The Museum of Beauty

Trillium/Queen Anne's Lace
[Design by KPA]

I am putting together a website called "The Museum of Beauty." Its accompanying book is almost complete.

Here are the beginnings of The Museum of Beauty, and book soon to follow.

Beauty in the Time of COVID

[Photo By: KPA]

Despite the gloom, doom and nihilism surrounding us, there is beauty to contemplate, and with which to refresh our minds (and bodies).

The Museum of Beauty

Welcome to the Museum of Beauty!

Steven Heinemann and Scorched Earth

Steven Heinemann
Ceramics
Terra Ruba, 2004
Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam
69cmX42X34

For a potter working with pots, Steven Heinemann seems obsessed with closing them off. No flower will adorn his creations, nor will water pour from his jugs. Heinemann is not interested in function, but

prioritizes process, material, and the non-functionalobject to create autonomous sculpture

writes Rachel Gotlieb in Steven Heinemann: Culture and Nature, an exhibition he held in 2017 at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto. And a footnote to this phrase, Gotlieb directs us:

For discussions on the autonomy of the art object within the realm of craft see Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997); Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007); and Bruce Metcalf, “Replacing the Myth of Modernism,” First published in American Craft, February/
March 1993, 53, no. 1, accessed March 1, 2017, http://lib.znate.ru/docs/ index-53911.html.

I discuss Adolf Loos, the anti-ornament modernist here in Throwing Out Ornament, asking (rhetorically) if

architecture hadn't regressed. "Think about the medieval cathedrals, or the renaissance palaces. All we do now is glass boxes. Lego for grown ups. We're back to simple squares and circle, just a little above the line in the sand drawn with a piece of stick."

I could add for pottery: simple curved shapes.

And simple curved shapes is what Heinemann produces, however asymmetrical, and therefore (falsely) complex shapes they may be. Although asymmetry is a more natural, inartistic, tendency, and a circle far harder to reproduce. Heinemann thus desires to work with asymmetry, imperfection, and ultimately, the non-aesthetic.

And this leads to my final point. Heinemann's vessels. An article on Heinemann at the Canadian Encyclopedia describes one of Heinemann's techniques as:

"controlled crazing" (fine cracks on the surface of a glaze layer) during firing as his primary method to investigate issues of containment, volume and decoration.

Thermal stress weathering, in nature,

...results from the expansion and contraction of rock, caused by temperature changes. For example, heating of rocks by sunlight or fires can cause expansion of their constituent minerals. As some minerals expand more than others, temperature changes set up differential stresses that eventually cause the rock to crack apart.

This is the impression I got when viewing his ceramic objects, with their cracked interiors, and which clearly will not be vessels for water. The first word that came to mind was "scorched." And indeed they are scorched, resembling the barren, empty, and lifeless desert regions which bear this description.

For an art form which has functionality as its primary goal, these objects close themselves off to any form of human use, and instead become aesthetic objects. And they don't succeed even in that goal, their aesthetics having been compromised by Heinemann's relentless pursuit of the anti-aesthetic.

Heinemann's intent all along is to give us a dystopian scorched earth, where we will live in the extremes of "Climate Change" as we are destined to according to our postmodern spiritual guides - our scientists, activists, and artists - as we struggle with pots that wont even carry the droplets of water we may find.

Heinemaan, who lives in this current world, and who needs to pay his bills (ask Van Gogh how living for "art" alone worked out for him), sells his pieces ranging from $7,000 to the $11,000. And people are ready to buy dystopia and hang it in their living rooms. Wealthy art collectors, that is. And his works are available in museum collections across the globe, who purchase his scorched clay, and as no acts of charity.

Art and dytopia generate money!

Heinemann is the husband of textile designer, Chung-Im Kim, about whom I wrote here:

Here are her fungal-like growths which she designs with felt, and which she sells for over $6,000 each. She categorizes them on her website as: Living Geometry.

Crawling fungi might be the only vegetation that grows on scorched earth.

Magnolia Buds

Magnolia Buds
[Photo By: KPA]

All About the Print

Faux fur leopard prints that are all over the place right now.

You cannot, of course, get the real deal anymore (as far as I know), but from designer labels to Walmart's Everyman's clothing line, we are graced with the presence of these winter warmers.

Perhaps it is the "inner feline" that is awakened. Or it is simply something undecipherabley attractive, innate and instinctive, about these prints, that has lured women to take out their pocket books and spend their dollars on a faux fur craze which has now lasted for several decades. And there's no risk of red paint to tarnish your respectability by (crazed) faux fur advocates (with whom you have NO allegiance, since you never know when they might turn).

Here is Walmart's $70 faux fur coat, soft and warm (I've tried it on!).


CAN$77 (US$60)

Walmart tells us:

Get coverage and style when you pull on George women's AOP faux fur car coat. Knit from soft, patterned faux fur, it’s styled with a revere collar [What is a revere collar - my link], jetted pockets and concealed snap closure. Fully lined, the shiny coat on this box-cut jacket will add an element of chic to any outfit you throw it over.

• 100% Polyester
• Faux fur knit
• All over pattern
• Full lining
• Revere collar
• Full snap button closure
• Jetted pockets
• Soft hand feel
• Dry clean only

Holt Renfriew, The Bay, Simons, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Saks, Bergdorf Goodman, all have their variations (all at least $100 more than what Walmart offers).

Everyman wins, hands down.

Below is a fascinating, and I think very good, article on the "history" of the leopard print.

What is Writing?

Below is an excerpt from a post I wrote in 2013 about writing:

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"What is Writing?

Half, maybe most, of writing is finding faults in one’s own writing, and fixing them, until one finds nothing more to fix. It is an immersion in one’s own flaws, and a constant, unyielding effort to ameliorate them." Lawrence Auster: March 18, 2013

This is the same with all art. Artists will say that once an idea has emerged, one has to fix it until there is nothing more (humanely) possible to fix.

That is the joy, and agony, of art. It is a ruthless companion. It doesn't suffer laziness. Yet, that is how beauty is born.

