The Perfect Coordination: Urban Decay Takes on Decadent Art

Vice-loving AND Cruelty-Free, Urban Decay's new store in Ontario

A cosmetics store called Urban Decay opened up recently at the slickly renovated Square One mall. I walked in yesterday to see all the decay. I wasn't disappointed.

Urban Decay has teamed up with "artist" Jean-Michel Basquiat to make the perfect co-ordination of imagery and makeup. In our era of anti-beauty, which is now reaching a nefarious satanic state (and where else does deliberate embrace of ugliness take us), Jean-Michel Basquiat's legacy becomes the perfect "artistic" expression for contemporary fashion and "beauty."

Here is what Urban Decay says about the UD/J-MB link-up:

We’ve been fans of Basquiat’s art since before the early days of UD; so when his estate approached us about a collaboration based on his artwork, we couldn’t wait to start creating. From the colors and shade names to the packaging, EVERYTHING in this collection evolved from Basquiat’s art. Like Urban Decay, Basquiat was an outsider who challenged the status quo and used color in nontraditional ways. From his informal graffiti work and the way he mixed mediums and colors to the way he spoke out against social injustice

Urban Decay Jean-Michel Basquiat Tenant Eyeshadow Palette: $39
Shades included:
- Studio (pale pink matte)
- 1960 (bright pink matte)
- Neo (rich aubergine w/micro-shimmer)
- Les (charcoal-black matte-satin)
- Graffiti (deep metallic green)
- Exu (bright green shimmer)
- Boom (bright teal matte)
- Untitled (rich deep blue matte)

OK, the "untitled" is funny.


Jean-Michel Basquiat
Self-Portrait, 1982
Media: acrylic, crayon
Dimensions: 239 x 193 cm
Private Collection
© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquia

Art critics dare not expose the emperor as having on no clothes because they would be exposed as having on no clothes either. So we get endless repetitive art-talk admiration for truly ugly horrors.

And it takes someone who has no stake in the postmodern art horrors either financially or intellectually to expose the nakedness of these. One such is a blogger, short-lived and anonymous (probably has a real job to protect, where he doesn't earn even a tiny percentage required to pay for these multi-million dollar doodles) whose post I've posted in full below.

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I don't get it: Jean-Michel Basquiat
By: Daily soup
June 4, 2011
[make sure to read the comments]

I once dated this fine art major from the academy of art college. she was a bit introverted at times but tended to emerge from that shell with a bat outta hell fury when angered or passionate about an issue. So her and I are on the haight and we go into this poster shop. she stops and and asked me; do you know jean michel basquiat? asking me in a tone that seemed to indicate irrevocable damage to our relationship was at hand should I answer poorly. not wanting to be erroneously outed as a liar, I simply said no, I am not familiar with jean michel basquiat. surprised, she looked at me as if I had looked in the mirror and said: you know what? I hate you niggaz. In an ever so sexy low tone, she explained a short history of this painter and then she gentility grabbed my wrist and led me to a stack of posters.

I was expecting to see some undiscover 20th century new york answer to leonardo du vinci or vincent van gogh.Instead I get these.....





If star wars came out in Shakespeare's day, I would imagine this is what the darth vader of his day would look like.

AFTER MY EXPOSURE to these...umm...yeah...I asked her, oh wow! was he insane? At this point, my girl was clearly offended. she went on into a whole discussion about not "getting it" and how I shouldn't be in art school because I lack the vision to see beauty in the abstract and so forth and so on.

I retorted by asking her has she ever seen the paintings they found made from serial killers and mass murderers? well these would definitely fit in the lot for sure.This led to an intense yet low decibel trade off of passive aggressive quips.I swear even arguing with that girl was a strange venture down the rabbit hole.
A day later, I went back to that store alone and for almost 15 minutes (and after fighting off the strong compulsion to make the sign of the cross numerous times before those painting) I went from a strong silent and contemplative stone pillar stance to a loud and eruptive THIS SHIT IS GARBAGE! WHAT THE FUCK IS THE DEAL WITH THIS OVERRATED SPLASH OF SHOCKING AND DISTURBING VOMIT OF QUASI ARTISTIC INSANITY WORTH ONLY THE CANVAS IT WAS PAINTED ON!?

Surprised by that flood of seldom used vernacular and vocabulary, I stopped myself. Then was asked to leave the store, NO SWEAT, I've BEEN KICKED OUT OF BETTER PLACES THAN THIS. I guess word got back to my girlfriend because she broke up with me that evening.

Look, I'm not ashamed of the fact that I could stand in an art gallery scratching in perplexity. Wondering what one sees in abstract expressionism. I'm not insecure about my uncultured and unrefined nature. I'm proud of my blue collar, sports bar self.

yes I do miss the GF from time to time, although we aren't talking, we do past each other and say hi. But I still get pretty peeved when I realize that our relationship came to an end over JMB. It couldn't be a micheal angelo?

I guess our relationship was less fine art and more chicken scratch.

Tieless Trudeau

The Prime minster of Canada comes out to press conferences looking like this:



He's not only tieless but has also ditched his jacket.

But even what passes for ties now is a thin black strip, usually leather. Gone are the days of paisley designs with matching pocket squares. Men have become as emasculated as their fashion shows us.

