimate demotion of man," comments Shaw, "the inferior not only of primitive peoples, other mammals, and the cockroach, but even of bacteria."

But, as Shaw points out, there is just one little problem with this belief in the superiority of primitive cultures: It is not true. Therefore it can only be sustained by ceaseless mental gymnastics. Embarrassing evidence, if it can't be suppressed, must be re-interpreted so as to make it fit within the egalitarian paradigm. It came to light some years ago that the ancient Mayans -long thought of as an exemplary, peaceful civilization-engaged in horrifying practices. Before going to war, reported The New York Times, "the king would puncture his penis with a stingray spine, while his wife drew a thorn-barbed rope through her tongue."

The Mayans waged war in order to capture aristocrats for torture and sacrifice; the captives would sometimes play ball games using the decapitated heads of the losers as balls. The Times admitted that the evidence of these practices had been available for decades in stone reliefs and paintings, but that scholars had explained it all away in order to keep the Maya on a "mist-shrouded pedestal," where they could be idealized as an austere and enlightened people. But while the new evidence has shattered that peaceful image, it has not ended the need to portray nonwhite and non-Western cultures in a positive light. Anthropologists now argue that the Mayan practice of royal self-laceration indicates "a cooperative, sacred relationship between the elites and the commoners." In other words, remarks Peter Shaw, "if the evidence shows a society's aristocrats obsessed with self-mutilation and torture, a bit of interpretation will help us see beneath the surface to the class solidarity so characteristic of pre-Columbian America and so lamentably missing from the modern world."

More recently, the human sacrifice cult of the pre-Inca Moche culture of Peru, memorialized in the ubiquitous image of the Decapitator (a demonic grimacing figure holding a severed head in one hand and a curved blade in the other), has been interpreted by Stanford anthropologist John Rick, not as the sacred core of the Moche culture (which it obviously was), but as a temporary expedient through which the Moche ruling class solidified its political power over a recalcitrant populace.

The New York Times referred to car thieves and police in Newark, New Jersey as two "cultures" that were "clashing,"

Once the Moche elites were safely established through the use of violence, Professor Rick told The News Hour, they were "no more violent than ourselves." Thus, in the practiced manner of a contemporary liberal academic, Rick effortlessly made it seem that there is no essential difference between this ancient cult of death and the "oppressions" of modern America.

What anthropologists write in their academic journals, public school teachers, judges, reporters, and social workers are disseminating through the whole society. When The New York Times referred to car thieves and police in Newark, New Jersey as two "cultures" that were "clashing," and spoke of a deranged woman sitting on a sidewalk as having a "culture" that was different from the "culture" of the shoppers walking past her; when a New York City case worker refused to investigate a Nigerian immigrant who had been torturing his son for months, on the grounds that such beating were part of the father's culture; when American teachers excuse the Japanese for their inhuman brutalities during World War II, while damning the U.S. for the wartime relocation of Japanese-Americans in California; when the national media covers up an endless series of horrifying racial murders of whites by blacks, while generating national hysteria over a non-existent white racist plot to burn black churches, the underlying idea is always the same: never to allow a non-Western or nonwhite people to be portrayed in a critical light, while portraying whites and Western culture in the harshest light possible.

As David Shipler, an apostle of racial correctness, inadvertently reveals in his recent book A Country of Strangers: Black and White in America[4], this systematic denial of plain evidence by "right-thinking" whites is achieved through a deliberate act of self-hypnosis:

This is the ideal: to search your attitudes, identify your stereotypes, and correct for them as you go about your daily duties.