The Grandeur of the King Dignifies the Cook

The short article The Grandeur of the King Dignifies the Cook by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, which I've posted below, beautifully exemplifies my attempt at putting beauty at the forefront of our lives. There is a branch of modern thought that declares beauty elitist: only a few (especially women) are beautiful; only the rich can live in beautiful homes, etc. What happens in this case is rather than untangle this "elitism" of beauty, the modern world has (or in the hypocritical nature of the modern world's elites, they have) abandoned beauty and throw out ugliness and horror instead as an ideological response to the elitism of beauty.

Of course these elites continue with their quest of beauty, which now only money can buy, but which comes soaked in snake venom. Even they must eventually find it repulsive.

Here is what I wrote about the universality of beauty. And below that is the article by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.

Excerpt from How to Acquire Style and Substance
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Reclaiming Beauty

[The] interesting thing about aesthetics is that it doesn’t require “equality” to function in any and all levels of life. The young shop girl can look beautiful (or at least aesthetically pleasing) and can borrow her ideas form the wealthy socialite to form her own pleasant look. Also, when beauty is around, even in limited quantities, everyone benefits. A beautiful statue in park is for everyone to appreciate. A beautiful lady glimpsed at in her car (in a store, a restaurant, etc.) makes people happy, including the lowly shop girl. Beauty does make the world a better place, I’m convinced.

---

The Grandeur of the King Dignifies the Cook

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira


An aerial view of Windsor Castle

Looking at this photo one’s first impression is that of a setting for a fairy tale. The immensity of the edifice, the marvelous variety of parts, the delicacy and strength that are affirmed in everything – all suggest that one is in the presence of something that far surpasses our day-to-day reality. This fantastic set of buildings is both the symbol and the shrine of an institution: the British Royalty.

In this symbol – like so many others of traditional England – the appearances still do not bear the mark of Protestantism, Liberalism or Socialism. What is expressed in these granite forms is still the medieval and Catholic concept of the divine origin of public power, the true majesty that should surround any political regime, and the paternal mark that should characterize it.

Paternal mark, we say. This castle does not aim to show massiveness, but talent. It is not made to intimidate, but to delight. The subject who contemplates it does not shiver at its sight; he does not feel like fleeing, but rather like entering.

And this for one simple reason: The King is a father who affably calls his subjects to himself, not an executioner who inspires fear to them.

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The Immense kitchen of Windsor

The relations between the great and the small are influenced by this ambience. The nobility of the Lord is transmitted to his servant.

Thus the immense kitchen of Windsor, at left, which is very authentically a kitchen, is indisputably a high, noble and worthy kitchen of a castle. It communicates something of the royal dignity itself to the humble menial activity of the cook and gives it a splendor that is, as it were, regal.

This is because in Christian Civilization the grandeur of the Lord does not humiliate the servant, but elevates him.

Translated from Catolicismo, August 1959
Posted November 14, 2012

Strength With Beauty

Presenter - KPA

Below is the paper I presented at the UN Sustainable Development Goals conference on March 19 2016, titled: Commission on the Status of Women: Women's Empowerment/Sustainable Development.

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How do we empower young women in the Third World?

What can we give them to make their worlds and their lives better?

Beauty.

Not Chanel, or Bergorf Goodman's Spring fashion.

Not the paintings of Michel Angelo, or the music of Mozart.

These are certainly beautiful, and young girls from around the world will surely appreciate, or learn to appreciate these beautiful things.

No, this simply means teaching them to understand their own beauty, and the beauty around them:
- of their mothers and grandmothers
- their villages
- their festivals and celebrations

And the beauty in their own lives

You might ask: Don't these young girls already appreciate what is around them?

Not enough.

Chanel and Mozart are the standards by which they judge, or are made to judge their own beauty, even if they don't know who Chanel and Mozart are.

And this may make them feel that what they have is not adequate for their growth and empowerment.

For their appreciation of their own lives and cultures.

A young Ethiopian girl, growing up in her 21st century village, will surely have seen many examples of European beauty. And a clever tailor in her village can reproduce dresses and skirts as close as he can to what those magazine models are wearing.

But, what about the shawl and dress, the netela and kemis, the hand-woven cloths, embroidered with familiar emblems? A dress she knows so well that she can discern to the fold of the netela who is wearing it correction, and who is not? And she can judge who is wearing it with a style superior to the others? The one who looks beautiful?

And it is not only the clothing, its folds, the embroidery that makes this image, but also the dignity of the girl that makes it all stand out.

The beautiful quality of the wearer, whether she is physically beautiful or not, her dignity and demeanor, her modesty and charm, will add more value, more beauty to the dress, as the dress also compliments her beauty
.
So, if a girl is so discerning of her surroundings, it is surely through her surroundings that we can expect her to follow guidance and directions to make her life better.

Her base is her culture and her environment. What she will do is influenced by what is around her. And her successes will reflect this, making her efforts all the more important and productive.

What if someone told her that this is what beauty is, and it is far better for her because she can discover from the colors she chooses for her embroidery and the way she wears her netela, her own culture's beauty, and her own confidence?

Beauty also will make her aspire to bigger and better things in search of that superior color, that fine weave, to make the best dress.

Since this young girl is willing to invest so much time in making her cultural creations and appearances as perfect as possible, we should help her in performing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals in the same spirit.

We should convince her that these goals, when performed with the same care and diligence that she does with these things she cares so much about, will give her a successful life. That she already has the tools.

We can teach her that just as much as she wants to have a beautiful netela and kemis, she can also attain these important sustainable development goals through the same diligence that she has learnt since a child.

Her culture is her empowerment. Beauty is her tool.

Via J. S. Smith
From The Orthospehre

“The primary ground of Faith is a normal and ineradicable feeling . . . that behind the world of phenomenon there is a world of eternal values, attracting us towards itself. These values are manifested . . . through phenomena, through the section of the world which we know, [and they] have been classified as the ideas of Truth, Beauty and Goodness” (2).
From
Faith
By William Ralph Inge
Full text here

"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

Tough Beauty in NYC

"Upper West Side" NYC Nail Polish

This is a post I wrote in 2011:

Tough Beauty in NYC

There is a make-up brand called New York Color (abbreviated simply as NYC which looks like it stand for New York City). Their In a New York Color Minute nail polish - meant to dry in a minute - are the most fun (if that is a word to use for make-up) since they're all named after neighborhoods in Manhattan, which is of course synonymous with NYC.