This past section was written BEFORE I looked up "Men's Tie Fashions" in google (without quotes).

And I found this on GQ's April 3, 2017 issue:

Notice along with the Thin Black Tie ^TM, the top button is unbuttoned.

It was one of the images for the article: Justin Trudeau Just Nailed This Ryan Gosling-Approved Style Move

The article is written by an adolescent thirtsomething, who fawns over celebrity men (including Canada's celebrity Prime Minister), and who has a degree in Fine Arts from Boston. I guess looking at pretty men now counts for an artist's task.


Men in the 1950s
Gregory Peck advertising for Eagles Clothes

For more on men and ties, read The Necktie by The Thinking Housewife.

"I am grateful to live in a country where diversity is welcomed and celebrated." But...

Amira Elghawaby
Journalist and human rights advocate in Ottawa

"I am grateful to live in a country where diversity is welcomed and celebrated. Canada is a country which provides me with opportunities to be an active and caring citizen, open to others, and committed to social justice, fairness and human rights for all."

Above is a quote from "Egyptian-Canadian" Amira Elghawaby, who is presenting her case alongside the Multicultural Act of Canada, as an unapologetic, non-multicultural, non-hyphenated Muslim.

But she is being authentic. Non-Multiculturalism now applies to Hindus, Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and every single ethnic and racial group, except for Whites.

The future is with "Non-Multiculturalism." Groups will be authentic to their races and ethnicities. But if Whites do so it will be called "racism."

Elghawaby is only following the cultural trend, and her "true self."

She is telling the truth.

That Ye May Be Perfect

[Photo By: KPA]

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James 1: 1-4
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting.
My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations;
Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.
But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

The Lesbian Vs. God and Other Stories

Hernandez (middle) performing Future Folk with her
Sulong Theatre Collective, which is a play based on:
"The experiences of Filipino women who come to Canada to work as nannies.
They send their wages back home, and hope after 24 months of employment
to become citizens and bring their own families to Canada."[Source]

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

Our Neighborhood Filipina Story Teller portrayed in my recent post Catch Them When They're Young has quite a resume writing for "minors":

Kilt Pins

In a Catholic high school in Scarborough, Ontario, amidst low-income housing, difficult race relations, and poverty, a young woman struggles to find her sexual identity. In this sincere portrayal of high-school kids pitting the voice of God and thousands of years of scripture against the voice of their own bodies, Kilt Pins cheekily asks “Is your kilt pin up or down?”

Scarborough

Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education.

And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father’s mental illness; Sylvie, Bing’s best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.

And more on Arsenal Press

Arsenal Pulp Press is a book publisher in Vancouver, Canada with over 300 titles currently in print, which include literary fiction and nonfiction; cultural and gender studies; LGBT and multicultural literature; cookbooks, including vegan; alternative crafts; graphic novels; visual arts; and books in translation. We are interested in literature that engages and challenges readers, and which asks probing questions about the world around us.

Of course these welfare artists insist that they get their financial sources from tax payers money courtesy of the Canadian Government (don't let the meek word "suggests" deceive you):

Catherine Hernandez suggests several strategies to redress...deep-seated inequities: hiring more diverse teaching staff; educating teaching staff in anti-oppressive values; implementing a “much more aggressive diverse application process to ensure the student body is multicultural”; and diversifying the curriculum beyond the canonical (white) narratives that dominate it [Source].

Here is one such publisher which has produced Hernandez's children's book, that petitioned successfully to get LGBQT children's books into the school curriculum through the Toronto District School Board:

"Flamingo Rampant is a micro-press with a mission – to produce feminist, racially-diverse, LGBTQ positive children’s books. This is an effort to bring visibility and positivity to the reading landscape of children everywhere. We make books kids love that love them right back, bedtime stories for beautiful dreams, and books that make kids of all kinds say with pride : that kid’s just like me!" tells us the publisher

Hernandez has had a lot of practice with her own daughter who is now around thirteen years old. Hernandez appears to have been married to a male from whom she separated soon after her daughter's birth. She writes: "I parented Arden with little to no help from friends, family and my spouse at the time." She says that her children's book M is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book was inspired by her daughter.

"Based on my many marches with my own child during what she called “Rainbow Time”, the book will follow in an ABC format, a small child as she gets ready to march alongside her mama at Pride.“

Previously-married-to-a-male Hernandez has a daughter now thirteen

Just shy of Arden’s 12th birthday, she approaches my partner, Nazbah, in the kitchen. “I’m so glad you’re my stepparent,” she says. Nazbah considers spearing a fork into their own heart in order to stop the tears of joy.[Source]

Catch Them While They're Young

M is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book
Written by Catherine Hernandez
Illustrated By Marisa Firebaugh

The Friendly Neighborhood Lesbian Storyteller is coming to a gallery near you!

The Art Gallery of Mississauga hosts regular "story telling" session for toddlers.

Here is information on the upcoming session at the gallery's website:

AGM TOT SPOT!
with Guest Storyteller Catherine Hernandez
NEXT SESSION: FRIDAY, JUNE 16, 10 - 11 AM
Art Gallery of Mississauga | 300 City Centre Drive | FREE & Open to the Public

Monthly on Fridays, 10 - 11 AM, join us at the gallery for an hour of stories, movement and imagination!