This, at its Orwellian core, is the mindset that enables contemporary whites never to entertain a negative conclusion about blacks, while always making whites themselves responsible for blacks' moral and intellectual failings. This (in Joseph Sobran's useful coinage) is alienism: "a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossessed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to 'build a new society' by destroying the basic institutions of the native."[5] This is the intellectual and spiritual environment which, combined with racial diversification, has turned America into the opposite of itself-into the anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-rational, anti-American anti-nation that is Multicultural America.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

References:

1 Steven C. Rockefeller, “Comment,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton University Press, 1992, p.87

2 Peter Shaw, “The Demotion of Man,” in The War Against the Intellect: Episodes in the Decline of Discourse, University of Iowa Press, 1989, p.138

3 Stephen Jay Gould, "Hooking Leviathan by Its Past," in Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History, Harmony Books, 1995, p. 138

4 Joseph Sobran, “Pensées: Notes for the Reactionaries of Tomorrow,” National Review, Dec. 31, 1985

5 David K. Shipler, "Acting Affirmatively," in A Country of Strangers: Black and White in America, Vintage Books, 1998, p. 491

Running a Country

This will be an iconic image of this latest "war."

Whatever happened in Syria, and the truth will come out, President Assad shows the composure and perseverance of a true leader. Briefcase in hand, he makes the long and solitary walk through the great hall of his presidential palace to continue with the business, and responsibility, of running his country.

Waiting For Spring

Magnolias at Dusk
Central Park, New York
March 2016
[Photo By: KPA]

Purveyors of God's Message

The New York Public Library's Rose Main Reading Room
[Photo By: [KPA]

Below is an abridged and edited version of an email correspondence with a friend, The Thinking Housewife:

Mississauga, with its swirling masses, must be how Babylon started out. And where will God place all these people in their afterlife if their "home" is the Babylon that is Mississauga and their false country that is Canada? He will surely bless their "return home."

At some point, God will hold us accountable, and especially us who are more aware. Our human harshness and forthrightness will be nothing compared to His wrath. I keep thinking that God is preparing me for something.

Each person will gain God's benevolence, I believe, in exact correlation to what he has given for God's message to pass on to the world, and in direct correlation to how he understands and thus exposes this nefarious and new postmodern world. That is why people hate my Reclaiming Beauty. Once informed through my blog, to a lesser or more extent, each is no longer as innocent as before that conveyance.

And yes we are in a lonely spot. But remember all pioneers (and after that indomitable independent American spirit) were "in a lonely spot." But that didn't stop them, and in fact it was a significant factor in helping them carve new and great territories. I should say saints also, but that would be really stretching my arrogance!

"Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle"

Joan of Arc Statue
Riverside Drive, New York
[Photo By: KPA]

Psalm 144

Praise be to the Lord my Rock,
who trains my hands for war,
my fingers for battle.

2 He is my loving God and my fortress,
my stronghold and my deliverer,
my shield, in whom I take refuge,
who subdues peoples[a] under me.

3 Lord, what are human beings that you care for them,
mere mortals that you think of them?

4 They are like a breath;
their days are like a fleeting shadow.

5 Part your heavens, Lord, and come down;
touch the mountains, so that they smoke.

6 Send forth lightning and scatter the enemy;
shoot your arrows and rout them.

7 Reach down your hand from on high;
deliver me and rescue me
from the mighty waters,
from the hands of foreigners

8 whose mouths are full of lies,
whose right hands are deceitful.

9 I will sing a new song to you, my God;
on the ten-stringed lyre I will make music to you,

10 to the One who gives victory to kings,
who delivers his servant David.
From the deadly sword

11 deliver me;
rescue me from the hands of foreigners
whose mouths are full of lies,
whose right hands are deceitful.

12 Then our sons in their youth
will be like well-nurtured plants,
and our daughters will be like pillars
carved to adorn a palace.

13 Our barns will be filled
with every kind of provision.
Our sheep will increase by thousands,
by tens of thousands in our fields;

14 our oxen will draw heavy loads.[b]
There will be no breaching of walls,
no going into captivity,
no cry of distress in our streets.

15 Blessed is the people of whom this is true;
blessed is the people whose God is the Lord.

There is Hope yet for America

So if you're watching, listening to, interested in the Mark Zuckerberg Fascist Empire downfall, here is a hilarious "discussion" on the Fat Boy: aka Mr. President, Zuckerturd, Obummer, Shrillary and all the rest here. But there are some very funny and witty ordinary folk out there (wth guns and religion?). There is Hope yet for America. LOLOL!