Imagine wearing the “East Village” turquoise blue, or the “Park Avenue” gray, and living the sophisticated life of a Park Avenue socialite or an East Village artist vicariously through the nail polish.

Toronto Color (abbreviated as TC) just doesn't cut it. Not least because TC doesn't mean anything. During tourist season, T.O. - as in Toronto, Ontario - crops up more as a gimmick than a custom. And even if there were a huge campaign to recognize TO (and a catchy TOC for a make-up line?), what Toronto locations would have the same effect as Prospect Street or simply Uptown?

These are the NYC colors and names that caught my attention:

- Mulberry Street - beige
- Central Park - pale orange/pink
- Wall Street - pale translucent pink
- Prospect Park - glittery pink
- Spring Street - orange
- Times Square - red
- Park Avenue - gray
- Fashion Avenue - fuchsia
- Lincoln Square - lavender
- Uptown - dusty pink

The only problem I have is with the “Wall Street” very pale pink. I would have thought that female Wall Street workers would be more bold.

The NYC make-up line is very cheap. The product labels say: "Designed in New York. Made in the U.S.A. Dist. Coty US LLC: New York, NY 10016." I would think that "Made in the USA" has a lot to do with the low prices.

So much for cheap Chinese products. I would support Donald Trump's presidency purely for his stand against them, and his promise to reduce the Chinese hegemony on our daily products while building up Made in the USA.

Here is Trump talking about China and cheap Chinese products on CNN:

They're making stuff that you see being sold all the time on Fifth Avenue, copying various, you know, whether it's Chanel or whatever it may be, the brands, and just selling it ad - ad nauseum. I mean this is a country that is ripping off the United States like nobody other than OPEC has ever done before.

These are not our friends. These are our enemies. These are not people that understand niceness. And the only thing you can do, Wolf [Blizter], to get their attention is to say either we're not going to trade with you any further or, in the alternative, we're going to tax your products as they come into the United States...

We would - I would lower the taxes for people in this country and corporations in this country and let China and some of the other countries that are ripping us off and making hundreds of billions of dollars a year, let them pay...

They're going to make General Motors build the cars in China. They're not going to let China - they're not going to let General Motors take their cars from this country and sell them in China. They want General Motors to give up all of its intellectual rights and at the same time have Chinese workers build the cars, something which we are not doing, to that extent. If you look at what's happening with China and what they're selling to this country - or take South Korea, with the television sets and everything else, they're making it over there. China wants General Motors to build the cars in China.

At the end, Wolf Blitzer asks Trump if he's going to run for the US presidency. Trump answers that he's "giving it serious thought." Since then, Trump has said that he will officially announce his bid for the presidency on the finale of his show "Celebrity Apprentice," a show which I'm sure taught him some hard lessons about race reality in America, and in the West in general. Trump may seem to have brushed off all those ugly "celebrity" incidents, but as a hardened businessman, I don't for a (New York) minute think he will take any of them lightly.

About

I just updated my "about" section. Well it is just a re-post of an outline of the speech I gave at the Power of Beauty Conference in 2014. All the information (past and present) still stands. The "future" is working its way through!

I'm on Saturday October 25 at the J.C. Williams Center at 10:40am.
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This is one of the first photographs of me after my family and I left Ethiopia.


Champs de Mars, Paris. Six months after we arrived in France.

This picture was taken about a year before the terrible, and still damaging, “Ethiopian Revolution” when Emperor Haile Selassie was unceremoniously removed from his throne, and soon after, a vicious communist regime ran the country for almost two decades.

I am ten in this photograph. My brothers and I were in English-language French schools, since we knew no French having received our primary education in English.

We lived close to the Bastille, in the city-center. Ironically, this is the center where the French Revolution started. But, we were oblivious to these political turmoils. We had turmoils of our own: How to make sense of this new and bewildering country.

We often went to Champs de Mars, the park where the Eiffel Tower is located. We went there to walk in the garden, to ride the various carts and ponies, to eat some ice cream. Pistachio was my favorite.

From this photo, it is clear that I was still in some kind of shock over my new environment. I wonder what it was that had caught my attention. A little girl, who could be a friend? People quarreling in that strange guttural language which I would soon learn to speak? A flower or plant I had never seen before? I don’t remember.

But this expression, and this curiosity, coupled with a deep desire to understand and make sense of my surroundings, has been my way of life ever since.

And Paris became my standard: For language, for food, for art, and for cities.

As I got used to the city, I became a devout museum-goer. Friends and families coming to visit us, would be told “Kidist can take you to the Louvre.”

I got to know Paris so well, and especially the older city-center, that I could get around through its small side-streets and alleyways. I would use the large boulevards for quick maneuvers to specific shops and locations and not for adventurous discoveries.

The juxtaposition of the small and intimate with the large that is so much part of Paris, became my standard for gauging a city. Wherever I went, I would look for the intimate and the grand. “This is how a city should be,” I thought.

It was in Paris that I got to love art, and Western art. Non-Western art was few and far between, and only occasionally would a visiting troupe of dancers or a theater ensemble come from an Asian or an African country. I don’t remember seeing any exhibition of African art. My informal education took took on Western orientation. And in my formal education, I went to school in British boarding schools, in the beautiful county of Kent.

By age eleven, I had acquired a Kodak Instamatic camera. Rather than take endless shots of family, pets (of which we had none anyway in our cramped Paris apartment, although I had two! dogs over my short life in Addis Abeba), or friends, I mostly used my films to take pictures of Paris: The Louvre, The Tuileries Gardens, the Seine, and here the Madeleine.


View from Eglise de la Madeleine [Photo By:KPA]

Here, even then, in my juvenile amateurship, I seemed to know something about perspective. The view is from the steps of the Eglise de la Madeleine, and looks all the way down to Place de la Concorde.

But Paris is a dictator. She tells us exactly what we should be looking at, and what we should be taking. Such a confident city! So sure of her beauty! That was when I began to form my ideas about beauty. I realized, or internalized the idea, that beauty takes time, that it has its standards, and that people love beauty. The same way that they love Paris.


Paris from our balcony [Photo By:KPA]

(I had a Parisian friend in Toronto, who just couldn’t bear to be apart from her beautiful city. She was too polite to say that she couldn't find Toronto beautiful, but she compared everything with Paris).