Catherine Hernandez is a proud queer woman of colour, radical mother, activist, theatre practitioner and the Artistic Director of b current performing arts. Her one-woman show, The Femme Playlist, premiered at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre as part of the afterRock Play Series, co-produced by b current, Eventual Ashes and Sulong Theatre. Her children’s book, M is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book was published by Flamingo Rampant in 2015.
The AGM recommends 1 parent for every 2 children at Tot Spot!

Below is the accompanying image:



Listen to the animated lesbian-Filipina-Canadian story-teller Catherine Hernandez tell the tale of the girl with the 'stache.



From Hernandez' website:

Catherine Hernandez is a proud queer woman of colour, radical mother, activist, theatre practitioner, burlesque performer, writer, the Artistic Director of Sulong Theatre Company and the owner of Out and About Home Daycare.

Yes: the owner of Out and About Home Daycare.

Here is is Hernandez performing The Boy and the Bindi by "transgender" "artist" Vivek Shraya (also an Art Gallery of Mississauga presenter).

And here she is in her pretty pink dress protesting Charlottetown Junior Public School's last minute cancellation of her book reading for preschoolers. This was her daughter's former school in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto.



But your friendly neighborhood daycare story-teller isn't as pleasant as she looks.

" />
Catherine Hernandez: Ethnic Lesbian
Twitter prole photo

Nor as Canadian as she seems

Dancing at the Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts & Culture

My hubs got permanent residency to Canada today! We are so damn happy. #marriedanamerican #welcome #wantadonut pic.twitter.com/YE99TeMyUU

— Catherine Hernandez (@theloudlady) March 18, 2017

#marriedanamerican should really be #marriedanamercanindian

Make You Perfect

Barrie, Ontario
[Photo By: [KPA]

But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.
1 Peter 5:10

The Jagged Edges of Canada: Diversity All The Way

The winning design for Canada's Sesquicentennial anniversary s a rip off of the winning design for the Centennial Anniversary.

Both are stuck on "multiculturalism."

I've said many times that "multiculturalism" makes for a bad design .

Here is an article I posted at Camera Lucida in 2009



July 19, 2008
How Multiculturalism Infantilizes design

I haven't yet read Diana West's book "The Death of the Grown-up", but here is an interesting insight she makes while answering questions on an interview on National Review Online:

Kathryn Jean Lopez: How are “dhimmi life under Islam” and “PC life in a multicultural world” similar?

Diana West: For me, this pairing was something of a “eureka” moment in the writing of the book.

I would describe PC life in a multiculti world as being marked in part by self-censorship based in fear — fear of professional failure, opprobrium or social ostracism. I would also describe this same self-censorship as a form of childishness. During one lecture on The Death of the Grown-Up, I took a question from a man who wondered, in a rather agitated way, if I were actually saying that multiculturalism is juvenile. I hadn’t phrased things that way, but, on quick reflection, I told him that, yes, that was indeed what I was saying. The fact is, buying into multiculturalism — the outlook that sees all cultures as being of equal value (except the West, which is essentially vile) — requires us to repress our faculties of logic, and this in itself is an infantilizing act. I mean, it’s patently illogical to accept and teach our children the notion that a culture that has brought liberty and penicillin to the masses is of no greater value than others that haven’t. In accepting the multicultural worldview, we deceive ourselves into inhabiting a world of pretend where certain truths are out of bounds and remain unspoken — even verboten.

I remember looking at logos of institutions who stressed diversity either in their title, or in their mission statements, and found this very same infantilizing going on at the design level.

Since there are no standards, that everyone and everything is equal, logo designs stress the equality of all these elements to the detriment of their design.

I've already talked about the COSTI Immigrant Services logo, which went from a lovely clear red line, as though traveling into to the horizon, to me signifying the release of the new immigrant into the bigger and greater society, into a disheveled, hardly stable umbrella which is trying hard to shade all those diverse elements under its inadequate roof. By forfeiting their strong message of "you can make it," they turned it into a half-hearted, insincere, "we'll protect you."

The same with the Ontario logo design which had a solid, identifiable trillium and withstood all the elements for several decades, until diversity entered the vocabulary. The logo devolved into three stick-figure like objects, hardly resembling the strong structure of the original.

Stick figures abound in diversity logos, as well as bright crayola colors. How childish can they be?

So, yes, as Diana West says, multiculturalism does infantalize. And a logo doesn't lie.

I wonder how long before either we change these logos (I hope COSTI comes to its senses), or we abolish these institutions altogether.

Here are a selection of logos I found just by googling: Canada diversity.






http://www.canadastop100.com/diversity/

Brief Book Review: Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It

Below is a brief book review I wrote on James Kalb's Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It.

He mentioned my contribution here on his website.
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Brief Book Review: Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It
July 30, 2013

I hate to copy full texts from any book, especially one newly published, but sometimes that is the best way to make a point.

I've got Jim Kalb's new book Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It. It arrived at the bookstore where I placed the order far quicker than I expected (about four days). I think that is faster than Amazon.com's delivery time, unless one pays extra for overnight shipment.