I watched about two thirds of the C-Span broadcast on Zuckerberg's testimony. Zuckerberg sat wth bloodshot eyes (no sleep, Mark?) but was quick, clever, and adept at shielding off ALL the questions. I think he wll leave Scott Free (excuse the mixed metaphor).

Denese • Denese • 9 hours ago
I had no idea he was only 5'7". There are photos of him sitting on a booster seat at the hearing. Funny.

That's exactly what I thought as he walked away on his "five minute bread." (Needless to say I didn't watch the whole -2 hr - circus).

Art and Empty Spaces: Part 1

Shellie Zhang in front of the window display of her Neon artwork "A place for Wholesome Amusement,"
At Fentster Gallery at 402 College St. until May 22, 2018
[Image Source: The Canadian Jewish News]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Part Two here]
There's a hilarious, short-lived, "dialogue" at the Art Gallery of Mississauga Facebook page.

Given the contemporary history of Facebook, it might be deleted some time soon, so I have it here as a jpg.

The Facebook screenshot (the jpg) is below the "dialogue" which I have transcribed:

Art Gallery of Mississauga
April 4 at 1:05pm

"In this space beyond the residual is a form of collaborative remembering, a narratology shaped by the resilience of past #cultural texts and the desire for future pluralistic frameworks. Side by side, the two marquees, in their proximity, propose a kind of #kinship, a way to engage in a cross-cultural collective #memory."

Annie Wong discusses #Auction artist Shellie Zhang's new neon #installation on past spaces and parallel histories for Canadian Art.

Shellie Zhang Recovers Spectral Traces from a Diasporic Past
The artist's new neon installation explores parallel histories between Toronto's Jewish and Chinese communities.
CANADIANART.CA

David Alan Hill
Is this statement really in any form that would engage interest from the average viewer?
What a waste.

Art Gallery of Mississauga
Thanks for your comment David.

This new work by Shellie Zhang, as articulated by Annie Wong in Canadian Art delves into the multiple histories of one space, 285 Spadina. This space is located in an area of Toronto that was once home to many immigrants who experienced normalized racism while trying to make a life. Zhang’s neon work asks an open-ended question to all who encounter its glow on the practice of remembering: how does displacement and diaspora of the past relate to the lived experiences of today?

David Alan Hill
this does shed some light on the work in a more comprehensible manner but still it is a problem to me that the descriptions are so elitist for average people. After all they are the viewers as well as the educated group that float around the art world. Lets be inclusive and not restrict the art experience.

Ian Crysler
Gallery babble, very unattractive.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jpg screenshot below:



David Alan Hill somewhat captualted under the pressure of social media (he should blame Mark Zuckerberg for that, LOL). But he should have hung in there. What exactly is the dialogue between two neon lights? What passerby will try (or care less about) deciphering these cryptic messages about empty spaces (apparently - what exactly is "exhibited" there anyway?)

The Art Gallery of Mississauga Facebook page (yes they still have one - LOL) showed this piece of information.

Amy Chua's Poetic License

In the blockbuster Broadway hit play Hamilton Lin-Manuel Miranda brilliantly used an all-minority cast to portray America's founding fathers. This was a radical - and radically patriotic - move.

Hamilton doesn't deny American racism or injustice. On the contrary, the pointed casting draws attention to those historically excluded from center stage in the the nation's creation and reminds us that America's ideals always far exceed its realty. But the play is also a reminder that this country's history is built on principles that transcend their time. It testifies to the aspirations that every American, regardless of ethnicity or race, can embrace the nation's history and identity as his or her own. It gives a voice to an America that is not rooted in blood or parentage, that is open to people of all different ethnicities, and that allows - indeed gains strength from allowing - all those subgroup identities to flourish. It speaks for the idea of America as a super-group.

What holds America together is the American Dream. But it must be a version of the dream that recognizes past failure instead of denying it. Failures are part and parcel of the story line of a country founded n hope, a country where there's always more to be done.
pp20-209


Dreams are not real, but they can be made so. The American Dream is a promise of freedom and hope for every individual on these shores. But it is also a call on all of us to make true the myths we tell ourselves about what America has always been. More than anyone else, Langston Hughes was the poet of this dream. In his 1935 poem "Let America be America Again," he writes:

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love

But then a second voice enters:

(It never was America to me.)