Fortunately, I was never like her. Firstly, because I had seen other beautiful places, however different they were from this enchanting Paris. My young school years were in England, in the lovely Kent valley, then in the port city of Dover, with the spectacular White Cliffs, and the volatile and at times dramatic English Channel.


Cliffs of Dover and the English Channel [Photo By:KPA]

I saw that there was beauty in other environments. That nature could be beautiful also, and leave us as enchanted as cities like Paris.

By about fifteen, while in Dover, I had graduated to a better camera, where I could focus, adjust the focal point and shutter speed. The cliffs deserved better! And I joined a photography group at school. My first “real” photograph, which I shot, processed and printed myself, is of the doorway of the school’s library. This was probably my first real attempt at making art.


Dover College Library [Photo By:KPA]

While taking this photograph, I deliberated whether the door should be closed or open, and decided on “half open.” The the next pressing issue was from which angle to take the shot: From the side, from the front, from afar, from nearby. I didn’t realize then that this was all about “composition.” Then finally once taken, the photograph had to be developed, and the decision became how I would print the picture. Should I darken the door? Should I crop the top? Is there enough contrast in the bricks?

It became clear to me that image making is a long process, with many points of deliberation. So the image being taken better be worth all that trouble!

While in England, although I never won an art prize, or even streamlined into the arts (I entered the sciences), I still participated in the school drama and music activities, all separate from the academics. I was in school choirs all through my high school years, and I won the music prize and received the complete Mozart’s piano sonatas, the musical notes, that is, not the records! I studied and performed at least one of them. And I received the poetry prize one year, and through the gift card I received, I chose a book on the impressionist painters which had so impressed me while I acquired my informal art education in Paris. I even won third place in a ballet competition, for which I received a tiny, but cherished book on the fundamentals of ballet.


Dover College School Choir

Then, I went to America to continue my post-high school studies. I went first to a college in the mountains of the Susquehanna valley. There I was surrounded by nature, but different from the wild English waters. This time, it was undulating valleys and mountains, which became my focus, and no longer the city (for now, at least). I became an expert bike rider, and would travel through the farms in the quiet country roads, surrounded by those mountains.


Bike ride through the Pennsylvania countryside


Susquehanna Valley [Photo By:KPA]


University of Connecticut, with the Nutritional Sciences building in the background

Then I discovered another city, New York City. Its size, and lack of the intimacies that Paris offered struck me at first. But I loved the grand avenues, those infinite perspectives both horizontal and vertical, the friendly, energetic people, the largeness of everything, including the museums, which I proceeded to visit. This was another confident city, confident in its unique identity. Paris was never on the lips of New Yorkers. Who wants Paris when you’ve got New York?

And I saw the charms of this city. Despite its largeness, it is very much a city of neighborhoods, offering intimacy in its coffee houses, the side streets, uptown or downtown, east or west. There were neighborhoods, where each had its own character. Looking up at skyscrapers, I noticed the care and attention they got from their architects and designers, despite the chances that few people will look up to notice the details.


Details of skyscrapers [Photo By:KPA]


Balloons on Wall Street, 4th of July celebration [Photo By:KPA]


Riverside Drive [Photo By:KPA]

I began to understand that beauty, and beautiful objects, had to exist whether they were noticed or not, since they add to the overall dignity and aesthetics of their surroundings. People can feel beauty.


Northern Spirit: Toronto's Harbourfront [Photo By:KPA]

When I arrived in Toronto, during the vicious period of the Marxist government in Ethiopia, I abandoned my “formal” education and training of the sciences, and took on, finally, my formal study of the arts, first by enrolling in the film and photography program in Ryerson University, in Toronto, and then taking several years worth of drawing, painting classes at part-time, night courses, until I finally landed on textile design. But I was well prepared for this, since all through my formal education of the sciences, I had been informally studying art: Taking courses in photography, dance, theater, and eventually painting and drawing.

But I never graduated from my film/photography (BS) program, leaving when I had one year to go. Once again, I took the informal route. If I had enrolled in drawing or painting courses in a university, I would have left with little skill or capability, given the anti-art, anti-technique mood that had started to permeate through colleges and universities and the "post-modern" rhetoric. Instead went to "night school." My night school teachers were adept artists, but the modern world of non-art had rejected them and their talents, leaving them to scrape along in a fiercely negative climate. One may say that this has always been the lot of artists, but I think that our era is especially vicious and destructive.

I thought I had finally landed in my field in textile design, and I thought I had nothing more to worry about, other than to learn this craft, and produce my creations.

But no. One of the biggest challenges I faced, and which I naively and bravely fought off, was people’s insistence, or assumptions, that I would do something “Ethiopian.” It was too long for me to explain that I had no real, physical or even emotional attachment to the country. But, that shouldn’t matter in Toronto, the epicenter of multiculturalism! Indian and Chinese students, who were born in Canada, who spoke fluent, accent-less English, who were wearing the latest MTV costumes, were churning out their “Indian/Chinese/Vietnamese/etc.” heritage pieces, and gaining high praise.

Finally, as I had always done, I retreated into myself, left behind teachers' advice to “do something Ethiopian.” I set up a mini-studio in my mini-apartment and developed my grand ideas.

I produced works on the landmarks around me: the Allan Gardens Conservatory; the triangular shapes of the Toronto gables; the reeds alongside Lake Huron; small spring flowers; large lilac bushes. And finally, the national flower of Canada, the trillium.


Toronto Gables [Design By:KPA]


Allan Gardens Conservatory [Design By:KPA]


Lake Huron [Design By:KPA]


Lilac Bush [Design By:KPA]


Trillium and Queen Anne's Lace [Design By:KPA]

But it wasn’t just a matter of creating these pieces. I spent hours bent over design and drawing books to teach me how to reproduce these images through ink, pencil and paint, which the clever but clearly unskilled textile design teacher wasn’t able to do.

And it was while I was doing the Trillium piece that many things came together.

Art needs to be local. We need to “see” what we’re representing. That art needs to have an aesthetic dimension - it has to be beautiful. And that there is a spiritual dimension to art, not always, not aggressively, but still subtly and present.