In any case, I went to the table of contents first, and found in Chapter 10:

Making it Real
Difficulty of the Struggle - Towards an Anti-Inclusivist Right - Fundamental Needs: Ideals (The True, The Beautiful, The Just and Good, Religion); A Favorable Setting - Making the Case - Limits

I went to the "The Beautiful" section on pages 170-171, and below is what I read:

For modernity, beauty is no less a problem than truth. Since it makes man the measure, the scientistic view assimilates beauty to personal preference. It puts beauty in the eye of the beholder, and so makes pushpin as good as poetry. Such a view is contrary to all intelligent experience. Beauty is evidently part of how things are. It forces itself on us as something of indubitable value that cannot be reduced to personal preference. That is what it means to recognize it as beauty. Our perception of it may depend on taste, but a personal element does not make a perception merely subjective any more than the dependence of knowledge on qualities such as intelligence, experience, and good sense makes truth merely subjective (5).

Beauty falsifies the dogma that denies reality to whatever is difficult to analyze and impossible to measure. It connects the material world to something beyond itself and gives us an immediate perception of something transcendent that is worthy of our love. It gives pleasure, so it attracts and pleases, but it is no less at odds with the technological outlook than fasting and prayer. It cannot be forced, and technique serves it, but does not create it. You have to wait on it and let it be what it is.

So anti-technocratic education must emphasize the beautiful. When those who appeal to tradition and the transcendent lack a sense of beauty, what they propose seems less an absorbing way of life that leads us to a grasp of the reality of things than one arbitrary ideology among others, a matter of rules, team spirit, and group dominance and not much else.

5. For a ground-breaking study of the objectivity of aesthetic valuby by a scientifically-trained architectural theorist, see Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.

I think beauty is even more problematic than truth. There is truth, based on facts, objective, scientifically obtained facts, but how does one objectively establish beauty?

The problem may be less difficult for scholars and (honest) artist, but how does an ordinary person identify and accept beauty?

One's children are "beautiful" however ugly they may be in reality. One's religion is beautiful. Look at the beautiful mosques that Muslims build to express the beauty they see in their religion. One's language has beauty, however gutteral it may sound. An ugly outfit designed by a prestigious designer is considered beautiful by the high-society woman who wears it.

Yet, these same people will recognize truth, and reject lies, if they are truthful to themselves. An ordinary person can identify truth and lies, and will often discern lies even when sugar-coated with what seems like truth.

Beauty, in modernity, is far more problematic, and far easier to misidentify, than truth. It requires a different level of discernment. It may indeed really be the territory of experts who can identify it, and who relay that information to others. People can live without beauty for a longer period than truth, as long as they have some basics fulfilled like a family life, a comfortable income, shelter and food, and even find it acceptable to live without beauty.

But, ultimately, lack of beauty is far more insidious, because it drains people's objective reality slowly. One can fight against an obvious lie, but how does one fight for beauty? Walking by an ugly building, day after day, will numb the soul. Perhaps we can be saved by small acts for beauty, like Winston in Orwell's 1984, when he bought a paperweight simply because he found it beautiful amidst the soul-numbing ugliness around him.

Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr. Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly outof the half-darkness...

[Julia] brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.[1984, Part 2, Chapter 4]

And here is the seemingly innocuous paperweight being smashed to pieces by the thought police:

Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands...

There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!...

There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr. Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in Mr. Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.

'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply. [1984, Part 1, Chapter 10]

Charrington knows that beauty is revolutionary. It can ignite the rebellion of the weakened and submissive, like Winston. Once Winston realized the possibility of acquiring beauty, he started to gain some strength.

Kalb makes similar observations about the re-creation of language and meaning in liberal society in his new book:

To some extent, the new standards are based on the view that the old ones were bad, because they had to do with the non-commercial and non-bureaucratic arrangements of the old society. Reversing and violating those standards has therefore become a virtue. Central and marginal have changed places: Islam has become a religion of peace, homosexual couples stable and loving, blacks wise and spiritual, immigrants the true Americans. In contrast, Christianity is presented as a religion of war and aggression, Middle Americans as violent and irrational, Republicans as the Taliban, and traditional marriage as hateful, oppressive, divisive , and pathological. When women and minorities do well, they deserve the credit, when they do badly, white men deserve the blame. Any flaws in the groups promoted from the margin to the center are whitewashed, the more glaring the flaws the thicker the coating. [P. 8]

Thirteen Provinces and Multiculturalism?

These were the alternate designs submitted to a focus group.

But why wasn't the simple 13 maple leaves design, representing the thirteen provinces, within two thin blue circles, chosen?

But then, where would they put all that multiculturalism?

How Multiculturalism Infantilizes design

2017 1967
The winning design for Canada's Sesquicentennial anniversary is a rip off from the winning design for the Centennial Anniversary.

Both represent the Maple Leaf, although the 150th designer does so somewhat reluctantly.

And both are stuck on "multiculturalism."

I've said many times that "multiculturalism" makes for bad design.

Here is an article I posted at Camera Lucida in 2008:

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

July 19, 2008
How Multiculturalism Infantilizes design

I haven't yet read Diana West's book The Death of the Grown-up, but here is an interesting insight she makes while answering questions on an interview on National Review Online:

Kathryn Jean Lopez: How are “dhimmi life under Islam” and “PC life in a multicultural world” similar?

Diana West: For me, this pairing was something of a “eureka” moment in the writing of the book.