The first voice replies

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And the second answers:

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

But far from concluding with defeat Hughes offers a prayer and an affirmation:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

[...]

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

AGM Art Auction

A full 1/3 s non-figurative most verging on the abstract (what is it??)

Gallery of Mississauga, indignation is met by powerful grace

In niigaanikwewag at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, indignation is met by powerful grace
Mississauga show is devoted to works by Indigenous women whose weapons of choice are determination and persistence, writes Murray Whyte.

.....https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/review/2018/04/06/in-niigaanikwewag-at-the-art-gallery-of-mississauga-indignation-is-met-by-powerful-grace.html

plus 4 images......


“The Onondaga Madonna,” a poem by Duncan Campbell Scott, a pre-eminent man of Canadian letters and, not coincidentally, one of the chief architects of the federal government’s Indigenous assimilation efforts, feigns sympathy with patronizing flourish: “She stands full-throated and with careless pose,” he writes, “This woman of a weird and waning race/The tragic savage lurking in her face/Where all her pagan passion burns and glows.”

I could go on, but let’s not, because it’s here, in her angry handwritten scrawl, that Meryl McMaster has chosen to let Scott’s words fade to a vanishing point, an oblivion of irrelevance to which they deeply belong. It’s hard to choose a signature piece in niigaanikwewag, the Art Gallery of Mississauga’s stirring exhibition devoted to works by Indigenous women but, for me, McMaster’s Truth to Power comes close. Alongside Scott’s paean to assimilation, the artist, who is Siksika Cree, looks placidly to the camera amid a stand of trees dusted with snow. Neither waning nor tragic, McMaster is self-possessed and confident; we see, in her juxtaposition, what has survived and what has not.

Niigaanikwewag (which, in the Anishinaabe language, is the feminine plural of “they who lead”) is like that: meeting indignation with a stoic, powerful grace, its works turn to a roster of female artists whose weapons of choice are determination and persistence — quiet defiance versus declarations of war.

Not that the latter would be unjustified. Scott and the generations of bureaucrats that followed his lead famously favoured a solution to “the Indian problem” that would deepen its assimilation procedures “until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department,” as he told Parliament in 1920.

But niigaanikwewag, guest curated by McMaster University’s Rhéanne Chartrand, chooses to vivify what is, not condemn what was. Stil, don’t mistake its quiet resolve for acquiescence: Rebecca Belmore’s Fringe, in which a deep scar runs down the back of an Indigenous woman, fitted with a fringe of beads, suggests violence met with a will to endure; Rolande Souliere’s Modern Day Syllabics is an array of graphic panels imprinted with symbols used by several Indigenous groups to revive languages nearly erased by the residential school system.

They run the gallery’s full length, controlling your movement, and that’s precisely the point. Souliere makes a quiet demand to pay mind to what was lost as she asserts it survival, imposing its subtle insistence with a physical presence.

Other works here toggle from strident declarations of self to silent determinations to carry on. A pair of works by Vanessa Dion Fletcher use traditional bead work to depict menstrual stains (both a symbol of Indigenous peoples’ continued existence against the odds, I’d think, and a poke at the “blood quantum” notion of genetic proportions that make one “Indigenous enough” to gain official status in the government’s eyes).

Meanwhile, Rita Letendre, an iconic abstract painter who just turned 90, kept her own Indigenous heritage tucked away her entire career, making the reasonable judgment that being a woman in the men’s club of Les Automatistes was challenge enough. Her two works here speak of resolve: to go on, against practicality and reason, and to forge for herself the life she couldn’t deny.

Niigaanikwewag means to describe leaders and each of the artists here are, in their way: Christi Belcourt, the towering activist for Indigenous cultural revival, whose intricate This Painting Is a Mirror is a constellation of tiny gestures that make a verdant, thriving whole; Tanya Lukin Linklater, whose performance piece The Treaty Is in the Body is part of a pioneering practice to inscribe colonial violence in a project of contemporary dance.