I realized that modern artists were discarding these elements, and creating works that people couldn’t identify with. That their purpose was not to create works with beauty, rooted in reality and with a transcendent element, but to recreate their own godless transcendence, their own reality, and they were discarding beauty as something frivolous which distracted from their own serious messages, usually of doom and gloom. The less talented of them went on with post-modernism, which was a distorted assemblage of objects to produce their “ironic” commentary on the world around them.

And multicultural artists were throwing away the reality that surrounds us, in Canada, and were bring in their own reality for their far-away lands, imbued with strange and alien aesthetics.

When I put these two together, multiculturalism and modernism/post-modernism, I realized what was at stake here was the art I know, which I have studied and participated in from a very young age ever since my fateful journey to that most beautiful city. It was Western art that was at stake, made vulnerable by these aggressive battle cries: “Hey, hey, Ho ho, Western Culture’s Gotta go.”

I didn't clearly articulate this then, but soon after, I started a blog called Camera Lucida working on the words “Chamber of Light” where (rather immodestly!) I thought I could shed some light on the world around me. And a few years later, after many postings, altercations with readers, and a maturity of my thoughts, I started my blog (about a year and a half ago) Reclaiming Beauty.

I started the blog on January 1, 2013 (a new blog for a new year), and on February 5, 2013 I wrote at Camera Lucida:

I have started a new project. It is bigger than a website.

I hope to reclaim beauty from the avant-garde, nihilistic environment that surrounds us. Rather than fight it, I thought I would start a site that would be study of beauty, a critique our our current beautiless, or anti-beauty, environment, as well as a place to give and receive practical guides and accounts on how to acquire and reclaim the beautiful. I hope to have a list of regular contributors to the site, who will eventually become a part of a bigger movement.

And on September 29, 2013, I posted at my Reclaiming Beauty blog my proposal for a book, but with a bigger vision of starting a Beauty Movement:

My book Reclaiming Beauty aims to document the contribution that beauty has made toward our Western civilization, from the earliest records of God’s love of beauty, to a young child who sees beauty almost as soon as he is born. Our civilization thrived, prospered and matured because of beauty. Our great artists, architects, writers, philosophers and scientists have always referred to beauty with awe and wonder. It is in the modern era that beauty began to be undermined and eventually neglected by artists and other intellectual leaders.

Reclaiming Beauty will show that the abandonment of beauty leads to the death of culture, and eventually society. Modern man’s neglect of beauty has initiated the cult of ugliness, leaving us with bleakness and nihilism.

But, people want beauty. And they will surround themselves with some kind of aesthetic quality. Still, beauty is the business of the knowledgeable. The man on the street may be able to recognize beauty, but he would not be able to explain why it is beautiful. That is the task of the experts.

With Reclaiming Beauty, I aim to present my ideas, observations and analyses on beauty, and to provide a guide for recommendations on how to remove oneself from the nefarious influences of our beauty-rejecting world. This way, we can build a parallel world which will eventually form a growing movement of beauty-reclaiming individuals, who can start to shape a world where beauty is not minimized and rejected.

Reclaiming Beauty will be the first book on beauty to make a comprehensive, historical, cultural and societal review of beauty. It will describe the moment (or moments) when beauty was not only undermined, but eventually abandoned, as a paradigm of civilized life. Rather than attributing beauty to a Godly goodness, philosophers, writers and artists began to view beauty as their enemy, and as their nemesis. They saw God as a judge who would not let them do as they wished. In order to pursue the image of beauty they desired, they began to look elsewhere. They began to abandon God, and by abandoning God, they began to change their world, filling it with horror and ugliness.

I maintain that this was not their objective, which was merely to look for a different perspective on aesthetics. This realization may have come too late, and too weakly, from the cultural leaders, but ordinary people, who are most affected by these changes in worldview, are already incurring changes. But they cannot make useful inferences, and hence necessary changes. They still need an elite to help them materialize their desires and observations.

A new elite that is pro-beauty needs to take the cultural reins, to guide and return our world back to its awe and wonder of beauty. To this end, Reclaiming Beauty will add an element which no other book on beauty has attempted: guidelines on how to renounce this world of anti-beauty, and how to progressively bring beauty back into our culture.

The book will be a manifesto for concrete references to these basic ideas. Along with the book, a website will be developed that will be an interactive continuation of the book. On the website, members can post their original articles, shorter commentaries, articles and excerpts from other authors, and encourage feedback and comments from other members. At some point, this group can develop into a more formal society, which can meet in a physical locations a few times a year, building beauty societies, whose purpose would be to develop ideas and strategies for bringing beauty back into our culture.

Part of the book will revised versions of what I've been developing over a number of years in my blog posts at Camera Lucida, Reclaiming Beauty and Our Changing Landscape, and from my full-length articles from Kidist P. Asrat Articles.

All images that head the chapters will be from my own collection of photographs and designs. Some of these images can be found at Kidist P. Asrat Photographs and Well-Patterned. Others I will choose from my collection of photographs, mostly in negatives and prints. Others I will take as the project progresses.

Cloisters, New York [Photo By: KPA]


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[Presentation at The Power of Beauty Conference, Saturday, October 25, 2014.]


Addendum:

The website has been running for several years now but the practical elements are still in the works. With my years of experience, numerous travels, hundreds of commentary and observations, Reclaiming Beauty is still my fundamental idea behind everything that I do.

Colors of Canada

Around here, there's no such thing as an accidental tourist. Newfoundland and Labrador is not Disneyland. It's a harsh and beautifully rugged destination with 29,000 kilometres of pristine coastline, perched at the most easterly edge of North America. Our landscape is full of a strange and terrible beauty. Our towns and cities, soaked in centuries of colourful history and culture, and we have perhaps the most genuine, creative and warmly funny people you're ever likely to meet. [Source]

The Power of Woman Saving the World in Haute Couture

Nicole Kidman is coiffed and made up by a backstage team of who knows how many so that she can come out onto the Golden Globes stage looking like this.



So tells us this Nicole fan, inadvertently hitting the mark with Kidman's fairy dress. The Time's Out black has channeled darker forces where women stand with uplifted fists in flimsy glittering dresses to attack men and society. It only takes one (male) engineer to turn off those lights at the Globes and render Kidman aflutter. Imagine going to war dressed like a fairy!