I would describe PC life in a multiculti world as being marked in part by self-censorship based in fear — fear of professional failure, opprobrium or social ostracism. I would also describe this same self-censorship as a form of childishness. During one lecture on The Death of the Grown-Up, I took a question from a man who wondered, in a rather agitated way, if I were actually saying that multiculturalism is juvenile. I hadn’t phrased things that way, but, on quick reflection, I told him that, yes, that was indeed what I was saying. The fact is, buying into multiculturalism — the outlook that sees all cultures as being of equal value (except the West, which is essentially vile) — requires us to repress our faculties of logic, and this in itself is an infantilizing act. I mean, it’s patently illogical to accept and teach our children the notion that a culture that has brought liberty and penicillin to the masses is of no greater value than others that haven’t. In accepting the multicultural worldview, we deceive ourselves into inhabiting a world of pretend where certain truths are out of bounds and remain unspoken — even verboten.

I remember looking at logos of institutions who stressed diversity either in their title, or in their mission statements, and found this very same infantilizing going on at the design level.

Since there are no standards, that everyone and everything is equal, logo designs stress the equality of all these elements to the detriment of their design.

I've already talked about the COSTI Immigrant Services logo, which went from a lovely clear red line, as though traveling into to the horizon, to me signifying the release of the new immigrant into the bigger and greater society, into a disheveled, hardly stable umbrella which is trying hard to shade all those diverse elements under its inadequate roof. By forfeiting their strong message of "you can make it," they turned it into a half-hearted, insincere, "we'll protect you."

The same with the Ontario logo design which had a solid, identifiable trillium and withstood all the elements for several decades, until diversity entered the vocabulary. The logo devolved into three stick-figure like objects, hardly resembling the strong structure of the original.

Stick figures abound in diversity logos, as well as bright crayola colors. How childish can they be?

So, yes, as Diana West says, multiculturalism does infantalize. And a logo doesn't lie.

I wonder how long before either we change these logos (I hope COSTI comes to its senses), or we abolish these institutions altogether.

Here are a selection of logos I found just by googling: Canada diversity.

Left: COSTI's newest logo
Right: Canada's Best Diversity Employers

Left: Diversity in the workplace
Right: Harmony Movement

Left: Diversity Canada Foundation
Right: Ontario's new logo resembling stick figures

Left: Unity in Diversity
Right: Hamilton's Centre for Civic Inclusion

Even those that seem to show some form of artistic design - for example, some idea of composition etc. - actually show their weaknesses through obvious signs of childishness.

These two from Culturescope.ca look interesting (although there is actually nothing to see, hence another indication of a lack of good design) but also have scribbles of lines going through them.

Culturescope.ca

And there are many more.

Addendum: Culturescope.ca no longer exists. As this website indicates:

As a result of a Strategic Review of Government of Canada, Culturescope.ca has been discontinued since April 1st, 2008 as the original program objectives have been fulfilled. The digital space has evolved tremendously since the Canadian Cultural Observatory was created in 2003 and the website still contains rich resources and documents on diverse thematic areas.

The evolution of culturescope.ca fulfilled these objectives:

The Canadian Cultural Observatory (Observatory) and Culturescope.ca: The Department of Canadian Heritage launched the Observatory in November 2003 to provide statistics and information on cultural and heritage policies, programmes, legislation and regulations. Its objectives are to advance cultural development in Canada by fostering responsive research, encouraging informed decision-making in policy and planning, and stimulating community debate and improved knowledge exchange. Culturescope.ca is the Observatory's collaborative, interactive website developed in partnership with the not-for-profit, private and public sectors...[Source]

But we still keep coming back to those multi-culti stick designs.

Infantilizes design

I haven't yet read Diana West's book "The Death of the Grown-up", but here is an interesting insight she makes while answering questions on an interview on National Review Online:
Kathryn Jean Lopez: How are “dhimmi life under Islam” and “PC life in a multicultural world” similar?

Diana West: For me, this pairing was something of a “eureka” moment in the writing of the book.

I would describe PC life in a multiculti world as being marked in part by self-censorship based in fear — fear of professional failure, opprobrium or social ostracism. I would also describe this same self-censorship as a form of childishness. During one lecture on The Death of the Grown-Up, I took a question from a man who wondered, in a rather agitated way, if I were actually saying that multiculturalism is juvenile. I hadn’t phrased things that way, but, on quick reflection, I told him that, yes, that was indeed what I was saying. The fact is, buying into multiculturalism — the outlook that sees all cultures as being of equal value (except the West, which is essentially vile) — requires us to repress our faculties of logic, and this in itself is an infantilizing act. I mean, it’s patently illogical to accept and teach our children the notion that a culture that has brought liberty and penicillin to the masses is of no greater value than others that haven’t. In accepting the multicultural worldview, we deceive ourselves into inhabiting a world of pretend where certain truths are out of bounds and remain unspoken — even verboten.
I remember looking at logos of institutions who stressed diversity either in their title, or in their mission statements, and found this very same infantilizing going on at the design level.

Since there are no standards, that everyone and everything is equal, logo designs stress the equality of all these elements to the detriment of their design.