One piece, though, makes the connection a little more clearly. Caroline Monnet’s Creatura Dada is a video piece capturing a bacchanalian celebration around a table of plenty: the decadent slurp of oysters, the free flow of champagne, the peeling of grapes, enjoyed by a clutch of Indigenous women to whom such just deserts have rarely been offered.

The entire procession is led by Alanis Obomsawin, a living legend of a documentary film director who, now 85, knows something of Indigenous endurance and mettle. Surrounded by a youthful cohort, Obomsawin is a figure of rapturous joy, and one feels the passing of a torch from a past marked by determination to a future of ebullient vitality — a future made possible by the stoic perseverance of the past.

“She who leads,” yes; but to where is the question niigaanikwewag looks, in its plainspoken grace, to answer most fully.

Niigaanikwewag continues at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, 300 City Centre Dr., to April 15. See artgalleryofmississauga.com for more information. Four Lands, a public engagement project about shared lands from Jumblies Theatre, in concert with the exhibition, has its “grand finale” April 12. Please see www.jumbliestheatre.org/jumblies/current-projects/four-lands

Easter Cross

Easter Cross
[Photo By KPA]

"I don’t mind these people, or dislike them. I certainly don’t hate them..."

John Derbyshire, writer at VDare, is using the old and tired language of "I am not a racist...but" argument to defend hs "anti-immigration" stance.

He writes in a confused conundrum of superficial compassion and declared hard line.

In his recent post on the "caravan" that is approaching the southern American border, he writes:

...it’s plain that the biggest cohort of caravanners are unattached young men, a lot of them sporting tattoos.

I have nothing against young men, and not very much against tattoos. Looking at these faces and bodies, though, I do seriously doubt that any of this cohort, if permitted to settle among us, will take up brain surgery, theoretical physics, or the composing of symphonies.

Then later on in the article, he waves his white flag of "I'm not a racist":

I don’t mind these people, or dislike them. I certainly don’t hate them, as the infantile language of the Cultural Marxists would say. Some of them look like nice ordinary people. Check out, for example, William Castillo and his family from El Salvador in the Daily Mail montage. I’d guess Mr. Castillo is a hardworking guy who wants his best for the little boy. Heck, if I were an ordinary working Joe in El Salvador, I’d want to get out of there, too.

He has links to photos of nice family units, who do not very nice things like break sovereign laws and enter a foreign territory illegally. These nice people are criminals.

Of course he blames it on the country he's immigrated to (legally, I hope. Or is that where all his commentary stems form?).

That is another issue. And as with all clever pundits, Derbyshire knows that adding a (lesser, in this case) argument of imperfect American immigration policies will blur the main, important one, which is that this human caravan is composed solely of potential law-breakers. And they willingly joined this human flow in order to break these laws of the United States. Gangs or no gangs, poverty or no poverty, since when has such activity been given a free pass in a real house of law?

When will the immigrants cease to be those alien godheads, even for people such as Derbyshire who purport to do everything they can to prevent their traverse across a sanctified, sovereign border?

Epicenter for the Gods

Yogic Prayer at the Square One Mississauga's Alex and Ani Jewellry Store
Notice also the cross-like symbol on the wall, which is: The ankh

Mississauga is the epicentre for Ontario's (and I would argue Canada's) multiculturalism. This becomes a conduit for multicultural gods.

The city centre, which is an extended shopping mall called Square One, hosts a variety of multicultural events, including the recent "Chinese New Year."

Stores, most of which stay neutral, nonetheless introduce the multicultural element in their products and their imagery.

Ths "high end" jewellry store Alex and Ani by Armenian-American Carolyn Rafaelian sells such items explicitly displayed in its showcase window. I have written about it here.

This is Holy (Easter) week now for the Orthodox Christians. Armenia has a long history of Christianity. Yet this woman prefers to delve into "Eastern" philosophy and project nefarious charms and evil eyes at passersby.