The Australian actress gave us a sneak preview of Clare Waight Keller’s debut Spring 2018 Haute Couture collection for Givenchy, wearing a bewitching black gown.

"Wow. The Power of women! Huh!" Nicole mumbles as she accepts her globe

The dress is a Givenchy custom made gown whose price tag is off the charts. No ordinary "Time Outer" could ever in her dreams afford wear a dress like this.

And her accessories are:

Fred Leighton [jewelry], including Art Deco diamond earrings set in platinum; an Art Deco emerald, diamond and black enamel bangle; a 6.10-carat Art Deco old European diamond ring set in platinum; and an Art Deco diamond and platinum ring.

It's Time's Out with a six-figure wardrobe.

Here's a rundown of her hair helmet and makeup war paint:



- Her hair is that now popular manufactured disheveled look promoted by couture coiffeurs
- Cream or moisturizer on the skin
- Primer for her face to "prime" or prepare the skin and allow makeup to stay longer on the skin so it doesn't run in the heat of the spotlight
- Concealer to cover any dark shadows around her eyes or dark spots on her skin
- A foundation base to even out any flaws on her skin
- A highlighter cream to add glow to her face, especially around the cheekbones
- A rose-colored rouge to give her cheeks a youthful blush
- Eye-shadow primer to prepare the lids and lets the shadow stay longer on the lids so it doesn't run in the heat of the spotlight
- Baby blue eye-shadow to bring out her eyes
- Silver glitter eye-shadow on the corners and the top of her lids to make her eyes sparkle
- A pre-mascara treatment for her lashes to protect them from the mascara
- Black waterproof mascara
- False eyelashes, or lash extensions
- Lip "plumper" cream for fuller lips
- "Primer" for the lips to prevent lipstick (or lip gloss) from "flaring out" or from fading
- A lip liner slightly darker than the lipstick or gloss to contour the lips again to prevent lipstick (or lip gloss) from "flaring out"
- Lipstick sightly lighter that the liner applied to the lips using a lip brush
- Lip gloss slightly paler than the Lipstick to add a shimmer to her lips
- And the whole face is sprayed with a makeup setting spray

That's it!

But nothing must be overdone. We don't want her looking like those old, spent Hollywood under cakes makeup, who get called "legends" before they're even dead.

And of course the mandatory black nail polish, with at least a layer of top coating plus two layers of polish to make sure the goth polish stays on and no nail chips off.

Our fashion commentators elaborate:

The dress blackout thing worked out really well for Miss Nicole – at least, from our perspective, since we’ve spent years telling her (i.e., impotently ranting at her image) that she’s one of those rare birds who really come to life when she’s wearing black. Give her a little shimmer and sparkle, a little ruffle and romanticism; render it all in Disney-Witch Black and she never fails to look stunning. We understand why she wouldn’t want to step out in black every time she steps out, but we sure wish she’d stay in the darker end of the spectrum when making her public style choices, instead of defaulting to the washed-out, tea-stained romantic looks she tends to favor more often than not.

At first, we found all the foofaraw on the back a little distracting and silly, but once we decided they were fairy wings, we decided we loved it. Sparkle on, Goth Tinker Bell.

I don't think it is any accident that fairy dust and black goth are the theme this year as these women declared that black was their dress code.

There is a nefarious force creeping its way upward into our world ready, to capture and manipulate any anomalies. Fake News rapes and Woman Power are the perfect ruse to destabilize our world and Godly order to let the serpent in.

The globe has what is actually a reel of film looping around it in a sinewy curve. It is a snake with its head peering at the top. If we wait any longer, we might see its tongue flickering at us. Those Eves in black have already fallen for its charm.



And here is the the perfect man for the Modern Abused Hollywood Warrior Woman:


Keith Urban

Welfare Advocate Sarah Jessica Parker: The Hollywood Limousine LiberalArticle Submission and Rejection

Below is an article I submitted to the on-line journal The Imaginative Conservative. It was rejected with the following email from Alyssa Barnes*, managing editor at the journal:

Dear Ms. Asrat:

Thank you for your interest in The Imaginative Conservative; I hope you are well.

Thank you also for your proposal. I regret to inform you that your essay does not meet our current editorial needs.

Sincerely,
Alyssa

First: What is this "conservative" trend (for decades now) with formal letters being signed off with a first name? Odd and deceptively familiar. Deceptively familiar because it looks like I am a "friend" of sorts, whereas I am interacting with Ms. Barnes on a purely professional level.

Second: What does "does not meet our current editorial needs" mean? Do they have too many submissions to consider? Do they not like the topic? Do they not like the religious references?

Conservatives have always been accused of being too stuffy and out of touch with reality. Then suddenly Trump pops up and they are shocked.

A professional interaction does not inhibit (or forbid) one to be out with the common man. And being out with the common man doesn't mean one doesn't treat him with some level of formality.

Does she think that I am being blasphemous in associating Mary Magdalene's love of Christ with Sarah Jessica Parker's profane use of perfume?

Still, stuffiness aside, conservatives, and those who call themselves religious conservatives, keep missing the boat with their grandiose elitism and consequently their inability to read the common man.

They're as bad in their intellectual ivory tower as is SJP in her Hollywood ivory tower.

I should have known better, as I wrote a critique of a post at the IC just a few weeks ago: Mo and Mao: How the East Might Revive the West’s Tradition. Of course, my argument is that it is the other way around.

Probably this post would have made Ms. Barnes' cut. Lainey Gossip is the website of a second-rate Canadian media woman Elaine Lui who makes her income on gossip. She has a degree in French (it must be all those naughty "frrrench" who corrupted her). I doubt it. She seems to link her "harsh" take on life to her Chinese background, Tiger Mom style.

“My grandmother ran a Mahjong den in Hong Kong. My mother played, that’s what they do - they play Mahjong and they talk sh-t, all day and all night. They smoke cigarettes and send out for food and talk sh-t some more. That was how they communicated. Gossip is communication. That's how I was indoctrinated.”

My voice is snarky, bitchy but also deeply, deeply gossipy."

She got her husband to quit his job at a media company to join in with her "bitching" as "the business side" of her enterprise.

She gossips, but so what? How bland and boring.

There's no bigger story, no message, no moral. Just mean-spirited humorless empty gossip.