I've already talked about the COSTI Immigrant Services logo, which went from a lovely clear red line, as though traveling into to the horizon, to me signifying the release of the new immigrant into the bigger and greater society, into a disheveled, hardly stable umbrella which is trying hard to shade all those diverse elements under its inadequate roof. By forfeiting their strong message of "you can make it," they turned it into a half-hearted, insincere, "we'll protect you."

The same with the Ontario logo design which had a solid, identifiable trillium and withstood all the elements for several decades, until diversity entered the vocabulary. The logo devolved into three stick-figure like objects, hardly resembling the strong structure of the original.

Stick figures abound in diversity logos, as well as bright crayola colors. How childish can they be?

So, yes, as Diana West says, multiculturalism does infantalize. And a logo doesn't lie.

I wonder how long before either we change these logos (I hope COSTI comes to its senses), or we abolish these institutions altogether.

Here are a selection of logos I found just by googling: Canada diversity.



Left: COSTI's newest logo
Right: Canada's Best Diversity Employers



Left: Diversity in the workplace
Right: Harmony Movement



Left: Diversity Canada Foundation
Right: Ontario's new logo resembling stick figures



Left: Unity in Diversity
Right: Hamilton's Centre for Civic Inclusion

Even those that seem to show some form of artistic design - for example, some idea of composition etc. - actually show their weaknesses through obvious signs of childishness.

These two from Culturescope.ca look interesting (although there is actually nothing to see, hence another indication of a lack of good design) but also have scribbles of lines going through them.



Culturescope.ca

And there are many more.

Hirsi Ali and Ferguson Busy Making Babies

Posted at Camera Lucida
By: Kidist Paulos Asrat
Tuesday, June 07, 2011


Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson,
no longer a "power couple"

Geert Wilders lives in effective house arrest in his country the Netherlands, and now is in court to defend, and save, his country and the West from encroaching Islamization.

Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali, his former countrywoman, former refugee asylum seeker to Holland from Somalia, former Dutch parliamentarian, and now an American citizen, is busy making illegitimate babies with her British boyfriend Niall Ferguson, according to the Britain's Daily Mail. Ali is pregnant by the British historian, who abandoned his wife and children to start a steamy affair with Ali after he met her at a New York event a few years ago. Ali came to New York to work with the American Enterprise Institute. She is now an American citizen, but everything about her, including her time in Holland, reeks of an opportunistic, global traveler - a nomad, as she correctly identifies herself in one of her books aptly titled Nomad - who will set up tent wherever it is most convenient.

In America, she started a non-profit organization to help Muslim-born women (whether believers in Islam or not) in the West, caught up in Islam's honor killings and other fierce misogynistic behaviors. As I wrote here, the plight of Muslim women is not our problem. The majority of Muslim women do not renounce Islam, but want the best of both worlds - a free life (possibly in the West) with the freedom to continue practicing the religion that has effectively persecuted them (how can we help people like this?). This is in some fashion how Ali is living her life. She hasn't renounced her "Muslimness" although she has a lot to say about reforming Islam to suit her feminist and Westernized lifestyle (see my blog posts here: 1, 2, 3).

Here is what I wrote on Ali in "Islam's Missionary Women":

Hirsi Ali insists that the West downplay one of its hallmarks, Christianity, in order to enter into a secularized unit to subjugate a totalitarian-inclined Islamic world, especially against its women. By declaring that only a West dependent on reason rather than religion can tackle this, she demands a solution that would throw out one of the prime Western traditions – that of Judeo-Christianity – which has historically been successful in defeating previous Islamic threats. Her Enlightenment-biased views allow her to boldly state “ The enemies of reason within the West are religion and the Romantic Movement”, as though Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment (which she gets chronologically wrong by putting the Romantics into the fray) is merely an amalgam of religious fanatics and sentimentalists.

News about Ali is always strange. It looks like she's has been trying to have a child for a while. Here's what she wrote about wanting to have a child in her book Nomad (via the Daily Mail):

I have struggled whether to have you on my own or to marry your father . . . having a child is a personal choice. It’s not only a personal choice; it’s a very selfish choice. I want to have you for me, for my delight, to enrich my existence.

The Daily Mail informs us that she had asked her doctor to have her eggs frozen in case she got too old to have children. So, I would conclude that her pregnancy was a priority in her torrid affair with Ferguson. (By the way, Ferguson, has previously cheated on his wife with eight affairs in five years, according to an earlier article in the often accurate Daily Mail, and I write here that there is no guarantee that he will change his ways with Ali.)

It is interesting that the Mail has posted a photo of Ali in her blue dress, a gaudy electric blue satin dress, looking both vapid and glitzy at the same time. But it is probably the only one they have where she stands in amorous link with Ferguson.

Ali has become an inconsequential speaker for the West by a non-Westerner. Her articles for the American Enterprise Institute are infrequent, and I haven't heard of any important engagement or activity in which she's recently participated. Perhaps the media (and anti-Jihadists) have come to the conclusion that her role as a non-Western mouthpiece speaking up for the West was too much to hope for.

Ferguson dedicated his latest book Civilization: The West and the Rest to her, writing that she "understands better than anyone I know what Western civilization really means – and what it still has to offer the world." He may have to reassess his view of her, and consequent admiration for her.

Double Whammy Discrimination: Diversity at all Cost Even if it Means Empty Museums

In our postmodern era I would be defended as a discriminatee.