Evil Eye Charm Bangle (from Alex and Ani online store)

[The Evil Eye Charm Bangle is] inspired by the traditional nazar amulet, which means “vision” in Arabic, the symbol of the eye stares back at the world. An unblinking emblem of strength, the eye was worn by ancient Armenians to ward off misfortune and harmful energy. This protective eye symbolizes the divine, watchful gaze that encourages you to look beyond the visible world. Let this ancient talisman grant protection and insight while you take a closer look at your own personal journey.[Information source: Alex and Ani online store]

Well nowhere is more apt than Square One, Mississauga, to send a yogic prayer to her potential customers.

This particular store is now portraying a woman in prayer. A closer look shows that she is praying in the Yoga-Buddhist manner.

The Paradox of Tradition

The Paradox of Tradition
Excerpt from Camera Lucida, 2009

The funny thing about tradition is that it changes subtly through time. Innovations happen by building the new from the old; by adapting the past into our own present environments. This is what modern artists just don’t get. They are stuck in a rut with their experimentations and self-expression. The true inspiration and, paradoxically, change comes by pursuing tradition

"Meritocracy, Diversity: Pick One"

Photo from the Washington Post article:
The White House releases a photo of its interns,
and the Internet asks: Why so few people of color?
(See larger photo here)

The Vdare blog has this fascinating post up: Meritocracy And Diversitocracy Incompatible.

Derbyshire, the author of the article via his radio show, expands on an article: Analysis: The White House releases a photo of its interns, and the Internet asks: Why so few people of color? by Eugene Scott, published on the Washington Post on March 31, 2018.

Besides the usual "blacks are less intelligent than whites" meme that Vdare endlessly announces, what I found so very interesting was that Derbyshire, who is married to an Asian woman and with two Happa children, should have missed this one: The statistically insignificant presence of Asians in the photo of the White House interns on the Whashington Post article. That is, statistically, zero. In actuality, I counted:
- One South Asian woman (no men)
- Two East Asian men (no women)

Asians have continuously been touted as smarter than whites (they get the highest scores in various standardized tests) the most diligent, and the most successful academically. But something strange happens when they hit the "real world."

I've written about it here regarding music and general academics, and here on the (in)famous "Tiger Mom" who was a subject of my two or three posts, and who has a new book out championing "tribal" connections - in America no less!

Amy Chua's (the Tiger Mom's) two daughters show similar traits. Despite a rigorous childhood of homework and volin practice neither has turned out to be the genius she (we) expected.

Well Chua's latest book is a little more complicated than that, but no less self-serving than her memoir and her American life. But more on that later.

Giant Crosses for Easter

How New York City commemorated Easter in 1956
via James Perloff

Extraordinary. If giant crosses were shining from skyscrapers now, for Easter 2018, we would wonder if some Satanic movement had taken over New York (look at how pop culture now is depicting the cross as a non-Christian symbol).

In short, we would be fearful, so conditioned have we become to view any overt demonstration of Christianity as Satan-induced.


MDNA Tour, 2012

Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast,
for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.
- Revelation 13: 18

[666] is made by touching your thumb with your index finger making a circle.
The other fingers follow the index’s shape thus forming the tail of two 6s.

The sign is given as a pledge of allegiance to Satan. When it is given over the eye,
it represents the eye of Lucifer. [Source]

Giant Crosses for Easter

How New York City commemorated Easter in 1956
via James Perloff

Extraordinary. If giant crosses were shining from skyscrapers now, for Easter 2018, we would wonder if some Satanic movement had taken over New York (look at how pop culture now is depicting the cross as a non-Christian symbol).

In short, we would be fearful, so conditioned have we become to view any overt demonstration of Christianity as Satan-induced.


MDNA Tour, 2012

Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast,
for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.
- Revelation 13: 18

[666] is made by touching your thumb with your index finger making a circle.
The other fingers follow the index’s shape thus forming the tail of two 6s.

The sign is given as a pledge of allegiance to Satan. When it is given over the eye,
it represents the eye of Lucifer. [Source]

A Simple Easter Meal

Roast Lamb and Vegetables
(Following the Williams Sonoma Recipe)


Easter Eggs in a Limoges Basket

Happy Easter!

Madonna Lily

From post at Camera Lucida on Easter 2012