These days Lainey's dishes have has gone "lo-cal." Perhaps it is all those celebrity endorsements that have told her to cool it down a little. She also smiles a lot on her tv show The Social , but then she can't help herself with her periodic "b..." outbursts.

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Here is the short bio at The Imaginative Conservative on Ms. Barnes:

Alyssa Barnes is the Managing Editor of The Imaginative Conservative. She is a graduate student in Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy and Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution. Miss Barnes holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Political Science, and Classical Languages from the University of St. Thomas' Honors Program in Houston, TX. She has also been an Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Fellow.

Barnes' Linkedin page shows that she has worked directly in churches and religious institutions, and has attended Catholic schools and universities.

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Article submitted to The Imaginative Conservative:

Welfare Advocate Sarah Jessica Parer: The Hollywood Limousine Liberal

John 12:3-8

Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.
Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him,
Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?
This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.

Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.
For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.

Luke 6:20-21

Then he looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Left: Sarah Jessica Parker promoting her perfume Lovely in 2005
Right: Existential drama at the 2017 Golden Globes, soon after the election of Donald Trump

Mary Magdalene anointed Jesus' feet with expensive perfume to worship him and adore him. Sarah Jessica Parker brands her perfumes as part of her name and uses this fame to promote government dependency by America's poor.

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Sarah Jessica Parker used to look pretty, and even lovey at times. Above left is a photo of her in 2005 with her perfume "Lovely," and then in the photo on the right at the 2017 Global Globe awards. By 2017, she is looking up as though searching for some vampire-god's guidance with her blackened nails and elongated claws for eyelashes. Why the spiritual drama?

Well the immediate answer is that she is "shocked" by the election of Donald Trump. Here is her emotional rollercoaster of a reaction over Trump's election:

"I am shocked by what has happened. I’m devastated by…I’m sad..."

That partly explains her appearance: sad/shocked/devastated and trying to put on a happy face.



Parker is wearing a wedding gown for the Global Globe 's, with no hint or irony. Except that this is a mangled and ripped gown touted as the latest design by divorced wedding gown designer Vera Wang.


Vera Wang: Fall 2017 - Dracula's Bride

She is wearing her SJP Shoe Collection heels, having moved up the ranks to a shoe designer. They are a rather tame "spaghetti strap" heels, carefully hidden by the trailing cut-out gown, since they don't fit the vampire theme of the dress. Parker has always been about pretty, which is why she cannot display her black nails and grey eyeshadow with a genuinely happy face.




SJP Shoe Collection: Westminster Metallic Sandals



A rich Hollywoodian, Parker hypocritically "supports" the poor as she lives a lavish, luxurious and indulgent life. Which is part of the "long answer" to her existential malaise. She is rich, wealthy actually, but she wants to (pretend to) be one with the poor. Since she has no religion, or rather since she has abandoned God, even the God of her Jewish ancestors, she has no idea of the meaning of Jesus' words (and even if she did know them, she wouldn't know how to relate to them):

"For you have the poor always with you; but me you have not always. [Matthew 26:11].

Her constant scurrying around, her beaten-down look, her idols, including President Obama, all attest to her deep desire to be this "good person." She has made her charitable missions her religion. But like true hypocrites, such charity, especially when in the presence of the President, come with designer shoes and gourmet-catered dinners, all carefully orchestrated to be hidden away to avoid ostentatious exhibition. After all who questions a little glitter on slippers and a plate of

"Chicken with a mustard sauce, diced tomatoes and a lot of relishes on the side..." dishes Aretha Franklin, one of the honorary guests, to gossip media waiting outside the townhouse "Very tasty," she added.

She has some idea of how goodness from others (strangers and friends) can make life better. She talks about her life in poverty as a young child with her family being on welfare for much of her childhood, and having to get "welfare tickets" for free lunches while in the third grade in a Cincinnati school. More information on her family background shows that her mother divorced Parker's father when she was only a year old and remarried a year later to a Paul Forste. Parker's mother seemed attracted to men with unstable financial prospects. Stephen Parker was an "aspiring writer." Paul Forste was a "theater student" who also worked as a truck driver when he came to live with Parker's mother, bringing with him his five children making the household child count to eight. The family lived off the "theatre student" Forste's truck driver salary and what Barbara brought in on her teacher's wages.

It is never pleasant to criticize someone's poverty. But how much of her mother's bad choices led to Parker's difficult childhood? Still, her enterprising mother managed to find some way out of this poverty by enrolling her children in various entertainment productions. By 1977, at age eleven, Parker had a role in the Broadway musical Annie. By 1979, she had nabbed the lead role. And the rest is history (including briefly dating John F. Kennedy)

Parker is now an advocate for welfare, albeit indirectly, through her vigorous support of Obama and all his failed government policies. She is the epitome of a limousine liberal but one who should know better thus making her a hypocrite. It wasn't the free lunches that catapulted her into the ranks of Hollywood's elite, but her mother's savviness and a little of her own talent.

She now keeps making her films, and concocts more perfumes (she's got about four by now although none as good as the first one). I used to be a fan of hers in her Sex and the City days, which, to its credit, was uncomfortably inhibited with its "sex" part. Kim Cattrall, the sexpot in the series, always performed her scenes as though she were in a rush for them to be over. The prudence was possibly due to Parker (she is a prude).

Her latest media promotion for which she attended the Golden Globes is for a television series called Divorce. Her painful experience with her parents' split when she was a young child seems to have made her wiser, making sure her marriage stays intact. She has been married to Matthew Broderick for twenty-five years now.

“What I do on screen doesn't cross the placenta, do you know what I mean?”
[Parker in an interview with People Magazine in New York at the HBO premier series for Divorce]

But Parker does not really believe in marriage. At least the formal traditional kind.

That is the hypocrisy of the contemporary liberal elite. They make sure their own heterosexual marriages stay intact, and a surprising number are intact albeit many are in long-standing second marriages, or married after several years of "cohabitation." Look at for example Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Meryl Streep and her non-movie star husband (she's the smartest of them all), Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. But everyone else's marriage is up for grabs of freedom: freedom to leave a husband in pursuit of a career; freedom to choose the gender (or non-gender) of one's "partner;" freedom to have children; freedom to adopt a Chinese orphan. Parker sees herself as the spokeswomyn for the common womyn who reconfigures life to suit her agenda and ideology. Parker hasn't gained an iota of wisdom, or empathy, from the difficult, and sad, life of her own parents' failed marriages.