My non-White, Third World background would automatically place me in the "victim" pigeonhole where my word against my white "antagonist" would preside, NO MATTER WHAT.



That is, until I start to defend this "white" monster and say he is the one being discriminated against.



Then the wrath, slow though it may come, is full on!



Especially if it is a white women who is regulating the discrimination channel.



This happened to me recently after I attended (and participated in) a lecture at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, where a group of artists were to discuss the works of Homer Watson, a late 19th early 20th century painter from southern Ontario.



I wrote about the exhibition and the panel discussion here: Homer Watson, Native Son. But I left out my questions to the panel.



As wrote in my post:

Last year, I attended a panel discussion on the exhibition Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape at the Art Gallery Mississauga. I had visited the exhibition numerous times, going through Watson's work one by one, to study his technique, his evolution as an artist, his views, his concerns, and his Canada.



The exhibition also displayed works by contemporary Canadian artists to bring this pine "narrative" to the fore. Some were reasonably good, but none reached the overall skill and beauty of Watson's paintings.

I was gong to leave it at that, just a personal observation (not naive or untutored, since I have a solid background in the arts), hoping that I would gain some insight from these artists.



But I should have known better.



The catalogue the AGM produced for this exhibition prefaced with this objective:

Contemporary Canadian artists looking at landscape must also find a way to access the ‘truth’ of a subject that is not only strongly represented in our national artistic history, but one that is both deeply political and personal.

So the "truth" of a subject is now mandated to "represent" not just our nation "objectively" but has to incorporate political and personal views as well.



A tree is not a tree is not a tree, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein .



I asked Reinhard Reitzenstein, one of the panelists, who is a pretty good sculptor (and who is white), if he believes that Homer Watson's standards, and art, set an example for artist in general or if his English (Western) heritage is insignificant. This was of course not what I was asking, as Reitzenstein clearly understood. I was asking him if he thought that Watson's work was good, was superior.



Reitzenstein talked for a bit and finally admitted that he doesn't want to emulate the now archaic art of Watson. We are in the modern age after all!



So, irrespective of technical expertise, artistic beauty, or individual ingenuity, as long as an artist follows the archaic art of Watson, his work can not be deemed "good."



This is the tired discussion of art which has reached now such a comical zenith that works are exhibited in museums and galleries simply based on their mockery (and not simply rejection) of this western tradition. And many artists have become wealthy doing so.



But the public isn't with the program, which is why the Art Gallery of Mississauga has to go through loopholes to get people to visit its exhibitions, including set up committees and workshops to "study" this lack of museum attendance.



I received a "newsletter" email about a year after this exhibition from the AGM, one of the few I have received from them to invite me to participate in two workshops ttled: Collections Through The Prism of Diversity Series (here are day one and day two of the schedules):



But I was given about a week's notice for a two day workshop, where would have had to pay $250/day to attend. My first reading of the email, before I saw the dates, was to figure out ways could come up with the sum, including asking for a reduced fee. Soon after, I realized that I was put on the list as a "visible minority" participant.



Here is the email I sent the gallery:

I can only surmise from this late notification that the AGM is getting some kind of monetary benefit from this "email list" which it seems to use haphazardly to meet with its program mandates.



In my case, the mandate appears to be that of a minority female artist who can participate in the discussion on how to add more "diversity" into the art collections of the region.



Through your lack of appropriate notification, you indeed lost the participation of a minority female artist (myself) who would have made a unique and substantial contribution to this discussion.

And the reply I received from Mandy Slater the director:

The AGM prides itself on its high professional standards and its strong relational manner. We provide a safe and accountable space for our diverse staff, volunteers, artists and audience. All of this supports the democratic nature of the work we do at the AGM.





Moving forward, if you are able to visit the AGM in a congenial and supportive way I encourage you to do so. If at any point in the future, you visit the AGM and create an unsafe, critical and or threatening space, we will contact security who will request that you leave the premises. If you do not comply they will be entitled to further legal action under the Ontario Trespass to Property Act. I have cc’d senior Security Officers at the City of Mississauga on this and other incidents regarding inflammatory and false statements made by yourself.



The AGM prides itself on embracing diversity and inclusion as a core institutional value. We strive to create an accountable and inclusive space that supports like-minded individuals.

Diversity counts at all costs, even if it means getting the "diverse" complainant out the door!



The irony of the AGM's position of course doesn't occur to its staff: that they are discriminating against me (shutting down my "voice" ) in order that they might continue with their program is exactly what they are accusing the white inheritors of Homer Watson.



This time though, they have found a whole different story: An "ethnic minority" who supports a white tradition!

Multiculturalism and its Impact on Canadian Culture

The Muses Clio, Euterpe and Thalia (detail),
Eustache Le Sueur (1617-1655), French Baroque painter
This painting and its companion piece depicting Melpomene, Erato and Polyhymnia
were used to decorate the Cabinet of the Muses of the
Hotel Lambert in Paris
The Louvre, Paris

The muses are the goddesses of creative inspiration in poetry, song and other arts, they are the companions of Apollo. They were the daughters of Jupiter and the Titaness Mnemosyne (memory) who had lain together for nine consecutive nights. The muses were originally nymphs who presided over springs that had the power to give inspiration, especially Aganippe and Hippocrene on Mount Helicon and the Castilian spring on Mount Parnassus. The nine muses and their usual attributions are the following.

- Clio, the muse of history (book, scroll or tablet and stylus)
- Euterpe, the muse of music, lyric poetry (flute, trumpet or other instrument)
- Thalia, the muse of comedy, pastoral poetry (scroll, small viol, masks)
- Melpomene, the muse of tragedy (horn, tragic masks, sword or dagger, crown held in hand, sceptres lying at feet)
- Terpsichore, the muse of dancing and song (viol, lyre, or other stringed instrument, harp, crowned with flowers)
- Erato, the muse of lyric and love poetry (tambourine, lyre, swan, a putto at her feet)
- Urania, the muse of astronomy (globe and compasses, crowned with a circle of stars)
- Calliope, the muse of epic poetry (trumpet, tablet and stylus, books, holds laurel crow
- Polyhymnia (or Polymnia), the muse of heroic hymns (portative organ/, lute or other instrument)
[Source: Web Gallery of Art]

More on the muses hereMore on the muses here.

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Multiculturalism and the War against White America
Speech at the American Renaissance Conference on May 29, 1994
By: Lawrence Auster

[Multiculturalism and its] Impact on American Life (Excerpt)

While the “delegitimizing” impact of unassimilable immigrants can be seen in many areas of American life, in no other field is it more obvious than in the arts. Cultural institutions in cities with large third-world populations are rapidly abandoning the Western high culture tradition in favor of third-world folk cultures. According to music critic Edward Rothstein writing in the New Republic, the new immigrants simply aren’t interested in Western music:

“[S]trikingly in a city like New York, [classical music culture] is largely a racially stratified culture as well: there are almost no black or immigrant faces (aside from Asians) to be seen in concert halls... My neighborhood arts organization, like many others around the country, has been unsuccessful in marketing Western art music to the new racial and international communities in the area. So instead they’ve begun presenting the folk musics of immigrant and black cultures.”

The same applies to the theater. “The reason that Broadway appeals less to New Yorkers these days,” writes theater critic Thomas Disch, “isn’t just that Broadway has changed: so have New Yorkers... [A] glance around the lobby at any Broadway show reveals who isn’t there: any of the city’s readily identifiable minorities — blacks, Hispanics, Asians ...”

Theatrical companies have tried to address the problem by introducing multiracial casts into Western plays, but have been disturbed to find that the audiences for such multiracial productions are still almost exclusively white. Evidently, third-worlders are simply not attracted to Western theater, even when it has lots of nonwhites in the cast. Since changing the cast doesn’t work, the only solution will be to give up the plays themselves. The irony is that these problems, are not seen as the result of nonwhites’ lack of interest in Western culture, and therefore as proof of their non-assimilability; rather, Western culture itself is blamed for not appealing to nonwhites.

Artistic images of American history are also coming under attack. Rush Limbaugh recently noted that the state of Oregon, after commissioning a beautiful bronze statue of a 19th century pioneer family, had rejected the completed statue because the image of a white pioneer family was considered “racist” and “noninclusive.” While Rush was unusually upset about this incident, it didn’t seem to occur to him that it had anything to do with demographic change — i.e., that it is our society’s increasingly nonwhite character that is making any “all-white” image seem unrepresentative and therefore illegitimate.

In 1993 there was an angry protest by black and Hispanic students at the University of Massachusetts who wanted the school to dump its official symbol, the Minuteman. The image of a “white man carrying a gun,” they charged, was racist. For the time being the school has resisted this demand. But for how long? As the university’s white population continues to decline, can we expect the Chinese and Pakistani students and administrators of the future to care enough about the image of the Minuteman to defend it against intimidating black and Hispanic protesters? Who will preserve the symbols of our Anglo-European national heritage after whites are gone?

Indeed, who will defend that heritage even now, while whites are still the majority? On Long Island this past Spring, a school production of Peter Pan was canceled at the last minute, after six weeks of rehearsals, because the town’s American Indian minority felt that the play’s portrayal of Indians (which, remember, is simply a childlike fantasy taking place in Never-Never Land) was insulting to them. So, to accommodate multiracial America, this classic play that we all remember with fondness from our childhood is to be proscribed. The most significant thing about the incident was that no one in the town, including the parents whose children had their play taken away from them, seriously protested this outrage.

In an even more horrifying example of white surrender, an elite private school in New England was considering hiring a well-known multicultural curriculum consultant when it was discovered that the consultant — a Caribbean-born black woman based in Toronto — had admitted in a published interview that her approach would make white children feel intimidated and guilty. After some discussion, the school’s board of trustees went ahead and hired her anyway.

These are examples of what is happening to our entire country and culture. As America becomes more and more nonwhite, everything we think of as the American culture and identity will be either censored, squeezed out or transformed into something else.

The response of establishment conservatives to these concerns is to say that such problems are created not by immigrants but by alienated white elites, as well as by the general moral decay of our society. “It is true that radical and liberal elites in education, government, and media appear to be doing everything they can to destroy whatever is left of traditional America, and they might well be doing so even if there were no immigrants at all.” But we must understand that even if there were no “cultural revolution” going on in this country, the kind of massive demographic change we are experiencing as a result of immigration would still be enough, by itself, to destabilize and ultimately destroy our culture.