Parker never adopted a Chinese infant, as is the trend amongst these multimillionaire actresses. She has one son with her husband, whom she bore late in life (at 35). And she couldn't leave it at that. Instead, her youngest two children are through a surrogate. Imagine telling your children they have another "mother" out there somewhere.

The "Lovely" woman has become the epitome of the narcissistic Hollywood actress.


40K/plate fundraiser for Obama and his wife in 2012

Parker held a fundraiser for Obama in 2012 in her multi-million Greenwich Village brownstone home and introduced him and his wife thus:

"It is a great, a rare, a very special and I’m assuming a singular treat to welcome you into our home – our radiant, our extraordinary first lady...[and the] beloved current and future president of the United States.”

She is now mum about her retiring president, whom she helped to re-elect for a second term. And the state of affairs in which he left America after his presidency does not make a good pitch for a sitcom.


Mary Magdalene Anointing Jesus' Feet
Stained glass window
Meyer's Studios, Munich 1899
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*Alyssa Barnes


Video screen shot of interview of Alyssa Barnes on her transfer to
the University of Saint Thomas. Notice the tight jean pants,
the tight short-sleeved t-shirt, the string bracelet,
the heavy make up on her eyes.
I wouldn't blame her rather than the authorities who allow such school "uniform."

Barnes wrote an article titled: Top Ten Ways to be a Man, with the preface to the article:

In an age in which tweed jackets have been replaced by sweatshirts, pants have holes and shoes lack laces, and the “un-done” look is considered attractive, maybe we need to reconsider our codes of conduct, especially when it comes to the art of being a man. Thus, the question is begged: What makes a man?

Video: Why I transferred to the University of Saint Thomas

Here is the Linkedin profile photo of Barnes which implies that it is a much more recent one.



Although Barnes looks much prettier in her the profile, she is wearing a glaring red lipstick and has clearly had her hair tinted. She looks like a natural red-head, and yet added these unnatural and unaesthetic highlights to her otherwise pretty hair. And her eye makeup is as heavy as her lipstick.

Timothy 2:9

In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array

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The Importance of Culture in Achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

How do We Empower Young Women in the Third World?
Presentation by: Kidist Paulos Asrat
At: The Importance of Culture to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
A United Nations Workshop
New York, March 19, 2016

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What can we give them to make their worlds and their lives better?

Beauty.

Not Chanel or Bergdorf Goodman's Spring Fashion.

Not the paintings of Michel Angelo, or the music of Mozart.

These are certainly beautiful, and young girls from around the world will surely appreciate, or learn to appreciate these beautiful things.

No, this simply means teaching them to understand their own beauty, and the beauty around them:
- of their mothers and grandmothers
- their villages
- their festivals and celebrations

And the beauty in their own lives

You might ask: Don't these young girls already appreciate what is around them?

Not enough.

Chanel and Mozart are the standards by which they judge, or are made to judge their own beauty, even if they don't know who Chanel and Mozart are.

And this may make them feel that what they have is not adequate for their growth and empowerment.

For their appreciation of their own lives and cultures.

A young Ethiopian girl, growing up in her 21st century village, will surely have seen many examples of European beauty. And a clever tailor in her village can reproduce dresses and skirts as close as he can to what those magazine models are wearing.

But, what about the shawl and dress, the netela and kemis, the hand-woven cloths, embroidered with familiar emblems? A dress she knows so well that she can discern to the fold of the netela who is wearing it correction, and who is not? And she can judge who is wearing it with a style superior to the others? The one who looks beautiful?

And it is not only the clothing, its folds, the embroidery that makes this image, but also the dignity of the girl that makes it all stand out.

The beautiful quality of the wearer, whether she is physically beautiful or not, her dignity and demeanor, her modesty and charm, will add more value, more beauty to the dress, as the dress also compliments her beauty
.
So, if a girl is so discerning of her surroundings, it is surely through her surroundings that we can expect her to follow guidance and directions to make her life better.

Her base is her culture and her environment. What she will do is influenced by what is around her. And her successes will reflect this, making her efforts all the more important and productive.

What if someone told her that this is what beauty is, and it is far better for her because she can discover from the colors she chooses for her embroidery and the way she wears her netela, her own culture's beauty, and her own confidence?

Beauty also will make her aspire to bigger and better things in search of that superior color, that fine weave, to make the best dress.

Since this young girl is willing to invest so much time in making her cultural creations and appearances as perfect as possible, we should help her in performing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals in the same spirit.

We should convince her that these goals, when performed with the same care and diligence that she does with these things she cares so much about, will give her a successful life. That she already has the tools.

We can teach her that just as much as she wants to have a beautiful netela and kemis, she can also attain these important sustainable development goals through the same diligence that she has learnt since a child.

Her culture is her empowerment. Beauty is her tool.

She Was So American

I took these photographs below of posters outside at the Bay's department store's "women's clothing" floor. I'm not sure why they have it there, and the sales women were unable to tell me. But I was struck by the femininity and beauty of the dresses, which were worn by:

That woman [who is] always seen lunching at smart restaurants - charmingly aware of the interests she excites. She's the woman who has traveled, whose leisure allows her wide cultural activities. She throws her time and energy into drives for her favorite charities, she encourages the opera, the ballet, the symphony, art exhibits. She's the influence behind the fashions that have carried our designers' names around the world. She's so American.[Text from the bottom of one of the posters]

I looked around the floor, which was the "fashion" section of the store. But there is nothing comparable to these clothes! There are a couple of nice red winter coats, but the dresses that may compare are glittery and shiny, and only good for a holiday outfit, and now for New Years (if anyone will wear them, and I doubt there will be many who will).

What a long way we've regressed with femininity and beauty!









Text at the bottom of the poster:

That woman always seen lunching at smart restaurants - charmingly aware of the interests she excites. She's the woman who has traveled, whose leisure allows her wide cultural activities. She throws her time and energy into drives for her favorite charities, she encourages the opera, the ballet, the symphony, art exhibits. She's the influence behind the fashions that have carried our designers' names around the world. She's so American.

[Photos By: KPA]
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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